cool

Quite frankly, it doesn’t. This thread is about the removal of adult content from multiple different places that happens in suspicious proximity to the removal of other adult content, such that it sure feels like it’s all connected.

So why did Epic also remove the game at the last minute?

“the stuff affecting adult content on Steam”

You filled in the rest. I didn’t imply that.

He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

No, I didn’t.

In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.

Quite the opposite. The reason I suspect there’s something legal behind behavior like this is that it is so laser targeted to this game. Especially when it was immediately followed up by their competitor eager to host the game (which had already removed the content named in Steam’s initial reason) and then changing their mind at the last second.

What I see in common between Horses and Github is that it appears that they see it as a bad idea to explain publicly why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that smells like a legal reason to me.

Exactly. Steam is so laissez-faire about adult content that removing one game, without elaborating, and allowing so many others sounds exactly to me like it violates or risks violating a law somewhere, and so they’re covering their asses, maybe even preemptively. I’m not a lawyer, but their advice is often to just shut the fuck up. Epic sure was excited to host it when Steam declined and then did the same thing. For all I know, the reason GOG can host it but the other two won’t is that maybe GOG doesn’t operate in a country where some law makes that game a problem for them.

What about the last 20 years of Microsoft make you think that adding value to their products has anything to do with their business model?

The part where they tried to make an Apple app store and it didn’t take. The open ecosystem of Windows is the thing that allows it to continue to exist and dominate. And the open ecosystem of open source software actively enhances their ability to sell companies server infrastructure, which makes them more money than Windows does.

I don’t see it. Indie developers would comprise the vast majority of open source projects. Many of them add value to their own products, and they know it, which is why they’re largely a services company now. And the timing is so close to everything going on with adult content in other places.

This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses. No one’s saying anything about any of it, which feels like that’s on advice from their legal counsel.

Eh, the others are more objectively measurable, so that makes sense to me.

Buses are unreliable, because they get caught in traffic. Trains maybe don’t run as often as we’d like them to, especially at night and on weekends, but my friends and I can rely on them, and they hit most of our frequent destinations anyway.

Anecdotally, I’ve got some friends on the other side of the river that said much the same and ended up switching to coming into the city via transit, as intended.

I haven’t played it, but the same elevator pitch is given every time someone describes it on a podcast: it’s like someone made off-brand Half-Life and merged it with the survival genre. I’ve heard a lot of good things.

Limited replayability? It’s top of mind for me when I’m rattling off replayable games.

I love the story of that game, too, but being unable to progress at those points makes for a good strategy game while also being antithetical to its message, lol.

Split Fiction is published by EA.

Even just split-screen multiplayer has value. Replication is handled by the engine. User accounts are handled by your storefront. Anti-cheat is something you’re thinking about if you’re designing an e-sport, but if you’re just making a fun video game that you might play with friends, it’s a nice-to-have. Why are we even collecting data such that GDPR is a problem? I know these are all things that multiplayer devs tell you they’re thinking about as to why this is so complicated, but we’ve lost the plot here so much that they’re building a game that they’re already expecting is going to reach millions of people without even being sure that they’re going to hit thousands. Which is how we get to an article like this one.

We’ve come a long way from the days when one programmer added multiplayer into Goldeneye at the very end of development, that could never happen today.

Why? I can’t name a reason why this couldn’t be. Even extrapolating out for added complexity of network multiplayer, maybe it wouldn’t be feasible to add in just a handful of weeks, but if you’re already developing with client-server in mind, the same thing can still be whipped up today in a reasonable amount of time.

Even the rest of your comment makes it seem like if there aren’t thousands of concurrent players weeks after launch that it’s somehow failed as a multiplayer game. The industry has broken all of our brains so thoroughly that most of us can’t remember a time where that wasn’t a goal, and I’m arguing that it’s better if we didn’t make it the goal. If you make a multiplayer mode that you can play with friends, that has bots to fall back on when you don’t, and is designed to scale to very few players in a match, that multiplayer mode offers just as much value in week 1 as it does 20 years later. It’s not falling back on a single player mode, nor is it a failure as a multiplayer game in a competitive market if you build something that can withstand reaching a small audience, like the industry used to. That we used to get both modes in tons of games back in the day is what made these games “the full package” rather than only a single player game or only a multiplayer game, and I reject the idea that one of those two things has to suffer for the other to be good.

Halo didn’t have Xbox Live until the sequel because Xbox Live didn’t exist yet when Halo 1 was built, but it did still have network multiplayer. And that was still very much serving multiple masters, just like its predecessor.

I seem to recall the reason they dropped the first one being that the tech stack it was built on couldn’t support the number of players trying to play it at once.