MudMan

I don’t know how you fix that problem, but I’ll admit that you do need some functional anti-cheat. Nobody wants to go back to the days of PC gaming being the wild west while consoles were nice and secure.

I wonder if in a world less focused on Windows some multiplayer games would just work on some secure container type of thing, or just have most of the gameplay run on server or something. There are definitely other solutions that wouldn’t rely on the Windows-specific crutches of the current implementations.

But they fussed about Call of Duty.

If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.

I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.

I heard they finally have official support. How well it works I don’t know. I haven’t tested it yet.

I think the assumption that people are going to have AMD hardware is a bit of an issue with this argument. Even with their current gen success they are under 10% of the market. That’s all good for committed Linux users who built their PCs with Linux compatibility in mind, but 90% of the desktop market (for gaming at least) is going to be repurposing a Windows device with a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

Is that where it is now? I haven’t looked at the documentation in an age. I think most stay lower because ultimately cloud storage is a cross-platform concern and different first parties have different requirements. Plus you want to keep it under control anyway. At any rate it’s not a huge concern and other services like PSN or Nintendo Online already charge for it, so… not a dealbreaker as long as the base implementation stays free.

Honestly, at this point the dealbreaking enshittification stuff I bump into is mostly subscription requests and paywalls from the sites themselves. Which, fair enough, people need to get paid and I don’t have a particularly good answer to give them about how. I am not watching ads on purpose as a support gesture, though.

You’d think, but at least in my Manjaro install I had the exact same, if not a bit worse, of an experience trying to share an exFAT drive than a NTFS drive. I don’t recommend it either way.

I definitely play enough games without full Linux support that I wouldn’t have switched fully, even if I didn’t need Windows for work. The anticheat issues are one thing, but with a high end Nvidia card I found a bunch of proprietary features either didn’t work or underperformed compared to Windows. Mix that with a HDR, VRR display and it was a bit of a mess.

Linux was snappier for desktop office work most of the time, though.

Hosting the games on NTFS and loading them into Steam from there under Linux is possible. It is inconsistent and a hasssle, though.

I will say the setup the OP suggests is totally doable, but when I’ve had it that way it turned out to be easier to just do everything else on Windows than to flip back and forth, so after I updated some hardware I haven’t been on a hurry to set up Linux again.

I’d say it’s more convenient to do this long term if you have two PCs. Maybe a laptop for Linux work and a desktop with a powerful GPU for gaming. Being able to have both on sleep and quickly switching back and forth is less likely to make you (well, me, at least) lazy than having to reboot each time.

Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?

Do people see ads? I’m on Firefox with an adblocker I haven’t seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.

Yes. They are wrong. Which is why I won’t agree with them just because the criminal in question is one of theirs.

And yes, I’m worried that fascists have a history of weaponizing institutions against their enemies when they control them and presenting themselves as victims and eroding those same institutions when democratic processes hold them accountable for criminal behavior.

It’s why, while I don’t question the criminal outcome, I would have politically preferred for them to lose support electorally before this happened. They are likely to try to capitalize on presenting this as persecution and, looking at historical comparables, they are likely to succeed. It’s not like Marine is so charismatic that her absence decapitates the movement by default. She’s no Trump.

Still, I’m not objecting to her being inhabilitated or jailed. I just hope the rest of the French political spectrum has a plan to manage the fallout, because so far they haven’t even been able to manage the fallout of actually not losing an election, so from the outside looking in my level of trust is low and Europe can’t afford to have France spiral down into fascism as well.

It’s your prerogative, but I will clarify the point.

For one thing, her “not reward” is not a “not reward”, it is an actual punishment, codified in the criminal code of many democratic countries, where the penalty is the removal of the right to participate in elections or hold public office. This is a right all citizens have that is removed for a period of time as a punishment for a crime. It is a literal punishment. You are factually wrong.

Second, naming fallacies doesn’t meant hey happened. I did not bring up anybody else into this conversation, so not whataboutism, I did not misquote or rephrase your argument, so no strawman and the fact that I pointed out an inconsistency in your point doesn’t mean I “distorted” it.

