It is not "Krafton free". Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn't just "the publisher". There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there's some number of lifetime sales that, if they don't ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they'd be legally required to pay out the "bonus" that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it's still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.
Honestly even the absolute best case for this game is still "the more you care about it, the better it is for you to wait until it's out of Early Access". Early access for an "exploration first" game means your exploration is going to find a bunch of "come back later" walls, placeholders, and bugs. That's the point of Early Access after all. I'd have enjoyed Subnautica a lot less if I'd played it during Early Access and was waiting on a patch to let me explore the Aurora.
Can you even buy this without a Steam account though? It's the Steam Controller, sold through Steam, designed to work on Steam. A third party driver to convert it to Xinput will probably drop within a week of its ship date (just like it did for the first Steam Controller), but if you're against having a Steam account I'd wonder why you want a Steam Controller in the first place. There's plenty of non-Steam controllers after all.
They made Slay the Spire 1, right? They pushed the anti-infinite changes to main after getting review bombed for a beta patch, right? I've seen some people say that the readjustments in the beta are "compromises" to placate the whiners, but it's much more likely that they used their experimental weekly beta patch to "overnerf" and "overbuff" so that dialing in the final changes becomes easier. If the right number for some value in your game is a 7, you find it faster by changing the 10 to a 5 and then buffing it than you would by incrementally nerfing it one by one.
Anything to do with Brave is yikes, and any step towards "opt out" advertising is yikes. Firefox went from "no bullshit" to "one opt out setting" to "30 opt out settings". There's always a first step. The only real reason to use Waterfox over Firefox in the first place is because you don't want to have to find and whack all the opt-outs - Firefox with the right config offers every advantage WF does.
Neat. I tried the previous version of GameNative for this game alone and it didn't work out of the box, googling gave me some tweaks that didn't work and ended on "just install the closed source GameHub and trust that instead".
Is it possible to "break" the Steam connection once you've got the game installed? I actually don't want cloud saves or auto-updates on the phone version of the game.
Does this version support Slay the Spire II? Apparently it's a game prior versions struggle with. I don't personally see the appeal in playing shooters or action games on a phone but 2D turn based games that are in early access? Yes please.
Honestly it never ever made sense to price a digital download at the same point as a physical object. Providing a digital download is entirely infrastructure costs, the cost of delivering "a copy" to the customer is fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, for a cartridge, for every copy, Nintendo (for example) has to buy a bunch of plastic and EMMC, image that flash storage with Mario Odyssey, print labels and stickers and encase that chip in more plastic, wrap that plastic in more plastic, ship those crates of plastic across the ocean, all to sell them to walmart and gamestop that take a cut of the sale themselves. When a customer downloads Mario Odyssey, all sixty dollars go straight to Nintendo.
Not just the installers, but plenty of games (all of GOG's catalog, but also a bunch on Steam) don't have DRM at all. They'll work just fine if you run the executable file without the "store" running (even if you got the exe file from Steam/etc and can't re-download without a login thus functional servers and account in good standing and internet connection).
Nintendo can already brick your cartridge over the internet and make it require game updates (via system firmware updates). They have already done this with Super Mario Wonder on Switch 2 - the game will not run without an update download. You can't revert firmware versions on a DRM box like the Switch, and new cartridges (even ones with "the full game" on them) will require and include firmware updates. Playing the console online or purchasing any digital-only content (or downloading free patches) also requires the latest firmware, and there are whitelist mechanisms in place for Nintendo to outright say "you cannot run v1.0 of game X on system version 16.7.2U". The v1. 0 being on a cartridge has no bearing on this functionality.
The only way to "play video games without relying on the internet or a company's server" legally while being 100% sure that the company can't do what they did to Mario Wonder is to buy and maintain multiple outdated firmware consoles that are isolated completely from the Internet. That's obviously infeasible, so the only way to "play video games without relying on the internet or a company's server" is the complete defeat or removal of DRM. On Nintendo platforms, that means piracy, full stop. On PC, there are a ton of games that are DRM-free digitally distributed products - those are the endgame here, not chips or discs. After all, with no DRM, you can put your copy of Slay the Spire on as many flash drives or DVDs as you want!
One thing I'd like to see from an app like this is "force the video into an arbitrary file size limit" with a list of priorities to do so defined by the user. Say I've got a video I want to send over Discord (10mb limit) but I'm not intending for the vid to be fullscreened by the recipient so scaling it down to like 480x480 would be fine.
If you browse on itch.io by popularity and go down the list until you find one you've never heard of (or never played, if you want easier standards) that's where the "newgrounds culture" is nowadays. Plenty of stuff that works in browser for free.
Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to "mostly positive" or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you "only censored the racists don't worry. We're getting brigaded"
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always... Read the reviews. If the good ones are all "lol cute dog" and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are "waaaah there's a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah", you can be certain the game's actual reception among non-idiots is higher than "mostly positive".
Reviewers that aren't the developer's friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing "chuds are mad about this" next to the "buy now" button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game's sales right there.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game's developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about "removing toxicity" after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game's "negative reception" entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about "woke devs" or "DEI" or "the chinese translation is bad".
It is not "Krafton free". Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn't just "the publisher". There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there's some number of lifetime sales that, if they don't ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they'd be legally required to pay out the "bonus" that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it's still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.