is that some sort of tongue controller?

This might be a micro version of the actual future internet, where we walk away from the global model and split it into ideological countries who believe the best way forward is to stop talking to the other group.

Reminds me of the world depicted in The Diamond Age. The setting is perhaps our world a few decades in the future, where the role of countries has faded and instead life is organised via fragmented, extremely diverse patchwork of phyles based on ethnic or ideological affiliation, but entirely irrespective of where they geographically are (a phyle can operate in many different locations). These phyles interact via a deeply capitalistic Common Economic Protocol, where the only “human right” that matters is harm to an individual’s ability for economic productivity.

Band together with other workers and organise yourselves to demand change from politicians. As a society we definitely need to transition away from capitalism - manual work for a livelihood is unviable in a highly automated, competition-based economy. As individuals we are powerless against corporations, but as large groups we can fight for our interests.

not all of them - Guild Wars 2 operates on a buy-to-play basis for its yearly expansions - you buy it once and have access to that content as long as the game is alive

it does have a premium currency store, but it’s all stuff you can do without - mostly cosmetics and a few QoL tools, but the game also lets you convert ingame currency to the premium one (over 11 years of casual play I apparently bought almost 2k GBP worth of stuff without ever spending an actual penny on the store)

Disco Elysium (2019) - I only played it last year, and it immediately became one of my favourite games <3

odd to think that it originally didn’t have full voice acting - the amazing performances feel so essential to the game’s atmosphere

thanks :)

I wasn’t that much of a fan of Stanley Parable anyway, that sort of humour is not really my jam 🤷

You do realize they’re not like a part of the actual game right?

For that game they are definitely part of its poking fun of videogames and gamers, it has other achis like not playing for 5 years, or playing for the entire duration of a Tuesday.

Nobody is making you do this.

Agreed, nobody is forcing me to play his other games either :) I just don’t like trolls, whether game developers or not 🤷 I’m one of those people who doesn’t separate the art from its artist.

and I never even started playing because I was too scared xD base building yay, jumpscares nay

I would have loved Sims Medieval if it didn’t have that roguelite meta progression where it expected me to restart my game from zero all the time and repeat the same quests over and over to progress the “god” unlocks. In every game I like long campaigns that I can sink my teeth into and build up meaningful progress, so this one aspect just sucked the joy out of any replays after the first run.

But I remember I loved the graphics (and music!) bc they used my fav Sims 3 engine, just made the textures prettier.

Yeah I love that GW2 doesn’t do vertical progression. I’m a casual player and kitted out my characters many years ago, and since then - unless I want to try out a new build - I don’t have to touch them again.

I have a love-hate relationship with Genshin, and the only reason I’m still playing is that I love the exploration and I consciously ignore everything else in the game 😅 (aside from fun event minigames)

I used to be a lot more susceptible to fomo (“oh no this event is only available for 3 weeks, I should grind through it even if I don’t enjoy the story or the minigames”), but Genshin trained my fortitude against its psychological manipulation, and now I don’t even touch the story or any content I don’t enjoy. Thanks Hoyo for making me care a lot less about your game lol…

yeah, I checked my list of games on Steam, and of the ones with 20+ hours playtime, the only I didn’t actively enjoy were some idle games, so they don’t really count. Everything else I liked. I stick with meh books more than with games :)

I haven’t got banned, and I still visit reddit for communities that don’t have an alive lemmy equivalent, but in the past year I’ve used lemmy a lot more, it’s better for conversations.

the developer kept changing the unlock criteria to deliberately troll the players - while it’s appropriate for the meta commentary of the game, it made sure I’ll never play one of his games again D:

Not quite official figures, but SteamHunter can show rarest achis in terms of absolute user numbers, and yea most of mine are from very obscure games, or games where the unlock was bugged for most players.

On the 2nd link it shows that in 2022, even before genAI tools broke into game development, Steam released 12,248 games, so on average 34/day. So genAI at most only doubled the output rate.

Yes, there were many low-effort asset flips out there even before AI, but I think the main factor is that game development is a global industry, and from the pool of billions of gamers, tons and tons of talented and hard-working game developers emerge who all compete against each other for attention. And like in other creative industries, the handful of most successful companies on top command most of the audience’s interest, while the vast majority of aspirants can’t make a livelihood from this work.

I found this article from early 2022 that says that at the time there were 44,000 game developers on Steam, 3/4 of whom only released a single game. (It doesn’t say the reason why - I suppose could be just starting their career, or their first release was so unsuccessful they didn’t continue trying.) 57% of developers at the time made less than 1,000 USD lifetime revenue.

Well and cheaters of course.

yea it undermines Steam achievement collecting a bit that there has been an easily available achi unlocker out there for almost 2 decades

new one from an update in March, so will probably drift down the list:

long-term rarest:

all my remaining rarest ones are from Civ 5, I guess most players don’t have the DLC

Can you expand on why you think the market is saturated?

Not the one you responded to, but:

More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 — Chris Zukowski’s tally puts it at 20,282, which works out to about 55 games per day. And 2026 is running faster: SteamDB counted 11,979 releases in the first half of the year alone, a pace of roughly 66 per day that projects to something near 24,000 for the full year if it holds. (source)

and roughly 3/4 of them has less than 50 reviews, and half has less than 10, which means basically no audience (source)

is that image AI generated? the way the sand interacts with the hand just looks wrong

edit: surprisingly not AI, at least the hand and sand are from 2016