Worth pointing out that the last project the digg guy worked on was a pump and dump NFT scam (remember NFTs and how they were totally going to take over the world?).

That’s plenty of competition, it’s just that they suck at actual competition or are comfortable in their niche market.

I am not talking about the mere presence of competing entities. I am talking about market forces (in the real sense). If they were subject to market, they would not be able to charge an arbitrary 30% (because this figure would undercut to gain market share).

I wouldn’t really call Colony Ship a dark Christian RPG.

It is an excellent game! Strongly recommend if you prefer roleplaying focused RPGs and don’t like excessive action combat (FPSs are great, don’t see what RPGs should be just like them in terms of combat).

I can also recommend Iron Tower’s previous game Age of Decadence. Relatively original setting for an RPG and modicum of originality for the ending scenarios.

I am surprised how easily people are siding with Valve. I say this as someone who’s last console was the SEGA and is happy to see Valve improve Linux gaming.

That being said the 30% fee cut is clearly only possible due to lack of competition. In a competitive market, the cut would go down to service cost + some margin (subject to competition).

I don’t believe Valve or any other platform providers ever argued around economic reasoning for choosing specifically 30.

It most definitely does cost the customer more.

What your describing us not how pricing and economics works.

I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).

I was interested in AoC as I prefer sandbox MMOs. I just can’t play themepark MMORPGs, I always feel like I would be better of playing a single player RPG or multiplayer game of a different genre.

That being said their monetisation policies were a massive red flag (including selling Star Citizen style JPEGs of MMORPG items) and their CEO was disengagous.

I would much rather AoC was a success, I would even be willing to try out a 1.0 release, but such a complex sandbox MMO is difficult to implement form a financial perspective if you have ~250 employees based in the US (and in a very expensive region too).

I apologize for the broad generalisation (in my defence, the use of demonyms in such a context doesn’t always suggets complete generalisation). That was uncalled for.

I’ve lived for several years and travelled a lot around the US (both while living there and during subsequent visits). The impression I got is that corruption is not purely a far right thing and a far larger proportion of say the centre-right voting public enable it than would think. They might not be as openly committed to crime and corruption as say the far right, but much for the centre-right voting is simply too well off to risk rocking the boat and pursuing true anti-crime measures.

Let me give you an example of the latter. Meta has been found to knowling enable and support fraud to the tune of $16 B (10% plus of revenues) in 2024 alone. They even had a playbook to enable this scheme, so there likely entent to engage in crime.

This is a more pedestrian example, there also the enablement of Rohingya genocide (I don’t support capital punishment, but I would be willing to consider exceptions for egregious crimes against humanity, but let’s go with a more clear cut case.

Am I being unreasonable in stating that the vast majority of the centre-right voting public may vaguely believe Meta’s action to be criminal, but they fundamentally oppose any actions that might address such criminal activities. Things like immediate internment of all Meta executives and senior operational staff involved in this scheme, raids on their properties to uncover evidence, asset seizures for any entities involved in crime (so Zuckerburg would lose ownership stake in Meta if his engagement was proven during criminal proceedings)

The facts are pretty clear in this case, Meta didn’t even deny it, they decided to try PR their way out of it, hoping the issue would be forgotten.

There may be structural reasons for not pursuing such crimes, but that’s a weak excuse. Every country has problems (some far more challenging than American structural issues),

I stand by what I said, tech platforms (especially B2C, but not only) run by entities either based in the US or being subject to American influence cannot be trusted.

I will happily change my stance; it brings me no joy to see any country become a bastion of negative forces such as oligarchy and global promotion of crime and corruption. But there are limits to open mindedness and a desire to emphasis the positive elements of a given culture/nation.

At some point, there has to be real world changes and impact. I do not believe a hypothetical win by the centre-right in both legislative and executive office will change anything (FWIW, I actually lived in the US under Obama). I will also note that the issues with Valve were implementing during Obama’s terms.

Apologies, in retrospective that was wrong to say.

I should have said “entities based in the US jurisdiction (or that are influenced by American-style corruption)”.

