Community MetaSteam | January 2023 - A new season begins

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Mivey

Mivey

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Sep 20, 2018
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I hope everyone will have a great 2023! Thanks again for the great OP, Mor.
Completely missed that Scott Pilgrim will finally release on Steam. It literally feels like 100 years that it game out. Nice to finally have it on PC for real.

Also looking forward to Persona 3 and the new Dead Space remake. I never finished the first game, so the remake is just perfect for me. Will wait for reviews to drop, of course, but I hope it holds up
 
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Li Kao

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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fantomena said:
I decided this year is the year Im gonna play A Link to the Past and Super Metroid.

Ironic thing is, it's quicker to download the rom and emulator on PC than it is to use my Switch to play them.
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Are you fucking kidding me ? You never played them ? Those are gems, I would say you are for a good time but they must have aged, too.
 
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Mivey

Mivey

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Pommes said:
The reference designs of the new 7900 AMD cards seem to have a big problem:
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Kinda wonder how a bad design flaw like that, if it does end up being true, makes it to a final product. AMDs has decades of experience with GPUs, you'd think their internal Q&A would quickly show the problem long before the card hits production.
 
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lashman

lashman

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Patching a game to add a launcher is like doing an operation to put in an appendix, and it's become alarmingly common this year. Once, I seem to recall, patches fixed bugs, corrected typos, and added new content, but since a September "Quality of life update" to the BioShock games (opens in new tab) added an utterly redundant new launcher, I've begun to worry that every update to my games library carries an unwelcome guest.

This is nothing new. The infestation of launchers in our start menus has been a nuisance for years, but February's release of the Steam Deck (opens in new tab) means they've graduated from irritant to a potentially game-breaking problem. The addition of the 2K launcher to the BioShock Remastered Collection didn't just add one more useless ritual you had to perform to play the thing you bought, it straight-up broke the games for users on Linux (opens in new tab) and Steam Deck. Valve's Proton compatibility layer could translate BioShock itself from Windows to Linux without breaking a sweat, but the launcher? It had no clue what to do with that.

It's an absurdity to jam a launcher into a six year-old remaster of a 15 year-old game in the first place, but when that launcher subsequently causes a failure to launch? You've accidentally done satire of yourself. And look, I'm no MBA-toting marketing guy, but I can't imagine the scant purchasables available on the 2K launcher are a huge revenue generator for the company. Perhaps it's an incredibly rich vein of player data: A rare and revealing insight into the behaviour and motivations of the six of us still playing BioShock in the year of our Lord 2022.

This wouldn't be worth complaining about—which is not to say I wouldn't still complain about it—if it were an isolated incident, but it keeps happening. A November update to Kerbal Space Program added a launcher whose sole reason for existing seemed to be to advertise KSP 2, and players immediately took to Reddit (opens in new tab) and the Steam forums (opens in new tab) to holler about broken mods and Steam Deck screwiness. As I write this, EA is trying to cobble together a fix (opens in new tab) for Deck failures caused by its Origin-replacing EA App.

Is any of this worth it? Have you ever launched a game from Steam, only to watch Origin or UPlay spark to life, and thought "Ah, yes, how pleased I am to see you"? Of course you haven't, unless you own EA or Ubisoft stock. These things don't exist to make games better, they exist to give business liches and C-suite types a little warm glow.

It's all the more irritating to me because, my friends, there's a better world. I've seen it. Forgive my blasphemy, but it's called the Nintendo Switch, a hand-size block of glass and plastic with all the power of a tea candle. I bought one a few months ago; it lives beneath my television and asks me for nothing. When I turn it on—which I do by picking up the controller that sits on my coffee table and pawing at its large, friendly buttons—it clicks instantly to consciousness and into whatever game I was playing last. At no point in this three-second process does any software launch beyond the game itself, at least none that I can perceive.

Don't get me wrong, in every respect besides actually launching the games, the Switch is a worse way to play than my ox of a computer. Games run worse, cost more, and for some reason I have to pay Nintendo to make full use of the internet connection I already pay someone else for. But the untroubled experience of starting games on the console has almost driven me to resent the openness of PC as a platform: the very thing that makes it great, but also the thing that allows this launcher nonsense to proliferate unchecked.

There's reason for hope. The beginning of this year saw Bethesda terminate its launcher (opens in new tab) in favour of migrating back to Steam. Admittedly, games like Fallout and Skyrim have their own, game-specific launchers that let you fiddle with options and data files, and which remain maddeningly unnavigable with a gamepad, but it's a start. I suppose Steam is, at the end of the day, another launcher, but it's never once fired up when I launch something I bought on the Epic Games Store or GOG.

It would've been nice if we could get a handle on this years ago when launchers were just an inconvenience, but now they're actively breaking games surely something's gotta give. I want to stop getting up off my sofa to enter a 2FA code after the EA App signs me out for the millionth time, and Steam Deck users want their games to actually work. Please, let 2023 be the year we all hit the unlaunch button.
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Arc

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Kyougar

Kyougar

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Nov 2, 2018
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Hektor said:
This is the year of KIngdom Hearts on steam.

