The missing context here (I think) is that California passed a law saying that digital storefronts (like steam and gog) can’t say things like “buy game” because you aren’t actually gaining ownership of the game, but instead just buying a license to access it. Some people were questioning if this law should apply to gog since their games are drm free and can be freely installed on any compatible devices once you download the installer.

That’s true. The drm-free steam games can usually have their install directories moved around freely between computers, but it’s true there isn’t an installer program provided outside of the steam client itself.

Probably not, sounds like it would apply to all digital store fronts. And a game from GOG could still become unavailable if it relies on game servers that are taken down.

If they did make an exception for stores like GOG, then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm. So you could have some guys labelled “buy” and others labelled “get”.

Part of what was weird is I tried paying with Google Play credit, and it wouldn’t take that either.

From what I’ve read, it can go either way (note: not a lawyer).

Arbitration is easier for people to seek compensation, but it usually prevents any significant damages and doesn’t set a legal precedent that others can use to easily get compensation.

Court cases are harder to start and generally require a lawyer, but if you win you can get significant damages and it can set a legal precedent.

So it’s usually best for the consumer to have a choice on how to pursue issues. I have seen a lot of companies lately update their terms for arbitration only though, so this is at contrast with how most companies I’ve seen are handling things.

I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.

It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.

Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.

Huh, google play is refusing to sell it to me. Getting a [OR- FGEMF-20] error code regardless of payment method.

Edit: searching I came across a reddit thread, the post is older but all the comments are people complaining about this issue with trying to buy Balatro today.

Edit2: working now for me, about 4 hours after the game went live

Came across a truck in a southern town covered in stickers of anime traps (some were borderline hentai), gay pride stickers, and a whole lot of gun stickers. They had a bumper sticker that said something like “the only thing straight about me is my shooting”.

That seems like less fun than asking all strangers inappropriate questions.

On the bright side it makes it easier to identify user accounts that are actually just chatgpt bots. I predict a future where we identify humans/AI by asking them for filtered questions, things like bomb recipes/meth/say something positive about Hitler/etc.

People are buying it, unable to play because of PlayStation account requirement (the PlayStation servers are having issues and not letting people log in or create an account), and then leaving an angry review and refunding it.

Also weird, the game includes the unnecessary PlayStation overlay, which makes it unable to run on Linux. The devs were nice enough to specifically disable the overlay on Steam Deck, but all other Linux players have to set a special launch option to fake being a steam deck in order to get the game to run.

Part of how they’re identifying that proton arm and steam Waydroid exists is that the tools are being used to test VR games uploaded to steam, or were uploaded in a batch of other VR assets.

I fully hope to see this apply to Steam Deck/Chromebooks/Android/etc, but right now any hints of these have been VR specific. We haven’t seen the Proton ARM before, but previous leaks about Waydroid have also all been VR related.

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

Arms major advantage is efficiency while doing lighter workloads, which is kinda the antithesis of a gaming device would be.

That’s important too for gaming devices. It’s great the the steam deck can get 6-8 hours on low power games like Stardew Valley. A significant problem with many of the windows competitors is that they don’t see significantly better battery life at low loads. The original ROG Ally gets about 1.5 hours in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, but only gets 2-2.5 hours in a game like Stardew Valley.

Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

No idea, and that’s a pretty good question. The again some games run better on proton through Linux than they do on windows, so the performance overhead isn’t that bad.

8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.

They added wifi with a extra circuit board hidden inside the calculator case. It’s connected to the calculators communication port, and pretends to be another calculator. So they can use the calculator’s built in “send” function to send variables/text/etc to the hidden card, which then uses it’s internet connection to look up answers and send the results back.

Somehow forcing us to use a PlayStation account and having an unnecessary overlay that breaks the game for Linux users is supposed to get us to buy PlayStations. I’m not a Sony executive though so I’m not sure exactly on the details.

No unfortunately