What are /r/JimSterling's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-that-began-with-pictures-of-ellen-page-1440500148

https://kotaku.com/nsfw-players-uncover-a-naked-ellen-page-in-her-new-vid-1443968188

Some more relevant and creepy shit.

Very disappointed. I like to support multiple creators with small pledges, including Jim. This is now very expensive to do on patreon.

The payment processing fee is quite a bollocks argument. The charge they are doing is roughly what payment providers charge for a single transaction, so if you support 10 creators they take home 90% of this new fee.

/u/Jimquisition will you consider an alternative to Patreon?

My opinion since the announcement is pretty much the same as in the video. I believe that it'll filter out at least some scams, trash and other not-so-desirable stuff while not really limiting any "real" developers.

It may sound harsh, but in my opinion if 100$ are a significant cost for a game dev then they simply do not belong on Steam. The reason being that if you actually do want to make a game that some general-ish audience would be interested in (as in, even niche one, but not just your friends and family) then you need stuff like a company, trademark on the name, a lawyer, accountant - and that's not counting paying other people that help you with the game (even the smallest indie titles have at least music or art done by someone else than the lead developer). And that stuff costs way more than recoupable 100$.

So yeah, if it's a major cost just release on itch.io and use that money and / or money from your fans to pay the Steam fee if you really need to be there.

This.

They also distributed executables to play the roms that where spiced with malware. Here's some wot feedback: https://www.mywot.com/scorecard/loveroms.com

There are also plenty of reddits posts, videos on youtube or executable descriptions form virus trackers to find via google.

The original post on that was from last November. Only now did it get attention. Figures.

The cool thing about Linux is that it's free to use. If you have a powerful computer, consider running a Virtual Machine (common one is Virtual Box) and try it out. Personally, I wouldn't really use Linux outside of development stuff, but some people really like it's flexibility and power.

And I agree with the other reply. Modern Ubuntu feels more similar than different from from Windows for everyday use.

There's a big difference between Collectible Card Games that do not allow Trading cards

(like Hearthstone, latest Magic Duels and the upcoming Magic Arena),

and the Trading Card Games that allow it

(like Magic the Gathering Online - which also has the "redemption" feature where you can exchange a whole set of digital cards to a whole set of physical cards for $25+shipping (though as Magic Arena slowly replaces Magic Online, I'm expecting this kind of redemption to disappear in the favor of redemption the other way, where you'll get the copies of the physical cards you bought in an unopened box/booster in digital form in Magic Arena - but this is only speculation so far...))

For those that don't have a clue, 11 projects on the same day:

https://greenlightupdates.com/?d=76561198045856086

For instance, the game "Halloween Night Lands" is in fact
Solo Halloween Hero from Stom Studio:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stomstudio.halloweenhero&hl=en

I remember when GTA 5 came out there were articles saying it was the most expensive game ever made. Kotaku, VRZone If GTA5 was only ~$260 million (apparently including marketing) and that was one of the biggest games in recent history then perhaps they don't cost as much as we might think. Though we need more data to know about smaller games and mostly online games.

This isn't new. Recently I purchased Watch Dogs 2, the first Ubisoft open world game to interest me. I went over to PC Gaming Wiki to find out how to disable the startup movies, as I do with every game, and noticed this line:

>To purchase the complete game with all content, you only need to buy five things on Steam. You need to get the Gold Edition of the game, the Mega Pack, Supreme Pack, Ultimate Pack, and the free Ultra Texture Pack. This combination gets you all the content for the least amount of money.

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Of course, I don't care about cosmetics in single player games, so I had to work out for myself which DLC packs to buy.

Here's a Kotaku article on this. From the article:

>Loot boxes in FIFA 18, Overwatch, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are now illegal in Belgium, with the country’s legislators declaring today that if the games’ publishers don’t remove the offending microtransactions, people behind the games could face fines and even time behind bars.

>As reported by Eurogamer, Belgium minister of justice Koen Greens said in a statement that the loot boxes in these games were in violation of the country’s gaming legislation and thus the companies selling them are subject to criminal punishment, including fines of up to 800,000 euros ($974,605) and prison sentences. This determination was made after Belgium’s Gaming Commission spent several months reviewing how loot boxes operated in these games and others following the controversy surrounding Star Wars: Battlefront 2’s microtransactions. Since then, many stories have come to light about how much money some people have spent on loot boxes and other in-game purchases, and the practice as a whole has come under lots of scrutiny.

Didn't think it was EA's term considering it has been used for years in places that aren't EA's games.

Evidence of my comment: Kotaku article from 2014.

