It was about the time they pushed the inclusion of banner ads in the application. Nobody left skype until advertisements were plastered all over it, even some with sound. Most of my gaming friends were early haters, as we’d been using Xfire and it served our primary purpose just fine.

Outer Wilds. Wish I could forget it, as the progression is based entirely on player knowledge it has 0 replayability(I mean this as an endorsement).

Tombstone is out! Skilling MMO (So think runescape) with a retro-future wild west type theme and pixel gfx that can be played from steam, its own client (available on itch), a browser, or android. Runs on anything, obscenely fast update pace, developers on discord respond to issues dummy fast. I’m currently playing tombstone.

CRPG doesn’t usually refer to MMOs or action rpgs. They’re referring to games that emulate a tabletop RPG but on a computer, which is where the C comes in. Generally they’re modeled after Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems, like Pathfinder.

Nintendo is just as bad as the “other big publishers” and your sentiments aren’t founded in reality. Their gacha practices, frivolous licensure of hardware, and constant patent trolling bring the games industry as a whole down as people like you paint them as a forerunner. I’ll try not to write a whole TED talk but no promises.

Someone mentioned just the Pokemon TCG, but almost every mobile game nintendo has released has had one of the worst dollar spend ratios out of the genre they chose. Fire emblem? Obscenely expensive. Pokemon go? LONG time gating unless you cheat or pay. Dragalia Lost brought in tens of millions annually - 1 in 200 chance from the average loot box for a dude. Don’t get me started on pokemon quest, one of the most “get mom and dad’s credit card” games ever devised. Literal loot boxes were only removed from mario kart tour late 2022.

Nintendo has a couple of exceptional quality teams but those teams would be that quality with or without the Nintendo brand attached to them. There is nothing special about the company or the manner it is run when you compare it to the other major gaming companies, right down to release quality being low for many games because of crunch and share-driven deadlines. Hell, some of their flagship franchises have been victim to it recently (Pokemon titles).

Nintendo puts their seal of approval on peripherals for their systems - have you ever bought a nintendo brand microSD for the switch? Grandma has paid 4x+ the price every year for a nintendo switch branded microSD that might not even come in a file format that works on the switch. All this, of course, to support the console with bar none the worst online connectivity that you must pay for, that cannot be improved by any means. Seriously, the ethernet dongle makes absolutely 0 difference in stability or quality if one player is using it, and it hardly improves things even when all connected players are using it. Insane waste of money.

Anyway Nintendo literally does do that. They are greedy (mobile game cost:return ratios), corner-cutting (trash licensed peripherals), and draconic in the way they patent vague game interactions and prosecute anyone for trying to innovate in “Their space” (see the recent patents locking everyone except nintendo out of the sleep game space). They lock access to their games away from the public, and what they HAVE done is re-release, at full price, decades old games for limited times (Mario collection).

There’s interviews confirming they have interest in NFT and Metaverse titles going back to 2022, it is a matter of time. TL;DR the corporation is not your friend and you are only considering a tiny fraction of what they do.

You are not thinking of the hippocratic oath (there is no mention whatsoever of gossip about patients). The do no harm clause specifies bodily harm/abuse in a physical context. You have supplied a TV or Movie memory concerning diagnosis, or maybe you think HIPAA is somehow related to the oath. Many modern doctors don’t take the traditional hippocratic oath. If you’d ever read the text, you would know why.

You’ve clearly rattled all this off without taking a single second to look at context. The goldwater rule isn’t an actual law, and it does not in fact have an explicit analogue in the current APA ethics guidelines (though you can argue the same instruction is conveyed throughout a couple of the standards). You have made up rules that doctors live by in your brain. American psychologists do not “have to follow the goldwater rule”. Every time I see you post it’s some “I googled it!” regurgitation with absolutely no understanding of the topic, or insane ramblings about how we should be nice to AI. Your five minutes of searching is not going to help you think critically about anything. This is facebook user behavior.

The kinect and even PSMove had great potential, but they never did anything that really stuck out. The wiimote was mostly used for one thing across multiple games: wiggle it and get a function that a button also did more reliably. That said they somehow released multiple titles that stuck with people for a long time, even some of the shovelware type games that actually used motion tracking were kind of fun. Meanwhile with Kinect, while microsoft still actively supported it, you almost exclusively had shovelware type experiences but they had the word Kinect in the title. Even Disney joined in. Those games were unapologetic garbage and largely didn’t function, even with plenty of time setting up a kinect play space.

