It makes a bit of sense for that, and there are HMDs built for that purpose that are… eh… less gross? I guess?
But mostly it’s a secondary device. A toy you keep on the side and pop out for parties or when something reignites the novelty.
VR is Guitar Hero. Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.
People get very stuck on this part, and I genuinely don’t think it’s the issue.
Look, l have very decent “VR legs” at this point, but I’m still not a likely spender and I don’t play long games in VR or crack out my headsets very often at all.
The issue is not motion sickness or space or tracking stations. The issue is having to put something on my face and not being comfortably on my couch, free to go pee or get a snack without removing a thing from my face.
And yeah, it’s uncomfortable. That’s part of it. A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem. But the thing is, those aren’t a thing that exists, they are not even an incremental step that we can get to at any point, and also TVs and monitors look just fine.
VR is a neat trick, and I gladly keep my headsets around for any time when something actually interesting pops up. But it was never going to be the next big thing.
I am baffled that the anglosphere has a dress code for schools in the first place. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anybody getting even talked to for what they wear in a public school here, and I’ve had teachers in the family for four decades.
Private schools sure, but those are for nepo babies and idiots.
It’s not even long-term consequences. Immunodepressed people still exist.
But yeah, long term consequences, too.
People shouldn’t be thinking if they can start treating Covid like a cold or a flu ,they should be thinking about using what they learned from Covid when they get a cold or a flu instead.
Why would it be any different than before? Some of the answers here range from depressing to terrifying.
I know people whose health and lives are being threatened by Covid, directly and indirectly, as we speak. Infectious disease continues to be infectious. Do what we all learned to do.
Seriously.
I mean, they have to.
But honestly at this point that’s not even enough. You know they tried, you know whatever need for cash they were trying to fulfill remains. It’s one thing to let that go when buying a piece of software that you just… have, but building an entire business on top of this middleware and knowing you have a business relationship with them indefinitely as a result?
At this point it’s a dealbreaker. You can’t trust them again. If I start a new dev studio tomorrow Unity would not even be in the running to start choosing an engine. They made themselves into a liability overnight. It’s stunning. I don’t know what the hell they’re putting in the filtered, flavored water they sell to executives, but this year has been an endless chain of self-immolation I had never witnessed before.
I don’t think people realize how horrifying these addendums are.
Not only do they not really fix the issue, but they prove that no, yeah, they hadn’t thought about the possibility of “install bombing” at all until just now and it would totally have triggered massive fees.
I mean, the announcement was terribly worded, and some of the stuff (like wha’t a “monthly fee” or a “retroactive fee”) were very unclear, so you could hold out hope that they knew what they wanted to do and were just bad at explaining it.
But nope, that ship has sailed. They clearly didn’t give this any amount of thought.
So yeah, I’m more worried about it now than I was yesterday, believe it or not. Like, a LOT more.
Yeah, I’m not getting into an online quotefest and all of those points I’ve already addressed, so this is an agree to disagree for me.
I mean… would it? Indie devs not only existed before Steam, but typically have a hugely contentions relationship with them. I haven’t forgotten all the growing pains about races to the bottom through sales, arguments about curation and the entire Greenlight fiasco.
I’d give them credit for pushing indie devs enough to get Nintendo to stop being annoying to work with, but that was Microsoft pushing Sony which in turn pushed Nintendo. Steam is background noise in that process.
Valve solved the issue of PC piracy in the way Netflix solved the issue of TV and movie piracy: by creating a convenient service people liked to use that is significantly more hassle free than digging through shady websites. If they hadn’t figured it out, the next-in-line big store that happened was GOG, which is coincidentally a DRM-free storefront that grew as a reaction to Steam. I don’t know what the CD Projekt Deck would have looked like, but we at least would have gotten a third sequel of a game series, so there’s that.
Look, Valve people speak a very specific way. It takes a while to wrap your head around what they mean.
The quote you’re giving me is Valve-speak for “we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don’t add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform”.
And yes, those things do apply to Steam. You absolutely don’t own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you’re actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup. This is itself a breach of Steam’s EULA and not a service they provide. It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool and, while there is a “Offline Mode” you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.
The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam’s DRM is, in fact, DRM because it’s crackable is kind of shocking. It’s a testament to their PR, for sure, but also to their ability to do long term moves due to being a private company. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM, but it did take a competent CEO with no shareholders in his way to deploy that strategy.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not DRM or games-as-a-service. It absolutely is. Valve invented or perfected DRM, online distribution, battlepasses, monetized UGC and, technically NFTs. The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.
