Fubarberry

I think Overwatch 1 at it’s peak could be compared to CS2.

Right, that’s why the collective play amount is ~140k when the steam daily is only ~30k

That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.

According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.

For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.

So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.

That was a good investigation and explanation about a weird number of up votes. Thanks for explaining it.

With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.

That’s the part of France that I want to visit.

Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

Usually these laws have somewhat neutered benefits though. Even though employees may have a right to ignore calls/texts/etc, the company can still decide to let you go (for “unrelated reasons”) or promote other people instead. If they don’t explicitly say they’re doing it as retaliation for refusing to communicate after hours, you can’t really hold them accountable.

That does sound quite a bit different, although without the actual details of the internal situation it’s hard to say.

Stardew doesn’t bother me because the updates are free. As soon as there’s more content for the game, I have it. If I feel like playing Stardew again, the new content is a reason to jump back in to playing it again.

However with Dead Cells, whenever I think about going back and playing it I think about all the new content that I haven’t bought for it. It feels like my options are spend money for the current complete game, play an incomplete version, or just don’t play it right now. I’ve been deciding on “don’t play it right now” for years now.

The original designer of Dead Cells, Sébastien Benard, formed a new studio and has a new roguelike game on the way called Tenjutsu in which players take the role of a renegade yakuza.

Earlier this year, Benard called the decision to end Dead Cells development “the worst imaginable asshole move”.

I’m curious about how others feel about this. I think Dead Cells is an incredible game, but the amount of continued DLC releases has actually turned me off of the game somewhat. I’m actually glad development has ended in a way, so that I can rebuy the “complete” game and have everything.

The game already had tons of content, I don’t think it needs perpetual new content additions.

the data from india is incomplete and not fit for the analysis you’re attempting.

Yeah, that’s the main reason I didn’t include it. I couldn’t find anything representing good numbers, at least not without more time researching it than I actually have available at the moment.

Makes me curious about how common these incidents actually are. It’s pretty easy to think somethings a widespread epidemic from sensational reporting on it, but have it actually not be common at all, at least when compared to the population or other causes of death.

According to wikipedia, there were 1,358 people who died in the US from mass shootings between 2006 and 2017, so about 113 people per year. For comparison, the US had 430,934 deaths from car wrecks over that same period, so about 35,911 deaths per year. So you’re over 300 times more likely to die from a car wreck than a mass shooting (which would bring up the question of if you would be willing to visit a country with cars if you’re unwilling to visit the US due to mass shooting fears).

With india, I’m curious if it’s the same thing, where just the scope and size of the country makes it easy to paint a bad narrative when in reality things aren’t so bad. On the other hand, a lot of the really bad rape stories to come out of india involve multiple rapes happening to the same person (like that recent story where a woman was gang raped, went to the hospital, and got raped by a doctor at the hospital). When it happens multiple times to one person like that from different sources, it feels a lot more like a widespread issue than just random cases of bad individuals doing bad things.

I think the main thing concerning about it is the stories where someone was gangraped on a public bus, or things like that. It’s hard to imagine something like that happening at all, the fact that it could be happing and people there joined in instead of stopping it is what makes it so horrifying. There are also that recent case where a woman was gang raped, went to the hospital for it, and got raped again by a doctor. It’s easy to discount individual cases of a bad individual doing something as bad individuals in a large society. However when one person gets raped multiple times by different people suddenly it feels like it’s not isolated bad incidents and is instead a wider cultural problem.

Favorite: Steam Deck, it’s my favorite piece of gaming hardware I’ve ever owned. The controls are fantastic, it’s now frustrating to use other controllers that don’t have back paddles, gyro, or track pads.

Least favorite: cheap off-brand controllers, with bad tactile buttons, sticking buttons, analog sticks that drift, analog sticks that only register 8 directions, etc.

Also, Wii U. I have some mixed feelings on it because I have some good memories with the system, but the hardware never paid off. Their were almost no games that made use of the gamepad screen in a way that wasn’t just a gimmick, generally the only real advantages of it were being able to play on a handheld screen while the TV was being used (a feat that the switch and steam deck so far better) and being able to have split screen multiplayer where the players can’t see each other’s screen (limited because you only have 1 game pad, and the deck struggles to do two different rendered screens for many games, with games like Hyrule warriors having to cut the enemies in half when doing split screen).

Oh, good to hear they repealed that law.

There are actually some legal movements to reduce unnecessary knife laws, because a lot of them are based around the idea of 50s punks and don’t make actual logical sense.

But yeah, it depends entirely on the state. The only knife laws in my state is you can’t conceal carry a Bowie knife, but all other knives (OTF, automatics, balisongs, etc) are legal.

It depends on the state, my state has almost no knife laws, but in New York (for example) nearly all folding knives are technically considered illegal gravity knives. Basically if you open a knife 99% of the way, and are able to flick it the remaining 1% open it’s considered an illegal gravity knife.

It’s pretty dumb.