I’ve got a UGreen NAS for media hosting, and I’ve been loading it up with Blu Rays and DVDs for the past few weeks to stream via Jellyfin. Going alphabetically, I’ve now made it to the letter J in my library, with 54 movies and 407 episodes of TV ripped so far. I have a tiny comic collection that I started playing with in Komga just yesterday. I intend to scale up slightly, with all of my other self hosting needs handled by a mini PC, which should be enough, that I can retire from its gaming use cases when the Steam Machine comes out. I’m trying to figure out all of the pieces I need in order to safely expose that to the internet for my friends without the use of something like Tailscale. When I started, it was like that Simpsons gag where Homer went from reading Advanced Marketing to Beginner Marketing to looking up the definition in the dictionary. But after about 50 YouTube videos all explaining the same concepts slightly differently between them, it’s starting to click.

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Live service has broken people’s brains.

Well, I definitely wasn’t going to buy a PlayStation 5 when it was $500, but now that they’ve stopped putting out versions of their games on PC that run better than PlayStation versions, and now that the console costs $650, I’m definitely enticed to buy one!

There is a space for rentals to exist, but if you know exactly what you want already, the price of that indie game you’re looking for already isn’t very expensive, especially during a sale. We’ve probably got a bunch of these games in our libraries already just from bundles.

Gaming centers that buy the same hardware in bulk, is what I understand. So naturally, they’re going to buy them with Windows pre-installed.

They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.

They want Epic because of Fortnite; that’s why they invested in Epic in the first place, and it’s what the article cites as business reasons for the acquisition. If Unreal is doing what they need to already, it could still see cost cutting that affects video games, as they don’t see as much need to enhance it with features that actually support new games.

The article says Sweeney still retains full voting control, which would mean he’s got at least 51%. As I understand it, he can sell any time he wants, and Tencent gets a portion of the sale.

I debated posting this one myself, but the article does highlight that Disney isn’t even sure if they want to do it, and Tim Sweeney is the gatekeeper of this ever happening. The worst thing that can come from this is that Disney gets bored with owning a video game company a few years down the line and then dissolves the institution responsible for the Unreal engine.

Yeah, I miss it. Given the total obliteration of LAN and the incentive to subscribe to PS+ or XBL, I’m pretty sure LAN is actually forbidden on modern consoles, since the PS4 and Xbox One.

I don’t know about Save the World, but the other modes of Fortnite are barred by anti-cheat on Linux, no matter how you launch it.

Whenever Steam makes a controversial decision, Epic always takes the opposite stance, like on NFTs. Unfortunately, not once has Epic done this on something that I felt would be better for me as the consumer. Here’s some low-hanging fruit: being able to tell what kind of multiplayer a game has, or how much of a game I get to own with my purchase, is awful on every store, including GOG. Steam has a tag to indicate that a game has LAN multiplayer, but plenty of games have it and don’t list it. There is no tag to say, “you can host private servers for this game, whether on LAN or internet”. If a store took a stance to answer these kinds of questions for me, that store would fare better in my eyes. But of course Epic won’t be the ones to do it; their big cash cow is a live service game that must be run through them.

They did have the wisdom to use Fortnite’s proceeds to make something like a Steam competitor that both takes a lot of startup capital and also has the potential to wildly exceed Fortnite’s future review, but they did not have the wisdom to make a store that customers would actually want to use for any reason except giveaways.

From what I’ve learned on Economics Explained, I don’t think it’s something that necessarily leads to better outcomes than global trade, beyond just redundancy. Competitive manufacturing relies on low costs, which relies on low wages, which favors countries where there aren’t thriving sectors of the economy that pay better than manufacturing. And even once that country is favored, it brings in more money, which leads to higher salaries, raising the quality of living, and eventually making the factory jobs non-viable in that country either. If I didn’t get anything in the above incorrect, I believe that’s called the middle income trap.

Almost certainly not, but it’s probably not far down the list.

They did.

Roblox gets mods and UGC because people wanted to be there to begin with. Mostly children, but still people. I don’t know how to make an apples to apples comparison about how prevalent modding was back then, because there are just way more games out today in general; but there were still tons of mods. Elder Scrolls and the mod community have always been intertwined, and once again, people like what’s there in the first place. Even with the reputation of Elder Scrolls being a game you install mods on, it’s only something like 10% of players that ever install them. I have never modded Elder Scrolls.

The third-most populated game on Steam right now is Dota 2. Dota 1 is a mod. Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. PUBG came from the designer of a Battle Royale mod for Arma.

Were you playing games through the late 90s and early 00s, by any chance? Because we’ve been here before. At least three of the most-played games on Steam right now came from mods.