Steam has published the list of 100 most played games (by peak concurrent player count) of 2024. Also shown are the top sellers, new releases, steam deck, played with controller, and VR categories. Linked at the bottom are the previous years winners as well.
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The best description I have heard of Portland when I got here in the late 90’s was that it was a city full of shipwrecks and refugees – where people wash up on it’s shores with few prospects and sketchy pasts. Portland is nothing if not a strange place. You’ll find odd things posted on poles all over town. Every now and again, someone will dig into one of these to find out what they’re about. The Willamette Valley Dream Survey is one of those. Long story short: the most recent branch of this that showed up in Utah revolves around a doomsday prediction on Sept 5th, 2020.
Nexpo did a little over-dramatic dig into the phenomenon by going so far to buy a burner phone and calling them. He also digs into a local 2600-like hacker group called Futel (he pronounces it wrong, it’s pronounce Few-tell – like ‘futile’ as a play on words about telephone monopolies and other alt-conspiracy type plays on words). that converts old payphones into free (likely VOIP) phones.
Valve’s Year In Review for Steam revealed that only 15% of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. 47% of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (or “recent favorites”), and 37% played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).
That 15% is a significant increase over the 9% of playtime spent in 2023 on new games released that year (though it’s down on the 17% of time folks spent in new games in 2022). So 2024 has actually seen a bit of a bounce back from last year.
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Want to maximize your time off in 2025? Take these 12 additional days as vacation days and get the maximum number of long weekends!
Contiki also has a calendar calculator to help you out (If you squint enough. Time to hire a better graphic designer). Enter a dummy email address since it displays it, not emails it to you.
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ADP, the payroll company, has shared the lowest and highest median salaries by state. They used the wages and salaries of almost 10 million employees over 12 months to collect their data.
The results? Oregon is 48th – essentially tied with Arkansas and below Nevada as having the worst pay in the country.
| Rank | State | Average annual salary |
| 48 | Oregon | $50,100 |
| 49 | Arkansas | $50,000 |
| 50 | Mississippi | $46,000 |
| 51 | New Mexico | $40,200 |
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The housing shortage in Portland seems to be improving – until you look at why. It’s not because Portland (with some of the most housing unfriendly policies in the country) is building more houses (they are a little bit) but because people are leaving.
What is happening in San Francisco—and in Portland, to a lesser extent—is that the housing shortage is temporarily improving, not because of the construction of new housing but because people are moving away to cheaper places.
In a case study on San Francisco, the Up for Growth report noted an issue that a report from the Common Sense Institute Oregon highlighted earlier this week.
“Household formation in these areas significantly decreased. Driven in no small part by the high cost of housing, households that could have formed in these communities formed somewhere else instead
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Oasis is a free to play online Minecraft clone built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched – a company that designs custom silicon to demonstrate hardware optimized transformer-based AI algorithms.
Minecraft clones aren’t anything new, but Oasis is. That’s because nobody programmed it. It is completely AI generated rendering – just like the realtime AI generated Doom clone I wrote about earlier. Everything is generated via realtime AI rendering via transformer based network trained to generate minecraft-like output. No gameplay was programmed.
Like a lot of generative AI, it has a tendency to hallucinate when you look at things you have looked at before (textures will change, blur, etc). It certainly won’t be replacing minecraft anytime soon, but these kinds of projects show how one might use AI to do proof-of-concept work.
Go play it for free yourself at oasis.decart.ai
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Ian MacLarty made this strange game that plays with your perception. Free here: https://ianmaclarty.itch.io/catacombs-of-solaris
The Dead by Daylight Twitch streamer Hens333 was curious about a streamer’s meteoric rise, and couldn’t figure it out. The streamer didn’t appear to have any decent content, didn’t seem very big in the community – but was getting massive viewer counts.
So, he dug into it and then went on a massive data deep-dive and believes he found what the internet dreads – that it could likely be a whole empire of fake views and purchased popularity – all to get lucrative sponsorships.
Check out his epic analysis here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2333312919?t=00h46m30s
If Hens333 is right, then the streamer is simply buying views via streaming viewer bots (here too and countless other similar bot services) that give his videos very suspiciously consistent and high viewer counts, buying twitter retweets, possibly even paying to have articles written about him, and then has little gambling minigames which are likely only won by the bot accounts. The goal: get yourself rank in the top 30 most watched Dead by Daylight streamers on SullyGnome.
Doing a little napkin math, he is likely spending $1000-2000 per month for bot accounts based on his viewer counts. Why would you do this? Ego?
A quick look at his Twitch page clears it all up. Sponsorships. His Twitch page is littered with dozens and dozens of sponsors.
If all this is true, then it means he might be making $10,000’s per month on sponsors with only a $1000-$2000 per month outlay. Some note he isn’t even playing the games many times – just showing replays of previous sessions. One more highly suspicious data point is that just about ALL his youtube videos have less than 50 views:
The streamer in question is realzbluewater, and if he is doing this, he is likely committing criminal fraud by misrepresenting his actual viewer count to advertisers.
This could come with serious legal repercussions as well as criminal charges. He wouldn’t be the first. Charlie Javice is now up on charges that she deceived JP Morgan about the number of actual users of her college financial planning company called Frank. They alleged that Javice even paid a data-science professor $18,000 for a list of more than four million fake student names. She claims JP Morgan simply didn’t do their due diligence. Right now, she’s up on Federal charges for securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy.
I personally believe there is a lot of the kind of fraud Javice is accused of. It’s been pretty much rampant by people on Forbes 30 under 30 list (more comically being called Forbes 30 doing 30 list). It’s also ridiculously easy. Purchasing views and reposts for any social media account is just a google click away. You can buy thousands of re-Tweets, Twitch views, Youtube views, fake comments, Instagram followers, Facebook upvotes – and just about anything else for just a little bit of money. Just google it and you’ll find tons of services that do all these things for under $50.
I sure hope realzbluewater is legit. If he’s not, he’s likely committing criminal fraud and could be sued by his sponsors and face jail time.
Twitch is likely not cracking down for 3 reasons. Firstly, they get ad revenue if the views or real or not. Secondly, even if they detect this, they can’t ban streamers when they detect bots swarming a channel or others could use those kinds of attacks to get streamers taken down or banned. Finally, the increase of numbers helps Twitch too. Twitch has been struggling financially and definitely could use all the viewers they can get – even if the majority of them are bots.
Just one more likely datapoint for the Dead Internet Theory. If this kind of fraud is becoming more rampant (and I believe it is), there is going to be a reckoning. Advertisers are going to start asking questions about fake numbers and realize they’re getting ripped off. When the reckoning starts, people better have long, clean records when the investigations begins – because the hosting sites will blame the streamers, and the streamers will likely be thrown under the bus.
Note to self: great business idea. Start a company that does user/data verification and fraud analysis services. When the day comes, everyone will want you.
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Starpowerdrummer is basically a human Drum and Bass/Jungle drum machine. Listen to him play in real life what was previously only possible on a drum machine. He’s so unbelievably clean and exact – it’s kind of mind boggling.