MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jul 13, 2019, 20:28:
Holy shit, the chargeback fee to the Developer/Publisher is $20 !?!? That's insane! Is that automatically filed by the credit card companies when a customer reports a suspicious charge? It seems like that could potentially bankrupt small studios.

aka_STEVE wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 14:33:
did anyone notice the complete irony in the drivers ..?

Nivida announces these new drivers are optimal for Division 2 & boost performance.
- then in the actual pdf notes; they clearly state that the Division 2 still crashes on these drivers in DX12 .



OK, ...so now the game optimally crashes ???

you can't even make this shit up, at this point.

HorrorScope wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 13:06:

Acleacius wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 12:30:
It seemed like the weakest deals of any Steam Summer Sales I can recall.

I didn't know it was ending today... I knew I have Kingdom Come on the list for $18. When I went into the cart noticed I got $5 off because of their race thing where I picked Hare last week, who knows why. But it was good for $5 and then for $13.... made the last minute deal. Picked up PoeT2 and Kingmaker. Those three games should be played sometime in 2020 or 2021 and be good for a couple months of game time.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 11:43:

Tipsy McStagger wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 11:27:

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Jul 9, 2019, 11:20:
NO THANK YOU, I will be using the vastly superior AMD cards from now that AMD has completely crushed Nvidia's performance.

Is this a joke?

Maybe he likes 65db loud fan noises? Don't judge <3

Muscular Beaver wrote on Jul 2, 2019, 16:00:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 2, 2019, 14:34:

Tipsy McStagger wrote on Jul 2, 2019, 10:47:
I've been holding onto my 980 Ti as my systems bottleneck for a couple years now.. Debating just doing a 2070S for now and then upgrading to the next 2180 or whatever it'll be called on release.

Sounds like a good plan. The 2070 will easily hold you over for a couple of years.

No, bad advice. Because 8 GB is already not enough and the next gen of consoles is around the corner.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jul 1, 2019, 11:57:
"HURRRR...I NOT BUY GAME ON BAD STORE! ME SMASH FACE ON KEYBOARD TO PROTES..dsl;kdjsf;lkjadsf;lkasdj;alsdf;dfs"

Beamer wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 17:48:

Creston wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 17:29:

Beamer wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 09:00:
Right now, the only real loss is "choice," which I don't think we ever really had with Steam (the choice was Steam or Steam), and hypothetical future losses, which we have no reason yet to assume will actually come true.

Except that you could buy Steam games pretty much everywhere. Other than during summer/winter sales, I never buy anything at Steam, I always buy it at GMG.

Can I still buy games for 25% off at GMG if they're exclusive at EGS? Nope. God, all these benefits I'm getting from Tim Sweeney & Crew, they're getting overwhelming. I should make a list!

Yeah, I know, I said that's one issue.
But you CAN buy EGS keys on Humble Bundle. It's a live feature, but it requires the publisher to work with these stores to provide keys. It isn't Epic holding them back. Borderlands 3 is for preorder on GMG right now. And here it is on the Humble Store. Most of the other games they carry are available on multiple platforms, but not listed on GMG for any (including Steam.)

I assume that, when this is solved for and publishers put EGS keys on these sites, it'll all be gravy and there will be no complaints. But from what I understand, neither publishers nor GMG are rushing for this, because it requires a site overhaul on GMG to let people pick which DRM they want, and the demand is currently so low that they're not interested in building it out. Similarly, publishers provide Steam keys to GMG, but aren't super excited to also create a process for EGS keys, since again, far less demand.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 12:09:

Drayth wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 10:51:

Verno wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 09:09:
Epic doesn't get the kid glove treatment just because they're a new player in the industry. Seems pretty rational to me. I'm not sure why people are so obsessed over what others do their money either.

Seriously. GoG does pretty much everything right, and how much discussion on them occurs on average? You don't see anyone feeling the need to grab a sword and shout from the castle walls every time they have a sale, or when something doesn't get released on their store. Point being, if evryone's more or less content with a service there's not a whole lot to discuss other than the occasional praise over a sweet deal, or legitimately interesting news.

But when Epic news causes a genuine stir there's a VERY vocal few who feel like they need to explain to you how your thinking is wrong and their crystal ball has told them that Epic checks out. They totally will stop starving the market if their competitor will just give in to their demands, that they themselves totally will be living by as well forever. And yeah they may have gotten rich off someone else's idea, fumble how to handle a seasonal sale, and are known to have a stressful workplace for the sake of constantly pumping out new content, but their tactics are totally altruistic, meant for the betterment of all gamers, swearzys. Throw all your money their way so they can keep starving the market.

It's not like a company that can literally throw tons of money to anyone willing to sign an exclusivity deal with them would also have the money to hire some of the best marketing people who could come up with tweets like this one. This is from the heart.

Oh and if their tactics of buying out all these indy games happens to kill off GoG, meh... at least we're sticking it to the evil Steam store, with it's dumb feature rich store front and earned market share.

Hopefully that's one of the main takeaways that people get from this: buy on Gog, FFS.