And finally, I am not primed to “defend scum like her”. I have not, in fact, defended her at any point. She’s been found guilty of a crime, which makes her a criminal. What I am not is a demagogue willing to argue that harsher penalties, and specifically harsher penalties for people I don’t like, are the correct solution when every piece of serious research and information I have says they’re not. If it doesn’t help when the US does it to poor people for racist reasons it doesn’t help when aimed at politicians. Criminal penalties must be dissuasive, but that bar is pretty low and there is no proof that harsher penalties lead to more compliance.

That is some pretzel logic.

I mean, for one thing there is plenty of proof that harsher criminal punishments do not reduce crime in any way, so there’s that for the US-style “just jail more people for longer” nonsense.

But also, it doesn’t follow that leniency is what got you here when she has literally been punished with the penalty you were hoping for in the first place. It sure makes it sound like you were primed to think this was too lenient no matter what it was.

It’s on par with Steam, I think. You get like 200 megs per product. I know because my Witcher 3 install is above that and it’s annoying. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker as a subscription benefit, I don’t think.

With the rest I do agree.

I can tell they’re struggling and have been for a while. It isn’t easy to compete with Steam, and the thing that would have done it (having DRM’d new games in the service) was voted down in a similar survey some time ago.

I would not be against some Patreon-like crowdsourced solution for behind the scenes stuff and prioritization rights. GOG, or something like it MUST exist. Steam is bad enough with their current dominant position, it can’t be the sole remaining option in this market.

I would much prefer to be able to give them more money in exchange for more games, though. I am constantly frustrated by how often some indie game is only available on Steam, and I’ve started buying things full price on GOG but waiting for sales on Steam as a matter of policy.

Normally you’d expect this to be pretty definitive, but fascists are real good at playing victims, so I’m not particularly convinced this will move things in the right direction. Electoral losses would have been preferable.

Of course if she did the thing, she did the thing. I’m saying all things being equal I want to see these idiots lose support without having excuses to target democratic institutions in retaliation.

You’d think “not being president” is pretty life changing, but what do I know. In any case, there is a four year prison sentence in there as well. Presumably pending appeal. I have no idea how the French penal system deals with it after that if it holds.

Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.

“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).

Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.

Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.

They’re not even introducing regualtions. These are non-binding guidelines, as far as I can tell. Basically a declaration of how the relevant EU protection services will interpret existing EU regulations. They explicitly don’t force courts or individual member states to do anything. You could follow these rules and get sued in your country… or you could ignore them and win in court.

They do address that:

When in-game digital content or services are offered in exchange for in-game virtual currency that can be bought (directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency), their price should also be indicated in real-world money. The price should be indicated based on what the consumer would have to pay in full, directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency, the required amount of in- game virtual currency, without applying quantity discounts or other promotional offers Although consumers may acquire in-game virtual currency in different ways and quantities, for example through gameplay or due to promotional offers, this does not change the price of the in-game digital content or services itself. The price must constitute an objective reference for what the real-world monetary cost is, regardless of how the consumer acquires the means to purchase it.

I would argue this is a remarkable loophole, though. It effectively means they are ordering devs to display a higher price in real money than in virtual currency. Effectively a prompt that goes “this is normally ten bucks, but if you buy it this way you can get it for seven in virtual currency” would be following this recommendation to the letter.

Turns out regulating things this granularly is actually kinda hard. Go figure.

Yeeeah, no, they did nothing of the sort.

This seems to be a set of non-binding guidelines for HOW to provide virtual currencies in games as per consumer protection agencies within the EU. Specifically that when something can be bought with purchasable currency it needs to show the money price next to the in-game-currency price and that currency packs should not be deliberately mismatched to in-game item prices to leave frustrating leftovers to encourage more purchases.

This article is just incorrect. Please seek better sources, like the direct link to the text someone more competent than this reporter provided.

Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.

I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.

I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.

I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.

I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.