Nuclear Monster

  • When Sony’s upgraded Playstation 4 Pro shipped it only offered performance improvements for games that were updated to support it. That’s a manual process that costs money (in wages) on the part of the developer to support. Not every game is going to get an update. It’s an impossible task for games that have had their development teams disbanded, or small studios that don’t have time to go back and retest and resubmit their updates to Sony.

    An upcoming firmware update (4.50) is to resolve this issue, partially. Boost mode will offer enhanced performance for all older games. With the caveat that there is no guarantee they will support it.

    Richard Leadbetter has thoroughly tested the new mode for Eurogamer:

    In short, boost mode will work best in stabilising performance closer to target frame-rates and should prove interesting on unlocked titles, but you can’t expect game-changing miracles. Games like Destiny that stick doggedly to their 30fps cap will see no improvement, and titles certainly won’t break their performance limits and suddenly run at 60fps. However, there are plenty of games out there that glitch badly or run nowhere near their theoretical limits. In this scenario, boost mode could be revelatory.

    Enhanced performance isn’t everything, and I’d be surprised if Sony didn’t eventually blacklist games that don’t work well with the boost, but this is huge news for anyone that bought a Pro and a disappointment for anyone that bought the regular Playstation 4 before this functionality was announced.

  • The FTL developers, Subset Games, are working on a single player turn-based-strategy game that looks a bit like Advance Wars. Into The Breach has no release date yet, but it will be out (not simultaneously) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Here’s their description:

    The remnants of human civilization are threatened by gigantic creatures breeding beneath the earth. You must control powerful mechs from the future to hold off this alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this turn-based strategy game.

    I’m pretty disappointed that Nintendo hasn’t announced a new Advance Wars, but I’m willing to bet that Subset has a good spin on it.

  • Liam Dawe:

    Steam has hit another milestone for Linux games. We now have over 3,000 Linux games to fill our time with. The exact count for me right now is 3,008!

    An impressive number of games with Linux support. I wonder how many are native ports versus Windows pretendulation.

    My search comes up with 3164 for Linux and 13433 total games on Steam.

  • Valve is replacing Steam Greenlight. Alden Kroll:

    The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

    While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.

    Steam Direct sounds like Valve is moving a little bit closer to the free-for-all of itch, which is good but $5000 is a bit much. They should have had the dollar amount straight before going live with this.

    Valve are also still making money off of software that encourages rape. That shit needs to go.

    How will this work for free games? They wouldn’t recoup a fee unless it can be done after a certain number of downloads.

  • Bryan Menegus:

    Some of these servers, especially the Discord chat spun out of 4chan’s far-right stomping ground /pol/, use their room to coordinate “raids” on other servers with ease and impunity. Trolls acquire invite links to other servers and post them in a room called “Raids” (formerly “Raids Defense”), encouraging the chat’s 1000+ members to descend en masse on vulnerable or unsuspecting communities, bringing with them a tidal wave of abuse. Other servers have rooms for doxxing—the posting of personally identifying information like addresses and phone numbers of victims. Such behavior is a clear violation of Discord’s Terms of Service, though it seems those rules cannot be presently enforced.

    I recently started a Discord server (an odd term for a set of chat rooms and and not an actual physical or virtual piece of hardware) for the ioquake3 and iodoom3 communities, to see if that would help those communities stay current with gaming culture. Those communities have been fortunate enough to not be harassed via Discord, yet, but they have been targeted in the past by people from Reddit and 4Chan.

    Reddit and 4Chan have been responsible for allowing hate groups to form for years, and only removing hate groups when it becomes fiscally irresponsible to continue hosting them. It sounds like Discord has the same problem. The leaders of these businesses don’t value responsible community management, and aren’t punished for it unless users and communities leave.