Nils

Kotaku is going to Kotaku. Don’t feel FOMO, the game is not all of that.

The game has a little boost in players every time they release some bigger package, but then drops significantly. I imagine their numbers will soar when they add lootboxes and market access. And the number of bots will increase significantly.

Despite a bunch of technical problems, like being rerouted to a server in Amsterdam with a jump first in Buenos Aires. The game design is a massive time waste, and all decisions from past year made matches way longer (if it was not hard enough to find a team that want to end the game when we are at advantage). My last matches before ditching it were taking ~40min, that is too much for a team shooter.

I guess they are going for the “MOBA” time length, what is bad. I also ditched MOBAs when match length went from 12~15min to 30~40min.

Now imagine playing two +40min matches in a row with the same salty players (common in MOBAs) with no away to avoid them on your team in the queue. At least you can mute and report.

I think Steam, GOG and Epic have API/SDK that anyone can use. It is not like they check what every single person is doing. Steam has a problem with gambling and grey market trading that uses their services, it is not like they are actively going after them.

Btw, Comet main dev is one of the devs behind Heroic. It seems imLinguin is also based in Poland and very active with the GOG community. GOG definitely knows about them. Maybe something changes since they are willing to invest on Linux now.

I don’t have the exact commit anymore, but it was at the beginning of 2024. I remember going to suggest them to be more straightforward with their changelog, but someone beat me to it.

Yeah, I remember other project for epic, Legendary, that a bunch of people built on top, but it was discontinued recently.

Edit: nevermind, I found the mastodon comment, and the people reporting the problem with gog on github. From there it was easier to find the commit.

https://mastodon.social/@heroiclauncher/111824351634717227 (It was actually a reply to their own mastodon post where the “informed” about the change.

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/commit/2f88dc9af051d1b1a5d79fd1baf584f1b7875168#diff-a80892a1c67a5d05d39672dd972dbb6646c6f82b57a1b6a608db0e77e09adf89

Scroll down to webview/index to see the change. The subsequent commits were all to fix issues caused by this.

Nice, quite easy to get into development mode. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamframe/setup

One day, Heroic stopped working for me, it was flagged and blocked by my network. They injected affiliated links that redirected to weird domains, with no warning on changelogs. I was worried of a man in the middle attack and I investigated the PRs. They did not even document it properly on the commits, but it was intentional, you could see the line changing in the code made by one of the main devs.

Nothing against them making some money, I would have opened a rule for them. But doing this kind of thing without notifying people is shady at least. Later I found a message from the devs in one social network(mastodon maybe?) about adding it, but that is hardly notifying your user base. Subsequently, more people reported the client not working and they addressed it. It was not only about network rule that blocked most users, Heroic could not reach some GOG services without https and for some reason the weird redirects were forcing the route through http.

With some wording, they made some users believe they had “team up with GOG”. But they just signed for the affiliated program that anyone can sign for, GOG had no idea who they were and were not officially endorsing them. Quite often you see on lemmy people arguing like GOG is behind Heroic, or that Heroic is an official GOG store.

Since then (early 2024), I stopped recommending Heroic to people and moved to other options (wine, lutris, bottles). I am sure it was an honest mistake. But it will take a while to recover the trust.

All problems aside, I still prefer an open-source solution that I can investigate this type of thing easily over a closed blob that I have to reverse engineer and sniff packages.

When they released Witcher 2 on Linux (CDPR) some top hat (sorry I don’t remember who) did not like the feedback from the players and used it as reasons to not support Linux on subsequent titles. One hope it is not the same guy that bought GOG.

What a cool series, thank you for sharing! I was not familiar with the channel and will take a look on the rest.

I did not know much beside the game and the IP stealing thing. It is sad what happened to them.

Then some clueless person complains that Steam dominates the market. When Epic is constantly shooting their foot.

People like to make informed decisions and those labels help. In proper countries even beer have content labels to say if there is rice or corn with the barley.

I feel like Atlus filled the space Square left after the merge, and it is living the golden age similar to what Square enjoyed in the 90s early 2000s. A bunch of quality titles coming each year in the most diverse genres (I think just missing something like Ehrgeiz, maybe they pull it out with the Sega merge).

Not really sure what is different between the management of Atlus and Square Enix, but I feel like a bunch of Japanese companies are banking more on diluting their IPs and counting on the goodwill of people’s nostalgia. At least Square Enix did not drop everything to pursue the pachinko business (I hope).

It seems that this article as based on this investor release, it has way more details omitted by the gamespot author https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20250514_01_en.pdf

There was demo available back in 2020~2021, did they add anything new, or is it different stuff?