I've been at it a little longer, but my motivation was much lazier. I simply can't keep up. Watching other people spin plates make me dizzy and every single different account screen introduces more plates.
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They really all came crawlin' back to Steam, didn't they?
- Thread starter polonyc2
- Start date
I've been at it a little longer, but my motivation was much lazier. I simply can't keep up. Watching other people spin plates make me dizzy and every single different account screen introduces more plates.
Beamdog has their own launcher? Fuck that, I'll stick to the original games with mods.
Battle.net is being phased out.
MechWarrior 5? How is it? Reviews I've seen are very lukewarm.
Lack of a CD drive prevents me from using my originals.
We’ll see what they replace the launcher with probably just a rebrand, I doubt they put all their stuff elsewhere.
MW5 is good, they’ve managed good DLC for it and they vastly improved the AI since launch. The mods available for it also do a good job on replay value. Ultimately it’s best played with others but even single player it’s a fun ride.
SecretStash
Gawd
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GOG is great, no nagware when I want to go in offline mode and avoid updates. Just install with no strings attached. No reverting offline mode either. I just want to play games and stop phoning home before I play. I don't need the platform experience. Galaxy is good enough.
The good part of steam is that they haven't abused their monopolistic position too much (they do a little). I have too many games with them, but sucks I can't feel like I own the game.
Haven't spent a cent on Epic but do have their free stuff. Good for competition and the smaller than 30% margin is good, but I wouldn't trust them to have market dominance.
Platforms are just bloat. Competition will probably still be the roughly the same now that many of these companies let their stuff on steam.
The good part of steam is that they haven't abused their monopolistic position too much (they do a little). I have too many games with them, but sucks I can't feel like I own the game.
Haven't spent a cent on Epic but do have their free stuff. Good for competition and the smaller than 30% margin is good, but I wouldn't trust them to have market dominance.
Platforms are just bloat. Competition will probably still be the roughly the same now that many of these companies let their stuff on steam.
Flogger23m
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Is it? That would be interesting since it pre-dates Steam by almost a decade. Of course the initial versions of it were quite different and the modern thing is essentially a Steam like copy.
Dion
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When you vote with your wallet thats all they listen too 
NOW STOP BUYING 60-70$ games on day1.
NOW STOP BUYING 60-70$ games on day1.
and they will focus more and more on Free too play skin selling, game pass-streamingWhen you vote with your wallet thats all they listen too
NOW STOP BUYING 60-70$ games on day1.
?
Dion
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Free = bad?and they will focus more and more on Free too play skin selling, game pass-streaming
MavericK
Zero Cool
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I think Steam Deck has had something to do with this, people just aren't buying games on alternate services when they either don't work or are a pain in the ass to get working on the Steam Deck now.
MavericK
Zero Cool
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Free-to-play = microtransactions up the ass
Usually not without consequence would it be the news, social media platform, video games or github, the paying upfront possible to make a good profit just from that amount for good&services has a lot of advantage over long enough amount of times.
Oh, I guess a name change. I'm kind of hoping the MS buyout goes through so Blizzard games go to Steam.
Gorankar
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Free 2 Play, leads to Pay 2 Win more often then it doesn't. Pay 2 Win games are a pox on the industry as far as I am concerned. Cosmetics only F2P is fine with me, but anything giving an in game advantage over other players that don't pay is garbage afaic.
I have issue with having multiple launchers myself. Steam works for my needs, and exclusives end up getting ignored. So many games already in my backlog and so many games get regularly added to my backlog via Steam and GOG, that it would just be a waste to add to the backlog with more launchers/stores/whatever..
GoldenTiger
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Which still sucks in mmorpg titles especially. No more "wow, that armor came from slaying the uber dragon of Doom, that looks awesome!" and now it's just "oh, guess he lootbox gambled on the cash shop. Whatever." They also tend to then restrict anything cool looking to the cash shop, and break the game's lore aesthetic. No thanks... I miss the $15/mo everything included mmo subscriptions
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Susquehannock
Supreme [H]ardness
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Are launchers even necessary? Glorified store front?
More like free fuckin money when Valve does it.
Literally generated hundreds of dollars from their marketplace selling in game shit.
Between that and me selling the PUBG pre order items, I didn't pay for a game on steam for years.
Axman
VP of Extreme Liberty
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How do people make money with Steam?
Flogger23m
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Fairly stupid. Either keep what you have and improve. Renaming something won't make it better.
If you can't keep up just throw in the towel and go back to Steam 100%.
Yeah but... Can you Imagine Microsoft making it so all Gamepass subs get active WoW subs? I already hear regulators crying over that.
Not because it's bad for any gamer or the Microsoft brand but because Sony, Ubisoft, and a few others would make sure that the lobbyists get a paycheck fat enough to make it a priority for them to complain about.
DukenukemX
Supreme [H]ardness
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Using desktop Linux on Steam Deck or in general?
I'd like to see Epic make their own hand held console with Epic Store running on Windows and see how affordable that's going to be against the Deck. That is one of the many reasons why Valve went Linux for the Deck.
What is this Heroic? Is this another Wine build or method to get Epic Launcher working?
As a WoW gamer myself I think this would be better than charging $15 a month just to play one game. Plus I'm not a fan of buying expansions if I don't actually own them. I make it a point that I would try Dragonflight if I didn't have to buy the stupid game. Blizzard is more likely to make a bad expansion then to make a good one. I primarily play WoW classic, and once WOTLK is over, so is my sub. I'm not interested in Cataclysm as I would never pay a sub to play it. Been down that hole before. Merge that subscription with Gamepass and you might have something there. I get more value from Netflix for $15 compared to a WoW subscription. Once League of Legends MMO is out, that's probably where I'm going for my MMO fix. I, like most people, don't have time to play more than one MMO, and right now WoW just doesn't offer that much beyond nostalgia. A nostalgia I have no interest in revisiting again in the near future.