*Disclaimer: I buy everything I can on Gog, instead of any other platform.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 25, 2019, 13:18:

Nullity wrote on Jun 25, 2019, 13:03:
Edit: Upon further thought, the issue might not be just Valve and WINE, but a large number of the games on Steam are probably 32-bit only. In those cases, Valve has no control over it, which makes their stance more sensible.

Here's the rub, however. It is Valve that requires developers to ship 32bit binaries because they, Valve, will not update their binaries to the 64bit equivalents. Squad (the studio behind KSP), for example, got around this by not using many of Valve's libraries and packing their own libraries that were 64bit.

Several Linux friendly developers have bluntly stated (paraphrasing) "We have 64bit binaries ready to ship. We can't on Steam but we can on GOG."

So if GOG can support a 64bit binary but Steam can't....where does the fault really lie?

CJ_Parker wrote on Jun 7, 2019, 15:48:

Cutter wrote on Jun 7, 2019, 13:49:
Pfft, this was already free on Steam.

Only Kingdom: Classic was ever given away for free by the publisher on Steam. Kingdom New Lands being a freebie is a first thanks to Epic.

No more fake news, please.

Simon Says wrote on Jun 2, 2019, 10:20:

RedEye9 wrote on Jun 2, 2019, 09:08:
Faster RTX 2060, RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 gpu's. That'll please early adopters.

Especially if the rumors of them being cheaper by 100$ is true...

I couldn't care less tho, the prospect of finally having a xx60 card at 250$'ish is way too appealing ( don't get me started on the 2030, 2050 and 2050ti, the so called "16xx"s ).

Not sure about the failure rates of Turing tho... I keep hearing/reading about nightmare reports about people using multiple ( 5+ ) 1080tis for heavy compute projects since its release with zero issues, then switching to 2080s/2080tis and having them all fail within months doing the same task as the 1080tis.

If that RX5700 "2070 perf" is released around 300$, I'd probably hit it instead and OC it to the max, twin 8 pins PCIE connectors and power usage be damned, power is the cheapest in NA, if not the world, around here, altho I'll probably regret it during the hot summer weeks, having no A/C, but it'll keep me warm in the harsh Canadian winters :P.

Saboth wrote on May 19, 2019, 06:32:

Also, there's a reason the Steam Sales are getting worse, and that's because they realized there's really no reason for massive discounts because they are the only game in town. And yes, while developers are the ones who decide discounts, I have no doubt Steam plays a role in "influencing" them, as these days, the old discounts of 90%, where you could get a game for $1 or $2 seem to be completely over.

So yeah, I do hope competitors do well, as that will force Steam to do better.

MisterBenn wrote on May 15, 2019, 09:39:
I must confess I left Stellaris behind too after the Megacorp release. It was a culmination of several issues. The game is still not feature complete 3 years after release (still no intelligence layer.) The diplomacy has plenty of features but the AI barely participates, other than to just set diplomatic status according to its like/dislike score. The gameplay systems seem overly restrictive (forced end war, can only declare on certain people, and so on) which leads to a gamey feel that I didn't expect from a sandpit style game with huge galaxies. There are too many abstract resources to balance that add to the gamey feeling. The DLC have added additional playstyles but in effect they have added multiple ways to do things with a lot of overlap, that seems to have bloated the feature list without really enriching the strategies you can get involved with.

The DLC policy has contributed to a feeling that Stellaris has been an ever-changing beast... the game is designed a certain way, it settles down, some nice mods appear on top and it feels pretty stable. Then a major update comes out, the mods don't work, some central game functions are completely reworked, many critical functions and gui items cease working, and everything feels like it's regressed for a few weeks while official patches and mods scramble to become stable again. It seemed ridiculous to me that for significant periods of time after release, major parts of the game were not working at all. Or like with the megacorp release, the AI was completely non-functional for weeks after release. You've gotta have a lot of faith in the game to overlook things like that and trust that it will eventually get there - for me though I just felt that this was unacceptable for a released game. There are definitely some positives to the Paradox/Stellaris business model... some of the reworked mechanics are clear improvements to original versions. But I have ended up disillusioned where things feel too much like they are engineered to keep customers in the pocket, paying for updates for the life of the game.

Much as that was a bit of a rant, there's a lot to like in the game. It clearly has the best space 4x flavour around imo, with nods to pretty much any sci-fi book/TV/film that you happen to love. If somehow you are into multiplayer then the Stellaris engine is great for that. I know the game makes a lot of people happy - I think you have to be the type of player that will happily accept the mechanics and the dev cycle the way they are, and be in it to enjoy the ride.

Edit: oh - check out the Starnet AI mod. It's a rework for the AI players that makes them a lot more like a multiplayer game (emphasis on military techs, maintain large fleets and swallow up weaker neighbours with no remorse.) Several people have said this AI is genuinely a big threat. No idea as to the status of the mod with regards to the latest DLC that came out, but the prospect of AI players that can actually kick your ass is pretty inviting.