Xbox one S with BT connection for me as well.

Although these Gioteck looks really nice, personally I don't like controllers with integrated lithium batteries. I prefer the good old AA powered ones. When they are out of juice, you just swap in your spare batteries and put the empty ones in the charger. Much better than waiting hours or using the cable.

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Quoting: DMGWhat is main goal in this game? Survive, launch yourself back to space or what?

Good question. For the sake of the game itself it's sending a single rocket to space. That's when you get the victory screen. But you can continue.

And veteran players would tell you that the real game starts only after you start the first rocket. That's when you have all the tools necessary to scale larger and larger. And I kind of agree.

As all sandbox games also in Factorio you define your own objectives. That depends on tastes. I'm an automation guy. So I like to use circuit tech to automatize everything, from production of any kind of item to forward outposts resupply and artillery trains patrolling. Others are optimization guys. They seek perfect production proportions so that every production line consumes exactly what the previous one produces. Others again are RPM nerds (or, rocket per minute). They basically grow their bases as large as possible until the framerate of the game becomes impossible (don't misunderstand, the game is extremely optimized but ofc if your factory continues to grow eventually you hit your CPU limit). You have to try to understand how this seemingly innocent game can become an addictive virus.

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Quoting: StoneDancerWhy do some people think that returning to the old way will mean higher prices. We always used to trade in, sell or give away our disc (or even ROM cartridges if you remember them?) media. When most games went to downloadable the costs for the distribution plummeted but instead of seeing that cost saving the consumer is charged even higher prices for games. I for one have been asking for this ability for a long time. I want to give my game to a friend when I'm done. I bought the rights to use it, I should be able to sell those rights just like the lease on my apartment.

Pricing of digital videogames follows different rules than pricing a piece of physical videogames. All the fixed costs are virtually just for producing the first copy. All the others are free. No box to print, no cd to burn, no transportation or stocking costs. For this reason publishers have all the interests to sell the highest amount of copies as possible (well, before Epic paid them to sell less but that's an edge case that can't last forever) at the highest price. Even if this price is crazy low. So you have day 1 price. First discount after a few months. Then another price reduction after a year. And so on. Publishers control prices with care. The idea is that when nobody else buys the game at a given price you can only maximize profits by reducing the price in order to match the expectation of a fair price of more people. And so on. Imho it's a good enough model for us. Maybe you won't get a game on day 1, but even if you're super poor eventually if you're patient enough you'll get the game you want at an affordable price. It's not perfect, but I'd say that it's more positive than negative. At least we can agree that it helped a lot to the success of PC gaming.

So being able to resell a copy changes the equation. Just hypothetically suppose you buy the game at 60$. Now you know that you can sell it for around 50$ after a month when you finish it. This has several implications. After a month the game for you effectively costed you 10$, plus the negligible interests on the 50$ you had invested in the transaction for a month to be precise. But let's ignore that since for a single copy it really is negligible. It also means that after a month because of you and other day 1 buyers there is a copy on sell for 50$. The publisher won't be able to sell new first hand copies for 60$ anymore. These are digital goods second hand markets sells copies that are exactly the same as first hand. The 10$ would become unreasonable. So having lost the control of the prices publisher will now have to at least match the 50$ price tag to sell additional first hand copies and make more profit. If you were the publisher how would you try to improve the situation? Well, for instance I could sell the game on day 1 at 120$. Ouch that's a lot of money. But hei! Whoever buys a copy knows that he can sell it later. Let's say 100$ a month later. The effective cost after you sell it would be around 20$, still much less than the 60$ people consider fair now. So why not? Now the publisher not only gets 120$ instead of 60$ on day one, but after a month it will be able to sell additional copies for 100$ instead of 50$. The benefits are clear: the sell copies slower, controlling how many licenses they print to not inflate the market. But as opposed to now where scarcity is just detrimental the scarcity actually help them maintain the value higher for longer, resulting in more profits in the long run.

