• BenchpressMuyDebil@szmer.info
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    2 minutes ago

    An independent studio that develops a game I’m playing recently launched a “supporters edition” which includes pretty much OST, a bunch of wallpapers and some concept art. It’s essentially a donation.

    I thought - wow, with half the videogame world owned by Embracer Group I actually want to support this smaller studio.

  • this@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    The last two people are the same person.

    They might be buying up hardware with AI as their excuse today, but tomorrow they will be indefinately renting you processing power that you’re unable to buy(because they cornered and manipulated the hardware market)

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      5 minutes ago

      because they cornered and manipulated the hardware market

      Makes me think of the ‘First Time?’ meme but with the housing market wearing the noose.

  • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works
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    10 hours ago

    Yeah… allow me to doubt those gamers…

    Are those gamers the same that whine about FC26 being a copy-paste of FC25 and then proceed to buy it full price?

    Or the same whinning about the last COD being ai slop in a review after 358 hours of gameplay?

    Or those saying “I won’t buy another pokemon game ever after the last shit they released” just to then buy the new shit they make?

    A few gamers will boycot, but most of them are going to keep buying everything from their favourite series non-stop because, apparently, they can’t live without it.

    • 87Six@lemmy.zip
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      10 hours ago

      Yea most gamers are just sheep. They will linstall anything the most convenient way possible and not even use the 2hr refund window on steam even if they don’t like the game

      • Potatar@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        My head canon: Most gamers are children: their parents who have no interest in their kids’ hobbies buy the “biggest game” to show their affection.

          • 87Six@lemmy.zip
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            11 minutes ago

            Yea I think the average is at least over 18 either way which is no longer a child. Hell at 16 you’re no child either, you’re a teen, and despite them not being too bright they at least can’t be fooled to think holding a controller in from of a screen = playing

            The issue is people are dumb, not age…

            Whenever I see people playing anything with Vanguard anti-cheat I cringe my soul out.

            Same with Denuvo games.

            Just because something works on our computers doesn’t mean we should install it. We have to stand up for those in poorer countries that can’t afford good PC’s by refusing to run unoptimized garble… But alas that will never happen, will it…

            In regards to DRM and other privacy concerns we have to stand up for our digital rights to freedom. Our PC’s should be ours but that is less and less normalized today… Our phones are no longer ours already…

          • Potatar@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            Most people are children (western countries have weird age pyramids but that’s nothing compared to Asia), that’s my reasoning. I’m very suprised I’m wrong.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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              56 minutes ago

              But the adults have the power to tell the kids to go to their room so the adults can play. Also, up to a certain age, you can just let them hold a controller and they think they are playing (or don’t even understand that anyone is playing and just think holding controllers is something fun to do while watching some things).

              • Potatar@lemmy.world
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                51 minutes ago

                I wasn’t in those statistics (open seas) until i was 24.

                I’m pretty sure my cousin (6 y.o) looks like a 46 y.o to the credit card firms because he plays on his father’s phone.

        • Naho_Zako@piefed.zip
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          5 hours ago

          I’m not a child but young enough to live with my parents, and I have family members who don’t actually understand the stuff I like, so the last 2 or 3 Pokemon games I’ve gotten were because of them lol. They do this with anime I never even watch too. Whatever’s popular, they’ll buy it…

          I still haven’t been motivated to finish Sc/Vi, it’s just that boring. Sw/Sh was also a tad mediocre, but I still enjoyed parts of it. At least LA was fun, albiet too short imo.

          Rant About Pokemon

          But yeah the only thing I like about the new Pokemon games are the characters, music, and designs. Difficulty is abysmal, some villans/teams are fucking dumb (Sw/Sh was ass), and the day-one DLC is killing me. And while I’m far from a graphics snob, when seeing how old Pokemon games like Wii Battle Revolution had such good animation, and new open world games like ToTK and Xenoblade look and perform well, it just makes me wish GameFreak didn’t own the fucking series. And most of all is the lack of creativity.

          We haven’t had a PMD game in almost 6 years, snd it’s been a DECADE since the last brand new PMD. Rangers was shot dead out back. Conquest is a corpse. The battle colosseum/revolution series is a skeleton. The last Rumble game was 3DS and was a pay to play mess. Same thing with Shuffle. Fuck Trozei, Dash, Pokepark, all of them. Hell, even Duel was kinda fun and it was a mobile game. I severly doubt if we’ll ever see any of these series again anytime soon. And it’s a shame because these are some of my favorite games in the whole franchise, that I literally poured hundreds of hours into.

