Plenty of normal people don’t have time for a single live service game

I didn’t realize the new Steam family sharing was so detrimental to close ones away from each other. Their Guide & FAQ is clear with their intentions:

While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.

To that end, we expect the requirements for participating in a Steam Family to change over time as we monitor its usage and add requirements to keep usage in line with this intent.

Last line is pretty brutal. Apparently even family members living in the same country & different household might be in for a surprise eventually. That’s really saddening because at first glance this overhaul sounded amazing considering a single game was locked by play instead of the whole library.

For peripherals (screens, audio) rtings is pretty cool. They take testing seriously with a scientific/engineering approach.

It’s at least a century old problem imho. In the 1950’s clever capitalists where already looking for ways of “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary”. I can’t believe how often I’ve had to buy a new fucking toaster. It just keeps getting worst.

Ullman’s argumentation is very wiggly when it comes to impact on performance. On one hand, he claims there’s very little proof, on the other hand he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed. Furthermore he says their hands are tied as they’d need their client’s approval to publish such numbers, conveniently ignoring the possibility of anonymizing and grouping data. Remember they state to being included in 70-80 games yearly.

Finally, and this is an old song, but anyways: preventing loss in sales due to piracy is an exercise in wishful thinking. The amount of pirate players who would have paid in an alternate universe with no cracked version can’t be reliably estimated.