Anyway these are just speculations. Who knows what will really happen. Maybe they will sell you copies that you can sell back for guaranteed 90% of the value a month layer if you want. That would control price fluctuations and empower grant them interest free month long loans. Maybe reasonably priced legit copy scarcity will just drive people en mass to piracy and everything will blow up. Maybe they will abandon the single license model entirely and do only streaming or subscription like other people suggested. And maybe we'll never find out because the rule implications are different than this like somebody pointed out already. :)

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Quoting: EhvisI think people are making far more fuss about this than what is really going on. It appears to me that the ruling is about the passages in the licence agreement that forbid users from reselling their games. I suspect that all that is needed for Valve (and other stores) is to remove those passages and inform the users that this is in fact legal. However, nowhere does it really say that Valve needs to implement a system for people to resell individual games to other users. Which means that all that the net effect maybe that you will be allowed to resell your entire account. How many users will that benefit?

This reminds me of the good old wow times, when you had to go to the chinese to illegally buy a lv 60 Tauren druid. Now we could just all go to the cow market parisienne. :D

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Quoting: minidou

Quoting: MalNedless to say that releasing an untested and badly optimized game would quickly become a suicidal move and nobody would do it.

How horrible.

:) My domain is in the digital markets. I know that free digital markets are more efficient. For a fact. So I'm not saying that the idea is necessarily nuts. It's just that for us customers it would require active interest to get the most out of it. Much more than now. And the average Joe doesn't have the resources to do it. So one would need to rely on broker services to effectively find good key keys at reasonable convenience. A G2A on steroids. Soon to appear brokers would find business opportunities and make the market more efficient in the process (my Borderlands 3 scenario is about this, efficiency mechanics would devaluate licenses of low quality games). So far so good. But markets can (and will be) manipulated if someone has enough resources to do it (spoiler: there is always somebody with enough resources). So you will also need regulation and authorities preventing shady stuff.

Like *exclusives* undermining market efficiency. They already do but it would be significantly worse in a free market. Also the markets need to compete with each other. But the real challenge is how to regulate first sale publishers. Digital copies are not like physical ones. Selling an additional digital copy costs you nothing and second hand licenses do not deteriorate over time also. They don't occupy space and don't have logistics costs. Publishers can produce or not produce them at will. Publishers would also be able to buy back their own copies to keep prices higher. Should this be illegal? After all licenses would become no different than any other financial asset. But publishers will do inside trading by definition, they know about patches, DLCs, free updates and future plans. They would speculate for sure if they can. And if they are prevented to do it by themselves they could delegate others. Or sell reserved information to traders for profit. Maybe not as companies but as individuals. Who controls that? At what cost? Really, you can't possibly hope to regulate digital goods with the same principles and common wit you use for physical goods. They just don't apply.

This matter if left alone could become so complex and so exploitable so fast that it could take very long time until a reasonable and functional balance is found. And in the meanwhile: chaos. Not that balance cannot be found. It's just not so obvious as one might think at first glance. And usually in this kind of competition the guy with the less resources is the guy who loses.

But maybe it's just me being biased and overthinking everything. The actual rule could have much less implications than this like just allowing one and only one resell per license. Or it could just convince french legislators to make specific laws for digital goods. And I do believe things can improve in this regard. Especially on exclusives and geoblocking, laws are to hard on piracy and to permissive to content distributors (for instance: why should be illegal to download something that is not sold or not easily found in my country and that I cannot buy from foreign digital services?). Though usually in the EU is more about transferring profits from US firms to EU ones rather than making the actual citizen interest. However I keep my idea that just empowering people to buy and sell licenses at will is not a good idea without serious rules, limits and watchers in place. And that stuff has a cost. Is it really worth it?

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Those French... The market will simply adapt. Publishers will create scarcity to drive up prices. And day 1 buyers will rush to finish the game in order to sell it before the prices lowers to much.

