Relatedly, he may also try and chase the RPG market. Apparently he got
pissed off by the badmouthing Gygax got in a book about the making of
Dungeons and Dragons that painted early RPG material as anti--woke.

D&D was wholesome (despite attacks from the Satanic Panic). It didn't need to be trashed by anyone.

So, as you may already know, I have a Steam Deck which I bough in order to play non-steam games. Yes, I am a weirdo, I know. In any case, a friend of mine told me that since I finally have a gaming computer (of sorts), I could start picking up freebies from Epic.

For those who don't know, Epic is a videogame store that is known for giving free videogames away quite often. By this, I mean that usually they hand a videogame away per week, and on special holidays they might hand out one every day. They are paying game publishers so they can offer the game in the handout programs, just because they want to entice players to register an account with the store.

Am I the only one who thinks this is bonkers?

Most free games offered through these programs are quite mediocre, but even if you only get a good game every two months, you can build a respectable videogame library and play to your heart's content without paying a dime ever again.

This has made me realize the videogame industry seems to be in a sharper decline than I thought. Publishers are willing to accept scraps from Epic - probably because they don't sell that much - and Epic will rather buy users and lose money because otherwise they would not get any.

It is starting to look like the book industry, in which a small number of people makes an actual profit and 95% operate at heavy loses.

Thoughts?

I don't keep up with the industry, but I will say that all of the video games I still play came out in the 80s and 90s, only a few in the early 00s. I don't even remember the last time I actually purchased a video game. Anyway, my point is, I'm not doing my part to help the situation.

2024-12-27 00:43 from zelgomer
Subject: Re: Freebies, and the sustainability of the videogame business

model.

I don't keep up with the industry, but I will say that all of the video

games I still play came out in the 80s and 90s, only a few in the early

00s. I don't even remember the last time I actually purchased a video

game. Anyway, my point is, I'm not doing my part to help the situation.

If you want to be truly hostile, you should get that Age of Rifles match going XD

So, I have been playing Fallout 3 at today's videogame orgy with friends. For those of you who don't know, Fallout 3 is a videogame about nuclear war survivors trying to make the best out of a nuked America.

There is a side quest in which a guy, who is building up a museum of American History, tasks you with finding the Declaration of Independence. It turns out it is located in the National Archives, which has been overtaken by radioactive supermutants. Once you mop the floor with them, if you manage to access the security vault, there is a very nice surprise awaiting for you.

It turns out the Declaration of Independence is being guarded by pre-war
robots, leaded by a robot who believes himself to be Button Gwinnett himself. Their first reaction is to try to crush you because they believe you are filthy Brittish, but soon you can formally talk to robot Gwinnett and establish some negotiation talks.

There are many dialog options to carry the negotiations. You can try convincing him that you are Thomas Jefferson, for example. What we did was convince the robot that King George was after the Declaration of Independence and that we could foil his plans if we made a false copy and sent it instead. He bought the plan alright and we somehow ended up convincing him we were an agent from the Congress.

That part was cool because after the robot hands you the false Declaration of Independence, he asks if there are new commands from Congress. You can tell them the Congress have ordered them to self destruct, and all my friends wanted me to pick that option. I told them instead "The orders are to protect the Declaration of Independence." The answer was "Now they will only take it if they pry them out of my cold dead hands."

The whole thing was so cheesy MAGA it was epic. The museum guy took the fake none the wiser and was so happy about it.

"This is no mere scrap of paper, sir. This is the doctrine laid down by my fellow members of the Second Continental Congress. It absolves us of the tyranny of King George the Third of Great Britain. It is perhaps the greatest symbol of this free nation."

Last time they tried to launch a patriotic videogame here they shut it down :(

Keep in mind that the fallout series is meant to be satirical. The developers don't admire the patriotism and nationalism there, they're mocking it.

2025-01-18 23:45 from zelgomer
Subject: Re: MAGA Robots
Keep in mind that the fallout series is meant to be satirical. The
developers don't admire the patriotism and nationalism there, they're

mocking it.

I am well aware. It still gave me gosegumps

I just wanted to stop by and mention I have realized Steam fanboys are very dangerous for the videogame industry.

For those of you who don't know, Steam is a digital store that licenses about 70% of the PC videogames that get sold these days. I say "licenses" instead of "sells" because when you buy a game there, you more often than not don't own it, but instead you get permission to play a (often) DRMed version of it.

First of all, I want to acknowledge all the good things Steam has accomplished for the consumers. The most outstanding of them is the fact they have brought commercial games to Linux as a way to ensure their whole business model is not Windows-only. As a result, many games which used to be Windows-only can now be played very easily on other Operating Systems. This effort reached its apex with the release of the Steam Deck, a handheld computer running Linux and designed to play commercial games from the Steam store - which happens to be able to play games from elsewhere anyway.