          Having said that, anyone got any good Mystery Dungeon games to recommend? I tried one of the Chocobo ones and put it down after like 3 hours…

  • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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    13 hours ago

    I fear wishful thinking, gaming consumers (demand) don’t wield such power over supply.

    The format doesn’t work as well but lemmy try …

    Perhaps …

    • onnekas@sopuli.xyz
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      5 hours ago

      Yeah. It’s more like this. If gamers had this kind of power things would not get worse every year.

    • Zanathos@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      This is a better version imo. These companies are going to kill consumerism of the PC market soon enough. It will take some time, like 20 years or so I imagine given the current landscape and old inventory, but these are the starting steps.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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        4 hours ago

        Yes, everything will be a subscription service effectively killing foss & PCs.

        Soon we will be illegally trading old PC hardware amongst ourselves until it eventually fails (which is only a few decades for the newer chips), hunted & persecuted by the matacorps.

      • planish@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        IMHO it’s already dead.

        Nobody’s made RAM actually targeting the specs in the standards for years; the sticks ship with built-in overclocking settings for one or the other proprietary system, and the boards expect the sticks to already be on their Qualified Vendor List to actually work right. The interface between the RAM and the motherboard is ceasing to be a legitimate extension point.

        There’s two people who make CPUs, not to any spec but to work with their own other chips that need to already be on the board, which are then driven by firmware software basically supplied by the CPU makers. When the CPU makers update their base firmware bundles, the board makers skin and ship it. In the distant past, one could slot competing CPUs from different vendors into the same board, and they would execute BIOS software fundamentally under the control of the board makers. The interface between the CPU and the board has long since ceased to be a legitimate extension point.

        The real remaining extension point is PCIe, and since its dominant use is to attach exactly one ever-widening GPU from one of two (or perhaps now three! How spoiled for choice we are!) manufacturers, each year fewer slots are provided. The target customer only needs one, and it needs as much physical clearance as humanly possible. A case will have 7 or 8 slots on the back and a board will provide two slots to plug anything in, one to actually use and one to be able to claim that there’s more than one slot. And each year there’s less stuff to put in there (who buys sound cards?) and more stuff (fast networking, wifi, fancy USB) is integrated into the board.

        And all these components have started to acquire fancy molded plastic and metal casings, to the point where it’s not clear why they need a separate enclosure around them.

        So the net result is you obtain one fancy shrouded box from Lenovo, or you purchase two fancy shrouded boxes and plug them together, and you call the result a “PC”. And then on the software side it’s a terminal for a Microsoft account, which you use to run a client for fetching from Steam, which you use to load client software for talking to live services. And now the people orchestrating all this are wondering why they bother actually mailing you the boxes.

        This is very deeply not personal computing.

  • atro_city@fedia.io
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    10 hours ago

    Uh… gamers are the so weak, they buy anything that’s shiny enough. Games by big studios pushing out shiny crap still make millions. Gamers can’t stop buying skins and will have wars about them too. EA, Blizzard, RockStar Games, Ubisoft, and many other companies are still huge companies because gamers barely care. Only once in a while do they massively reject large games.

    Only about 1.2M EU gamers even cared to sign in the EU initiative to Stop Killing Games. There are 450M EU citizens. There are way more EU gamers than just 1.2M and the vast majority didn’t care enough to sign an initiative in their own interest.

    RAM makers are safe. Gamers will just give in and pay 3k+ for a gaming rig with welded on RAM (or whatever shit it is crApple does to make their devices unupgradeable).

  • ViatorOmnium@piefed.social
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    14 hours ago

    There are way too many people lining up to fellate Gabe for this to be accurate.
    People might get pissed off when DRM is buggy enough for them to notice, but most gamers don’t realise that they don’t actually own a single game in their Steam library.

    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      Steam games do not need DRM to be sold there - the publishers chose to have it if it exists. Many can be run from the .exe without going through Steam.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.

