It’s reviewed poorly because it just came out and is missing a lot of features (read DLCs) and bug fixes the previous civs already have. That and there is no British civ yet (unless they’ve added them recently-ish).

Didn’t play much of Humankind, but from what I’ve heard, it was a great concept, but it lacked a lot of polish and got a little overhyped when it came out as the ‘Civilization killer’.

Soon!

Makes sense. They don’t get money from ads, so they have little to loose by banning them apart from annoying some publishers, but from what we saw in the past, what will they do? Leave Steam?

Classic killing two birds with one stone: get more revenue from sales, and make customers happier.

They can probably try, but much like this case, it’s very unlikely it will get anywhere.

Sure, but that’s tangential to their market position relative to their competitors. CS2 loot boxes are a problem, but they’re not responsible for Steam being the biggest PC game store.

You are completely right. What I meant, is that since PC Gaming is only considered a subset of PC & Console gaming market (as opposed to, say, Mobile gaming), if it were to grow in share within said market, it will likely attract the eyes of regulators who could improve the current situation.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear before.

Regulation isn’t just about breaking them up. I was more thinking along the line of applying the DMA and DSA to Steam proper, which would only lead to benefits for us. The presence of the speculation casino that is the Steam Market into the hands of kids without any regulation is nuts, and that’s not saying anything about the current hypertoxic state of the Steam Community forums. That’s not okay, and Valve seems reluctant to fix that (the former becausr it brings them a metric ton of money, and the latter probably to avoid pissing off the gamergate libertarian crowd). Regulation could force them to do so.

That’s a good point. The number of Switches sold does nearly match Steam’s MAU.

Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld?

Every Switch owner I know has bought at least one Nintendo game over its lifetime, and often several. According to the best selling Switch games list, it’s safe to assume at least one in every two Switch owner has bought Nintendo games for it. Is it due to the marketing and advertisement coming from the fact they own the platform, or that they’re still the kings of both casual and family friendly couch gaming? I suppose indie is strongly catching up, at least on the former but the latter might be more difficult.

I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Given that PS and Xbox exclusives now all make their way onto PC to the point we barely have to ask anymore. Though if we were to reach that point, I’d seriously worry about the centralisation of the Steam market. Hopefully regulation will catch up soon.

Nintendo’s unbeatable advantage will always be its first-party games, but the Switch 2 — a device rumored to be a fairly light improvement over its predecessor — doesn’t quite feel like it’ll be as culturally dominant as the Switch was in 2017.

That remains to be seen. Back in 2016-2017, every gaming media was skeptical that the Switch would be anywhere near as much of a success like the DS or the GameBoy had been, or if it was going to be another failure like the Wii U.

Why buy a game on PS5 when you can get it on Steam and have access to it on any number of devices?

That has been one of the arguments for PC gaming in a long time, but it never quite reached the console players’ mindset. Not to mention that, despite its dominance in game distribution, Valve and the Steam brand are nowhere near as recognizable as any of the other ‘big 3’. The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays. I can’t see it take less than a decade for that mindset to start changing change and competitors and regulation to get interested, and even that’s an optimistic estimate.

Still, it’s good to hear the platform exlusivity walls are finally breaking down.

That’s some title gore and a half. They apologized for baning people who were flagged as cheaters for using ‘compatibility layers’ (clearly Wine/Proton) and unbanned them.

I’d argue it’s not useless, rather, it would remove any financial incentive for these companies to sink who knows how much into training AI. By putting them on the public domain, they would loose their competitve advantage over other cloud providers who could exploit it all the same, all the while not disturbing the current usage of AI.

Now, I do agree that destroying it would be even better, but I fear something like that would face too much force back by the parts of civil society who do use AI.

Oh wow. That’s even worse than Falcom’s policy regarding composers. Are they really that afraid their staff will get poached? Or are they being so cheap that they just don’t want them to get the raises that accompany the rise in fame?

The transitions between these eras will offer the chance to select a fresh civilization, with a range of options determined by your previous choices.

Wait a minute. I feel like I’ve seen that one before…

Oh well, fair enough. Humankind drew heavily on Civ in its design anyway.

I think the issue is the same as Apple being anti-competitive about the AppStore. Sure, techically, both Steam and the PSN are platforms for selling games, but they’re each restricted to specific non-overlapping platforms (respictively PC and PlayStation) where there they have a (near for Steam, absolute for PSN) monopoly. Hence, anticompetitive behavior.

In Europe, next year, every phone will need to use usb-c. Since you’re probably not using multiple phones at once, having more than one charger is a waste of BOTH ressources and money. Having the charger separate BUT with the price included in the phone’s (because let’s be realistic, there is no such thing as ‘free’ in the mobile market, just fees you don’t see) would just raise the phone’s price for everyone (including myself).

So I’ll have to disagree. Having the phone NOT bundled with a charger is fighting both an economical and environemental waste.

Lineage is the oldest one (Divest and /e/ are forks of it). Calyx has a focus on security and privacy (comes with a free VPN with no signup requires). Currzntly Calyx is based on Android 13, even on the Fairphone 4 which doesn’t have it supportes. I son’t know enough about iodé to comment about it though.