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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

The question here is: so what?

Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.

Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.

And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.

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>The question here is: so what?

Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.

Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.

>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?

older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.

Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.

> very few open source games that are actually fun to play

you found one?? please share

OpenTTD?

OpenRCT2, OpenMW, DaggerfallUnity

Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is fun and it uses very little resources. The game and engine are open source.

Other than that I can’t really think of anything other than good clones like OpenTTD or crappy clones like minetest.

Maybe Dwarf Fortress in the future if tarn or his brother open source it.

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