These things regularly come up, and people complain about the obvious garbage, that constantly fill their store pages (which doesn't really happen to me).

Looking forward to the next final update.

So true! Remember the good old days with games like Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Resident Evil 9? Those were the best. It's a pity games like that don't get made anymore.

WTF are you talking about.

I mean the games that Steam says are being infringed were developed by the dev under a different name. So they want proof, that it's really the same dev, which I think is reasonable.

People are always complaining about fraudulent DMCA claims and how anyone can just say they own the rights to something, but apparently doing the opposite thing also also wrong.

Saying Valve ruined the sale is weird to me. Are the Daily Deals from today ruined, because there's a banner for Where Winds Meet on the front page right now?

You can also see on SteamDB, that the game got a (relatively) sizable increase in players, following the sale.

They can't realistically restrict keys

I think it's actually illegal to restrict this stuff in the EU.

In the past Steam had separate keys for lower income countries in Europe, that could only be activated there. However, either because laws changed or they started to actually be enforced, Steam had to change it.

You can still make the games cheaper to buy in those countries, but you also have to allow people from Germany, France, wherever to buy them (as long as it's in the EU), which very few publishers want to do.

The source is one single user on ResetEra, that doesn't post any proof.

Another user refuted the claims and posted logs, that show what gets sent, which seemingly doesn't include any Copilot data. The AI part only happens, when you actually ask a question to Copilot (duh). So the thread gets closed.

The article omits the second part of course, and everybody in this thread is just foaming at the mouth, because it's Microsoft, so it has to be true.

This is an old article BTW, and it's apparently not really true? Or at least different than what the article makes it seem.

https://store.steampowered.com/...

Rumors are not facts

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I'm sure you've all heard the rumors that Steam doesn't allow NSFW games to release free updates, only paid DLCs.

This is simply not true.

Since our game's release, we've rolled out numerous free updates, with the latest major content update dropping just three days ago.

Steam hasn't officially changed its policies, and there's no rule in the Terms of Service supporting this claim.

These rumors stem from a handful of vague NSFW game developer announcements with no solid backing.

We will continue to release free updates in the future.

Have a great day!

(I can't view the link myself, because of a regional block, so I'm trusting another comment, that the quote I copied is correct.)

The article talks about games that are marked adult-only with warnings, but apparently the problem is only with games that don't have any NSFW content yet, so they are technically SFW, and they want to add it through updates or patches. Games that already have NSFW content will be able to receive patches as normal, and add more.

like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench

I found this in one small area, which was probably done for the flavor, since it makes thematic sense there, but otherwise it's always been permanent unlocks.

From the article:

While it was never a mere recreation, it expanded significantly over time. Nowadays, Turtle WoW differs from World of Warcraft with features like additional playable races, leveling zones, quests, endgame content, and transmogrification.

I think around the time Blizzard did their Season of Discovery for Classic WoW, I heard a lot of people talk about Turtle WoW and how they want something more like that (Classic+) and not just the old game anymore.

Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK)

Unsurprising that they find this, since that's what their business is about.

MAXIMIZE GLOBAL GAME SALES WITH ROKKY

Expand sales of your PC game beyond Steam. Sell game keys to 200+ global storefronts simultaneously with Rokky. Enjoy revenue increases of up to 100%.

I think for most of your examples it's your rose-colored glasses speaking.

also a ton more Toxic and Mean

You're just forgetting all the console war stuff from the past. Or the "CoD lobby" type shit.

E3 or even Gamescom from the 2010s im like "Holy Shit look at all these Cool Games" but obviously nowadays its just "meh" really

Again, I think you're just not thinking about all these mediocre games that have existed since the very beginning. All the shitty movie tie-ins or whatever, that got pumped out all the time.

Gaming has been toxic and mean for a loooong time. Shitty games have been made since basically the very beginning.

Dunno about that last part. According to some comments I've read, the head of this project has been doing some shady shit for years.

Running their own mount shop in-game, taking other people's work without permission, selling gold, whatever.

That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I'd probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.

That's been a thing for a while now. Basically all the big, modern games, that are also on current gen consoles want SSDs (some are just SSD recommended on minimum specs, but required for higher specs). BG3, Cyberpunk, many of the Playstation Studios games, some Xbox studios stuff, etc.

Hardware Unboxed recently did a video, if the drive speed matters (mainly about PCIe SSD speed) and tested with HDDs, SATA SSDs and NVME SDDs. They found that some games will give you a notice if they detect an HDD, but almost all will still run, even if the specs say an SSD is required. Most of the time, the initial load times will be loooooong with an HDD, but otherwise the games still work, although a few had graphical glitches because of slow asset streaming. Once you get to SATA SSDs, it starts to matter a lot less, and with an NVME you just want the biggest drive for your budget (like <10% difference for the initial load times, if at all, between PCIe 3.0 and 5.0).

As we get more and more games that use DirectStorage (or similar technologies), the number of games that truly require SSDs will most likely go up, until then HDDs should still be fine, as long as you're ok with slow load times and maybe some more texture pop-in.

I think the law doesn't say that prices have to be the same, it's just that you can't block people from other countries from buying stuff at the cheaper price.

With physical goods you either have to actually go to the country or get it shipped to you, which can make this not as easy or "profitable". However, with digital goods you just go to a website and there's not really anything to ship, except maybe an email, so those same hurdles don't exist, which is why those lower income countries usually get the short end of the stick with prices for games and stuff.

I believe you're vastly overstating the importance of this game and franchise. As I said, I think it's a terrible series of games (and I've played them up to CS3), so there's absolutely some bias here.

Also, what do other people's reviews have anything to do with how impactful or important something is to the medium? Does this mean that the Hentai game Mirror with ~96% positive, 85k+ reviews on Steam is even more significant than Trails?

And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.

Please show me where those fingerprints are, because I don't see them.

Your only arguments for your statement in this thread are, that there are a lot of Trails games, and that the games are all connected. Comparing this to FF7 seems like a real stretch.

If these games are so important, how about some examples of how they influenced gaming and their impact, either to devs or gamers.

BTW I think the Trails series is garbage and has only one good game in it.

I use Arch btw

Two weeks is ancient, when it comes to stuff like this, in my opinion.

The thing is, the article doesn't make it clear, that this is about technically SFW games, that add NSFW content later down the line.

I don't know if that's a new policy because of the recent issues or if it was always a policy, just not enforced.