I doubt the conservatives will restructure the American government. When Trump dies, if it’s in office, J.D. Vance will be president.

If they continue with Project 2025, well, then I guess Christians will never have to vote again.

There’s just something off-putting about a text based forum getting video content.

Vermhat is my President of choice if I’m being honest

I played it for 10 hours, it runs fine. Granted, I have a 5800x3d and a 3080, but from what I’ve been reading the people complaining have similar specs.

I think it’s a bit of a CP2077 situation where some peoples experience vastly differ from others, from bugs to performance.

AI does give more reasoning than a forum might, that’s true.

I like that it’s named after the person who created it and what it was inspired by. It was created by Beth. It was inspired by the Steam Deck.

It is the Beth Deck.

It’s brilliant, really.

And to the end user who doesn’t know what they’re doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them “further”.

I say this because if you’re following forums, chances are you’re following guides, which means you don’t understand what it is you’re doing. Which is fine, I typically don’t either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.

But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.

Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn’t need to understand.

This is how I feel about it:

Best chance to own a game is a DRM-free digital store (GOG, a few games on Humble, itch.io, some others). But own always means “a license for personal use”. Has been like that forever. Even if you buy a disk - you own the (physical) disk and a license to use the software contained on it. You can’t of course own “the game” because that would mean you’d be free to distribute it. It’s all just semantics… You own a game for personal use! Just like you own a baseball bat… but still aren’t allowed to purposefully use it to bash somebody’s head in. Ownership has never been a 100% or nothing thing.

It’s just that DRM turns that ownership effectually into a usage license.

There is no ownership for digital files, because ownership would mean freedom to distribute. Semantics. So, we all have licenses to everything we “own” digitally.

As such, I don’t really feel slighted by Steam because this has been my understanding the entire time. Digital ownership =//= ownership. It’s the same for if you ever bought music from iTunes in the 2000’s.

I would feel different if Steam actively used DRM on everything (developer has no choice), and things like Steamless to remove Valves trivially easy DRM weren’t as accessible/were actively prevented.

I buy games on Steam and if they act up then I use my license in fair use for myself and format shift or whatever else I see fit to make my game functional, and I doubt that I would ever be taken to court or that the account could be compromised from doing this. Quite frankly, once the games files are on your computer Steam can’t do too much unless you let it.

And for me personally, I don’t mind the tradeoff for cloud saves, per game notes, community control schemes and per game personal bindings, access to community forums - I understand that not everyone feels this way, nor should they, but given that everything digital is a license anyway, it seems clear to me that Valve is interested in providing a service beyond a storefront for games, while competitors aren’t doing much of anything outside of litigation or twiddling thumbdrives.

The alternative to this is not using Steam, getting what you can from Itch.io and GOG, and not having access to pretty much everything I just mentioned unless you set it up yourself somehow (cloud saves are feasible but that’s a hassle, and everything else would be much harder, save community forums). Which is absolutely fine, but I like the services that Steam offers and I was never under the impression that I “own” the game any moreso than I “owned” my PS2 games. What’s more, there’s no license limit to these titles, so I can have my account for 20 years and play the games on as many computers as I want. I have encountered storefronts that limit your licenses to 3 to 5 uses, or sometimes slightly better ones sometimes have authorization revoking.

All this said, the gaming landscape is certainly struggling, it seems quite telling to me that all these companies are more interested in engaging in litigation to tear down competitors than they are in bolstering their own platforms to make them more appealing to gamers.

Thank you! I have a lot more if you’re interested, I got pretty into VR for a while and I wanted to find what really worked and what really didn’t.

I still really enjoy it but it’s harder to find the time and space these days, but every time I do go to set it back up I’m just as amazed.

I mean there are, it’s all just extremely subjective.

Pistol Whip is musical John wick simulator, with community made levels. This is pretty much the pinnacle, IMO it’s better than beatsaber which is a little more boring for me. Then there’s the story based and multiplayer based FPS games, alongside the rhythm ones. Arizona Sunshine, Superhot.

There’s Vermillion, which is a VR painting simulator. It’s incredible as an artist with a small space and not having to clean up afterwards. There’s also SculptrVR for modeling, SynthVR for music (synthesizers) which IMO is actually a quintessential piece of software as an actual synthesis rig is thousands of dollars, rooms full of space, and in this game it’s all available to you. There are a number of other games depending on your hobby preferences.

