Haven’t seen a game that uses ads like this, but very good that it’s strictly prohibited now. That shit should never have taken off on mobile, but alas. At least we can prevent it on PC.
If you see Google launch a “free game only” store for PC, get worried.
I would be astonished if there was anything good on it though. If you are going to make a microtransaction game you probably don’t want to put a lot of effort into it because people won’t play it for more than about a week. This stuff’s only profitable if you can shovel new games out of the door on a regular basis.
Oh there wouldn’t need to be anything actually good on it.
You just need Superbowl advert money and suddenly you’ve got millions of users with no money.
I suspect the only reason this hasn’t happened already is that those millions of users are already on mobile, being flashed with garish noisy adverts every two minutes of gameplay, and moving them to PC some of the time wouldn’t really increase ad revenue…
Playtron can keep their GameOS, anything associated with Cryptocurrency is a hard pass. I remember a lot of cryptobros were financing the fuck out of Playtron. Naturally, this is a product I consider dead to me. I will buy a Steam Deck from Valve, as they aren’t actively trying to scam their potential user base with Crypto nonsense.
I’m probably going to get the middle tier of Steam Deck as it does provide a decent value; as I play a lot of farming sims and cozy games, the Steam Deck fills this purpose well for me. Better than my Switch ever could. I was also considering the Lenovo Legion Go S, but waiting for hardware and software reviews for that device is a smart move. As it could be an amazing device, or it could be fucking shit on launch.
OLED made some minor improvements, but $150 more for the next step up is a huge ask. You act as if there are plenty of easily available cheaper handheld PCs out there. Not that I’ve found. Prices for old technology are going up, not down.
3.5 years old isn’t that old lol. My desktop CPU was almost 10 years old before I noticed any bottleneck in AAA games.
And speaking of AAA games from the last few years, all like, 2 of them, probably won’t be missed by most people.
The deck is a solid computer and it’s a good product that’s built well and is pleasant to handle and use and playing desktop games on that OLED with HDR support is a joy and on top of a decently polished UX (as polished as you can get in PC gaming really), the tinker potential is endless, you can do with it as you please because it’s yours and you own it - and it certainly feels like it. No adware, no enshittification etc.
I think there is a “graphical plateau” to gaming; a universal constant a bit like Moore’s Law. And while it’s not certain, it’s very possible the Steam Deck has mostly moved beyond it.
I definitely don’t think there’s an infinite bound to the detail games can add, especially within the resolution displayed on the Deck. Plus, many formats of games have not been well-served by that sort of extra detail. When a fringe hit like Liar’s Bar, REPO, or Lethal Company comes along, it never really needs the extra horsepower of top consoles. There’s a few rare PS5 exclusives that may struggle on it, but given Cyberpunk 2077 runs on it, I don’t even think we need be too worried.
I understand what you are trying to say, I feel like it’s not that old of a device in comparison to a Switch or Switch OLED. It’s still going to be a decent buy at the price point; I’m not overly worried about spending that much on a Steam Deck OLED. It wouldn’t take but a month of casual saving to afford a Steam Deck and given a lot of the games I buy are Deck Verified…It’s not a bad deal. This thing will likely be good enough for a few more years of play, particularly with indie games. Given that there is plenty of time for further consideration, I am leaning towards waiting for reviews of the Legion device I mentioned…On the off chance it is the better buy.
Just an anecdote, but I have a much smoother experience playing with the original steam deck than I did on my desktop. I mean the frames aren’t as high, the screen is small and resolution is low, but for whatever backwards reason, it just feels so smooth to look at and play with. I guess you see and feel the graphical artifacts better on a large screen with large resolution, and everything feels so uncanny somehow with high refresh rates and 100+ fps. Can’t really explain it though. Weird stuff.
Just finished the last of us 1 remake and 2 remaster with the deck. It just looks so gorgeous, I ran both with mixed medium-high settings, and it was an amazing experience. Before those I played cyberpunk with some crazy 500+ mods, and it was just excellent to play. Same with Witcher 3, though that’s getting old by now, so less surprising it runs so well.
In fact, I’m yet to play any lightweight games on this thing. Or even indie ones. These graphically intensive games have been such a joy to play, I haven’t even had the time or motivation to attempt anything else. I’m finally getting through my dusty, cobwebbed library, especially these more expensive games, and that’s been almost miraculous! A desktop requires sitting down, dedicated time and focus, but I can bring this thing with me pretty much anywhere and play a checkpoint or two or whatever while on a bus, a train, waiting for an appointment… anything. And it fucking runs all these games I’ve dreaded to play on the gaming rig because it just never felt good because I couldn’t hit ultra settings on everything, and the artifacts just were too noticeable and things weren’t as immersive as I’d have liked.
But this small little thing? So enjoyable, it’s so weird.
This is something I want to yell so loud every time I see anyone underestimating this thing talking about playing less demanding, smaller or older, indie, or otherwise more basic games. Thanks to some black magic I can’t make any sense of, the exact opposite is what you’ll want to do I bet!
They were sued in 2019 by a Native American tribe over that, I haven’t heard much about the issue since. It’s likely they are merely being neutral in the situation now, as no one is throwing up a fuss. Still, it’s not cool behavior on the part of Valve.
