ampersandrew

Preservation is why it’s important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven’t pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I’m not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don’t care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn’t matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I’m sure you have too. I’d love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There’s no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I’ll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn’t mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn’t mean it’s worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.

There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I’m with you on it being inevitable. There’s no way to truly stop it.

Cars are actually a great analogy here but probably not in the way that user intended. The way we use them and the scale at which we use them are inherently unsafe, but seat belts and air bags are an illusion sold to make us believe that we solved the problem as best we can, even though we didn’t.

From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I’ve observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.

They’ve all got server side anti cheat too.

Fortunately, since it’s playable offline, it doesn’t seem to matter how many people will be playing in a month.

There are, but the incentives put in place by public companies tend to favor short-term results when they’re releasing quarterly earnings, something that some big investors have pushed back against for that very reason. Public investors may not be more corrupt either, but they may be less knowledgeable about the harm they’re doing when they make changes to the product to get more revenue, like that infamous investor call where someone suggested charging $1 to make Mario jump higher. Microtransactions are clearly a business model that customers are willing to pay for, so it makes sense that person would raise the question, but I doubt that guy plays Mario games in his spare time, because no one who does would suggest that.

Public shareholders are no more corrupt nor less moral than private shareholders, but all of their incentives and information end up being based on more short-term results. Valve is every bit as driven by money as any other company, but they’re thinking long-term, and they believe that there’s more money to be made long-term by treating customers better than their competitors do. That means they release open hardware that isn’t locked down, unlike what their competitors do. They want to mitigate business risk by decoupling PC gaming from a dependency on Microsoft, and all sorts of very capitalist entities mutually benefit from a healthy, usable Linux ecosystem that they can each make work for their own needs.

PC gaming has only had a slow, steady rise since Steam entered the scene. But perhaps one other catalyst might have been the Games For Windows initiative (not “Live”) that standardized controller support, added some extra marketing oomph, and gave more incentive to make the same game on PC and console rather than making two entirely different games (sometimes with the same title, like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter).

None of these solutions are lazy, and I promise you they have large server side components too. From what I can tell, shooters are just especially cursed when it comes to cheating, and there’s no real way to stop it.

As a co-op game, it used to not even have anti cheat, but then they decided to add leaderboards, and it hasn’t worked on Proton since.

The controller lag might just be a symptom of the same problem, but it’s strange regardless. Bummer. In my neck of the woods, Proton has been so good that I often find myself not even checking compatibility ratings before buying a game. I’m actually struggling to remember the last time that Proton failed me, since the things it struggles with these days, like certain kinds of anti-cheat or DRM, are the exact reasons I wouldn’t buy a game even if I was on Windows. Kubuntu/AMD, if you were curious.

Prior to Proton, it was a popular recommendation to use GPU passthrough to a virtual machine running Windows, with Linux as the host OS, but I never did it myself. Which games are your holdouts? Live service stuff with anti-cheat?

Rather than tinkering, I often just omit the games that don’t work well and buy AMD rather than Nvidia. I’ve got a Windows partition, but the last times I’ve booted into it were to update firmware on a fighting game controller and to play Dragon Ball FighterZ, which is basically the only game I have left in my library that I’ll play with friends and won’t work on Proton (online, anyway). Tinkering isn’t even a thing I’m thinking about one way or another, but the nagging and removal of control that Microsoft annoys me with is something I actively seek to avoid. Different stokes, I suppose.

It really feels like you just showed up to argue, man, because you took us so far from we started. Just look at the Steam Tracker page on GOL and take a look at English-only versus the one that shows Chinese players. That’s all. The “surge” is easily explained.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to convince me of or why. I just explained why it’s worth tracking the percentages with and without Chinese users, and why this article, as written, needs additional context. And that number 130M is over a year and a half old, by the way, like I said before.

Yes, it’s true of all demographics that most people just play those few big games. None are so massive in absolute numbers on homogenized PC setups like China that they visibly swing percentages on their own.

The percentages only matter as far as observing trends, which is why this article and its Windows equivalent need to be presented in the context of how much China moves the needle in either direction, since Valve only releases numbers on total monthly active users at irregular intervals. The last time we got a number on that was March 2022, as far as I know. Home PC usage in China may be on the rise, but 12% of Windows 10 users didn’t switch to Windows 11 and Linux in the past month; Simplified Chinese dropped by 19%. That’s not a trend in user behavior, the thing that interests us about the percentages. It’s just a large part of the survey not participating in it this month.

If we had absolute numbers for monthly active users to go along with the percentages, you’re right; the percentages would matter a whole lot less. But since we don’t, we can observe trends, and those trends make a lot more sense when you get rid of outliers.

I’m not saying that Chinese players only play Dota 2 and PUBG. I’m saying that measurably, the biggest swings in the survey come from Chinese players who only play a couple of the biggest games and nothing else, and they play on homogenized hardware at gaming centers running the same graphics card and operating system. In these same ebbs and flows, people write articles saying “Linux usage surges” and “Windows 11 users leave for Windows 10 en masse”, but neither is true. All that happened is that those Chinese players came back for one specific game this month compared to last month, and you can see that by the increase in Simplified Chinese users.

There are plenty of people, regardless of location, that use Simplified Chinese and wouldn’t be outliers, but you’re better off collecting that number during a down month, and you can get a better representation of actual Linux usage over time by selecting one language that isn’t Simplified Chinese, like English.