Your initial claim remains false.

As indicated, digital game storefronts offered refunds explicitly prior to Steam, and it wasn’t leading the way, especially given its policy was that all purchases were not refundable, up till 2015’s changes.

Leading the way isn’t making some exceptions to their policies occasionally, it’s making refunds a part of the policies from the outset when others aren’t.

@Kedly What? This is flat out untrue. Back in 2008 Stardock’s attempt at a storefront via Impulse offered refunds: https://web.archive.org/web/20080708091849/http://tgnforums.stardock.com/315290

Later in 2013, EA of all companies would also offer refunds on their storefront, Origin: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/08/ea-begins-offering-refunds-for-its-digital-game-sales-on-origin/

And later that same year, GOG would offer refunds: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/gog-s-new-money-back-guarantee-is-more-about-trust-than-refunds

It was only a couple years after EA & GOG, in 2015, that Valve began offering refunds on Steam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/valve-begins-offering-refunds-for-all-steam-games/

Not OP, but I hadn’t heard of Tempest Rising before! I’ll have to keep an eye on that, thanks for mentioning it!

arrested for photographing some abandoned urban environments 😅

honestly that doesn’t seem too much of a stretch

Game was Interior Worlds btw for any interested.

How does some of the Warframe community reconcile that kind of narrative with its whole business model?

I’m aware it’s generally considered among the “better ones”, but it still is what it is, a freemium game that by necessity has to push its business model on you since it doesn’t have an upfront cost.

I guess maybe it inadvertently adds to the atmosphere of being under the heel of capitalists?

Not to mention, sometimes they actively take away from the art direction. You can have a game that’s clearly going for semi-realism and yet keeps damage numbers flying off like it’s a comic strip, which doesn’t fit whatsoever.

The strangest, funniest mixture are the games built off comic licenses that employ a semi-realistic style with damage numbers, when a better combination would be stylized so it would all fit better artistically.

This is a great point (as well as others that have mentioned similar). I wonder if some of the old arena shooters from around then (or their open source offshoots) may handle just as well today, considering that.

I’ll have to look into those that are still active and see! Thanks!

Servers may be some of the issue, but the problem then is that a number of games, at least outside of MMOs, don’t seem to give much of a choice on that. Presumably they’re trying to connect to servers that should give a good experience, but… 🤷‍♀️

Regardless, the intent here isn’t so much to troubleshoot networking issues, as it is to find games that may handle less reliable/rougher network situations decently, as much as is really possible anyway.

No worries on the wall of text! Also fwiw I’m familiar with RTS games, which is why I mentioned not being in the mindset for them currently. They’re a lot to take in, even on a good day! 😅

Nevertheless, when I’m of the right mind for’em, I really enjoy’em. Building up outposts, assembling a bunch of units, and fending off enemies, it can be a bunch of fun!

Lately I’ve been more interested in peaceful builders/strategy games though. Still, BAR and the like remain really impressive!

I think you forgot a link to the game itself! 😜

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

That aside, I’ve been giving it a look again lately but haven’t dove in just yet. I’m in an odd mindset atm where I don’t know if I’m down to wrap my head around RTS mechanics, but I’m really impressed by the looks of the game!

Also wanna highlight that this is a great rabbit hole to go down for other open source RTS games via Zero-K, Spring Engine, OpenRA, etc.

#VideoGames #Gaming #OpenSourceGames #BeyondAllReason

I haven’t seen either of these mentioned yet, so you might look into Ponpu, and Light Fingers on the Switch.

Ponpu might be a little much, but Light Fingers may be a decent-ish pace, as it goes for something of a digital tabletop-like game design. They tend to go on sale around the holidays, so if you wait a little while you may snag’em on the cheap.

@Lowbird @Link To add to this, when Nintendo attacks emulators they even screw over folks that buy their games to show support and then play them via emulator for the benefits they provide over the original hardware.

Sure, that may be an exceedingly small number of folks, but I’ve personally done this with older titles simply ‘cause emulation provides so much more flexibility. I’d do similar with other platforms’ recent games if it was as viable (looking at you specific PS3/PS4 exclusives).

@Mars Tbh this is the risk with making games exclusive to any console (as well as any platform, speaking more broadly), or for any publisher.

The games industry across the board is largely terrible at preserving their past works, with it only recently becoming even of slight interest to any of them (e.g. Microsoft backwards compatibility). They’d rather old IP rot & be forgotten than risk releasing it & losing the slightest profit opportunity from a nostalgia cash-in.

@WorriedGnome @milkpiss @orbit Regarding the price, I wonder just *how* any business could effectively reduce costs without adding in bloatware or the like.

So far in the MR headset space the main ways have been to either just *eat* the cost (see: Meta/FB & Quest) or offer a lesser experience (see: Google’s foray into Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, etc.). The Quest has been making some headway, but it’s still been an uphill struggle even at its lower cost.

(sorry for notifs, testing federation)