The 24 hours peak players was just under 250. The headline using “300” is understating things.
The 24 hours peak players was just under 250. The headline using “300” is understating things.
Sure, repartitioning works too.
You install your own windows? Do you really know if the pre-installed windows gets deleted?
This one seems to be easy to manage. Formatting the disc seems easy to do.
Yeah they manage both distribution methods.
I’m just highlighting at least one example where they have regrettably left the standalone as a 2nd class option.
I had a situation with The Saboteur.
When installed manually with downloaded installers it had configuration issues, IIRC it was limited to 1280x720 and the in game option to modify it didn’t work.
But when installed with Galaxy it defaulted to 1920x1080 and the in game options worked.
At that point my game was working and I didn’t investigate further so I don’t know if it was downloading different installers, or performing post install tweaks to my game config, but from a functional perspective the game was broken when not using Galaxy. Ideally whatever the “magic” was it should be included in the standalone installers!
I had a think about this scenario and I think that if Steam was going to present this argument they would need to document and support this workflow. At the moment the fact that it sometimes works is more of an accident than anything (essentially it’s all just files on a disc and sometimes the files still work if you move them somewhere else).
But if they document that you can transfer the install data to another location, and identify which titles that applies to? Then I can see a reasonable argument that they qualify.
This article seems to say that it covers only digital items that have an always online requirement.
https://www.gamefile.news/p/california-ab2426-crew-call-of-duty
So i think offline games don’t need the warning, but online games, steaming movies, etc do need the warning.
Edit:
I looked a bit further and found the bill text:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2426#99INT
(4) This section does not apply to any of the following:
[…]
© Any digital good that is advertised or offered to a person that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.
This exception clearly allows for user downloadable installer for a game with offline functionality. But consoles, steam, etc where you don’t get a standalone installer, they look like they will need the warning on all titles.
It can be interesting to see the questions that make it to hot questions.
Its a little sample of the various communities.
In Australia they’ve bumped it from au$25 (with periodic discounts to au$12.50) to au$60.
Thats a 140% increase!
No mention of the recent changes to classify simulated gambling R18+.
Thats going to cause some titles to cut content to avoid the higher rating.
It had a public github repo so I would expect there to be copies in the wild.
Average score was 76 placing it in the 63rd percentile.
https://opencritic.com/game/16790/star-wars-outlaws/charts
Its the kind of middle of the pack results that show its not bad but its not great either. License fans with realistic expectations will probably have a good time.
Yes, that kind of packaging is exactly what he is fighting!
I had assumed they were a one and done appliance that would be replaced if under warranty with the faulty unit going to e-waste.
The word was selected by the American Dialect Society in January 2006 as the “most creative word” of 2005.
TIL
Oh! So that treaty somewhat standardizes PA patent rights across participating nations and allows a the patent office to act as a agent in procuring international patents but doesn’t actually offers a “globally” recognized patent in the way that the Berne Convention does for copyright.
So it looks like the infamous loading screen minigame patent was only registered in Japan and the USA. If I have this right it would not have been a barrier to implementing a loading screen minigame anywhere else (e.g. PAL regions in their entirety)?
The cycle I see is aligned with the console generations.
For the first half of the gen the console proposition is reasonably modern and some people with older PCs will pick up a console instead of a new PC build.
For the second half of the gen the console proposition is dated and PCs can achieve the same power for a modest price, or exceed that power for a few dollars more. Some people will switch to PC either as an upgrade or when their current console fails.
Then the cycle continues every 6 or 7 years.
More than anything, the problem is apps.
True, its a real chicken and egg situation. No one what to use a platform without decent app support but no one wants to develop for a platform without any users.
Isn’t this the scenario the Patent Cooperation Treaty was intended to resolve?
You are probably right but there has to be some kind of path forward baked into the regulations.
It will be a bit of a farce if retro gaming becomes illegal because no one submits the paperwork for 8-bit consoles.