Its unfortunately a pretty common thing, especially for gatcha games. Look at the whole Limbus Company debacle from a few years back, for example, where people protested outside the studio because the summer skins weren’t sexy enough (for a game that hadn’t previously sexualized characters heavily) and got an unrelated artist fired because she was a feminist and thus was surely the one who made the decision.

With gatcha games, its a bit of a perfect storm with the extreme investment expected in these games, the monetization of characters, an industry that leans into this, and the fact that these games tend to be made in and marketed towards east-Asian regions where generally, sexuality is more accepted but sexism also more common and played largely by young, immature men.

Edit: Notably also, a lot of the men getting super invested in games like this are also vulnerable, which means a lot are likely to also end up in groups like the incel “movement” as well as being more likely to be swept up in any existing toxic culture around the games themselves.

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They provide a bunch of other services tied in, like the reviews, Workshop, and most infamous, guides and forums. While the reviews and Workshop tend to not be too bad (although still often not great) the forums and guides tend to be completely unmoderated and as a result, devolve into spam and extremism.

Its possible I’ve just been lucky enough to avoid that part of the playerbase. Then again, my perception my also be skewed from spending so much time in Dead By Daylight, War Thunder, Minecraft and Counter Strike. At least in Dota, it takes some effort to kill more than a couple teammates.

Honestly, by online gaming standards, I’ve found Dota pretty tame. Prehaps its just because I stick to more casual modes and have a high behaviour score, but I rarely see much more than a “GGEZ” at the end of a game, or players tipping mistakes. I think its been at least a month since the last time I saw someone hack, intentionally teamkill, or throw. Obviously, its still a competitve online game (toxicity isn’t rare), but the only other online game I can think of where I experienced less toxicity was Deep Rock Galactic.

Well, they implemented some graphical improvements and options, as well as workshop mod support so now would be a good time for a replay.

Who even thinks this is a big deal? This screams boomers being upset about violent video games all over again.

While its not a big deal, at least for Gmod specifically, they really could use some further moderation. I’ve seen some pretty reprehensible stuff there. The most recent example that comes to mind is “Burning Ukrainian Soldiers” on the front page (complete with combat footage to compare against and racist description of Ukranians), but that sort of thing is not rare at all.

In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.

That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.

A couple of major factors:

Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.

Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).

Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.

People don’t want to date those who don’t value or respect them, their lives, their family, or their country? Im shocked! Shocked, I say!

Its not that old (although that does fit the theme) but Hotline Miami 1, and to a lesser extent, 2. Both are limited a lot by the engine, and by the small scale of their development. If they could be re-made in a new engine, with some modern customizability and QoL features, as well as added polish on things like the door physics, I think it could go a long way to ensuring they stand the test of time.

The the infamous Weimar Republic mark was only one 4.2 trillionth of a dollar. This is a quadrillion x quadrillion dollars.

Depends a lot on the cat. Mine just started scratching the wall beside it instead.

Even with Ana, while it was the peak of Overwatch’s healers, had a lot of the same issues, esspecially when it comes to juice, and feedback for impactful actions. For example, while your primary specialty was healing, the main feedback for that was your teammate’s health bar going down slower, whereas if you decide to play selfish and shoot enemies, you watch their health rapidly tick down, they die, and you get a flashy kill reward and voice line. Even in terms of the OW1 medals, there was only one healing medal and like, 3 or 4 for damage. Despite healing being such a core part of the game, there’s very little moment-to-moment “reward” for it.

Even for a lot of games with strategic views, being able to hover above the battlefield or fly between your battle lines would be so cool - like the most immersive tabletop wargame possible.

Honestly, this just highlights how badly thought out the gameplay is for non-dps classes in a lot of games. So often, both the healer and tank are left as second-class citizens, as all the emphasis is put on killing enemies. For example, in Overwatch, while tanks and healers were effective, there was little depth and little reward in the role compared to DPS characters. Orisa was a dps who couldn’t leave the objective and had to hit ‘e’ on the ground every few seconds. Mercy just followed someone around, with little agency of their own. Compare that with, for example, Junkrat, where you were encouraged to be flying around the map, bouncing grenades off walls to make yourself near impossible to hit while still killing dozens of enemies. Theres both more depth, and more frequent, significant gratification. This is a big part of why I like Dota - supports (tanks aren’t really a thing in the same sense) have a whole separate game they tend to be playing to manipulate the map in their favour, and can still impact fights with a plethora of significant abilities that are flashy and impactful in their own right.

Honestly, Im really suprised official support lasted this long. Microsoft largely gave up on VR years ago.

Unfortunately, that popup only lists third party DRM.

They do not have to. FTL is one example I know of off the top of my head.

Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can’t buy the space, Valve doesn’t bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn’t enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I’m interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam’s success that often gets overlooked.