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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part.

    This part is not really what the initiative is about. The initiative can’t guarantee you’ll be able to find 100 other people to play with. Even matchmaking (unless it’s somehow made integral to the game) is not really relevant to the initiative. What the initiative is concerned with is preservation of games. To give a specific example, if you’re able to organize 100 people to play the same game the initiative wants you to have the technical capability to set up the game for 100 people. And to give a more real life example, Anthem is shutting down at the start of 2026. That means if me and my 2 friends get nostalgic and want to play Anthem in 2027 we literally cannot, the game won’t run. But if what SKG wants to achieve would be a reality right now then EA would have to have a way for me to set up whatever is necessary for me and my 2 friends to play Anthem together, be it some kind of server binary or P2P solution or source code or whatever, doesn’t matter how the company wants to solve this as long as it works. That’s what SKG is about.

    My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.

    SKG isn’t saying companies should make BR-s local/split screen. It’s only concerned with keeping games in a playable state. SKG doesn’t alter the game design unless the technical stack required to keep the game running is somehow integral to the design of the game. SKG deliberately leave the “how a game should be preserved” open so publishers/developers could preserve games how they see fit. If the publishers/developers want to rip out the multiplayer and replace it with local/split screen that’s how they’ve decided to preserve their game. That is not really criticism of SKG, that’s just a bad faith argument that can be made only because SKG isn’t as restrictive as people claim it to be.

    And specifically in your example the design of a BR game does not need to change at all because the only thing preventing some BR-s from being preserved is the fact that you cannot set up your own servers.






  • That’s what I mean by artificial exclusivity. There are games where the developer or publisher decided it’s the only platform they will release on but that kind of “exclusivity” is not at all the same as Epic paying developers or publishers to not release on Steam. Valve/Steam doesn’t prevent those games being released elsewhere, the developers/publishers themselves don’t want to.

    I could understand smaller (I’m talking literal solo devs or studios with less than 10 people) choosing to be exclusively on Steam. Supporting other platforms can have huge overhead costs for them. But for a studio the size of Gearbox there’s no benefit to being exclusively on Steam. They have enough support staff to manage multiple stores. There maybe be suits wondering if it’s worth being exclusively on Epic but there are no suits sitting around wondering whether to be exclusively on Steam or not, the answer is obviously not.










  • Fair enough, feel free to buy USB-C headphones then.

    Edit: Time for the real reply.

    I never have to charge my wired headphone.

    But you still have to charge your phone. When I charge my phone I also charge my headphones. Most wireless headphones notify you in advance when they’re running low, in my experience enough in advance to not run out before charging again. And finally, charging even once a day is still less overhead than having to manage wires every single time you use the headphones.

    Nor do I have to buy new batteries or new headphones when they die

    Yeah, you only buy new headphones when the wire gets damaged because that one time you didn’t take good enough care of the wire. I personally had to buy a new set of headphones every year because I’m bad with wires. I’d either store them poorly because I was in a hurry or they’d get stuck on something and get yanked. My first BT headphones lasted me 5 years before starting to have noticeable battery issues and then I still used them for another 3 years before the battery was so dead it wouldn’t live my daily commute.

    overall my response boils down to “just use wired then” because the arguments are silly personal preference arguments and the wider consumer market has already decided that wireless is better. But if you want wired nothing is stopping you from getting USB-C wired headphones.