I’d love to see an extension that, instead of removing the client ID tracking information, instead randomizes it - and does so on inputting a link too. Removing tracking parameters needs 100% certainty, a single link clicked while signed into Google or whatever on another browser can be enough to establish a connection between you and the friend who sent the link. If I show up as clicking one link from Bob and 9 links from null, I’m still connected to Bob. But if my 10 links are from Bob, Jane, Alice, Fheism, Bggur, Daxi8, Michelle, Sssssssssss, Mgke7d, and BRomgi, good luck targeting any ads with all that noise. Especially if the systematically replaced clientIDs are recycled within the addon’s database and end up creating ghost profiles on the advertisers’ end.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says “we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.”

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the “better” tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio’s stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it “right” instead of doing it “easy”, they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But “pushing” smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn’t the way. It’s the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with “good enough” defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to “do the lighting”.

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like “before you hire anybody” early, and it’s a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn’t the “best, most capable, free-est” one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn’t need all the other features he’d get out of something like Unity or Godot.

Since nobody else posted it in the comments yet: 600 euros for the base version, 900 for whatever the X version is.

OP, remember this isn’t Reddit, we can put the actual number in the title of the post.

TBH if you didn’t want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That’s like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

In the US and most of the rest of the world, that’s what they’re doing. In the UK/EU, they’re being forced to require age verification.

Do note that while “protect the children from seeing a titty on the internet” is an unwinnable and pointless battle, the outside UK/EU method doesn’t do anything to prevent it. I’m against age verification as a process, I want my accounts to be fully pseudonymous whenever possible, but without it there’s nothing preventing a horny 15 year old from entering January 1 1990 into the age field or clicking “yes I’m 18” the way everyone’s been doing since the Internet moved beyond Usenet. The EU/UK law is acknowledging the ankle-high barrier that “dude just trust me” age-gating applies, and is attempting to introduce some form of actual verification/accountability for sites that display porn. Doing this is, of course, awful for the freedom of information and privacy that can exist in online spaces, but “we gotta protect the children!!!”.

As far as Nexus goes, this statement is as close as possible to saying “we are going to be complying with this law as we are forced to, but are committed to doing the absolute bare minimum required of us. UK/EU users will have to use a VPN into any other region to bypass whatever age verification system we’re forced to implement.”

Whatever they end up doing for age verification in the EU/UK can probably be bypassed by a proxy/VPN, at least.

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing “gshsjajfkfksiwn” in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we’re really micromanaging every art shortcut as “potential pay to hire more artists” now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn’t change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It’s not a “the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!” situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is “good enough” just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They’re using generative AI. Every last one of them. They’ve been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced “content-aware fill” algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone’s job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than “asking” chatGPT to “translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese”.

Yeah, there’s less reason than ever before to play something like Stardew or Isaac or Hades on the Nintendo box where your save file is hostage to their system and you’ll never be able to use mods and the developers have to outsource the patches to a third party so the game’s always a couple months behind on the new features…

When the Switch 1 came out it was also the only console that had the “half-handheld” form factor. A lot of indie games like Isaac, Hades, and Slay the Spire got PC gamers like me to double dip (or in Hades’ case, actually choose Switch over Steam) for the gameboy factor. The Switch (2) is no longer unique in that regard. I haven’t touched my Switch 1 for anything but exclusives since the Steam Deck came out.

In 2025, a company that is just looking to make a shitload of money is enough to automatically “win”.

Valve: “What are you selling?” Video games, video game hardware without vendor lock-in, and in-app purchases. “Who are you selling it to?” PC gamers.

Literally everyone else in the space except for Itch, which is decidedly focused on too-indie-for-indie games and is small enough to be acquired if it ever gets popular: “What are you selling?” The promise that we’ll make more profit next year than this year. “Who are you selling it to?” Shareholders or a corp that’ll buy the whole company.

It’s an absolute no-brainer. Until anyone else can answer these questions in the same way Valve does, Valve is automatically the best player in the space. Even if another store sells games for cheaper, or has exclusives, or bans DRM, or manages to make a better storefront program, or pays developers a bigger cut. I’m not on some “good guy Gabe” circlejerk shit. There’s no morals to ascribe here. Valve makes enough money and is okay with making enough money, forever. MS, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, CDPR, Apple, Amazon, ActiBlizz, and every other storefront operator will be considered a failure if they don’t make “more more money than last year” every year forever. I know which platform I want to maintain a library on. I’ll happily use GOG and Itch to buy DRM-free installers though, those will outlast any enshittification the platform does in the future.