      On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like Stardew Valley Terraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:

          • It doesn’t work for social aspects like friends, statuses, etc.
          • It doesn’t work for monitoring achievements.
          • The storefront is just the actual gog.com webpage rendered as a surface. GOG Galaxy’s store UI, by contrast, flows with everything else.
          • I don’t think games auto-update, although I could be wrong.
          • It’s bloated by nature of also being a launcher for Epic and Amazon – platforms I will never use. GOG Galaxy allows crossplatform stuff, but it’s not a full-on multilauncher.
          • The UI is pretty ass. I sympathize a lot with this one as someone who works on the (often disastrously undercoordinated) UI of a similar-profile project.
            • Rectangular UI elements’ corner rounding is all over the place (from sharp 90° to Material 3 and everything inbetween).
            • Themes are extremely samey with an enormous bias toward dark themes (I say this as someone who exclusively uses dark themes: a single light theme and thirteen dark themes means you don’t give a shit).
            • You can’t hide the left-hand menu bar to actually center the page you’re viewing.
            • Actions like toolbar dropdowns have no animations (I understand not wanting these; that’s accommodated with a “Disable Animations” option).
            • There’s absolutely zero compatibility with Orca (screen reader) that I can find.
            • Etc.

          Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.

          Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.

      • ViatorOmnium@piefed.social
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        14 hours ago

        Me too, but there’s a chicken egg problem of the studios not putting games there because it doesn’t have a big market share, and gamers not using it because it doesn’t have all the games.

        • SUPER SAIYAN@lemmy.worldOP
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          14 hours ago

          Yeah, thats where it needs the support of gamers. But it’s not practical without big games and to buy indie games there, even I do care about my library of games in the same place.

        • Whitebrow@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          GoG does have regional pricing in some countries. It’s very limited but saying they don’t have it at all is false.

              • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                It’s the other way around.

                People from poor countries were not buying games because the prices were expensive compared to their income. For that regional pricing was introduced to combat piracy. Some revenue is better than no revenue.

                • planish@sh.itjust.works
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                  7 hours ago

                  The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.

                  Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.

    • msage@programming.dev
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      11 hours ago

      Most games on Steam are DRM-free and you can start them without a launcher (meaning Steam).

      So you can buy a game, download it, copy game files, refund, keep playing.

  • Bruncvik@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Here I am, happy with my 10 yo desktop, playing games from my backlog, and teaching my kids to play Duck Tales and Dynablaster. Can’t wait for to introduce them to The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam and Max Hit the Road. From what I hear, most parents in my neighbourhood are doing something similar, so there’s little peer pressure to get the latest hardware to play the latest games.

    • AxExRx@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      My best friends’ kid’s favorite console is an old laptop with N64 and Playstation emulators on it i gave them a while back. They call all the old games ‘real’ <franchise name>

      Like real Zelda, and real Mario cart.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    14 hours ago

    Oh sure, its the gamers who are doing the beating huh?

    I doubt ai companies are scared of us… but maybe they should be.

    • LadyMeow@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      13 hours ago

      Idk watching companies do increasingly insane anti customer shit and people still just gobbling it up, nobody is scared of gamers, they love them, they shell out no matter what!

    • Virtvirt588@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      In a sane world this would be true, but unfortunately we live in a capitalist hell scape where its the exact opposite.

    • SUPER SAIYAN@lemmy.worldOP
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      14 hours ago

      It could happen if the niche audience get to know about these things. How many streamers do you think they are aware of these topics? They only do stream on niche games with sponsors and free games from epic.

  • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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    14 hours ago

    Except all big games still have DRM, nothings happened to Cloud gaming, and the AI companies are still churning out shit.

    Let’s stop masturbating to ourselves and realise the companies aren’t threatened by us at all.

    • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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      14 hours ago

      I mean, it’s not like “gamers” (as in a significant percentage of us) were actually doing something. As everywhere else, most people are relatively uncritically consuming stuff, and only bad game design can have consequences like a large portion of a fanbase not buying a franchises entry. Not like DRM was a political issue in gaming communities. And Cloud Gaming is even hailed as a way for people who can’t afford high power gaming machines to play the newest titles (a claim that has some merit but we need other solutions but that is another debate).

        • Virtvirt588@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          “Have you ever tried having lower standards of living” said the conservative to the homeless man.

          • Axolotl@feddit.it
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            9 hours ago

            I am not conservative lmao, also, if you are homeless i doubt you are gonna spend 20€ every month for gaming

            • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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              10 hours ago

              No, far longer. You don’t get a decent gaming PC for 250, even with used parts.

              And during that time, what do you play on?

    • Axolotl@feddit.it
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      13 hours ago

      DRMs are mostly broken by crackers tho and there are many people that hate DRMs and cloud services, though it’s not the majority sadly

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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      14 hours ago

      Gamers have definitely been boycotting games, lately. It just doesn’t seem to impact live service games as much because of the Whale economy.