gila

Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don’t exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.

Could do that, or sideload the APK from https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/client/androidtv/

D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.

You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.

Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.

Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!

From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.

Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.

Lineage OS doesn’t include google apps or services. Jellyfin works though.

Do you need an in-remote microphone? If not, I’d suggest a degoogled nvidia shield tv (i.e flash it with lineage OS or similar)

My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.

I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.

I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.

I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.

tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them

You could just refund it if it doesn’t work well for you. GOG are usually pretty generous

I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm

That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.

Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.

Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can’t purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.

The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it’s been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.

The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn’t any skin gambling, though.

These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that’s it.

A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.

That and the other launchers are a product of Steam’s dominance, not a cause of it.

Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.

Valve has done a lot of great things, I’m not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn’t become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.

Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.

Also, GOG exists.

Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.

Neither offer something which didn’t already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)

I really liked enter the gungeon. It was one of the first roguelites I played. It’s fairly basic in terms of mechanics compared to some newer entries in the genre. But it’s just good arcadey fun. Bonus is that it runs on a lot of systems. It’s still one of my go to’s for plane trips or other offline scenarios

I grew up near gas hubs, where it’s normal to have gas mains at home, have family employed by producers. They’ve been spinning this yarn as long as I can remember. It has not clean energy by any stretch, this is just the basic sales pitch for natural gas unchanged for like 30 years

Meanwhile NASA’s next flyby depends on Elon Musk fixing Starship. I’m sure that won’t get delayed again.

It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is