Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”

Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.

Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.

This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.

At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.

Yep, the only resilient form of preservation is digital files stored in multiple locations with no DRM. No account system redownloads, no piece of plastic and metal. Only drm-free releases or pirate copies

3ds games do not pass the “hammer test” of digital product resiliency. They aren’t even properly tied to an account. If I smashed your digital-purchase-laden 3DS with a hammer, or threw it off a bridge, you’d never legally get those games back again. Even buying a secondhand 3ds with the right games installed (as legal purchases) violates the license terms.

currently, while the servers are up, the Switch passes the hammer test. Buy a new Switch, sign in to your account, re-download your games.

Note that neither of these are true preservation because the threats to game preservation are more varied than “smashed your console with a hammer”. And also that physical copies are borderline meaningless in an era where the majority of games have DLC. If I hammer-test your 3DS but you have Smash as a cartridge, you’re still never gonna legally play as Cloud Strife again.

The Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch all got hacked thoroughly before the console’s end of life and thus the legal preservation situation is mostly irrelevant, but the currently ironclad Switch 2 is a ticking time bomb.

Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren’t going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn’t be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)

Cloud saving people is a pretty core mechanic of FF7

You always love to see when game devs come back to add more Polish to their game.

This headline keeps being repeated by this one for profit CEO. Have you looked at the business model being “disrupted”? It’s ads and upsells for premade CSS widgets.

Download them once from the website, store them on a resilient NAS, never worry about your shit getting patched or losing it again.

Steam’s DRM will still lock you out if you’re logged out (not in “offline mode” that can only be entered by logging in online and then toggling it). Some games on Steam are truly drm-free and navigating to the executable will start the game without even running Steam at all. It would be nice if Steam exposed which games are truly DRM-free.

Note that native Steam shortcuts will never work without being logged into Steam (in normal or offline mode), because they’re steam:\\ protocol links. To play DRM-free Steam games steamless you need to navigate to the actual file or make an OS shortcut to the executable.

It makes sense because GOG was never going to drive year over year growth for the publicly traded CDPR. Operating as a private company, it doesn’t need to provide shareholder value and can be sustainable by simply “being profitable” forever, like Steam. Publicly traded CDPR holding GOG was a ticking time bomb but for once it seems to have been defused.

GOG isn’t “attacking” steam for market share though? It has a legitimate niche in the market: being a storefront that bans all DRM and also doesn’t require a launcher/account to buy and install games. GOG’s main competitor is piracy (because DRM free means trivial to pirate), so its main features to compete with that are ease of use, trustworthy installers, and consistent + easy access to game patches that pirates don’t often keep up with.

You don’t legally own any software you purchase (bar true FOSS), even if that software is stored on a disc or cartridge. It’s a meaningless distinction to make.

The best thing about GOG is the ability to never use a client or launcher at all. The ability to just download the installers from the website and store them locally means that your GOG games will outlast the following: GOG as a company enshittifies, GOG as a company dies, your account gets banned from GOG, you lose access to your GOG account, your favorite game gets a game-ruining update from its developer, some song license expires and devs are forced to patch or pull the game…

I mean, the whole video should be three images and a paragraph to begin with. Entire thing’s engagement bait

You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that’s now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or “first three months free with Discord Nitro”. This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you’ve been personally enshittified on, but there’s no “answer to your question” other than “mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam”.

See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and “cheap” aren’t compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5’s bootROM keys just leaked, it’s likely that’ll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.

You also didn’t really ask a question. You asked “how do i make games work with my budget” without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you’re playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your “future of gaming” might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was “how do you deal with this” - my answer is “I don’t buy apple products or use subscription services”.

Never paid a subscription in the first place.

Ps5 pro, ps5 slim, ps5 digital edition? Nintendo Switch (Erista), Nintendo Switch (Mariko), Nintendo Switch OLED, Nintendo Switch Lite?

Piracy never ever actually hurts big companies. Game consoles make their entire business on selling “just plug it in and click the prompts and play the game, ezpz” as a lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how fully hacked a console is or how easy it is to hack them, the percentage of users that’ll mod and pirate is always miniscule.

Look at sales numbers for Pokemon X and Y, which released when the 3DS was ironclad. Compare them to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which released when 3DS piracy required a $100 flashcart and an ancient system firmware with no downgrade route. Compare those to Pokémon Sun and Moon, which released when five minutes with an SD card and a magnet would let you pirate the game directly from Nintendo’s own fucking server, complete with fully functional online play. Notice a pattern? No you don’t, they all sold like hotcakes.

Every first party Nintendo game released after 2016 other than Super Mario Odyssey was available to pirates before legitimate buyers, until the Switch 2 came out. That entire near decade of Nintendo was exclusively releasing games for compromised platforms. Nintendo did pretty well financially during that period, I’d say. Wii piracy was trivial as soon as the Twilight Hack dropped, yet late life Wii games sold gangbusters. And on the Wii, pirates legitimately got a better product because they got to bypass the Wii’s dogshit DVD lens and disc load times. R4s and clones and upgrades existed for nearly the entire Nintendo DS lifespan. GBA games were playable on the PC before the console came out in the United States.

Eh. Nintendo’s been bumfucked like this for the majority of the Switch lifespan. detecting and banning modded consoles is a cat and mouse game that favors the cat. Piracy favors the mouse, because piracy happens in your home on your hardware. Online play is you trying to play ball in Sony’s court.

Softmodded consoles probably won’t even be able to play online, let alone cheat online.