Being a body in the online matchmaking pool adds value to the next player who has a greater incentive to give Blizzard more money because they played with you. Just logging in to play the game helps Blizzard, not to mention the positive word of mouth you spread afterward. That said, OP clearly has an itch to play this game that isn’t going to go away. There are games I won’t touch because they do things that offend me, and I’m not tempted to play them when there’s so much else out there. StarCraft II is one of them, even though it had been one of my favorite games in the past and there’s nothing else quite like it, for what that’s worth.

Ubisoft games put a tower on your map and then reveal other activity icons on your map once you climb it that it expects you to clear. Breath of the Wild asks you to use your eyes to decide what you find interesting from the top of the tower. Elden Ring has different types of rewards tied to certain types of locations, but it expects you to put together what those rules are on your own. There’s a huge difference there.

I guess not according to your unquestionable criteria but you don’t get to say in the seventies is bad.

I said reviewing in the 70s tends to not result in a sales bump. In order to average in the 70s, you’ve got far more negative reviews in the mix than a game that reviews in the mid 80s or low 90s. It doesn’t end up so unanimously praised that people can’t shut up about how much they love it, which drives sales, generally. I’m not here to talk you out of a game you enjoy. I really enjoyed Screamer and Invincible VS this year, and I’d call them both great games, both rated 77 on OpenCritic. Neither sold phenomenally well. If they’re lucky, those projects were scoped accordingly so that they were able to turn a profit and continue employing those developers.

Your first question was “Didn’t both those games review and sell well?” The answer is no. That’s what we were talking about, in this thread about Ubisoft laying off thousands of people.

For what it’s worth, I think they made a number of good games, but there’s far too much that’s far too similar between them. By the time Black Flag came out the first time, I was tired of the checklist open world format, and it’s why something like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring will pop off when it addresses what people like me find lacking in the Ubisoft format. These days when I get into an open world game that adheres to the same principles as Ubisoft (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, for instance), it’s often despite the format, not because of it.

Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold.

There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.

I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.

Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.

I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.

The CEO makes $1.5M per year in cash, so I very much doubt they’re spending hundreds of millions on executive salaries.

I have no criticisms myself for Star Wars Outlaws, as I didn’t play it, but the market didn’t want it, and Star Wars is for sure not underserved. I have been inundated with so much Star Wars since Disney bought it that I’m sick of it, and I’m not even seeking it out. The other thing I’m sick of is the Ubisoft Open World Game. I’ve played a lot of those. They built an efficient machine for churning those out. The market seems to be sick of them, too, at least relative to its former appetite. It’s not surprising that people are tired of both Ubisoft’s formula and Star Wars. You take a risk with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a moderately budgeted game. You don’t take a risk with $200M+; that’s lunacy. Even with The Lost Crown, they reminded me via their Ubisoft launcher and additional DRM why I haven’t missed purchasing Ubisoft games for so many years.

Executive paycuts aren’t going to cover the delta of 1000 job cuts per year. Everyone loves to cite that one time Nintendo did that, but the math just usually doesn’t work out to the point where this solves layoffs or something. What’s going to get them out of financial fuckery and keep their talent retained is if they stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on projects like Hyperscape, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar that people don’t want and instead make games that their customers do want.

Correct. I have received help from that server in the past, and it’s unusable now. Part of what I hope to accomplish is to replace Discord, or at least offer my friends an off-ramp. Getting started with Discord is way easier, and in the year 2026, I wouldn’t know what other client to use to look for a community that gives me quick help via live chat. I no longer know how to use IRC, I’ve found.

OpenCritic only goes back to 2016, so metacritic would be all you have here.

I’ll bet there’s no shortage of games with combat models with counters built in to them that predate Assassin’s Creed, but Arkham Asylum’s came from an earlier prototype that they built that was basically a rhythm game. AC’s combat was pretty terrible for a long while, but it was also a stealth game, so it didn’t matter all that much.

Yeah, but I was also fascinated by the dialogue directly speaking to that fatigue and the series’ failings to live up to the fantasy.

“So what’s the plan here?”

“Plan? Come up with your own plan! I’m not here to hold your hand!”

It was an innovative series at a time where we still got them frequently, and while seemingly intended to be a trilogy, they chased dollar signs over prestige. It’s hard to say they made the wrong choice there, but the animus made a lot more sense in the context of a trilogy with a beginning, middle, and end. For my money, Unity was the best game in the series and came out in one of the the weakest years for video game releases giving it a really good chance at an award, but it was a technical mess, especially at launch. I don’t think I agree that Arkham Asylum has much DNA in common with Assassin’s Creed.

Weird, because it’s not low frame rate; though the FOV is pretty tight in this trailer. I’m pretty sure you can pull it out and set the FOV higher if you like. In the meantime, the quick fix (usually) for looking at the trailer is to sit further away from your screen. From experience though, wait for the effects of motion sickness to subside before trying again, rather than trying to push through.

Hey, just wanted to chime in and say thank you. I think your guide moves a little fast for someone like me, but through omission, I was able to suss out what was wrong, I think. I don’t know if it was a default setting or if it was something I picked up without understanding it while trying to fill in the gaps of DNSmasque DHCP, but I had two DHCP Options set; one was a Set option for router[3], and the other was a Set option for dns-server[6]. The fact that you didn’t have that in your guide at all led me to try a configuration without them, and now I’ve got full connectivity on my VLAN. I’ll of course now start properly blocking access off rather than leaving everything totally permissive before opening up services to the web.

If you didn’t know, a far better way to monitor what’s happening with your Steam account than chat logs is to go to your Account Details–>Security & Devices, and you can see who’s accessed your account, from which location, and from which device. You can hit the “Sign out everywhere” button, and then no one should be able to get into your Steam account without access to Steam Guard on your own personal phone that you probably carry on your person at all times. You don’t necessarily have to shut your computer off when you’re not on it, but it’s good security practice to at least lock it (Windows key + L) when you step away. Even then, the only people who could access it if you’re not doing that are people who share the same physical space as you, like your family or roommates.

If I keep a chat window open for three weeks, the only one that will retain my last chat history for that long is the active chat tab. Any other tab I have open in that same window will purge the chat history after a week or two. That’s about all I know for how long it’s kept on the client, and I doubt they’re keeping it any longer on the server. The truth is I don’t know why they purge it, but if I were placing bets, my first two guesses would be cleaning up garbage on their servers that they don’t need; and preventing scams from lingering that could compromise your account security. If you haven’t set up two-factor for your Steam account, I would do so, and sharing your account with others like you’ve been doing is likely asking for trouble as well, so you might want to use the family sharing feature instead.

There are DRM-free games on Steam, but they really ought to advertise on the store page which ones those are, because we can currently only find out by experimentation and community wikis.

You’ll get a human in a couple of days if the automated portions couldn’t resolve your issue in full.

It’s not a monopoly.

My guess is that they’re actively purging chat logs at the same rate that they disappear off of your system. They’re storing data for over 130M active users every month, and I’m sure they’d be happy to be rid of a lot of the least useful of it.

When I was given a similar suggestion, I asked why I would need proxmox for my project, and I was told something along the lines of, “Don’t discount their usefulness if you’re trying to do this as a career.” I am not trying to do this as a career. I already have one of those. I’m trying to replace subscription services with something more economical and under my control.