It took years after the kinect was no longer popular/supported for developers that actually wanted to do something with it to arise, with Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. Hilarious results. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1507780/discussions/0/3192486000805884901/

Are you familiar with the term lobbying and how it shares a bedroom wall with bribery? Individual votes usually matter little to none in the grand scheme of things, and there’s next to no evidence that politicians above the local level give a shit about individuals throughout a huge swathe of the US. Governatorial election promises in the southeastern US are almost universally lies about quality of life improvements, from healthcare changes in florida benefitting no one to roadwork that never happens being promised every election cycle in alabama and mississippi. There is a HUGE disconnect between representatives and their constituents in these states, and they’re not the only ones.

Realistically, that money is not being used effectively to sway anyone, especially when little is actually used for propaganda, and weak vectors are chosen. Many campaigns are still running on outmoded methods of contact, like outdated lists of people for cold mailing, text messages that wind up in your spam filter, and shock value ads that only serve to annoy and change VERY few minds about anything.

You have a very optimistic outlook on how any politician views a letter or email from a constituent. Within my whole lifetime, I cannot name ONE politician in the US that has changed course over constituent contact. Not for any single thing. That’s why someone asked if you were eight years old earlier; most people from 25-40 years of age have, at this point, accepted that the current system does not operate in the way that we were taught in school. Instead, we have this broken system where the cries of the masses enter the void, and MAYBE ONE “representative” echoes them to a person or place where change can begin. The ones that do are decried so unbelievably fast it makes your head spin, and the ones that retain office while doing so are treated like crazy extremists by any media that could inform people of their goals, so there’s no hope of popular/uninformed support.

Idk dude, just googled “id analytics ssn” and I immediately get a page of results of articles from 2012-15. Could probably just add “as someone else” in scholar for the paper

An ID analytics study showed 40 million united states SSN had more than one name associated with them over a decade ago.

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/cross-industry-fraud-files/docs/financial/LexisNexis-Risk-Solutions-SSN-White-Paper.pdf

Whitepaper from LexisNexis, corporate background check company, explaining avout SSN not being a unique or even really reliable identifier

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don’t visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon’s box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They’ve lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don’t think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See “laches defense”).

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.

Maybe you didn’t realize, but by volume, sales in the west for BMWukong were stellar. >4M sales volume (76% of 17.8 million sales were chinese) is performing well by any standard. It dwarfs the sales volumes of other recently popular Chinese titles, taking the top spot for sales in the west handily. Other games like the GuJiang series, dyson sphere program, the matchless kungfu, crimson snow, tale of immortal had substantially fewer players despite getting nearly universally positive reviews. This is the definition of breakout success, when you reach a new market.

For reference, this game is selling in the west as well as street fighter 6 and guilty gear strive, games that are performing far above a previous genre standard.

You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment

Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality

You’re incapable of having a rational discussion and ignoring the fact that you needed to install uPlay even when buying it through other storefronts. This isn’t something steam did better on, and you googling and linking the first article you see that remotely confirms your viewpoint (which is now detached from the thread) is kind of childish

You cherry picked a single example you couldn’t recall until pressed. It’s really obvious you’re only here to trash a storefront you don’t use for no reason. If you recall, the division 2 was only on uPlay, requiring you to install the game through it even if you purchased it elsewhere - and that’s a substantially worse data collection vector than EGS (multiple breaches) and it is actually missing features like linking of DLC to the store page. What’s your point?

You are not arguing in good faith here - the other user is being very clear about their question and you are pretending not to understand. You invented a sourceless situation to answer the question while saying you didn’t understand it.

What features? I have seen a lot of complaining about performance of the storefront here, which leads me to believe a lot of the complainers have not actually used EGS in actual years. I haven’t seen anyone mention an actual specific feature of Steam that EGS is missing. Multiple running versions for beta testing, DLC linking with the main game page, sale frequency, everything except the social features of steam (which are notorious for being garbage communities) are on par in EGS these days, so this thread is confusing for me since you guys haven’t actually explained a single missing feature.