1. OWNERSHIP

By accepting these terms, you acknowledge and agree that you do not own or have any proprietary rights in the Game or any Mods you create, except as specifically mentioned here. Any Mods you create are your property only if they consist only of your original creative work. To the extent that any element of your Mod includes or is derived from the Game’s intellectual property (such as code, themes, characters, names, stories, dialogue, locations, artwork, sounds, music, and visual effects), you agree that all intellectual property rights therein, whether they are registered or not, are owned by Larian Studios and its licensors.

I’m not sure I believe you about your first point.

Apex Legends is a battle royale, Gigantic and Battleborn are (were) more like MOBAs, Paladins and Dirty Bomb don’t work on linux. I haven’t played all of these games, but I don’t think they’re as interchangeable as you’re implying.

The Black Pool is a game I decided to try recently. It reminds me a lot of Returnal in terms of visuals and gameplay, but I don’t expect the story to evolve much beyond the initial “kids lost in the woods trying to get home.”

It’s a 4-player roguelike where you get to choose random elements to slot into different abilities, namely a Primary, Secondary, and AOE attack as well as a jump, dodge, and once-per-world ‘rally’ buff. Each element makes the ability act differently, like a light primary is a slow charging piercing laser while wind is a projectile with knockback, and you also get to upgrade your elemental abilities after each stage you clear. I’m only about an hour into it so far, but I definitely think it deserves a little more than the 29 player peak it got right after it launched.

I think that’s what makes it such a good point of comparison though. It’s titled differently and we were promised it would be different, but all that really happened was they changed their monetization tactics. And maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I remember liking Overwatch when it came out, but now I have almost zero interest in playing Overwatch 2, even though I’ve gone back to it a few times just to give it a try.

Honestly, paying for a (primarily) multiplayer game isn’t a problem for me. I actually might prefer it when you look at Overwatch vs Overwatch 2. But I wasn’t about to sign up for a playstation account to play my Steam game.

Organic Maps (the app) lets you download maps of various areas ahead of time

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=call of duty

Can I use an existing save?

Short answer: No.

You cannot use an existing Fallout: New Vegas save to play TTW. Even though a save might load, there are too many changes for it to work correctly. No support is provided if you do this anyway.

Saves made with previous versions of TTW will not work with 3.x. Too many changes were made to allow saves to be compatible.

Found it

Starting Season 10, all new heroes will be immediately unlocked when they launch. All existing heroes will also be unlocked for players. This means that heroes will no longer need to be unlocked through the Battle Pass to be playable in all game modes.

New players will still need to complete the first-time user experience to unlock heroes as they learn the ropes. Once the heroes from the original Overwatch roster have been unlocked, all Overwatch 2 heroes will also become available.

So unless there was another change, new players still need to play/win games in order to unlock the full roster.

They actually changed that a while back, new heroes aren’t in the battlepass any more, everyone gets them for free. I don’t know how that works with the “new player experience” where you needed to win games to unlock the base heroes on a new account though.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Street-level_imagery_services#With_photosphere_support

I was also looking into this recently, and I think one of the limiting factors would be the storage and processing power you’d need to blur faces and license plates and then let everyone have access to millions of photos on demand.

I’m no expert, but that looks like windows 10 on a steam deck.

food pyramid

You’re really showing your age with this one. The food pyramid got replaced 13 years ago

I don’t know about a distro, but it looks like they are still maintaining an HTPC app for windows, mac and linux. The linux one looks like it was last updated about 2 weeks ago

I know there were a bunch of subreddits with bots that automatically commented Are you looking for this specific thing? on every post, and a lot of posts were answered correctly by those bots.

Not all of it, obviously. But if you want someone else to, you should consider not making them search through a different website to try to find it.

You could at least make it easy and post a link to the pdf

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

Alright, if you’re not convinced that there ought to naturally be differentiated pricing, and that the uniform pricing we see is artificial, I don’t know where else to go.

I think my point was more that publishers aren’t going to do that. Back when digital wasn’t the default, it was acknowledged that selling a download was a fair bit cheaper and easier than manufacturing disks or carts that could easily be resold by the customer after they were done with it, but the pricing didn’t change to reflect that. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time, and not just with steam.

Anyway, I enjoyed the discussion but I’m going to call it here.

Fair enough, good night.

I don’t know what you envision when you say “stick around”.

I would expect people to start buying games from the epic games store. They’d be using it regularly and have a sense of ownership over the games they have in their libraries.

What evidence would be needed to convince you?

Honestly, I’m mostly just being pedantic. I’m perfectly willing to believe this kind of clause exists, but I want to acknowledge that at least for now there’s no actual evidence of it.

What other explanation for the observed behavior can be put forth?

For games being the same price on different store fronts? Whatever the justification for selling digital games at the same price as physical games was back when digital purchases were becoming mainstream, or for the same reason that Nintendo games will rarely go on sale: because there are still people willing to pay.

“Selectively enforced” is the wording used by Valve’s own employee.

Is it? Because I pulled the term from the complaint filed Apr 27, 2021 under the Price Veto Provision section. Where did you see a valve employee saying it?

Not to be nitpicky (because this might be solid counter-evidence), but do we know that in a universe without the Steam MFN policy Ubisoft wouldn’t have listed the games concurrently on Steam for 18% higher?

We can go back and look at the historical prices for The Division 2 and see that Ubisoft didn’t have a lower baseline price on their own store compared to the epic store. So either Epic has an MFN policy as well, or Ubisoft would most likely want to keep their prices consistent across platforms and stores.

Strikes me as a little beside the point. A randomly rolled free game once a week isn’t going to change anyone’s purchasing habits or change the landscape of the marketplace. If I want to buy game XYZ, the free weekly does me no good—at most, it gets me to install Epic (which is what they want). But it isn’t going to change the fact that Steam gives more bang for the buck, all else equal.

That’s the thing: you’re being given a random game every week and that’s still not enough to get people to stick around. The games they’re giving away are often pretty good too, and yet it’s not enough to convince people that the Epic Games Store is worth using. And looking at the store now, it seems they’re just giving back 5% of the money you spend, meaning if you opt into their ecosystem, all their games actually are cheaper. At some point you need to admit that people won’t abandon steam just because prices are lower somewhere else. Because the alternative would mean that piracy would be everyone’s preferred method of getting games.

The fact remains, that Steam is preventing games from being listed for less on Epic. So if price isn’t the most important factor, why does Steam feel the need to impose such a policy?

We also don’t really know that they do. The source saying that the MFN policy exists at all is the CEO of Epic Games saying so on twitter. And I’m pretty sure the lawsuit says that it’s “selectively enforced”, so there aren’t any actual examples of Valve vetoing a game’s price based on the price in another store.