ANY gaming, or even tech, company looking at possible acquisitions is interested in Valve. In the same way that everyone would be down to clown with Ryan Reynolds if he knocked on their door but we know it won’t happen.
Sensationalist media will grab at anything, really.
I mean, the Nintendo thing started with an email Phil Spencer replied to titled “random thought,” and the email was basically a lot of “Yeah that sounds great, but here’s why it’s not going to happen. But sure, though, it would be nice to own Nintendo, and I know a guy who’s been trading some of their stock if you wanted to maybe buy some.”
I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.
I could swear it was higher earlier this year/last year but looking at the survey results, Linux climbed to 2% this survey. I think maybe that half remembered headline was something like “Linux is higher than MacOS at 1.5% market share” or something like that instead?
Steam is a massive worldwide market, and the Steam Deck isn’t offered everywhere. Chinese users for example have to import it, so not many are used there.
I got the hardware survey on my Windows PC, but not on my Steamdeck. So I wonder if there is only 1 survey per user, and most people don’t use a steamdeck exclusively?
It does include it. The article list it in detail: 36.79% of the Linux users use the steam deck. And the number is falling, which means there are more users also using Linux on desktop PC (or other gaming handhelds)
The steam deck is also amazing, such a nice piece of hardware. I’ve been gaming on Linux for years and I’m surprised how well it works. Feels like a console.
Me before the comma: Good luck to them, more options can’t be a bad thing.
Me after the comma: I intend to wipe the existence of your useless company from my memory entirely, so I’m just going to point and laugh at your failure in advance and immediately move on with my life.
What, there is nothing wrong with your device… but I do not want to give you anything under warranty… Let me just put a scratch there real quick while you come back from showing me where the breakers are. feel free to watch it here in an it’s glory
Why on Earth would they make it Nvidia exclusive given how thoroughly that company has screwed the pooch on open source drivers and consequently how dominant AMD has come to be in Linux gaming?
I don’t know that we’re bitching per se, just kind of a weird choice. It’s like they went to Popeye’s and tried to order a salad, it’s just like yeah, the ingredients are technically there, but why?
Don’t Nvidia cards natively support this through gamestream? I don’t know if Amd has something similar or not but you can already easily set up something like this to stream to a steam deck
The nvidia/vulkan open source driver is apparently pretty rad. I haven’t had a chance to test it myself yet since I am running a dual gpu setup that contains one gpu that isn’t supported. The original maintainer for nouveau is apparently also working at Nvidia and contributing to the project as an Nvidia employee now too soooo maybe they are turning over a new leaf?
And I still feel like their definition of playable is a bit narrow. I regularly play “unplayable” games on my steam deck without much issue. You just might need to fiddle about with the controller settings, compatibility modes and use the built in magnifying tool and keyboard once in a while. It’s really not the end of the world.
But that’s just it. That fiddling isn’t something the dev probably accounted for, so it should be noted that the experience will be less than optimal. I think it still fits.
Tinker: runs fine with some in-game config or with Steam OS tools like Steam Input
It would exclude any lower level tweaks like changing launch args or using a special Proton version, those can stay unsupported. Basically, if you can get it working well intuitively without looking stuff up online, it should have some level of support.
I’ve played several “unsupported” games that work fine, so something should be done here.
The point isn’t even whether the terms are acceptable anymore. They tried to change the deal retroactively because they felt they had a strong position in that game developers are already invested into their ecosystem.
They may have gone back to saner terms for now but unless the entire management structure resigns, there’s no reason not to say they won’t try again in the future.
It doesn’t even matter of their management as a whole changes. No matter who it is, what matters are their actions going forward. The only way to get out of the hole they dug themselves in is years of sitting around being good.
They tried to change the deal retroactively because they felt they had a strong position
I’m honestly surprised that I have not seen by now a meme pic of Darth Vader telling Lando that the deal is being changed, but the face of Darth Vader is instead the CEO of Unity.
the thing about terraria is that the devs love to play as much as the players. so they love the game and are always interested in making the experience better. not just for the players but them too.
they’re also not a massive corporate run, shareholder-pleasing company either. so they actually listen to suggestions from fans. it’s the best.
They’re also in the enviable position of having made a game with some of the highest profit per employee in history, so they’re not under the pressure that most are.
Me too. It’s probably been 10 years since I’ve last played. I have a solid 64 hours played and no achievements completed. Maybe I should check it out when this update comes out. It’ll probably feel like a brand new game at this point.
I am also not a fan of building stuff and making it look nice. Just follow the easy rules to make a liveable cube and call it a day. That said I think terraria is the only game where I would consider actually spending some time making it look a bit nicer since it is so easy to do. I remember last time after completing the game I looked at some other peoples builds and got inspired.
I love how unity went from “we have a tech that can distinguish pirated copies with 100% accuracy, and also we exploit android and iOS sandboxing with 0-days to track reinstalls without fail, trust our numbers” to “we have no idea about the install numbers, you need to tell us”
It’s a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can’t be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You’d need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of “jailbreaking” LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
gamingonlinux.com
Ważne