This still seems fake to me. You can modify whatever website you want. Try it yourself. The video is bullshit. He said he refreshed the page, but there's no proof of that. He simply grabbed the fake image location, slammed it in there, and made it link to the new url. This is really easy to do in about a minute. Don't trust screencaps, or videos where he doesn't actually load a page. Even then, there are pretty easy ways to just copy the website source code and make it look like you're loading into a real website, when it's actually a local copy of the website.

> The GDPR does not impose any requirements on how you make your request. This means that you could in principle simply write an informal letter and send it to the controller. In theory, even a phone call would do.

> In most cases, however, you should use the written form, if only to be able to prove later that you have actually made a request. And while you could also state informally that you would like for your data to be deleted, we advise you to make a more formal request referring to the specific legislation. This ensures that the controller cannot talk their way out of their responsibility.

Source: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/

As a sysadmin who was in the middle of the GDPR storm, just sending and email with subject "GDPR Request for erasure" or something along the lines with text being "I request that your company deletes all data from their server that are related to me" should do. I mean legally it is a legit request.

Bear in mind that if you are from US or non-EU country they may decline. They also may delete their data only on their EU servers and migrate the data to their non-EU servers. Even tho it is illegal it is very hard to prove.

After that if they send you any email that is not a direct response to the GDPR request (or if you find yourself pwned through Epic or any site related to them that you did not sign up for) you may press charges for ignoring your Right to be forgotten.

Nah, you aren't anything like the real idiots in this thread. They only thing that I would say are flaws in your comments, are that you use bad games to explain your points. Bit your save when, There's shit like this guy in this thread.

Is it known how many of these are from the final wave of Greenlight?

In any case, it's not particularly a problem. Steam is, in part, becoming a hosting service like itch.io. They aren't trying to prevent hosting crappy games, but rather the side of Steam that deals with promotion and curation is going to give them no attention.

If you don't believe me, open a few random games on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/explore/random and you'll find there are plenty of obscure, crappy-looking games from previous years that essentially don't exist. Without the mechanisms of Steam pushing the game forward, it makes little difference whether they host it or not. The focus on the 'new releases' queue and the total number of games on steam is somewhat irrelevant, as almost no customers find games that way.

The INI typo refers to the Xenomorph AI recognizing the stages to try hiding from and flanking the player. Fixing it makes the game more like the original trailers.

Nobody knows why it wasn't fixed and, 5 years later, it's still not fixed yet.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/templargfxs-acm-overhaul/news/the-biggest-bug-in-the-game-is-just-one-letter-long

That's right. Windows 10 is a spyware OS with a built in keylogger. Even using 3rd part software to disable most of its snooping capabilitied doesn't fully shield you from it.

If you wan't to protect your privacy but participate in next gen gaming with AMD's ryzen, or Kabylake cpu's you're forced to surrender your privacy just to meet system requirements. (Good links btw).

Fully agreed here.

And yes, though I'm not a fan of the good ol' slippery slope, this I think is one and we need to push back.

I'm doing my best, I use blocking and tools like AdNauseam. And since I can't at the moment block Youtube ads, I wrote a small extension to blank and mute videos when there's an ad on.

It's a small protest but a protest nevertheless, advertising is already too pervasive and corrupting influence in today's world.

Can we also note that during the conference, Blake Jorgensen stated that "We're trying to build games that last for years, not for months..." yet, the NFS Rivals Network app stopped working for God knows how many months.. I tried installing it like a month ago, and I got the "This site can’t be reached" error. Even on the phone's app.

Now I know I'm nitpicking, the NFS Rivals game is working fine, but, for a feature that was shoved as a side-dish with the inclusion of microtransactions way before loot boxes were a thing in major IPs, says a lot about the future of "games that last for years". It's a simple website that they didn't even bother keeping it up since it stopped bringing more money to the table. The bill was cut off, I guess they deemed nobody was using it anymore.. Okay, then why make the freaking game with an online component? Will the 2015 NFS die the same way?

The album the track is on is out of print, but Kirsty MacColl - Kite (1989) might be available as mp3 or on Itunes or something. It does not appear to be available as mp3 on Amazon, but a physical release is here.

Can't have the full value back - someone will still have to spend their time making and maintaining the software, and there will always be the issue with payments between different countries, but that cut could certainly go much lower... (see for instance itch.io's policy)

I mostly agree with Jim on this it is just that as a person whose preferred platform is Linux I am kinda stuck with Steam. Sure there is the occasional Linux game on GoG but both a lot less then on steam and without a launcher the visibility is pretty bad, another option is itch.io which is in regard to a launcher a bit better but also misses a lot of games. Add to that that neither itch nor GoG has active developers working on Linux (Valve has both people working on the opensource AMD/Intel drivers and people working on their fork of Wine, Proton, which to some extend has official support, not that I blame itch or GoG having developers for this costs a lot of money you don't have with a smaller platform). Other alternatives are of course running Wine yourself or using a VM with GPU passtrough, both options requiring quite a bit technical know how to get working correctly.

