Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.
VeggieTales is giving them too much credit - there’s good moral lessons in there! (And the creator said all the botanically-fruit male veggies are canonically trans??)
Full story Machinima style series are rare, but if you just want heavy editing and a somewhat coherent plot as opposed to nearly unedited gameplay, Alpharad and LarsBurrito might work. Alpharad heavily edits his videos and usually writes a script to go over the gameplay that does a good job pulling a story out of the footage. LarsBurrito does a similar style, but also often does themed playthroughs where he writes the script to flavor the playthrough to fit whatever character he’s roleplaying as.
If you want actual story but are ok with significantly less editing, Mianite is a series I rewatch every once in a while in a similar way you describe. The scripted story doesn’t really start picking up until a significant way through season 1, but there is still enough conflict between the different players to make it more than just a Let’s Play.
Indeed. The sources I’ve read seem to lay blame with games not usually patenting mechanics (which apparently is all patent officers look at for prior art, not other games), meaning it needs active challenging to be thrown out.
PocketPair is based in Japan, which is where the previous, more directly problematic patents have been filed mid-litigation. While there is clearly prior art for the US patent, it isn’t quite as comically broad as the Japan ones, and since Japan doesn’t seem to care about prior art, those remain the most concerning to me.
In the US, yes. In Japan, it would appear such a concept does not exist.
Yeah but not raw milk straight from the udder (unless you enjoy salmonella), letting it dribble down your chin and get in your beard (unless that’s what does it for you I guess, you do you)
My main gripe with TLJ is that the editing is a total mess. Multiple scenes lose continuity between shots. The most egregious example is the milk scene, which in addition to being gross and unnecessary, was clearly jammed in between two shots meant to be continuous. Rey and Luke start walking down a skinny peninsula, no space cow in sight, then hard cut to space cow and Luke milking it, then hard cut back to the end of the peninsula and Luke setting down his stuff.
I found one for NieR: Automata at a used bookstore that has maps, a ton of concept art, and a short story.
There are thousands upon thousands of indie games with neither of those mechanics…
I’m not saying it isn’t insanely hard (actually I mentioned that fact twice), I’m just trying to point out that Steam gives developers more tools for visibility than any storefront that exists, with most storefronts giving no tools whatsoever. Any game with no marketing budget selling enough to support a multiple-person development team, when they have to compete directly with AAA games, is impressive for both the developer and the platform.
If you want to advocate for improvements and change, you can’t just ignore the positive things that already exist.
~Also you clearly didn’t read the page about the update visibility rounds, because those have nothing to do with popularity and are completely randomized regarding who among the recently-updated games gets a spot on the front page. In fact, your game gets rotated off that spot once you’ve gotten 1 million impressions.~
Blatantly untrue, as update visibility rounds are one of several marketing tools Steam gives you that can put your game on the front page for free, regardless of popularity.
Kitfox Games has published a guide (one among many you can find on the internet) on how to successfully market a game with no advertising budget. While their existing audience definitely helped, and as they mention, it takes a significant amount of time and effort, they do not spend actual money on sponsorships or advertising. This would not be a viable strategy on any other storefront, save maybe Epic, though Epic still gives fewer tools than Steam.
Steam has been coasting on the fact that everyone shoots themselves in the foot, sure, but you should look into the unparalleled level of “free” (30% cut) marketing support Steam gives to developers. On no other platform could developers end up with the visibility they achieve on Steam with nothing more than very strategic timing and good social media presence. It’s still insanely hard, but the fact that it’s even possible to compete with zero marketing budget against AAA companies speaks volumes.
It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.
I see lots of discussion about the solution / what used to be done, but I want to point out why unofficial servers stopped being easy/standard/possible to run.
The first time big money entered esports was on private Starcraft LAN tournaments. Blizzard sued to get a cut of the proceeds, but because the privately-owned software (game and server) was running on privately-owned hardware, the courts ruled that Blizzard got no money.
AAA companies learned from this that allowing the playerbase to run their own servers meant losing out on money, so most AAA multiplayer games with even a small chance of ending up as esports make it so they can only connect to servers operated by themselves, longevity of the game be damned. If they weren’t so desparate for every scrap of cash they could possibly generate from the game, I would bet most multiplayer game would still let you run your own servers, like they used to.
Graphics are, like it or not, the main thing the majority of people look for first when they go to buy a game, and raytracing is a ridiculously easy way to achieve that in comparison to the time and skill required to elevate traditional lighting to that same level of beauty. PS5 and XSX both support raytracing, and PC graphics cards that don’t are coming up on 10 years old at this point.
Any AAA developer is going to see those two facts, that it’s way cheaper and runs on most of the market’s hardware, and abandon development work on traditional lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is RT-only, and it was a huge success.
DLSS is in a similar boat - it reduces the need to spend time and money on optimization.
Now, let me be clear, I lament both of these facts. I think raytracing looks gorgeous, and DLSS is usually a nice performance boost for minimal tradeoff, but I don’t think every game should look photorealistic, and some games just don’t look good with DLSS on. What I’m saying is they both make game development cheaper and faster for very little relative downside, so I wouldnt be surprised if all AAA games required raytracing within the next few years.
It seems that several employees of Nexon left and recreated a game that Nexon had been working on, down to buying the same Unreal assets. I saw somewhere (but I have no source so this might be inaccurate) that as part of the legal proceedings, the Dark and Darker team were ordered to provide documentation about the early stages of creating the game as proof of originality, and they had nothing to show.
I disagree with many of his views, but I definitely wouldn’t call him right-wing. He seems to me more like a libertarian from before “don’t tread on me” actually meant “please tread on me.” Hell, he’s said the CEO of Nestle should be shot.
The trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss
Only for chicken, for salmonella reasons, and steak, because I’m terrible at judging doneness without it.
Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.
As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.