Guess I’m throwing my PS5 out the window and going to PC. This war on physical media is ridiculous. Pretty soon they’re going to require us to buy the console but rent the controllers for the very low price of $79.99 a month.
Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.
Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.
If Steam were that shallow you would see competing efforts like Origin, Uplay, Epic Games Store etc take off. In reality Steam is anything but shallow, it's the cumulation of two decades of adding customer focused features. Competing efforts not only can't be bothered to invest as much into features, but they always add features with the goal of benefiting the store owning company, not the customer. That's a key difference that makes them fail.
You have to be very dense to think AAA video game devs have some woke agenda and not just knee-jerk reaction to market changes. There are plenty of games for you to goon to.
What's the difference between calling it "woke agenda" or "market changes"? Seems to me you agree with the other poster, that AAA game devs now make games targeted towards different people.
"woke agenda" implies that agenda is...being woke. "Market changes" implies companies that chasing money as they designed to do. AAA publisher goal is to make as much money as possible, they achieve that by selling as many copies as possible. That is achieved by targeting wider audience. Teenage boys and man babies with brains of a teenage boy can only get you so far.
Woke in nearly all contexts in 2026 can be substituted for a racial, xenophobic, and/or homophobic slur and mean exactly the point of the person who used it. The lack of actual examples when called out makes it very obvious.
Sure, but that's just arguing over the morality of terms. On the one side you have people worried that their culture is being destroyed, on the other side you have people worried that their culture isn't represented. Both sides seem to think the other side is the devil.
Having gamed for three decades now I'd say the shift has been very real. There's a much larger fraction of games that have representation of women, mental illness, disabilities, races, etc.
Is that progress or destruction? Depends on which side you fall on.
You're saying there are no examples, does that mean you think no shift has happened? That games are still made the same way? If so, are you claiming that games always had this sort of diversity of representation? Or that games nowadays still don't have it?
It's similar to asking was the end of Jim Crow or slavery progress or the destruction of white spaces and to be sensitive to the people who wanted those to continue. I think a lot of the issues we have today are because people in both periods did not ostracize those people like Europe ostracized the Nazis.
Having a main character that isn't a straight white male is so minor in comparison. But giving that idea credence is a dangerous path backwards to those arguments of the past
My argument isn't that one side is right and the other one is wrong. I'm not asking for sensitivity towards any side either. I'm talking about there being change at all. I'm hoping for more honesty in these discussions.
So when people, who don't like this change, point out their dislike of it, the reasonable reaction would be to argue that the change is good. Not that there hasn't been any change.
Concord, the single largest failure by a game company (and really, most other companies too, except maybe movie studios lately). Wasn't that the backlash?
Steam has existed for an eternity compared to any console specific game store. It's not great that you can't resell what you have on Steam, but at least you get to 'keep' it.
Steam games exist on physical media that players have some control over: I can copy my Steam data directory across PCs/Steam Deck, I would not be able to do that on a PlayStation.
Sure, I can't resell my Steam games, but the openness of the PC platform has advantages over closed consoles. Valve can't brick old games the way Sony can - a new computer in 2046 will be able to play single-player games backed-up from Steam, not so much for consoles.
Valve have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy unlike say, Sony and Microsoft. If there are no disks then there is no point in consoles in my view, they're just worse computers.
Steam only exists because Valve forced players to install it, force an online activation, and permanently bind their retail copies of Half-Life 2 to a Steam account. They also forced patching which meant in an era of dialup you couldn't play your single player game for hours, and needed to be connected every 30 days or your game would stop working.
None of the console manufacturers pulled that shit, that Valve gets a pass is wild to me.
I mean the devices where steam operates are fully open, even the ones valve makes. You can install any OS you wish, any software or competing store front and thus give them 0% cut.
You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.
plus, nothings stopping you from distributing a physical PC game. Heck, iirc steam still supports it. Even if it didn't, you could still buy a physical PC anyway since they can just have an exe, flatpak/snap/appimage, or dmg
The look and feel of an interface could be covered under a design patent, which would be a different question than copyright, and a much higher bar to enforce (particularly, protection is far from automatic).
You’re talking about enforcement which is a fair point of view, but I’m taking about likelihood of getting sued and having to settle in order to avoid the risk of losing a case in court. Which is the more common case for situations where one company alleges the other stole their IP.
Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.
A lot of the lawn care lead websites don't offer ZIP code exclusivity, which we do. And the leads are already warm, because they are actively seeking a solution to a definite problem. This all hinges on a large amount of traffic, but when the leads do come, their conversion rate should be pretty high. We also rely on affiliate income to monetize. Ready-to-go packages could be offered in the future, not a bad idea.
Georgia, but doesn’t require green, just doesn’t allow for wild grass to grow. The HOA can set any kind of rule it wants grass wise. Please prove wrong!
While in some ways I am against HOAs, I've also lived in neighborhoods without them and inevitably someone always ends up with a rusted out old Buick covered in a tattered blue tarp in their front yard for 400 years
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