There are other stores attempting to survive in Steam's shade. GOG is a popular one, whose appeal is that they sell DRM-free games and whose value proposal is that your game library does not depend on them. You can download the games you buy from their store and keep the install media stored anywhere you see fit, and install it offline if need be. Another one that comes along in discusions is the Epic Store, known for giving games away for free quite often as a marketing strategy to convince people to visit their site.

Epic gets a lot of trash from the Internet, often for quite valid reasons. Its store and client is not quite good, specially when compared to others. However, one of the points that gets them the most hate seems to be they often try to convince game developers to sign exclusivity deals with them, so games get published through Epic first and only hit other stores much later.

Following a recent Internet discusion I realize that there exists a vast amount of Steam users that hate Epic because of this. Specifically, these users want every game to be in Steam so they can use Steam as their only game provider, and they hate Epic because they try to have games Steam has not. I find this very disturbing because the implication is they'd rather have their game collections monopolized.

I am not a fan of Epic (I think their value proposition does not cut it) but, in all fairness, it is not like they have many options. Steam forces all games in their store to fix their price so nobody else has it at a better price, so EPic can't compete with cheaper product - no developer in its right mind would suicide their game by excluding it from Steam. The only way Epic has to try and grab customers from elsewhere is by having games nobody else has. Why would anybody use their store otherwise?


This is compounded by the fact a lot of gamers have the mindset that if a game is not on Steam, they are not purchasing it, period.

So it seems the playerbase is currently cornering themselves into a monopoly, not because Steam is exercising an outrageous abuse of monopolistic power, but because the users themselves are generating this monopoly.

It is like customers who refused to have Coca Cola at all because their favourite
store didn't have it, and attempted to actively sabotage Coca Cola for not being in it. It is so weird it makes me realize the lamb mentality is stronger than I thought in the masses.

It is like customers who refused to have Coca Cola at all because
their favourite
store didn't have it, and attempted to actively sabotage Coca Cola for

not being in it. It is so weird it makes me realize the lamb mentality

is stronger than I thought in the masses.

Or like dumbass statists who vote for more government.

Or like dumbass statists who vote for more government.

Yes, but at least those think they are getting something of value, like having the government force other people to pay for their stuffs. It is an evil (and ultimately non-working) choice which is done on somewhat rational grounds.


But these people want a game distributor to have ultimate monopoly on the industry, and the benefit they get are not having to register to a different store. What the fuck, dudes.

Hi guys.

Have you ever heard of My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic? If you haven't, fear not, because you will: it was a fan game created as a parodic homage to the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV show. A team of developers who called themselves Mane 6 put out some work and coded a fighting game, Street Fighter style, in which you could control your favorite pony andlove and tollerate the shit out of the pony you liked less.

That was, of course, until Hasbro sent a Cease & Desist order, because corporations always need to ruin good stuff.

The good news is the team took the game and, with the help of the MLT:FiM animator, created new characters and a new identity and gave birth to Them' Fightin' Herds, which is nothing other than the old game Hasbro trashed, remade with a different IP and with more funding.

The game is available for free at the Epic Games store until Thursday. It works well under Wine too, if you are a Linux user. As far as I know, the game itself is no longer developped but it is quite serviceable as it is.

That was, of course, until Hasbro sent a Cease & Desist order, because

corporations always need to ruin good stuff.

There needs to be a solution to this sort of thing. I get the concern, and I do think there should be protections for IP, but if I want to draw cool finger paint art of Luke Skywalker and hang it on me refrigerator - not a problem - but if I want to distribute the finger paint art for free because I love Star Wars so much, then the Disney lawyers start getting their panties in a bunch.

Is there no system workable system where we can have both?

There needs to be a solution to this sort of thing. I get the concern,

and I do think there should be protections for IP, but if I want to

draw cool finger paint art of Luke Skywalker and hang it on me
refrigerator - not a problem - but if I want to distribute the finger

paint art for free because I love Star Wars so much, then the Disney

lawyers start getting their panties in a bunch.

Is there no system workable system where we can have both?

Actually, Hasbro's official policy is not to crackdown on fan projects unless they have preasure to do so.

Most countries have exceptions for parody content. In fact there used to be the argument that a pony fighting game was a parody of My Little Pony to begin with XD.

The real problem with fan projects is when they interfere with the official material. For example, imagine I am writing a series of novels about undead horse robots. I gather a following and fans start producing fanfic non-stop. One day I publish yet another undead horse robot novel and some fan complaints it is very similar to one of his fanfics, so I must have just ripped his fanfic off.

That stuff actually happens. One of the solutions is to outright chase down fan works without asking questions first, which sucks.