Hahahaah, no. There's nothing that Windows can do that Linux can't do, besides "AAA" games, and that's vanishing by the day because of the push for cross platform applications.
Been using Linux for 20+ years, and switched my main workstation to Linux 3 years ago. Honestly should have done it a long time ago, it's refreshing not having to constantly worry about Microsoft sending yet another update down the pipe that craters the machine. The Windows 10 machine in my garage used for controlling my 3D printer has cratered itself 7 times in the past couple of years just from bad Windows updates. Good riddance Windows.
M76
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Not free, free to play, huge difference.
Free to play games should be illegal, they use the tactics of drug dealers of old, give sample for free, then lock the patient into a massive ripoff cycle.
I found it easier to get the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) working instead but yeah outside the latest games Linux can pretty much do it all as long as you don't have any weird USB or Wifi chipsets included in a few things, looking at you MSI and AsRock...
DukenukemX
Supreme [H]ardness
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I agree but we need to update a lot of copyright and consumer laws to make this work. It's still a grey area whether or not you own the software you paid for. I guarantee you if free to play actually gave you ownership of the software, the business model would disappear. Same goes for in game purchases, as in it should be illegal. I think we all agree that NFT's have no value because they aren't real. So why do we let companies who generally pray on children and teenagers, trick them into paying for digital crap in games? If you own the game then all the digital crap should be yours. Like most things, money talks and bullshit walks. Steam is the biggest offender of this, and Valve won't do anything to stop it if it makes them endless amounts of free money. Gotta pass some laws to make this stop.
Network chipsets did used to be a bigger problem than they are now, you had to use FWCutter and NDISWrapper to get certain Wifi and LAN chipsets to work by emulating the Windows networking driver stack and run the Windows driver. There are Linux distros that make this easy now with community repos, like Ubuntu and their proprietary driver section.
But it's not a problem only Linux has. Windows has the exact same problems with network drivers either not being available, or not having Windows 10 drivers that work properly. In some cases, just garbage drivers in general that cause system instability (I'm looking at you Atheros and your trash "Killer LAN" network chips.)
Windows in general has more driver problems. Every time I build up a Windows 10 machine, I still find myself having to hunt the dark dusty corners of the internet for drivers, ESPECIALLY Intel drivers. Intel has made it extremely difficult to find chipset drivers for virtually any of their chipsets, because they want you to use Windows Update. I encountered this problem last night on a Z170 machine I was building up for a friend. Ran Fedora 37 on it first and had zero driver issues, but when switched to Windows 10, it took me hours to resolve stupid driver problems. Windows 10 had a driver for the LAN chipset, but it didn't work, so I had to copy a newer one over via a flash drive.
Dion
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Weird i haven't paid a dime to dota2, lol, fortnite or the new cod and have gotten thousands of hours of entertainment. I wasn't aware these games required my wallet...
Companies only respond to money.. If they get the $ they will keep doing it.
While you don't have to pay, all of those games have predatory gambling mechanics designed to target kids and people with addiction issues. They're disgusting.
They're free to play, but pay to win, or pay to have the latest shiny cosmetic item.
xDiVolatilX
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Damn sounds so nice to be divorced from Microsoft. Too bad I know nothing about Linux and I don't have the time/patience to learn. Also I mainly game on my PC so that's the icing on the cake lol I'm doomed.
If you have the patience to deal with the perpetual BS that is Windows, you'll do fine in Linux. I'd recommend one of the newbie friendly distros like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE before diving into more advanced distros like Debian, Arch or Fedora. Ubuntu will keep you out of Bash most of the time.
Bash isn't scary, quite a bit of syntax carries over from DOS/Windows Command Console. You can of course do a whole lot more in Bash, but you don't need to for basic navigation.
As a rule, I have been swapping out all the wireless cards in the devices around the office to the Intel AX200's, the drivers for those work well in every OS I have thrown at them and the cards are relatively cheap and they fix so many issues. Since I started doing that the number of "my internet is slow" complaints has dropped off significantly.
That's great and all, but you're forgetting about that small thing called wifi card whitelists. Manufacturers for decades have put whitelists in laptops that only allow specific blessed wifi cards to be used. Not on the list? Not going to work.
The list usually is not publicly available. It varies wildly between models within the same vendor, and even more between vendors.
It might work for you if you have a corporate homogeneous PC ecosystem, but not in the service industry where every day is something different.
I haven't run into a whitelist issue like that for at least 10 years, I didn't even realize they were still a thing.
Googling would indicate that Lenovo continues the practice, but Dell and HP haven't continued doing this for a very long time. I guess that's one more reason to not bring in more Lenovo's except for my TR Pro machines, not really an alternative there :'( But those are so locked down I can't even replace the Ram or NVME drives there without getting a signed part from Lenovo, it fails to recognize them otherwise.
Bloatware, useless games that nobody wants to play.
But I guess you can get a dopamine rush for getting free products, myself I require a good game that's worth playing.
NightReaver
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It's also funny because free games was definitely NOT what brought people over from prating in the 1st place. It was service. If you offer better service, people are willing to pay more. Using "free games" to defend Epic seems like a regression, actually. Why not just pirate? Epic apparently already paid for your copy regardless of where you get it. I guess Tencent loses out.....LOL.
M76
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If I want to play a game I buy it when it comes out. If I don't want to play a game a few years and giving it away for free won't change that. I always have more games to play than free time, so wasting it on games I had little to no interest in would be utterly stupid of me. That is why subscription services don't work on me either like games pass. Why would I pay a subscription to have access to dozens of mediocre to crap games I have little interest in?
Armenius
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