If there weren’t enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn’t kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. There’s a whole graveyard of companies that tried to make “our own Steam”. Fucking Discord tried to do it. What’s that going to do for a marketplace where you’re selling “licenses” to users? What good’s your licensed copy of Fallout New Vegas on Amazon Prime Games Launcher when that launcher no longer exists? Say what you will about Steam, most people are pretty confident it’ll still be around in eight years.

If there weren’t enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn’t still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn’t killed it, and isn’t even attempting to kill it. It’s just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can’t compete with Steam while giving shit away for free, that’s not a “Steam monopoly” it’s an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is.

Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren’t worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that’s beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next.

Steam’s existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and VHS/DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies at home. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went “hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves” and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it’s putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.

Y’know what people do seem to like? Microsoft Gamepass. I’ll never install it myself, same reason I’ll never install the Epic Games Store. But Microsoft is using an even less consumer friendly strategy (timed access to games with a subscription) to propose the same “upsides” as EGS (you don’t have to pay full price for games).

For me, it failed because I wasn’t willing to install some shareholder-driven company’s storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn’t the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them.

Epic’s exclusives are the exact same.

I get my PC games from five sources. Steam, GOG’s website, Itch’s website, standalone launchers (I’d probably be okay with a “store” of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don’t use that because I don’t install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I’ll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out.

A recent launch I paid for and didn’t use Steam for is “The Bazaar” - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn’t keep me from playing it.

I’ll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I’ll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn’t. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren’t exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company’s adware on my computer. Having the space “capitalism free” is unrealistic, unless we’re talking “pirate everything”. I’ll settle for “profit driven” over “YOY growth driven” leaders in the space any day of the week.

Now, if Steam’s position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto “monopoly”, what’s the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to not publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for “free” on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been “Free” on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by… Acting like Epic doesn’t exist. They don’t chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic.

Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of “monopoly” the way we’d say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company’s suing Valve over) alleviate this “monopoly”? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow “the game is more expensive on Steam” tactics would just make Steam even more of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform.

You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I’d see the validity in the argument. But it’s completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.

Ah yes. Massively unsuccessful games like… checks notes League of Legends. World of Warcraft. Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The magic part of the PC is that if your independently distributed game does fail, you can still, after the fact, decide to slap it on someone’s storefront in a desperate attempt for eyeballs - see Overwatch 2. Why not double dip? It only costs you hypothetical money you haven’t made yet. Am I supposed to be sad that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer?

Valve will never IPO, yes! I don’t care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that’ll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with “staying profitable” for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. We’re having this conversation on Lemmy instead of on Reddit for presumably this reason. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR’s GOG) have a primary motive of “being more profitable than last year”. If, let’s say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it’d be a failed company.

I’ll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that’s content with one money printer over every other option that’s always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It’s just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I’d use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.

If a game dev doesn’t value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam’s service, they don’t list on Steam. Simple as. It’s just that a lot of dev studios consider “visible on the Steam store” to be very valuable indeed. That’s what they’re paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).

CDPR judges that selling on Steam is enough of a boost that it’s worth the cost. Riot (for example) doesn’t. If you think every game company or indie studio feels mandated to use Steam, that’s a hugely consolebrained take. Nintendo has a monopoly. Want your game on Switch? Follow Nintendo’s terms and list on Nintendo’s store. Apple has a monopoly, challenged recently. Want your app on iPhone? Follow Apple’s terms and list on Apple’s store. Want your game on Windows PC? Upload an EXE somewhere. Sell a disc. Run your own launcher. Or license out to Steam/Epic/whoever.

The only reason you get more sales on Steam is because the PC gaming userbase overwhelmingly prefers Steam. Hell, I play Guild Wars 2, a 12 year old MMO that “launched” on Steam a couple years ago. You can still buy and play that game without any third parties getting involved at all, and always could. It doesn’t have any Steam achievements, doesn’t benefit from any Steam features, and has a decade old community in spaces other than Steam ones. ArenaNet decided that exposure via Steam recommendations was worth losing $x/player to list on Steam.