It matters because it’s there. If it was meant to not be DRM it… wouldn’t be DRM. That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
In practice, the DRM matters because it discourages keeping a backup of fully owned game files. On GOG it’s trivial to backup offline installers, which are provided explicitly (and I do keep a backup of games I only own on GOG, by the way). Steam explicitly limits your access to your games and how you use them, presumably to support a secure microtransaction environment within the Steam platform. That’d be the “ensures the Steamworks features work” bit in that text.
That’s extremely nontrivial for Steam, for the record. Disputing the ability to drive separate MTX under Steam is why several major publishers ended up withdrawing for a bit until they realized it’s not commercially viable and Steam is effectively a quasi-monopoly on the PC platform.
Cool. I don’t disagree with any of that, for the record.
It’s the defensiveness and outright denialism of the tradeoffs that I’m calling out, if anything.
But they did it. They made it work. Somebody else might have, I suppose, but it was literally them. EA was trying hard to push online activations and failing miserably. Download managers paired with DRM were a dime a dozen and were not making a dent. It was Steam.
They took the most anticipated game in the PC landscape and acquired the most played mod, bundled them together with their trojan horse of a DRM-cum-online store and forced the entire PC community to buy into it or be unable to play the big stuff.
That´s what they actually did in the real world. I remember, I was there.
So given that Steam absolutely counts as “shitty DRM” in my book, I’m not sure your representation fits reality. Like I said above, I buy DRM-free games whenever possible and my Steam account is still growing way faster than my GOG account despite prioritizing GOG.
No, wait, it literally WAS Steam. I mean, it wasn’t just Steam, but those guys were there at ground level. Valve is ultimately an offshoot of Microsoft, it’s not like becoming the main app store on home PCs by introducing structured DRM, sales and download management software wasn’t part of their plan.
So let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. Denuvo? Yep, that sort of DRM predates Steam. License limits and online activation? That’s contemporary to Steam and it’s the problem Steam is trying to solve. Online app stores built around DRM? Steam is as early on that race as it gets, and it’s absolutely built for that purpose.
I like it as a piece of software, too, it’s well made, but why whitewash it?
Plus, I have to point out that you seem to be arguing two opposite things at once. Is DRM inevitable? Well, since you seem to be correctly arguing that DRM-free alternatives do exist and seem to be financially viable… I’m gonna say no?
I’m just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).
And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go “you maniacs, you blew it up!” and so on.
Aaaw, but I liked getting jumped by everybody immediately. Made those charisma points feel earned.
I have wrist repetitive stress issues, so I mostly just use whichever hand hurts the least. It does take a bit of conscious effort, though.
It’s not magic, it’s an Nvidia server you’re paying for on a time share. And it’s decent, but frankly, as the kind of person that can tell when my 120Hz VRR display is hitting a flat frametime by eye it’s nowhere near comparable to local play, even in optimal circumstances.
Streaming is a nice option when you need a hardware-independent, location-independent way to run a heavy game, or as a stopgap when your client hardware can’t cut it with a modern release the cloud service covers, but it’s not an optimal experience and it’s problematic if it becomes a primary way to run games for a host of other reasons. I actually find GFN to be a solid idea, in terms of tapping into libraries you already own, but it’s absolutely a secondary, value-added solution to either running games on client or even pushing your own stream from a server you own.
Yeah, you know what those have in common? They all started providing one service more successfully than anyone else on that market and slowly accreted functionality in the absence of a popular local dedicated service. Twitter is not that, was never going to be that, and it is not becoming that, certainly not with a skeleton crew. The same goes for Reddit, which was certainly bigger than people think but not big enough to pull that move. It may have grown into a OF alternative specifically, just from having a foot on that business already, but that’s about it.
We do have one of those “everything apps” here, though. It’s called Facebook. Terminally online people don’t realize, but there are millions of people right now buying and selling used stuff, dating, watching videos and exchanging business information over it, even without accounting for the rest of the Meta ecosystem.
I had a full compliment of Rock Band instruments, including the keyboard that came out with Rock Band 3. Also the PS2 and 360 versions of the Guitar and even the modular one they made for the remake on PS4.
So what you’re saying is VR is exactly like Rock Band.