In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur's Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she'd picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.

Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.

Could be? I know Beehaw is defederated from a lot but I haven't kept up. The community is definitely active.

I'm in the same boat, want FemShep, always romance Tali. The ME2 LE romance mod is pretty painless. Unfortunately, last I checked, the modder never finished the ME3 LE mod. There's a way to force it in ME3 by hacking the save file and it'll still get you there, but it won't be as seamless.

Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.

Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.

If an Internet infrastructure giant can't make MMOs work, I don't see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn't getting funding.

It's too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don't know if it's going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.

Maybe it's because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital "J" journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I've always put the games press in its proper buckets of "previews for access" and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I'm rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).