The PSN account, which is free, was required but turned off during launch. It’s been working fine. Now if you don’t link your PSN to steam you can’t play after the end of this month. You lose a PC game on steam because you don’t have a PlayStation Network account.
It’s totally unnecessary and Sony has a shit cyber security track record.
Sony has shot the game developer in the face with this.
A couple friends of mine worked on the PS3 launch title “Lair” back in the day. Sony brass demanded, at the 11th hour, that they completely change the control scheme to use the braindead PS3 motion controller nonsense. The game wasn’t perfect but, before that decision, it was at least playable. Game launch was a disaster. San Diego studio closed. Execs who made that decision probably got promoted. They’ve always been like this.
Well... Who's ready for an endless stream of low quality AI asset flips?
We've already seen what AI-generated books have done to platforms like Amazon. I suspect that this will eventually be the end of "open" uncurated digital storefronts, since AI will eventually allow for crappy content to be produced at a faster rate than it can be consumed and it'll become impossible to discover anything worthwhile.
I am not sure whether AI will make the creation of asset flips much easier though, given that store bought assets are already being dropped into a ‘game’ already.
There are only a finite number of easily purchasable game dev assets out there, but in theory there is a nearly infinite of assets that can be generated by AI.
Mark my words, soon we're gonna be inundated with lot of really shitty, mostly AI-generated games by con artists trying to make a quick buck.
AI struggles to make a complete, composite product. This is the limit on game creation as it is anyway, not number of assets available to steal/download/buy. There are thousands of options for near-complete games out there that can be easily customized further with the millions of art assets out there as it is.
Even then, Steam isn’t completely without moderation. It’s been possible to automate the creation of asset flips for a while (and we’ve seen it done plenty of mobile), but Steam makes some effort to remove the lowest quality games and make it ineffective to publish low-quality shovelware. AI is still quite a ways off from being even remotely faster or more effective than just buying a template and filling in the resources with cheap or free assets.
Why take already created assets if you can generate everything the way you want it? I found lumalabs.ai yesterday wich makes text to 3D. Right now it could be a good base for someone to generate an idea of the final product and then have a 3D artist re-do them in more details for the final project or just clean them up a bit.
There are also good stuff done with AI, for example there is this game called Suck Up where you are a vampire and you go door to door trying to get people to let you in. People you are trying to convince are basically chatbots and it works a lot better than you’d expect
When they were at their old location in Bellevue I worked just a few floors up. Their offices are tiny, only a couple of floors for the whole company. It really showed that if you have a banger product you don’t need to scale up to hundreds of thousands of employees. They’re employees are dedicated, they know exactly what they’re doing, and their business supports them.
Valve is a master class in how to run a company. It started as a small company and had a direction they wanted to go: first person games with a strong focus on narrative, which at the time was a big deal. Almost as part of the early FPS genre the silent protag was a feature and having a thin excuse for lots of violence was normal. Then Half Life showed up and showed what depth the genre could have.
From that success they had the resources to make a big movie, which they didn’t do right away. They didn’t IPO for more money and access to big names in boardrooms that would secure backroom deals. They worked on multiplayer to prove the mod scene building around Half Life. Valve embraced Counterstrike and built around it, including the bones for Steam.
Valve has always been about seeing which way the wind is blowing, what organic direction the market is moving, and then finding their niche in that direction way before anyone else figures out the market. And they didn’t need Fortune 500 levels of employee count. They did it with a few people in a room talking honestly about innovation and what projects are exciting, not profit driven.
Hey, what if I could play my games while traveling? Or play them across the house? Simple things real people want to do, they just stepped up and did it. Where everyone else is trying to lock down gaming, they saw the potential in opening it up - and it turned out very profitable.
I wouldn’t go that far, they have had their fair share of criticisms of their unique corporate structure. The “no one reports to anyone else” model has seen many complaints of cliques, redundant work, wasted efforts, abandoned projects, and popularity contests to ensure you receive a good review at the end of the year.
They’re successful, yeah, but so are a lot of toxic work environments. Hopefully they’ve improved.
