Oh shit, I’m sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.

That’s kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It’s just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don’t lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.

Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.

I actually looked into this, part of the explanation is that in the 80s, Sweden entered a public/private partnership to subsidize the purchase of home computers, which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive. This helped create a relatively wide local consumer base for software entertainment as well as have a jump start on computer literacy and software development.

Also made the switch not too long ago, only using Manjaro. Steam’s proton had gotten extremely good at playing Windows games, so there’s a good chance that it could run your old strategy game.

You might already have this on your set-up, but having wine auto-launch for Windows executables has been fantastic. I regularly pull and run Windows executables without really giving it a second thought, and so far it’s generally “just worked.”

To be clear, your stance is it’s such a small step in the right direction, you’d prefer no step at all? Keep it cis-only or invest time/money in extra character models?

I think that’s been a fair description of the AAS space for a long time, which is fine. If you want innovation, go indie, if you want big budget, go AAA

To help give love to some games I think are underrated, here’s a list of my favorite games with 4,000 reviews or less on steam under $25 ranked by my personal play time.

Neo scavenger $15

Post apocalyptic survival sim, that reminds me a tiny bit of Oregon Trail. There’s a good chance a scratch will kill you, and finding a plastic bag so you can carry more than what you hold in your two hands makes you feel OP. I’ve put 74 hours into this game, have died and restarted countless times, and have hardly gotten anywhere in it, but it’s exactly my kind of survival game

Fae tactics $20

Turn-based grid combat reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics, with just a splash of pokemon. The mechanics and setting I found really fun, although the difficulty can fluctuate a good bit at times.

Xenonauts $25

If OG XCOM went more crunchy than streamlined, it’d be Xenonauts instead of Firaxis’s Enemy Unknown. The combat gives you a ton of control during combat, specifying how much time they should spend aiming before shooting, specific hours of overwatch, crouching, etc.

Star Renegades $25 (currently $5)

Roguelike turn based party RPG. It doesn’t do a crazy amount that’s new or novel, but it executes very well, and lining up a good combo with your build feels amazing.

Rogue Book $25

Slay the Spire with some smart additions. Instead of one hero, you play two, which gives some extra possibilities to mix and match between runs. Instead of an overmap with a couple branching paths, there’s a hex overworld where you can use resources to reveal tiles.

Wildfire $15

Avatar the Last Airbender as a 2d stealth action game. The level layouts are great, and the ability upgrades strike a good balance between being impactful and not trivializing encounters.

Don’t Escape: 4 Days to survive $15

A classic point and click adventure, except using human logic instead of insane Game Logic. Reminds me of a bunch of similar games I played at the height of Newgrounds. It’s a tight, solid experience that doesn’t over stay its welcome.

Alina of the Arena $15

What if Slay the Spire had a hex grid system? I’ve seen other games ask this question, but Alina is the best I’ve played. There are some really clever design decisions they’ve made where certain builds very intuitively form some classic archetypes.

Shardpunk $14 (currently $10)

Roguelike XCOM themed as a crystalpunk version of Vermintide. Combat is solid, but the theme of running to the exit while shooting rats on the way with crystal powered machine guns sets it apart for me.

The Case of the Golden Idol $18

This one breaks my “4,000 or less” review rule by a little bit, so I’m putting it at the bottom, but it is one of my favorite games. I understand the love for Obra Dinn, but Golden Idol is better in my opinion. Each puzzle is a scene more or less frozen in time, which you can click on things for clues as what’s happening. What sets it apart is how you really do need to solve the mystery to progress; the game doesn’t walk you into it nor really lets you brute force it. Hands down the best mystery game I’ve ever played.

Really fun GDC talk by spiderweb games https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?si=mZdu6eyyWD4OEWGw

I think it highlights how perverse the stock market itself is. It doesn’t really seem like it functions much as a way for riskier ventures to raise capital outside of a bank, but a giant casino that gives the illusion of not being a zero sum game.

It’s hypothetically possible for a company to make more money in the stock market by investing in themselves than by creating anything (see Tesla). And if all companies could behave this way and somehow knew what the stock market would do for 5 years, I’d wager a TON of companies wouldn’t meet it, invest in the stock market, drive up the “value,” more don’t meet it, etc. etc. until no one is making anything, and everyone is happy with their paper fortunes and try to sell.

https://youtu.be/uichEjBNqlg?si=EJucAkjquds16Y0s

I still don’t know it. I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in “a prominent figure in the Counter-Strike community” as a source for Valve’s internal finances.

Wonder how much money the website made for making up this rumor

I’d just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000’s thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you’re willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren’t nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn’t take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).

In terms of specific games, I don’t have any that aren’t already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.

Ones I’ve played, in no particular order

• Rust
• Civilization
• Valheim
• Project Cars
• Battlebit
• Stolen Realm
• Hell Let Loose

Surprised to see New World in there, I’d thought it had imploded

I feel the same. Something about having agency in the game has never really made them scary for me, but I guess horror movies don’t do it for me either so I guess it’s just not my thing. I loved RE4, though; horror aside it’s such a good game.

Heels are my pet peeve

2004 would have my vote. For the lazy:

• Halflife 2
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• GTA San Andreas
• Counter Strike: Source
• MGS3
• Fable
• Star Wars Battlefront

And a bunch of other bangers

I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.

But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.

Extremely excited for Rise of the Golden Idol. Loved the first one, and one of the few games my SO enjoyed playing