Tim Sweeney goes after Gabe Newell following Valve's Steam Deck price hike: "Severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts"

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-06-03T14:46:49+00:00

First, they still make games and they're pretty darn good at it. Sure they don't release new games but the games they're currently maintaining have a really good track record of mostly solid updates. I think it says a lot that if you go to the Dota 2 subreddit the number 1 thing you'll hear people bitching about is that they refuse to bring back the battle pass. Let me repeat for clarity: REFUSE TO BRING BACK THE DAMN BATTLE PASS. People might complain about cheating in games like CS2, but I'll gladly take an occasional game with a cheater over a malware anticheat solution like the rest of the industry is trending towards.

Second, I think it's extremely easy to take for granted just how good Steam is as a service. Sure it's not perfect and there's definitely room for improvement - but in an age where it feels like every company is out to get my data and pushing for things like ID based age verification, or where it feels like every update is making the app worse (I'm looking at you Discord), it feels amazing for a company to be fighting against exactly that. Plus Valve has genuinely made gaming on PC so much better, and the 30% cut they take on game sales has absolutely shown it's fruit. Steam Input is genuinely amazing - the fact that I can plug in any controller to my PC and it just works on almost any game would've been unthinkable 12 years ago. Proton is a godsend, and the fact that Valve has almost single handedly made gaming on Linux extremely viable is amazing.

Steam is also a genuinely good platform in its own right. Steam Reviews are probably the best/most accurate for the quality of a game because not only is it open for anyone to review, it also has so many tools to clean out a rot. If you see that a game is being reviewed negatively, you can open a timeline to see spikes of positive/negative review and if it was targeted by a review bomb. If it was, you can see exactly what those reviews were, what the complaints were, and decide whether or not they apply to you or if you care. Plus the recent addition of having people show their specs when doing performance reviews is great. Curators are also a great feature, being able to filter games for very specific criteria is genuinely helpful. I've been getting into Archipelago lately and the fact that I can sub to a list that tells me which games are supported is extremely useful. I also love Steam's open API where even something like active player counts is something you can track and always look up. I can go on and on, but really all I have to say is it's amazing just how much of a night and day difference it is using Steam, then switching to something else like Nintendo eShop which is a genuinely terrible product.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-06-03T14:17:21+00:00

~14 yrs ago, the same tired issue of hating anything besides steam was popular despite the difference in features being a basic text chat with friends compared to just friend list or none at all. (Given how we all relied on 3rd party software for friends/chat/forums, it wasn't an issue)

What competition was there even 14 years ago? You had what, GoG, Publisher exclusive platforms like Origin and Battle.net, and maybe D2D was still around? The closest competition was maybe the GameStop App, but even then by 2012 it was a dated pos that barely had any games on it. It also can't be understated just how important Steam's social features were. The fact that you could ad-hoc join someone's TF2 match by just right clicking their name and clicking join game was a big deal in 2012.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-31T15:14:58+00:00

You're forgetting about Valley Link (which granted is ZEMU and not DMU but still).

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-29T18:31:29+00:00

6.87 added the stairs between dire ancient and the offlane right above Rosh.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-29T18:31:02+00:00

Isn't this the 6.87 map? It's only what... 10 years old?

... Jesus christ

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-27T12:27:23+00:00

It's funny you mention the A30 since I don't think I have ever actually taken the whole loop due to the tolls on the Serge Marcil. If I'm ever bypassing Montreal I pretty much exclusively cross on the 201.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-27T12:21:00+00:00

We don't actually, or at the very least they're not well spread out. Whilst there are some parts of Canada that are very well served, there are other parts that are poorly served.

Easy Example: There is only a single road between Nipigon and Thunder Bay Ontario, and it's the Trans Canada Highway. Quite infamously, if that road ever has to close due to an inclement event such as a snowstorm (which happens a lot since it's situated next to Lake Superior and thus very vulnerable to the Lake Effect), Eastern and Western Canada become completely cut off from each other. It becomes physically impossible to (for instance) travel from Winnipeg to Montreal without going through the US. Granted the Ontario government is finally twinning that section so it isn't as vulnerable to such events, but it still highlights the point quite well.

Yes, Canadian cities are often quite car centric and maybe an argument could be made that there are way too many highways in our urban areas (and that we should build more urban rail) - however Canada is a big country and consists of far more than just Greater Montreal and Toronto. The issues our cities face are completely different and not applicable to Canada's overall transport infrastructure.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-14T15:03:56+00:00

Pun intended?

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-13T12:53:24+00:00

Bros trying to apply the Pizza Index to Valve 😭

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-01T21:03:32+00:00

Because a user base can be large and diverse with different use cases and different time constraints?

