I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t appear to be a direct continuation of Jin’s storyline, but I’m still excited.
I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t appear to be a direct continuation of Jin’s storyline, but I’m still excited.
The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.
I’ve definitely seen some games that do have an option for this.
And that’s just what they’ve done by accident. There was also that time they installed rootkits on their customers’ PCs, lied about it, belittled their customers when nobody believed them, then put out a fake uninstaller that actually installed additional software and didn’t uninstall the rootkit.
I use Futurama-based names. It started with my wifi network, which I named Zoidberg, because why not. The NAS is Infosphere, the media server is Hypnotoad, etc.
So I’m an insurance agent who has also been through a house fire personally. Any of the options people have suggested here would be fantastic and far better than what most people have, which is nothing.
What I suggest to my clients is to make a video once or twice a year walking through your house, inside and out. Video makes it less likely to miss a small detail that turns out to be important later than pictures, but pictures are also helpful. Insurance aside, it’s kinda fun to look back and see how things have changed through the years. I like to do it around Christmas.
Ideally that would be in addition to a spreadsheet or something with receipts and serial numbers and individual photos of specific items, but that’s a lot of work and hardly anyone keeps up with it on a consistent and long-term basis.
Whatever you end up doing, it’s useless if the only copy is stolen, burned, or sprayed with a hose. This is one thing I keep with a major cloud provider with a local backup. At the very least, make sure you have an off-site backup that’s reasonably up to date.
I mostly take issue with the paid exclusivity deals from Epic. That kind of thing can stay on consoles. I also don’t trust Tim Sweeney or Tencent, and I feel that they’re kind of openly hostile to consumers.
I don’t care for intrusive DRM, but it’s clearly marked which games have it on Steam and which don’t. I won’t buy anything that requires a second account or has Denuvo. I don’t do online matchmaking games anymore, but if I did, I’d also avoid anything with kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t really mind Steamworks DRM, though. It’s not intrusive and Steam is useful enough that I normally have it running in the background anyway.
I also like buying on Steam because they’re contributing so much to Linux gaming and FOSS, even if Steam itself isn’t FOSS. It’s because of them that I can have a Windows-free household without any significant compromises.