IM FEELING IT
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Panda Pedinte said:
BLOODBORNE ON PC THIS YEAR

YOU HEARD HERE FIRST FOLKS.
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I CAN FEEL IT
THIS IS THE YEAR OF.....

You know what? We are already feasting.
we survived the 2000's in PC gaming,
we survived the Phone gaming scare,
we survived the EGS scare
we left console gaming in the dust
we will survive the GPU scare

PC gaming life is good. You just have to sacrifice a Bloodborne or KH or two.
 
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Jav

Jav

Question everything, learn nothing
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When was the last day to vote the game of the year thing here?
 
Durante

Durante

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Oct 21, 2018
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Panda Pedinte said:
"it just another launcher"
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I had the exact same reaction when I read this from PC Gamer.

In fact, it motivated me to write about this whole thing for the first time in a while (on the PC subreddit):
Strange to see this kind of complaint on PC gamer, as it is one of the publications that really carried the inane "just a launcher" idea back when Epic did its first EGS marketing blitz (including, incidentally, massively advertising on sites like PC gamer; surely not a conflict of interest).

What was clear to everyone with more than a passing interest in and experience with PC gaming back then is even more clear now: Valve is the only company with actual influence in the space that relatively consistently takes the idea of putting long-term customer satisfaction over short-term bullshit to heart -- and if any other large publisher attained even a fraction of their influence they would actively make PC gaming worse for everyone.

Valve isn't just great for what they do (e.g. funding open source development, the Steam Deck, new Steam features, VR, etc.) they are at least equally important for what they don't do. They don't turn their extremely popular client into an advertising platform sold to the highest bidder. They don't remove or break old games -- they even go out of their way to support long-obsolete APIs in their value-add features like input or the overlay. They don't charge recurring fees for online features, or cloud hosting, or anything else the platform provides.

Anyone who thinks that any of the huge publicly traded large publishers would refrain from all of those for a decade after achieving a leading position in the PC gaming space is either hopelessly naive, paid off, or trolling.
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Ascheroth

Ascheroth

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Well, this is gonna be a massive JRPG year for me :sweaty-blob:
Digimon in February.
Trails to Azure in March.
After which I'll be able to finally play Cold Steel 3 + 4
Then Trails into Reverie is in June (though I might still be playing Cold Steel at the time, so might have to get this later)
There's also Nayuta in English sometime this year iirc.
And Star Rail has to release this year as well.
And I'm sure that's just a tiny fraction of things to come, lol.
 
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Knurek

Knurek

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Ascheroth said:
Well, this is gonna be a massive JRPG year for me :sweaty-blob:
Digimon in February.
Trails to Azure in March.
After which I'll be able to finally play Cold Steel 3 + 4
Then Trails into Reverie is in June (though I might still be playing Cold Steel at the time, so might have to get this later)
There's also Nayuta in English sometime this year iirc.
And Star Rail has to release this year as well.
And I'm sure that's just a tiny fraction of things to come, lol.
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Don't forget about two of the absolutely best JRPGs of the last decade landing on Steam:
Rance X might also get released early 2024?
 
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ZKenir

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Ascheroth said:
Well, this is gonna be a massive JRPG year for me :sweaty-blob:
Digimon in February.
Trails to Azure in March.
After which I'll be able to finally play Cold Steel 3 + 4
Then Trails into Reverie is in June (though I might still be playing Cold Steel at the time, so might have to get this later)
There's also Nayuta in English sometime this year iirc.
And Star Rail has to release this year as well.
And I'm sure that's just a tiny fraction of things to come, lol.
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yeah it's gonna be a glut of Falcom for me, I'll play Zero before Azure release in march and then I plan to replay 3+4 before Reverie (i'm really looking forward to these replays) and Nayuta.
I'll also get P3 day one, then there's also Digimon and Ryza3, add to that the fact I'm done with yakuza 0 replay so I can replay 1k+2k and then play 3-6.

Ofc I'm still playing P5R and then I'll have P5S, this'll be a great year!
 
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gabbo

gabbo

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Lashley said:
Yet they wanked themselves silly over EGS
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The argument in the article limits itself to just multiple launcher per game - you open a game from one launcher (Steam) and it opens another publisher launcher before the game/game menu opens eg Take2 and EA App.. This allows PCGamer to have it boths ways - tut tut this particular (and admittedly bad) practice, but also not have to wade into the issues with other storefront launchers (re: Xbox App, EGS).
 
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yuraya

yuraya

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So have there been any leaks for the January choice? I haven't found anything anwhere.

Steam sale ends on Thursday so its good timing I guess.


Panda Pedinte said:
BLOODBORNE ON PC THIS YEAR

YOU HEARD HERE FIRST FOLKS.
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We are getting Bloodborne, Metal Gear Solid Legacy collection, Kingdom Hearts, Demon Souls and SMTV on Steam this year.

And they will all release on the same day for maximum fuckery.

:wd_praise:
 
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