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So my fear is that as the market get more fragmented a lot of developers who used to port games to Linux are going to abandon that platform due to the launcher they are using not supporting it and thus it being to much effort for no gain.

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All in all I think I can summarize my feeling with the following: "Epic Games is not the Steam competitor we need but it is the Steam competitor we deserve"

On videogames becoming worse post launch...

https://borderlands.com/en-US/news/2020-05-13-dev-update-mayhem-mode/

Borderlands 3 is in such a horrible state that the game is in need of fixes that will roll out over multiple "phases".

In a game with billions of guns there are only around six (being generous) that do damage on the highest difficulty setting. A lot of class features and skills are anemic as well as other damage dealing abilities like melee and grenades.

A good representation of a game trying to be the perfect spaghetti sauce, alienating both the casual and hardcore audiences.

Uh, no : From that FFF : > After some research, we switched from processing payments through braintree and paypal, and instead implemented the incredible Humble widget. Specifically Humble widget has a built in fraud prevention, which completely stopped all the chargebacks we were seeing. I highly recommend the Humble widget for anybody looking to process payments on their own website. (That's when those 10% of chargebacks happened !) from the latest FFF : > Well anyway, after we switched payment providers to Humble Widget, the fraudulent purchases stopped. We don't really care about G2A anymore (but we are in a unique position due to our no sales policy).

You cannot buy keys on Steam. You either buy the game for yourself or for a friend but you never receive a key that you could resell.

Only the publisher of a game can generate Steam Keys (free of charge) and then the publisher is free to do with them as they please - like sell them through Humble.

Now a customer has 4 official ways to obtain the game:

• through Steam (publisher gets 70% cut)
• through GOG (publisher gets 70% cut(?))
• through Humble Widget (publisher gets 95% cut)
• through Humble Bundle (publisher gets 75% cut)

and only the latter two offer Steam Keys. So my assumption is that Humble just passes the chargeback costs on to the publisher. I don't know if Steam and GOG are doing the same but since you don't receive keys there to resell the scheme won't work on their stores.

I found a nice blog post from the Factorio dev here where he explains why he changed from selling the keys himself to selling them on HumbleWidget but it seems - 3 years later - that their fraud protection isn't satisfactory to the Factorio dev any more.

My humble opinion: If this is such an issue and financially not affordable they should avoid Humble and/or Key-Selling altogether and stick with Steam and GOG directly even if they take a higher cut per sale.

People won't stop using G2A (or eBay for that matter) when the price is right and they won't start pirating the game when the Steam Version offers more value (Achievements, Cloud saving, Multiplayer, etc.) to the game.

As a Linux user I think there is also something else forgotten in this discussion that the Metro series actually shows, both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last light where ported to Linux eventually. With them going to Epic store this is a lot less certain since as far as I can tell the Epic store does not support Linux, they might in the future (which might make sense since Unreal 4 engine supports Linux) but nothing certain as of yet.

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Currently Steam is the strongest with regard to Linux gaming mostly due to having a supported launcher and Proton, they are closely followed by GoG (no launcher so visibility is less) and Itch.io (does have a launcher but mostly limited to small indie stuff). The rest is a very distance last requiring either a VM (with VGA passtrough) or wine

And Hasbro - Wizards of the Coast are coming with Magic Arena :

https://kotaku.com/arena-is-magic-the-gatherings-answer-to-hearthstone-1802670009

I was hoping that they would port "redemption" in some form from MTGOnline (which allows you, once you complete a whole set, to have it removed from your digital library, and have it sent to you in the form of real cards), but now that I think of it, that would be incompatible with the plan that they seem to have of giving digital cards when you buy a physical booster.

And they are clearly being inspired by Hearthstone, as IIRC it has been confirmed that Magic Arena will be "free-to-play" and will have NO TRADING. (Though a "dusting" mechanic hasn't been confirmed.)

I still have some hope for Magic Arena, as the latest "free-to-play" Magic Duels had pretty fair rewards -

(about $0.5/day on average just by doing the daily quest and playing two multiplayer games (for 1 win), about $0.3 for the easy weekly quest, with the maximum rewards per day being capped at about $2.5/day - considering that you needed about $55 to complete a set with 4 sets per year)

• which didn't have any "dusting" mechanic, with new boosters you just completed the set (which also had a refreshing take on rarities where the most common cards were limited to 4 and the rarest ones to 1 (in a 60-cards deck) - so the pay-to-win aspect was somewhat restrained) -

• the most aggravating instead being that Wizards just dropped Magic Duels without sufficient warning after deciding to develop Magic Arena in-house (and no, free coins worth ~$10 and "priority access" to the beta just isn't enough) -

• and that the Magic Arena dev team seems to be competent, so we might finally have a good (official) Magic video game/software (the latest really good one being the one made by Sid Meier way back in 1997).

http://matthewsowards.com/ biggest Asset Flipper known to man. Anything this guy does is just plug-n-play assets from UE Marketplace, his latest is Unlasting Horror, here is the proof https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/first-person-horror-template

Just in case anyone's wondering what the fourth logo is at 0:45, that's AirConsole, a web based platform for local multiplayer games controlled by smartphones.