I’m having flashbacks to my last meeting with my direct manager and their manager, where the managers manager told me I should be managing myself appropriately because I’m an adult.
When I said, “well we need managers for a reason dont we?”, he replied " I dont know, do you?"
And that was the end of that topic, literally.
I hope Valve somehow has figured how that’s supposed to work, but the lack of communication that causes is so profound at my work, that almost noone knows what they are supposed to be doing or have any idea of what the bigger longer-term picture is.
Thats thr thought I immediately had and I couldn’t figure out what to say, and then the meeting moved on without my reply.
If I’m being extremely generous, maybe he meant it to be inspiring? Like you can do it without a manager! You are great!
I can’t figure out where he’s getting his management ideas from its all over the board. Oh well most of our clients will be gone by this December, and I’ll be gone by then too so its no bother for me anymore.
Edit to clarify: gone as in getting a new job, sorry if that sounded dark
Even if we take this number at face value, this is over a 20 year period, and worldwide.
Americans waste more than $408 billioneach year on food, with dairy products being the food item we toss out the most. The average American family of four throws out $1,600 a year in produce.
I don’t care if it makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I really miss the old sales where stuff would be steeply discounted for like an hour and then would go back to a normal discount. All the sales now are basically Black Friday bullshit type sales
Yeah, same. 90% discount is really a steal back then, but then i guess it makes sense because these sort of flash sales is only advantageous for people on one side of the planet and the other side will never get to see any sales.
I agree to a point. I also miss the excitement of those flash sales, but they were probably predatory–like gambling or FOMO–and I greatly prefer the modern game return policies—arguably what killed off those flash sales–which I can enjoy all-year round.
ik theyre unpopular for their f2p model but it’s funny seeing the complaints when it’s already in the top 100 most active games on steam, and will likely remain there. Ngl I think they (blizzard) anticipated this response but knew it’d make them a bunch of money anyway
When my parents bought me the physical edition of Half-Life 2 when I was a kid, I was absolutely gutted that I needed an internet connection to play the game because it wanted to install Steam. We lived in a rural area without Internet so I simply just couldn’t play it at all :(
I had the same experience. Real OGs hated steam and slowly came to accept it as the default distribution platform. It’s good now, but my account was created on December 25, 2004 and I remember how it was
I installed the first version of Steam directly to my C drive instead of putting it in a folder named Steam.
So I uninstalled it with the plan to reinstall.
After a curiously long time I realized the uninstaller was working its way through deleting my entire C drive. All my bookmarks, m t mp3s, my winamp skins… everything not on a zip drive… I tried to stop the uninstaller but it was clear I would have to do a full format and dig out the FCKGW XP key.
Ah Steam. Fuck you. You came around for the most part, but fuck you for that.
Honestly, Steam’s UI still needs some work. A better way to control what games get auto updates comes to mind. Also, Library and Downloads not being different tabs is odd because I click Library expecting to see my Library but I see downloads.
I distinctly remember when I decided Steam was best. I hated it and bought Borderlands (the original) through some other service. My friends got an update through Steam and I didn’t get it for a long time. The patch from the official website only worked for the physical edition.
I had great internet, and it was still frustrating bullshit.
Valve really abused their big-ass sequel to force their DRM’d marketplace upon PC gaming. We just got used to it because they’re competent at UI development and happy with console-level gouging of publishers.
This and the whole Team Fortress 2 bot situation (check Zesty’s video for more details) requires Steam to implement something against botting in general.
Could I buy a PlayStation. Yes. Will I, no. I lost interest in PlayStation back during the PS3. That console saw more Blu-rays and DVDs than games. Never bought a PS4.
And if/when this or any other formerly exclusive games come to PC, it has to compete with current release PC titles, but itself will be judged as an older title. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s new to the platform. I won’t be paying new game price for a port of an old title.
This is my problem with Ghosts of Tsushima… It’s already 4 years old. I’m not willing to pay 80 bucks for a game either way, but definitely not a 4 year old game!
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