#partially because I'm curious how long it would take for someone to ping me if I leave unannounced

[d-tergent]

I was talking with my brother about live service games. And despite his (and to a lesser extent, my own) interest in getting into one of these, I think the kind of game he's looking for doesn't exist He's understandably frustrated at Valve's lack of content updates for TF2. I've told him about Deep Rock Galactic and Warframe, but he doesn't seem interested in either. FF14 fell off in our friend group a while ago, but I don't personally know why. He's played Splatoon but wasn't interested in getting into comp at all. Both of us wrote off Destiny. Risk of Rain 2 got borked by the corporate shift, and Returns didn't stick. Fighting games never stuck either (Rivals of Aether lasted the longest). Terraria got left behind. Sky didn't stick after beating the game once, but that one at least makes sense. SMITE couldn't escape enshittification. My friend group even played SRB2Kart for a while, and when I showed Ring Racers to the group, excited about a brand new free game with friends, all I got was silence. Minecraft ended up being pretty turbulent in our friend group, even when changed with mods. Some of the others insisted we have a permanent server, even having the members pay a portion of the server costs, instead of using something like Essential to host games for free. All this really did was have people (me and another online friend) who played almost every day, making heaps of progress where others would only play on the server a single time, or stop playing after the first couple days. Like really, I think during one period we did the entirety of the Twilight Forest mod (and a ton of building with Create) before a third person entered the server again.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, I think I've grown distant from my main friend group and it's made me a bit sad. Whenever I'm talking about games I'm playing and enjoying I simply am ignored, and it's not like the server has no activity ever. When I get into gamedev proper, I want to do what Hopoo did with risk of rain 1, which was make that hangout game for their friend group, whatever it may end up being. For now though, he plays Overwatch, not my first choice personally, but he's given me an invitation to join, so I'll roll with that I suppose.