If Steam had an exclusivity clause, that’d be another matter entirely. As it stands, listing on Steam doesn’t prevent you from also listing your game elsewhere or bypassing the entire storefront middleman scheme.

If tomorrow someone made a better Steam, how many years would you have to wait to be reasonably secure that it’s not fueled by venture capital and serving as a loss leader foot-in-the-door scheme? It’s not impossible that Steam itself would enshittify and open an IPO, but the fact that the option’s been on the table for decades and Valve hasn’t taken it is better evidence than any other platform could muster. Valve has proven that it’s profitable and that it doesn’t need to care about YoY growth. Let’s overestimate their operations costs (CDN, R&D, employee salaries, hardware production, licensing, etc etc) at 5 billion a year. If they made ten billion in revenue last year and only make seven billion this year, Valve is fine. Think about that. Think about what a sixty percent drop in profits would do to literally any shareholder-backed company. It’d be apocalyptic.

That’s the main reason I’ll use Steam happily but never install another storefront on my PC. I’ll buy games on GOG or Itch as DRM-free installers, and store the installers locally, and I’ll buy and play games that distribute without a storefront launcher, but the only “storefront platform” anyone’s gonna get me to install in the next decade is Steam. If “better Steam” happens, it needs to demonstrate immunity to being bought out by Microsoft/Elon Musk for eighty morbillion dollars. And that can’t be demonstrated in a day.

That’s without any mention of actual “features” like reviews or remote play or proton or steam input or anything that actually makes Steam as a program good/bad. It’s all about the company’s refusal to go shareholder-driven. If Gabe sells Valve or his successors do, I’m off the ship and scraping the DRM off of my library. What I won’t do if that happens is go to someone else’s shareholder-value-generating storefront.

Gabe Newell is a man who, for the past decade at least, has had a big red button on his desk. This button, if pressed, will deposit eleven or twelve figures directly into his wallet to distribute however he likes, at the cost of letting some company gain control of how Valve operates. Make all his employees multimillionaires! Race Musk and Bezos for biggest number! Buy a small country! Whatever! Gabe Newell has not pressed this button, and has signaled that after his retirement or death that no successor to the company is going to be allowed to press it either. If Newell’s managed not to press it for this long, I’ll “trust” him as far as it goes. His successor hasn’t earned that trust yet, so is only coasting on “trusting Newell to pick the right guy” which isn’t guaranteed - a lot of guys would sacrifice a lot to press that button.

The PC is an open platform. Even more so with Linux. Steam doesn’t force exclusivity, you’re free to host your game on Steam for discoverability while also self-distributing or using other storefronts. Valve’s 30% is a price that a studio chooses to pay, because they know that a ton of PC gamers like buying games on Steam.

If all you want out of a storefront is a payment processor, CDN, and possibly DRM, you can release on Steam, Epic, Itch, GOG, or all at once. You pick Steam (or Steam+others) instead of others because you know that enough PC gamers are willing to pay for your game on Steam, because they like Steam. Epic can tout its small cuts or exclusivity bonuses or “zero percent cuts on the first $x” deals, but game devs know that 100% of revenue on an Epic launch week is going to be a lower absolute number than 70% of revenue on a Steam one.

Hell, if Steam did lower their cut to undercut Epic (which they absolutely could do, especially since they don’t have any shareholders and thus just need to be profitable instead of demonstrating YoY growth), that would be a more “monopolistic” move in the PC gaming space. Remember, the alleged monopoly is over devs, not users. As a dev, the only reason you’d ever consider Epic instead of Steam for your game is that generous profit-share ratio. Steam could remove that only advantage overnight if it wanted to “compete”, and doesn’t. Valve will settle for winning exclusively on the merit of “being a platform that doesn’t suck, and hasn’t sucked for 20 years, and doesn’t have financial motivation to start sucking now”. Because Valve isn’t beholden to shareholder value, if they lowered their cuts to 10%, that ten billion in revenue would be closer to three billion… Which absolutely covers every employee’s salary, the hosting and bandwidth costs of their CDN, and material costs for their hardware. Instead, they consistently reinvest in not just sitting there doing nothing and also not ever sacrificing user experience for number go up. Steam Machines and the Steam Controller could fail without bringing down Valve. The Index and Deck could be produced at scale and aimed at niche audiences because hey, they could afford a failure.