I do think parents have plenty of responsibility here. I don’t think that absolves Valve. We put regulations on who can legally gamble because we know it’s addicting, and I think it’s a problem how little Valve have done to prevent it from being done by those who aren’t legally supposed to. I’m not advocating for government intrusion to collect more PII, nor am I convinced necessarily that that’s what NY state is asking for, but it’s certainly what Valve would like you to believe they’re fighting against. I would love to see things legally categorized as gambling that currently are not, and the space that Valve is operating in may be less of a gray area than their competitors operate in due to the resale market.

Even before you get to the reseller sites that Valve is definitely aware of, benefiting from, and doing nothing to stop, the way the system is intended to work is still using all of the tricks out of the slot machine playbook.

Far more sources than just a credit card. You can sell something from home during lunch period to another student for enough money to buy a Steam gift card, and their parents would never know.

I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”.

It also might not be exactly what NY is asking for, even if that’s how Valve would like to frame it. The actual ask might be to just stop profiting from gambling.

I’m not a lawyer, and even having perused the official filing, it’s still legalese that I can’t swear I fully understand. There are two possibilities of what NY state actually wants:

1. just stop selling loot boxes
2. you can sell loot boxes, but only if you’ve verified that your customers are of legal gambling age

And I don’t know for sure which is true. Of course it’s in Valve’s best interests to represent this to their customers as the government trying to violate your freedoms, because it gets the public on their side. Remember the Epic case against Apple, where Epic knowingly broke a contract with Apple allowing in-game purchases to cut Apple out, then they had a trailer parodying the 1984 Apple ad to garner public support with “Free Fortnite” ready to go.

I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.

You can buy gift cards for Steam from the drug store or Walmart with cash, and there are many non-gambling ways to spend money on Steam.

I’d highly recommend you check out People Make Games’ videos on Counter-Strike gambling, which include testimonials from child gambling addicts. And if you still need more convincing, there’s also some videos by Coffeezilla.

But I’d also like to see more companies held accountable for this than just Valve.

It’s the project they’re currently working on. I don’t know why they announced it when they did, but at their current pace, I’d expect it to come out in the next two years and change.

I think I’d be okay if we never got another Fallout game. What we’ve got is satisfying, including the Wasteland and Outer Worlds games, and the Fallout show is great too. Maybe if Bethesda had a tendency to knock our socks off with something new every time they put out a game, then I’d be excited, but that’s not the Bethesda we know.

SiN Gold: Online PvP, LAN PvP

SiN Reloaded: Online PvP

Come on, man.

Yes. The friend that I watched play it via Discord I think has the same card.

Designers and asset artists are still developing a game without coding it. Even the music in something like Rift of the NecroDancer constitutes level design, and in most cases music still can be used for conveying critical information if not just tone. It’s all still developing a game.

Getting into game dev for the money is genuinely a bad idea, as your odds are terrible. There was a famous talk in the indie boom that showed you were mathematically better off opening a Subway franchise than getting into game dev. Technical roles definitely come with a pay cut compared to what you can find elsewhere (and I know that from experience), not to mention less job stability, so you’re taking that job because you like the work and the end product more.

Not for my friends who played it.

I really like seeing the breakdown of what percentage of players have done X, Y, or Z compared to me. When achievements were first implemented, it was the first time developers had real data about how people played their games, and it influenced how games would change after that. I don’t think many people are circumventing them via mods percentage-wise, so they’re mostly a good representation of the sample size’s behavior. I rarely go for all of them, averaging about 35% of achievements per game, but I did just 100% Escape from Ever After not long ago, and part of that was getting all of the achievements in it, which was a fun little extra activity to do in a game I really enjoyed.

If you really don’t want that record attached to you, you could prioritize playing games from GOG via offline installer, I suppose.

Thanks. I usually don’t even think to check for demos these days.

What does this series actually play like? I don’t think Monster Hunter is for me (though games inspired by it frequently are), and the story in World was pretty atrocious, so putting “Stories” in the title didn’t give me much confidence that I’d find a story with any value to it.

I gave it 5 hours. That’s a real shot and the point of this thread. And I also thought the story that I saw thus far had a tendency to info dump too much, which I found inelegant.

It’s good because other people thought it was bad is certainly one way to frame it, lol.

Could be, but I didn’t have the patience to see it. If that’s what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can’t say why they put it down, as I didn’t poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it’s not just me.