I checked CapFriendly, all four of the players in the NHL have contracts that expire at the end of the season.

Hart: https://www.capfriendly.com/players/carter-hart

Dube: https://www.capfriendly.com/players/dillon-dube

Foote: https://www.capfriendly.com/players/cal-foote

McLeod: https://www.capfriendly.com/players/michael-mcleod

Significant — you’d need to either get the old Linux build working (not an easy task today) or you can install it on Windows, copy the files over, and run it via Proton (but you’d need to manually add the registry key with your CD key to the Proton prefix’s registry).

August-November of that year was headlined by a slew of all-time greats: Half-Life 2, San Andreas, MGS3, Halo 2, The Sims 2…

If you were into video games in any way in that time period, you had something great to play, regardless of platform.

Rainbow Six Siege is up there — there’s six dimensions of assholery in the game by my count.

• Tom Clancy games tend to attract right-wing assholes because they’re Tom Clancy
• competitive FPS
• one-shot one-kill gameplay
• friendly fire on by default
• character picks
• you need to play to a specific meta

Universal Paperclips! It’s an idle game that relies on you making smart planning decisions to optimize things, so there’s a degree of strategy that most of them lack.

More that the article being a few years old means it’s missed out on a number of notable releases in the interim.

Note the date of the article: October 2021.

That’s my thought as well – the licensed sports game market is probably more reliable (and generates more revenue vs. development cost) than originals, and they can “streamline” their business by splitting the originals business off for a sale. Not including sports probably makes the originals side more attractive to platform holders, as most sports games probably include provisions that require multiplatform releases (see also: the MLB signing a publishing deal for Sony’s “The Show” on non-Sony platforms).

I have AA (via their bundle, it’s not really worth it on its own), and within a few weeks I wasn’t able to find online matches. It also didn’t feel great to play (both on touchscreen and controller), and they never released anything beyond 3-on-3 hockey. I would not recommend.

We know why Dolphin wasn’t put on Steam.

1. Dolphin ships with a decryption key for Wii games
2. Valve’s legal team got worried about hosting that (as hosting circumvention tools in the US is a direct violation of the DMCA, even if the tools are created by third parties), and reached out to Nintendo
3. Nintendo did their usual thing and said no (because they wrongly believe all emulation of their hardware is illegal, except if they do it), but in this case correctly identified the circumventing nature of Dolphin
4. Valve pulled down the Dolphin page on their own, without a legal demand from Nintendo

Valve continues to host RetroArch and the various cores, so it’s not like they’re opposed to emulation in general. The ability to copyright “magic numbers” in the US (Valve is an American company) isn’t up for debate, and it would also put them in violation of the DMCA, so it’s not hard to see why Valve would be worried about this specific emulator.

As for Dolphin, they have options:

• they can choose to keep shipping as-is, without being on Steam, as they host from a non-US site with looser copyright laws
• they can choose to not support encrypted payloads, and require that users supply independently-sourced decrypted games
• they can require users to enter their own decryption key they dump directly from their consoles (which, realistically, means that users would get one off the web separate from Dolphin) and use a dumped system BIOS, which would fully emulate the “real” decryption process

The best description of it I’ve heard is “direct-to-video Mass Effect”. Which is to say: it’s got the elements you’re looking for in a Mass Effect title, but it fails to execute on those elements very well.

Spelunky HD

A roguelike platformer. While it lacks any meta-progression (like the similar Rogue Legacy games), the core platforming keeps me coming back again and again. The systems-based nature of the game keeps things fresh through many play-throughs.

Umurangi Generation

A photography game that’s more cyberpunk than the game titled Cyberpunk. It gradually introduces you into its neon-soaked, Neon Genesis Evangelion-inspired world where humanity fights the good fight against kaiju.

Florence

A story of love, loss, and moving on.

They had their moment in the early 00s, but they went away largely because people stopped buying them. Even though Hitz and Blitz showed some of the more-cringeworthy aspects of their sports, the sales were good enough for the licensors to not really care.

If Tape-to-Tape ends up selling well, you’ll see the NHL pushing for their own officially-licensed version (because nobody in that league has any original ideas). The same goes for other arcadey sports games.

MLB tried to bring back arcadey games with RBI Baseball (through their Advanced Media arm) – without it, the only annual baseball game would be Sony’s “The Show”. They wound that down when MLBAM signed a deal to publish The Show on non-Sony platforms. I’d think that, if the sales justified it, they’d be happy to continue selling both sim and arcade games.

The engine also started as an engine for MMOs, which allowed them rich scripting for every NPC, as well as an inventory for every NPC.

The world fidelity that Bethesda builds, on a technical and simulation level, is unmatched — yeah, something like The Witcher 3 might look better, but it also doesn’t let you interact with basically every item in the world or pickpocket every NPC’s weapon as a way to neutralize them in combat.