You are correct that the nationality plays no role in this.

That being said, it is fact that all major US B2C tech platforms support corruption, engage in crime, engage in spyware activities and leverage shallow pompous PR copytext about alleged belief in free speech and “government official this or that”.

That ship has really sailed.

I haven’t played the release version, but it definitely branches out into its own thing. It is not just a direct clone of ~2010 era TF2. I would check it out if it sounds interesting.

I am planning to play it this weekend and I hope it gets enough momentum in Europe to have somewhat full servers.

Oh Yeah, time to get back into TF2.

One thing to note for others, this is a recreation (and evolution) of TF2 before it went crazy with random bullshit (so ~2010ish era).

Funny thing is I don’t support Valve or Tim Sweeney. While by American standards, Valve are angels, that is a very low standard. Sweeney is your stereotypical American corporate degenerate:

But honestly Valve is no better. Europe (and other countries/regions) should either force Valve to have to de facto white label their store for Europe (where they are a junior partner and hold minimal control) or kick them out. And I am not saying there can’t be collaboration on common goals; e.g. investing into Linux support and open platforms, but you can’t have Americans in charge of major platforms. That ship has sailed.

There are many massive issues with Valve:

• They made a huge contribution to the rise of lootbox gambling schemes
• They initially attempted a fraudulent scheme on local consumer laws on refunds
• For most of Steam’s life their TOS had mandatory arbitration requirements which is a local corruption scheme that is not too different from Soviet kangaroo courts. In their defence they did add that “as far as your country’s laws permit”.

I will admit that the overall logic of the case doesn’t make sense.

Yeah combat aged very poorly

I disagree, it’s a matter of what you are looking for and your taste in gaming.

I prefer combat like say in Morrowind or even the original Deus Ex. When I am playing an RPG, I want the combat to be challenging from a gameplay experience perspective (it’s difficult to shoot when you start out in the OG Deus EX) and reflect the fact that you’re a low level character and that you need to learn the game and understand how combat works.

Many modern RPGs almost play like an FPS with RPG elements tacked on. If I want to play an FPS, I will play a real FPS.

General UI/UX improvements are a must, but it’s not wrong for combat to be on some level unintuitive when you start out.

It’s sort of like saying Jazz has aged poorly just because it’s not mainstream in the way it may have been 70+ years ago.

The studio that made it pushed so hard to not call it VM 2 for that very reason…

That’s not the impression I got from following the new on VTMB. That’s what they claim, but their actions speak otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I think TCR make some solid games (although often with subpar gameplay), but that doesn’t mean I am going to uncritically accept their PR narratives.

I have yet to try it, but if you like city-builders / economic strategy games, Microlandia seems to be well liked.

The sad thing is that on some level indie games do get pushed out by shovelware on a certain level.

I’ve play Ostriv a lot.

The current build is very playable. There are many 1.0 release games that are in a far worse state (even with post release patches).

I would just try it out if I were you. The game is a lot of fun as it is.

I am a big fan of Timberborn, but if we go all pedantic about it, Timberborn’s flood mechanics aren’t all that realistic.

A game that came somewhat close to realistic flood mechanics was Pharaoh/Cleopatra (1999/2000). Even though it used an abstract/statistical model (due to the technical limitations of the time), it felt a lot closer to reality than Timberborn even if there were some gamey elements like how well you respected Osiris.

I didn’t know that this was de facto a client side feature (Lemmy WebUI, Piefed WebUI and my mobile client, Voyager, all support it).

That said, I strongly prefer Piefed style link re-direction; albeit it’s a client side feature just like the relative markdown syntax.

I don’t think having functional, active, somewhat niche communities is the antithesis of the Fediverse’s purpose.

If we had 1M MAU, that would be different.

It’s a common complaint for many people looking to switch off reddit that niche communities are lacking and that having multiple low engagement communities without any clear differentiation is confusing.

Multiple comms is a good thing, but you also need to make it easy for users to quickly understand what the difference between two communities is.