And then there’s space/relaxation simulators, on their own are great, but can be further enhanced with various software. For example, one of my favorite passtimes during lockdown was Elite Dangerous with my phone connected to my computer using SCRCPY, brought into VR as an overlay. So I was space trucking with Netflix and didn’t have to remove my headset to interact on my phone.

And then there’s murder simulators like Gorn and Blade and Sorcery, which also is the best Star Wars simulator.

So even your post doesn’t hit the problem on the head. There’s a few compounding issues.

First and foremost - the cost of the device in tandem with the lack of publicity. It’s no question that Blade and Sorcery and Beatsaber are well known VR games, but neither of them are marketed very well by their teams. Understandably so, how much ad money is worth putting into a VR game. But it’s hardly marketed by the headset sellers themselves, which you would think would be something desirable.

Second - the reality. Headsets are heavy. Moving is hot. Even if you do get your VR setup, really fun games translated to VR like Holoball (basically just racketball) can actually get you pretty sweaty. The other reality is space is a factor. Even though I have a smaller house I still got VR, but using it in a smaller house can be compromising.

Third - back to marketing, but with subjectivity. I would argue that there is killer software out there worth making VR worth having, the issue is that no one knows about it. Know one knows that SynthVR exists and let’s you save hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to play with synthesizers without having to purchase all the parts for racks. Vermillion is incredible for aspiring painters and regular artists who may be low on materials or space, or I’mOpenBrush if they’re looking for the 3D VR art side.

Finally - VR has a really difficult time with multiplayer. Without it, longevity can be shortened. With it, there might be no longevity at all because the game cost $20 and the headset and the cost of the PC that can run it and no one has even heard of Revolv3r. So while some games like PavlovVR somewhat takeoff and are successful, other games might have you waiting in a lobby for forever. Additionally, after the Vive there was a bit of a falloff of developer interest, and so there’re a fair number of games from 2016-2017 which look promising but are entirely abandoned, or might not even work on modern headsets (not so much an issue anymore now that Microsoft is ending support for Reality Portal.) This makes it even harder to find games for VR since you’re effectively sorting through a graveyard with a mix between hardware compatibility and something actually worthwhile.

There are a ton of fun VR games, fully fledged and arcade style, and there’s a lot of great software. I just don’t think people know about them, they’re hard to find, and they’re a bit locked behind a pretty significant price disparity.

I can’t answer your question but I will say it seems like the website name is trying to go for aesthetic naming, such as “level 80” being what the URL is supposed to indicate. If the website is mostly gaming articles, and the sites name is 80.lv, I can understand what they’re trying to go for.

Let’s just hope for their sake Latvia’s servers don’t go down. Or maybe they are Latvian (I doubt this though)

Thank you for informing me about informing me on the status of my comment with your comment.

W-what?

Passion project “dev”.

Mechanics first. Placeholder template for what you need for visuals. There’re also free assets for that if you want to avoid your own altogether.

Sound is a set all on its own, so I would save that for the near-mid to near-end point (before finishing touches). That is to say, don’t think about it for a while.

Others have said, but take it like a cake. One piece at a time ;)

Lol, are you recommending it because it’s the opposite of what you were on?

And from the corporate side of things, it’s not very business savvy to miss out on an entire generation or two of gamers buying games.

If you and I are parents and our Steam library has 1,000+ games, our child likely wouldn’t buy those games. But if they need to create a steam account for themselves, now those games are back on the table, securing future revenue for Valve.

There’s workarounds sure, like family sharing or just ignoring the ToS and sharing passwords. I think the real tell will be for our grand/great grandchildren, for once we are 100 or 120 then Valve will probably start wondering… Is averyminya really still alive and kicking, or did he share his library?

I feel like all it would be would be giving the account via your will, then having that transferred through an attorney, who has a copy of/access to your death certificate.

“we can’t change engines because we’ve figured out how to copy and paste really well”

You have to realize that if they had become Steam, they would have had so much money they probably wouldn’t have sold to Activision. Hell, they probably would have been the ones buying Activision.

The beauty of art means that is definitely a way the format can be used.