Also if we give it the benefit of the doubt (and it really is a stretch to make this work lol): I could make the argument that this person meant to write: “The movie has such a terrible premise, yet it was successful enough to have two sequels. Learning how it got that success despite the material’s premise taught me these 5 things about product management:” and just worded it terribly.

I can only speak for myself. For me it felt really great being able to explore the world having absolutely zero idea of what is what, how much game is left, etc. It is reminiscent of a time when I was a kid and playing a game was exactly like that.

I even got quite sad when my friend “accidentally” told me

I totally agree with you. I was just clearing up why people bring up Spore beyond just the first stage being similar.

People mention Spore because the official FAQ mentions Spore.

Thrive is never gonna be “from puddle to space adventures”-type of game.

People also mention Spore because this is exactly what the devs are envisioning. To quote the FAQ:

Gameplay is split into seven stages – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space.

Same. I had PayPal do an automated charge back because their system thought I was doing something fraudulent when I wasn’t. Steam blocked my account.

Talking to support and re-buying said game did fix the issue for me.

I’d argue that with their definition of bots as “a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet” and later their definition of download bots as “Download bots are automated programs that can be used to automatically download software or mobile apps.”, automated software updates could absolutely be counted as bot activity by them.

Of course, if they count it as such, the traffic generated that way would fall into the 17.3% “good bot” traffic and not in the 30.2% “bad bot” traffic.

Looking at their report, without digging too deep into it, I also find it concerning that they seem to use “internet traffic” and “website traffic” interchangeably.

I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.

Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.

You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas.

I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.

It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.

Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.

Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.

There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.

We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.

Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.

Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.

I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.

Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.

I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.

Money is not what makes it legal/illegal. But asking for money is definitely poking the hornet’s nest.

What really rubbed me the wrong way with ffxiv’s monetization past the regular subscription was the additional retainer service.

I know it’s not a large benefit to have, even if one’s main focus is on crafting/AH gameplay, but it still annoys me to no end that I could be more efficient by forking over an extra 2USD up to 6 times (iirc) PER MONTH. This means to max out one’s efficiency, one has to nearly double their monthly sub. Ultimately this was one of the many small frustrations with that game that lead to me dropping it, despite overall liking it.

Without knowing any specifics of the TOS or the exact setup beyond what I could gather in this thread: generally speaking they could still send you a bill through email or otherwise.

After that, if you’re not paying up, they might be able to successfully get the money out of you through court regardless, depending on a few factors. What’s more likely for smaller sums is that they’ll just drop it and ban you though.

IANAL of course.

And clearly people who are against Nazis are against socialism…

I sunk a lot of hours into Port Royale 2 many years ago. I’m not sure how well it holds up today or on its sequels. I think 3 was well received and 4 poorly.

In decreasing popularity (estimated by me):

• Creeper World: A mix of tower defense and rts (with pause function) against a ever expanding goo called creep. The fourth installment is 3D and the next one will be a side-view spinoff.

• Tales of Maj’Eyal: Quite popular among the people who are into traditional roguelikes, but I very very rarely see it mentioned outside that community. It’s definitely the (nearly) traditional roguelike I put the most time into thanks to its class/ability system that bridges the gap between roguelike and turn based rpg really well.

• The Captain: Technically not indie as it was published by Tomorrow Corp (of World of Goo/Little Inferno/etc. fame) instead of the devs themselves. A mix between old school point and click game, but as a highly episodic space adventure. You travel from planet to planet on an overarching mission and each planet has its own interactive short story. Some are longer, some are very short and you never quite know what you’ll find before you land. All of the short stories have multiple endings depending on how you tackle the moral dilemmas it throws at you.

• Infinity Wars actually released before the rise of Hearthstone and also before the popular Avengers movie of the same name. It is to this day one of my favorite digital TCGs, and I played so many of them. Before I get into the main thing that I love about it, I wanna mention that every single card’s base version (colorless) is free, anyone can build any deck for free the moment they pick up the game and be 100% competitive with everyone else. The only thing they monetize is bling. Unlike in most mainstream TCGs both players do their turns at the same time in secret, once they both lock in, their moves play out. This gives way for some insane mindgames and outplays that eclipse those in any other TCG I’ve played. It is a bit rough around the edges, so it might be more of a “hidden diamond in the rough” than a hidden gem.

• Bombernauts is a really fun party game. To sum it up in one sentence: “Imagine if Bomberman was a platform fighter.” If you have friends to play with it, buy it on a sale, crank powerup drops up to the max (they stack, which took us hours to figure out), maybe download a mappack and I’m sure you’ll have a blast if the trailer looked any fun to you. There’s virtually no chance to play it with strangers through as it is super dead.

• Lastly I wanna give a shoutout to Clonk. Clonk is (or was) a 2D sidescrolling game-series that is visually reminiscent of Lemmings. The gameplay is a sort of mix between Minecraft or Terraria (predating it by many many years) and very very very low-pop RTS. It’s a mission based game where you control around 1-3 Clonks (the lemmings) and has full online multiplayer support. The missions can range from “build a base in this active volcano”, “take out the enemy team’s castle”, “win this wizarding duel” to “build a bridge across this canyon”. What made it truly unique was the community and community creations though. It was created with the explicit purpose to be customizable and users made many, many different maps and modes. It was to me what Minecraft was to the kids in the generation after me (without all the content creators, of course). Some people made an entire RPG in it. Others made what was essentially Among Us, just to give you an idea. Sadly the spiritual open source successor Open Clonk could never recapture the magic for me, and I guess I’m not alone in that because it pretty much died around 5 years ago. If I could make one game popular overnight, it would be Clonk. It did warm my heart to see that some of the celebrated custom map/mode creators from back then ended up getting into gamedev. One of the games developed by someone I remember from back then is Vintage Story.

Holy fuck I rambled a lot about Clonk and I still feel like I’d have so much more to say but this isn’t the most fitting thread for that.

Or into a horse.

Ah yeah. I can see how anyone could understand it that way.

And same.

Wait, that’s what I meant by “clipped”.

Now I’m curious in what other way my comment could be taken.