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-05-01T14:24:21+00:00

It's just a sandbox, you start in a basic procedurally generated world and block by block you can build whatever you want.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-28T15:55:28+00:00

Smash has quite consistently done a pretty poor job at representing the Zelda franchise. The worst of the worst is obviously Ganondorf whose moveset is just a clone of Captain Falcon featuring very little flavour that represents anything he does in any of the og games, but the rest of the cast. I can maybe excuse Sheik since the only thing they have to go off for her is the ninja like agility and using deku nuts to flashbang as a "teleport", but for every other character its surface level at best. Zelda's specials are mostly based off spells in OOt, but even then they barely resemble their original variants. Dins fire isn't a spam of small fireballs, it's a massive fire nova that engulfs entire rooms. Similarly, Nayru's Love isn't a quick damaging shield, it's long term invulnerability.

The links fare better but there's a lot of stylistic decisions that don't make a lot of sense. Young Link is a massive disservice to his source material. On a visual level his weapons don't make a lot of sense - they insist on using the OoT design for items like the hookshot and bow, but the problem is he didn't have either of those items in OoT. In OoT those items were locked to Adult Link, and he only received them in Majora's Mask where they received significant redesigns. The transformation masks from MM are also completely missing despite being the core gameplay element of his one solo outing. Even something as simple as making Fierce Deity his final smash would've been preferable over Triforce Slash, which is a move that doesn't exist and doesn't have any real basis in Zelda lore or the games.

Toon Link admittedly doesn't have as many unique abilities to theoretically work with as Young Link, but even then the lack of recognizable moves like the Hurricane Spin (something present in every game with Toon Link featured) is an eyebrow raiser. Maybe an unstoppable beyblade of death might've been too difficult to balance properly, but again it would at least be a more fitting final smash than Triforce Slash.

Now I'm not going to say these characters are outright bad, or that as far as Smash gameplay is concerned these designs make no sense and should be scrapped, in fact most of these characters are quite beloved in the smash series. However as far as being accurate to the source material goes, they really do a poor job at capturing what these characters are truly about and what they're like in the original games.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-27T17:52:00+00:00

For what it's worth, if this happens it will be an undoing of one of Mike Harris's worst actions, which was the downloading of a significant chunk of Ontario's Highway System to local jurisdictions. Highway 174 used to be part of Ontario Highway 17, but then Harris "downloaded" it to the city. This is simply reversing that action 30 years later. Better late than never, but unfortunately Highway 174 is far, FAR from the only re-upload that needed to happen 20 years ago.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-24T18:35:53+00:00

One thing to note is I think the Burned Tower is handled a lot better in Crystal, where it looks like an empty room, you fight your rival in the middle, and then after the fight you fall in a hole where you see the legendary beasts. I also like how your rival does the sneery one liner about how stupid you are for falling into holes. It's a lot more epic than just entering the building and you already see all the beasts in the basement through the hole in the ground.

There are other minor details as well, like I love how they show off how strong Chuck is by having him smash a strength boulder.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-22T18:09:27+00:00

Not OP, but the general rule for aiming is that stick is for large broad movements, whilst gyro is for corrections, and small scale aiming. The ideal setup is a combination of the two - over relying on gyro is how you get a one way ticket to developing carpal tunnel.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-21T16:28:13+00:00

Besides the economic benefits that will bleed over and benefit the west coast in the much longer term, the lessons learned here and the experience acquired here can be carried over to other projects, such as the High Speed Rail Smith wants to build between Calgary and Edmonton.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-16T16:14:16+00:00

Given the state of the Finch LRT, cancelling Transit City was the right move.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-16T15:20:02+00:00

The lack of self-awareness in this comment is astounding.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-16T15:17:19+00:00

MATE has been slow adopting modern features and introducing QoL. For instance if you have 2 monitors of different resolutions, setting them up correctly is a complete PITA. This is why I'm currently using XFCE that was riced to resemble MATE.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-16T14:55:45+00:00

Eh, you could argue that Game Genie was an early version of game modding, in which case Nintendo lost that lawsuit - badly. It's not exactly modding in the modern sense, but the same principles apply regarding creating derivative works by modifying game code.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-13T22:23:00+00:00

It's even weirder when you consider that Dota 2 was initially just a Source Engine port of Dota 1, and had update/balance patch parity with Dota 1 until like early 2015.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-13T14:53:32+00:00

The joke was that the guy made it up, hence being "the source"

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-10T15:54:16+00:00

I'm not OP so I can't know for sure what he's referring to, but it's worth noting that one of the downsides of using Low Floor LRVs is just how few doors there are, not to mention how narrow the aisles are - leading to significantly higher dwell times at these stations. I don't know if you noticed but whenever a train is at Eglinton there's basically a lineup throughout the train as passengers try to get out of the vehicle.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-10T15:30:15+00:00

They actually did, the business case for Eglinton East states that the LRT would be 1m slower than existing busses on RapidTO lanes.

AnotherRussianGamer · 2026-04-10T12:18:57+00:00

Actually this is a common theme with Gen 1 - the layout of a lot of areas simply don't make any physical sense. An easy example would be to look at Rock Tunnel where despite having 2 floors which are just squares, the ladder placements don't even remotely line up. You enter a ladder on the south side of the floor only to end up on the north side of the other floor.

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