All in all I see more trouble than benefit for us gamers, with very expensive day 1 costs and a lot of license micromanagement. Not only for games but any digital good. Bad bad stuff.

Except for game quality. I'm just trying to imagine Borderlands 3 (just because it's the topic of the week) release in a world with second hand markets. No matter how much you try to manipulate the press and the metacritic score. People who can't play the game now will just sell it with the idea to rebuy it later when it's fixed at a lower price. And ofc in the immediate effect would be the game price plummeting and a financial disaster.

Nedless to say that releasing an untested and badly optimized game would quickly become a suicidal move and nobody would do it.

Anyway I think Valve (supported by all the other digital store owners) should be able to appeal to EU court. A fundamental difference like this in national regulatuon is highly disfunctional to the single market. The way I see it is that either that's the EU stance or is no member state stance. Mixed scenarios cannot reasonably exist.

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Quoting: eldakingI also had a shower thought recently that the big issue with recent games isn't spurious launchers, but spurious main menus. We already have launchers that allow us to select mods, load saves directly, change settings (even better, before loading the main software where those will apply so no restarting), and so on. Having an in-game main menu looks like a waste. (I was thinking particularly about what @Mal mentioned, that EU4 already needs to reopen the game to load saves)

That reminds me of the old worms 2 launcher. Which was in fact the game menu. It works. If the menu is in the launcher there are no useless buttons or clicks in the way.

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Btw my eu4 now doesn't start even by starting directly the game executable. It crashes soon after the loading screen. My plan has always been to rename the game executable like the launcher executable and live happily thereafter. But at Pdx they are always one step ahead... they fixed a lot of game backlog so the game runs better. But you can't benefit from it if you can't even start the game. :D

But there are also good news! The launcher actually works! Except when I start it from Steam ofc. Oddly enough there are no links to buy their other games. I was expecting "a buy everything we sell" a la Battle.net. Instead it's just an uglier and non functional version of the previous one. I'm confused by this move.

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: MalSo it is possible to skip the launcher? Very good news! I hate launchers. I can't understand why executives waste hundreds of manhours into "features" that detract value from their products.

Regarding the update, it's a small one. The big one will arrive later this year. Apparently at Paradox they started to listen and decided to make only a single DLC this year in order to focus on fixing the game. Much to my satisfaction.

In this case, the launcher will eventually allow for better mod management and mods across various stores (instead of being tied to the Steam workshop), among other things.

Being more cynical, it is easy to understand: while it creates some inconvenience for users, it is pretty valuable as a marketing tool.

You're not being cynical. All the features "packed" in the launcher (mods, dlc and such) could have been easily integrated in the main game GUI. Even more so for EU4 that already has to restart every time you change any kind of setting or option (and I really mean any kind, like switching to a different save game... and good for us that the linux version starts in mere seconds. Windows guys have to wait minutes every time!).

The only reason why some black suit decided that you have to click the game icon to launch a launcher which then requires you to click an icon of the game to actually launch the game instead of allowing you to do the obvious thing i.e. click the game icon to launch the actual game, is precisely to run ads of their others game in your face every time.

If they just showed some banner in the game loading screen or main menu instead of getting out of their way just to multiply the clicks needed for one single action I wouldn't care. But no! If you don't specialize in annoying the entitled gamer you won't make it to a publisher board room.

But yeah, launchers became the norm for publishers long ago. Paradox is just catching up. I'm just ranting for nothing. :) Maybe one day they will learn from mobiles experts not just the shit also the useful things like the art of designing effective GUIs. Or maybe not. It's just a click right?

At least the actual game continues getting better and better.

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So it is possible to skip the launcher? Very good news! I hate launchers. I can't understand why executives waste hundreds of manhours into "features" that detract value from their products.

Regarding the update, it's a small one. The big one will arrive later this year. Apparently at Paradox they started to listen and decided to make only a single DLC this year in order to focus on fixing the game. Much to my satisfaction.

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