I can’t help but feel like they’d make more money if they charged like $20 annually. I’d have signed up years ago just to support them. But considering that…

• I play most games without modding them at all.
• Quite a few of my more heavily modded games have Steam Workshop support, which doesn’t require a second application, updates automatically with the game itself, and is free.
• Most of the rest of the games that I mod have maybe one or two mods installed and don’t get frequent updates, so waiting for slow downloads is an annoyance more than a problem.

…that leaves like one or two games a year that would meaningfully benefit from what they’re offering, which makes it hard to justify spending so much. Plus, intentionally degrading the free service in ways that don’t save them money doesn’t entice me to pay for premium so much as make me resent it. So they’ve made $0 from me.

Tens of millions of us voted against it and did our best to convince those around us.

On the whole, we deserve what we’re getting. We asked for it. I just hope the rest of the world doesn’t forget that so many of us tried.

Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.

There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.

Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.

While this doesn’t directly affect me, I really hate that a payment processor I don’t even use can dictate what is and is not acceptable speech.

I don’t know if Android has an equivalent, but iOS has focus modes that you can segregate work stuff into. I have mine automatically switch to work mode when I get to my office and switch out of it when I leave. Work stuff can’t do notifications when I’m not in that focus. You can set up separate home and lock screens for each focus if you want, too. You can even filter by contacts if you have colleagues or clients who don’t respect boundaries.

I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.

It’s truly a non-issue, unless we’re talking competitive multiplayer games. The only single player game I can think of that I’ve had Linux-related problems with since I switched my desktop over a couple years ago has been the new Indiana Jones game, and that was patched within a week of launch. Proton makes it brain-dead easy. I have a pretty big library and not many games have official support, but they just work with Proton. I don’t do any tinkering with custom proton builds or anything either. On a fresh Steam install, you have to go into settings once to enable Proton in games that haven’t been tested with it, but then you just forget about it and play like you would on Windows.

Evolutionary psychology. I think there’s real research in the field, but it’s drowned out by charlatans who invoke its name to lend credence to their made-up bullshit without the burden of scientific rigour.

Surprisingly yes. You’re obviously not gonna be running it on ultra with raytracing, but it runs and controls well.

Eventually half caf owl evolves into Irish coffee owl. Evens out the heart palpitations and suppresses Karen-related rage and existential grief. But alas, this kills the owl.

I mostly take issue with the paid exclusivity deals from Epic. That kind of thing can stay on consoles. I also don’t trust Tim Sweeney or Tencent, and I feel that they’re kind of openly hostile to consumers.

I don’t care for intrusive DRM, but it’s clearly marked which games have it on Steam and which don’t. I won’t buy anything that requires a second account or has Denuvo. I don’t do online matchmaking games anymore, but if I did, I’d also avoid anything with kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t really mind Steamworks DRM, though. It’s not intrusive and Steam is useful enough that I normally have it running in the background anyway.

I also like buying on Steam because they’re contributing so much to Linux gaming and FOSS, even if Steam itself isn’t FOSS. It’s because of them that I can have a Windows-free household without any significant compromises.

I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t appear to be a direct continuation of Jin’s storyline, but I’m still excited.

The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.

It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.

I’ve definitely seen some games that do have an option for this.

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

I use Futurama-based names. It started with my wifi network, which I named Zoidberg, because why not. The NAS is Infosphere, the media server is Hypnotoad, etc.

I had the same issue at first, but once I learned that the game actually expects you to spend some time in the training ring with Bernard to both level up Henry’s fighting and build your own skills, it got a lot better. The game will let you do one round of training and move on, but you should do quite a few to level up, and you should revisit the training ring periodically as you level more to learn new techniques.

So I’m an insurance agent who has also been through a house fire personally. Any of the options people have suggested here would be fantastic and far better than what most people have, which is nothing.

What I suggest to my clients is to make a video once or twice a year walking through your house, inside and out. Video makes it less likely to miss a small detail that turns out to be important later than pictures, but pictures are also helpful. Insurance aside, it’s kinda fun to look back and see how things have changed through the years. I like to do it around Christmas.

Ideally that would be in addition to a spreadsheet or something with receipts and serial numbers and individual photos of specific items, but that’s a lot of work and hardly anyone keeps up with it on a consistent and long-term basis.

Whatever you end up doing, it’s useless if the only copy is stolen, burned, or sprayed with a hose. This is one thing I keep with a major cloud provider with a local backup. At the very least, make sure you have an off-site backup that’s reasonably up to date.