Assuming approval is a strict requirement, a middle ground solution would be an open source, federatable, steam clone, operated locally. Have an approving committee to priorise approving games from local developers, and working on evaluating international games after all local games are dealt with.
That’s for sure similarly efficient to gaming industry distributors system, where you need companies with the right connections to launch games in big platforms, like sony’s, nintendo’s, or microsoft’s. Or event steam’s, to a minor extent. Which also veto games not aligned to their opaque terms and conditions.
Also, it would improve international competition, with the removal of the technology barrier of entry, distribution costs would lower, games would become cheaper, and the share retained by creators and developers would be increased.
Long live, a collaborative approach to technology! Long live smaller profit margins! Long live open source!
How do you even stop distribution of malware though? For a second or two I thought this would be a really cool idea to start working on; but assuming everyone can spin up their own instance there’s nothing that would stop someone with evil intentions to create a fake store that federates with all good storefronts.
I was thinking federation for the social aspect of it, not the distribution aspect of it.
Distribution would be “the usual”. Stores acquire software, and licenses, store and serve the data through a server. Client software solve installation and integration between games and social stuff, like friends, messages, networking and achievements.
I mean, it’s not a one person project, but if I were supreme leader of Vietnam and had the people and resources to be working on providing video game entertainment for the masses, that’s how I’d be thinking about it. Not that software skills and supreme leader skills have any overlap…
Cool, who is that person? Can you link their steam profile here? Perhaps someone from Valve may see your comment and the person will be banned. Otherwise why are you protecting that persons anonymity?
witch hunts are where you hold horrific racists publicly accountable, and the more you hold them accountable, the more witch-hunty it is up-yours-woke-moralists
No, it’s where you go after someone for some perceived wrong. It might be wrong or it might not be.
They won’t be held accountable for this, they will just get abuse from random strangers. That’s not accountability, it’s more like revenge or some shit. And they likely want you to get publicly angry. They are trolls.
Just report and move on. It sucks but nothing we could do would help anyways,
Interesting to see Valve at 6.5 bn, I would have guessed they were higher given the extent of Steam as a distribution platform. But I guess that makes sense some other companies have a myriad of other digital and physical products, where Valve has only their small slice in both (Half Life, Counter Strike, L4D, Ricochet for digital, and Steam Deck, Index, some merchandise for physical)
The game has currently over 70000 players online (source: Steam Charts)
I know its not THAT big of a number for such a well known brand, but its still a big number. When will Blizzard fans learn that review bombing ain’t gonna do anything if they still play the game and pay for their stuff? We’ve been doing that for years now…
I mean, they play products released by Blizzard/Activision, so I doubt much learning will take place. Especially after all the decades of Activision being complete tools to their customers.
The second that merger was announced I peaced out. I knew what was coming after having witnessed what became of COD.
You can see a little steam icon in-game and after playing for like an hour I only saw 1-2 of those. I think most people are still using b.net. 70k seems pretty good ngl
But it says 300k currently. So yeah, it is quite a bit more popular in reality than TF2. Baldur’s Gate is at half a mil currently. Counterstrike over a mil.
Not to suggest the game isn’t doing well. Just throwing the numbers up for consideration
The last time I tried to play TF2 (2022), I joined 5 random servers and only found a handful of real people. The rest were bots. Is that still the case?
For the most part, yeah. The only way to avoid getting into matches with bots is to find community servers with active moderation. I queue into Uncle Dane’s servers when I feel like booting up TF2.
Most bots target the game’s “Casual” mode, since it’s the easiest way to hassle the largest group of people. If you play that mode, you will encounter bots. It sucks that you have to curate your own experience, but you can almost entirely avoid the problem by choosing your own community servers to play on instead.
IMHO: I’d argue that community servers are a “purer” TF2 experience in the first place. So many core game features only make sense in a pro-social “hangout” environment. I’ll rattle off a few from the top of my head:
Super long map timers are enjoyable as long as players can leave/join at any time
Unrestricted joining/leaving/teamswitching works as long as autobalance and votescramble exist
votekick/votescramble are great as long as people aren’t encouraged to abuse the system to gain an edge
Casual rips almost all of that out in favor of emphasizing the gameplay skeleton which remains. You’re no longer showing up to a permanent place with people you can get to know and be silly with. When the round timer ends, Valve may as well be blowing up the server and nervegassing the other 23 players for all it affects you. I posit that TF2’s Casual mode isn’t merely a “non-competitive mode” – it’s an “anti-social mode”. Playing TF2’s Casual mode is like… showing up to the amusement park, alone, except all of the restaurants and bathrooms are permanently closed and they lock the exit gates behind you.
FWIW: a lot of that number is genuine. Bots may be prevalent, but their numbers don’t generally wildly fluctuate over short time periods. Between June & July the TF2 playercount shot up by 50k and most of that was probably organic.
Yeah, I had many games on GOG, still have, and after I did full switch to linux using Proton is such great experience. I have Steam Deck too and it’s just more convenient to get stuff on Steam, sadly. I’ve already finished Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows two years ago and I’ve recently wanted to play Phantom Liberty DLC. I’ve tried to install it through Heroic, Bottles and directly through Steam and experience to setup GOG Galaxy to maintain cloud saves and achievements is frustrating at best, but I’ve also noticed some lags and micro-stutters when using GOG client.
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