On the other hand, how many USD sales does it take to buy those camels back? The $100 isn’t localized, but neither is revenue… If affording the $100 is really an issue, and you have a game that will sell, you could start a Kickstarter for $150 to cover the submission cost and likely have no trouble getting the funds, no?

There’s obviously a huge difference there. Video game NPC AI is closer to a complex flowchart than to genAI, at least traditionally - who knows what’s coming in the near future.

I’m not sure if you were being unreasonable by drawing the comparison (or by using the false comparison to intentionally instigate) or if they were being unreasonable by equating the two and banning you, but someone was.

Wow, Cave Story updates in 2026 is not something I would have expected at all. Looks like a pretty major engine upgrade, too.

I’m glad the creature collector + sandbox game mashup is becoming a genre; I hope we continue to see it evolve in new ways, though, and not just stagnate in the ‘survival crafting’ archetype. An open-world sandbox game with creature collecting elements doesn’t need those survival crafting parts to be compelling, in my opinion.

No! Wasn’t aware of it, but now that I am, I’m downloading it! Thanks for the heads up!

Nor do I in certain games have time to check in on my stuff regularly.

This is a huge part of it. When I was younger with no responsibilities and could tailor my schedule around a game, I enjoyed this stuff. Now? I don’t want to have to think about whatever game when I’m not actively playing it, and if I don’t play for a few days, I want to be able to return and find things as I left them. That philosophy is antithetical to many modern PvP games’ design philosophies, where they want you to be constantly thinking about it and emotionally invested in it.

Yeah, this mirrors my feelings exactly. Coop is great, though; happy to see that included.

As someone who doesn’t enjoy PvP, but who did really enjoy the Thief games, this makes it infinitely more interesting, not less.

The actual quote that the tagline paraphrases:

“And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible,” says Faliszek. “And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe’s better at that than you. I don’t know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things.”

Other good quote:

Faliszek says it infuriates him to see “lazy dev” complaints when companies like Epic “just cut them off at the knees, man.” He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: “And how many people still work there after all those years?”

And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. “They care so much about what they’re making that they’re still there and they’re all rewarded handsomely,” says Faliszek. "To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I’ll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.

"But Valve understood that. That’s how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I’m excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.

I know this may come as a shock to some people, but you do not have to buy the latest and greatest parts, and if you stick to parts that’re 1-2 years old, the prices are quite reasonable. Unless you’re doing some really top-end shit on your PC, DDR4 RAM will work just fine for you, and if you are doing something that’s too intensive to work on older parts, then discussion about “decent” gaming PCs doesn’t really apply to you.

I mean, excluding temporary price jumps that affect the entire industry like the current RAM and storage shortage… I assumed that was obviously implied.

Here’s the thing: you don’t need the newest, greatest graphics card. I’ve managed just fine for my entire life by never spending more than $800 or so on new PCs. (When I upgrade, I typically just replace everything and have a second PC, rather than replacing half of it and having spare parts). Do I have the best and latest? No, absolutely not, but I also said a “decent” gaming PC, not “the best PC money can buy”. Certainly comparable to - or better than - current gen consoles.

Consoles honestly don’t even feel necessary at all anymore. It used to be that you got better performance compared to a similarly priced PC, but that’s not really the case anymore; console prices just keep going up, and the price of a decent gaming PC hasn’t really changed much in the last 15 years. Even things like the Switch are largely invalidated by hand-held PC gaming solutions. Maybe it’s just time the consoles die off.

If this results in the AAA games industry dying and having a full reset in a couple years when this all blows over, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think indie games are going anywhere, so it’s not like we won’t have anything new to play, and AAA studios have just become so generally awful that there wouldn’t be any great loss there.

It’s such a fucking waste, honestly. I’d have loved a new Marathon game in the same vein as the original trilogy, but this is not that. Shit, I’d even take a remake of the original trilogy in this engine. But no, it’s more live service bullshit that nobody asked for.

I spent a lot of years playing EQ1, and I don’t think any game will ever really capture that magic again, but this sure looks like it’s a great attempt at doing so.

What! I love this conceptually.

The issue here is that I, as a gamer, want to know if developers espouse opinions that I strongly disagree with, because I don’t want to give them my money. So if a developer was (for example) in the Epstein Files, I would want to know that before buying their game. Reviews are an effective way to communicate that information, and I’d be rather upset to see them go.

You can’t reasonably allow reviews outlining some developer behavior and disallow others - that’s straight up censorship. As much as I disagree with the 'I will downvote games by someone who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death" stance, I think it’s their right to take that stance. I’m not really sure how you reconcile those two things without just banning them both.

What Steam could do is have a separate review category (from ‘normal’ ones and ‘off-topic’ ones) to categorize character profiles of the developers, and let people opt in or opt out of having those included in the aggregate score. Alternately, they could categorize reviews by the reason (e.g. “Performance / crashes”, “Unfun”, “Too hard”, “Too Woke”, “Developer is a horrible person”), and let people choose which categories they care about.

If DMCA is going to continue to be ‘guilty until proven innocent’, it really needs to come with some really fucking severe penalties for false claims. Using automated claims services should not be an excuse.

This was fun in Smash Ultimate for the switch; if you had amiibos, you could load them in as characters and they’d (supposedly) learn from what you did when playing against them. We used to pit our amiibo characters against each other and treat it like Pokemon battles. It was a good time.

I’ve played online games before where the entire point was to write a bot to play the game for you; I don’t know what the genre is called, but there’ve been a few of them over the years. The game is essentially just an API and the efficiency and complexity of your self-written bot determines your success or failure. It’s fun.

This is functionally that, except… you… don’t write the bot yourself. So… what the fuck is the point? Like, seriously. I’m not judging you - if this interests you, I would be legitimately interested to hear what the appeal is.