I'm hyped as shit that it made a tiny appearance in one of Jim's videos, even though I'm probably the only one who even noticed.

I think Jim may have got the argument that Respawn and Apex Legends being screwed by releasing too close to Anthem the wrong way round. It turns out that Apex hit 10 million players in the first 72 hours https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends/news/apex-legends-10-million-players whereas EA are expecting Anthem to sell around 6 million copies in as many weeks http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2019/02/ea_thinks_anthem_will_sell_6_million_copies_in_six_weeks

It's not a great omen for Anthem, especially since there seems to be no real hype/enthusiasm for the game from the general public.

No mention of platform specific preorder bonuses ?

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Because I noticed that happening with Metro Exodus.

Xbone: You get Metro Redux

PS4: You get a dynamic PS4 dashboard theme. If you preorder the gold edition, you get a second theme and the OST

PC: You get a digital artbook and the OST.

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What did Microsoft do to get the worst preorder bonus on the Xbone ?

I'd wish creators would just create accounts on few different donations platforms, so people have choice and Patreon – competition.

I'm going to advocate Liberapay, as it's non-profit, but seeing any platform other than Patreon would be really nice.

> Except it launched in late 2018, not 2004, and Epic has far more money than Valve did at that time

You can't always throw money at software to make it develop faster. There are books written about this. I mean, when Elon Musk had a kid, it took just as long to make as mine did.

> yet it's still missing basic features like a shopping cart

I roll my eyes every time someone makes this point. This isn't some essential feature they're lacking. Most app stores don't have a shopping cart. Steam is the exception here, not the rule. Open up your phone and buy an app, was there a shopping cart there? If you're using iOS or Android, there wasn't. You selected the app, and purchased right there on the spot. Same with the Nintendo E-Shop, and if I'm remembering correctly, the XBox and Playstation stores too.

I find it very telling that this argument is only ever leveled at EGS and not every other app store under the sun.

> They're trying to cheap out on the hard work of building a platform because they don't care about any of it beyond taking market share for themselves

Are you suggesting that any other platform is made for reasons beyond taking market share for themselves? That's the whole point of an app store, to gain market share. They do that by outcompeting their competition. I don't care what their motivations are, I only care that I as an end user benefit from the competition between retailers.

> All that crap about "better for developers" would be, long term, even for devs at best, since it's a saturated market no matter what cut you take,

You're going to have to explain this because it seems obvious on its face why being able to take home 88% of of the revenue instead of 70% and I have no idea why a "saturated market" would change that.

And the site now has the footer "Site Owned And Operated By Robert Romine": I can't see any mention of "Digital Homicide Studios LLC" on the front page or the contact page. The domain name itself is registered to "Perfect Privacy" (a quick check on http://ecorp.azcc.gov/Details/Corp?corpId=L19322421 and "Digital Homicide Studios LLC" is still registered)... Hmmm....

I agree with you. It is something that could be abused. But it would be a net positive for small developers. Small developers are usually the ones that are pushing creative boundaries and they are continuously being rolled over by these Asian clone factories and also AAA developers but to a lesser extent.

But look at this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elex.lastbattlegroundsurvival Do you seriously think that there shouldn't be a mechanism in place to stop this kind of theft?

https://www.amazon.com/Vilros-Raspberry-Buffalo-Classic-Gamepads/dp/B01J4HTOS8/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1492217115&sr=1-2&keywords=retropie+kit

This is also cheaper than an NES Classic, but comes with two SNES-like controllers and runs on a more powerful Linux board that can be a complete media center. 32 gigs of SD card memory, specs that can play just about any retro game you want up to the PSP/DS/Dreamcast as far as graphical quality goes, as far as tiny little boxes that play emulated games on your TV screen there's just not a better way to go about it. If you don't care about playing on SNES controllers, you can get Raspberry Pi 3 Model B kits for as cheap as $60-70 and just use whatever your want.

Check out the Amazon listing for BF1. You can pick and choose which edition you get, including no game at all. It's literally a $60 difference between getting the game or not (or $70 for the deluxe edition).