The developer worked designing slots for the gambling industry before.
Part his game mechanics are really addictive as they are similar to how people gets addicted to gambling (lootboxes, coins, spins, colorful lights, win animations, sounds similar to slots machines).
Also fuck giving saudi arabia money. Sometimes its unavoidable, but this is a video game. There are other video games, but there is no regime worse than the saudi regime.
“bUt ThEy DoNt OwN tHeM yEt”
The price has been settled on, so any success from here on out absolutely does directly benefit the saudis.
It’s frustrating because kernel level doesn’t actually help. The cheats and cheaters can also do that and do! I soured on competitive multiplayer because it’s become impossible to ignore that every popular PvP game is infested eith cheaters and that anti cheat is the equivalent of the TSA at Airports but even less effective. It’s security theater.
The only real prevention is consoles in games without cross play and that haven’t been cracked/exploited yet. Even then there’s man…AI In The Middle external cheats now that record the display output and can aim bot with controller input splicing hardware. But that’s not as easy to set up so way less cheaters.
Except then you’re gaming on a console which usually aim bots for you anyways because joysticks are inaccurate crap. Labeled “aim assist.” Halo Infinite for example was so egregious you couldn’t compete with controller players because of aim assist vs mouse and keyboard. That’s built into the fucking game!
They’ve been working on VR hardware for a while, but the market has kind of stalled out on what the technology is capable of. They’d have to be pretty confident that they can jumpstart it again with their own games if that’s what it is.
I’m hoping for an ARM based standalone Linux VR headset. Both VR and Linux ARM gaming would get a major boost from a major company putting out hardware with software support. A PlayStation sized gaming PC eventually someday too. Just an ARM VR headset is a bigger leap for Linux gaming from where ARM/VR Linux is today than an x86 gaming PC
The thing that would speak against ARM are the recent sightings of new AMD based APUs from Valve on benchmark sites. Unless that is the next thing over and they are actually now ready with Deckard/Frame.
It’s a great game with great gameplay and which is surprisingly replayable in survival mode if you go a year or two between plays.
It’s also one which, IMHO, doesn’t need visual enhancements - their choice of visual style was masterful (it works and is a lot cheaper in terms of 3D modelling costs that something more realistic would have been) and it’s the gameplay (which is pretty much all emergent gameplay in survival mode with no fixed set-pieces) that makes it a great game.
That is a bit surprising, because I have used a Legion Go (non S) with both Windows and Bazzite and performance seemed pretty comparable across both. I certainly didn't notice double the battery life at any point. Maybe I just didn't bench the same set of games, this seems very specifically to yield best results on CDPR games. Or maybe it's because these benches are just for the Z2 and not the Z1 Extreme version, and this is very specific to that chip.
It could also be the memory management/config is different on the SteamOS side and some games are getting different amounts of VRAM across OSs? How do these stack up to Bazzite on the same hardware? Is there an advantage to brand name SteamOS?
I want to see more benchmarks from more people with more configs. Everybody in the tech industry is busy fawning over overengineered fans over in Computex and this actually interesting release isn't getting the right amount of coverage.
Seeing this with Bazzite, Garuda, “vanilla” distros like Mint, Arch, Manjaro, etc. would be really interesting, I agree.
My amateur guess from the outside would be, that SteamOS is perhaps stripped down in a way, that “normal” Linux background stuff only gets booted up when switching into Desktop mode, which would explain the massive improvements for battery life. But that is a guess, cannot be sure about that at all.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don't know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they're both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn't great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren't distracted right now, because there's an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.
I’d like to see someone else reproduce the original test results. Seen the same set of data posted multiple times and honestly the numbers look like major outlier and either different settings or something wrong on wibdows.
That may be legitimate if the Windows settings are the factory settings. That's why I was pointing at memory management, because if you have a 32 GB device and you're assigning 3GB to VRam while the SteamOS version does something different things may get funky results in some games, especially running at higher resolutions and so on.
So it's entirely possible that the out-of-the-box setup of these machines on Windows and SteamOS are legitimately that different but that a better Windows config would mitigate it, which is still bad for something sold with a preinstalled Windows image, for the record. Or maybe the overhead of Win11 is just that big, I don't know. Would certainly love to see someone look into it.
I can tell you that bumping the default VRAM allocation on Windows handhelds has taken some AAA games from unplayable to quite solid in my experimentation, but I'm not gonna sit here swapping OSs and games back and forth for benchmarks. At least not for free.
I hate to say it, but if MS released a competitor, it will probably outsell the Deck 5:1 regardless of quality, if only because of the advertising reach. Your average non-gamer has never heard of Steam. Everyone and their grandmother know MS and would therefore be more willing to get one for their kid.
Edit: I suppose I should explain a bit. People here are comparing Steam DAUs to console DAUs. That’s not the same as sales.
All of those users are already playing on a computer. Also, many of the most popular games on Steam I are free and low-spec. A lot of Steam users are not spenders.
Compare the 3.7 million Deck sales to the 2.2 million Switch 2 preorders (and the 150 million Switch 1 sales) before it even hit shelves. You can’t even buy a Deck in a store and you won’t see an ad for one. If MS makes a handheld, they’ll have billions at their disposal in advertising.
Did you know that Steam’s monthly active user base dwarfs any single console out there? At this point, it’s almost as large as PlayStation and Xbox combined; definitely bigger than the combined install base for each of their current gen consoles. Steam is more mainstream than PlayStation at this point. (However, the caveat is that the Steam Deck can’t be purchased at Walmart.)
I would rather bet that most people have no clue what an operating system is and that the one they (unknowingly) use is made by Microsoft. On the other hand if they play games (on that PC), they will know Steam, because they actively had to install it and click its icon frequently.
The Steam Deck was the way of bringing SteamOS to the masses, now the HW developers will sell their devices in Walmart just by the Switch and the other consoles, it will be cheaper due to the 0 license cost (or, you know, pocketing the difference) with a big, ever expanding, catalog.
About the Switch 2, the hype is there definitely and it is a known brand, mainly sold to families and casual gamers. But even PlayStation and Xbox are not competing with Nintendo.
I agree with everything you said, but I still don’t think that will change the decision of someone on the fence. The Deck is the odd one out.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Deck and SteamOS and want it to succeed, and expect them to to a certain degree, but I just know the average consumer and they’ll just look at the SteamOS handhelds as a weird knockoff gaming computer.
We all know how special it is because we were the target market. But when all is said and done, it comes down to what people know.
If Valve was advertising like the big guys do, maybe, but with no ad support, not a chance.
I fixed it. It was 15 million projected in the first year, 2.2 million preorders. But I think that point still stands. The Deck has been out for a few years now.
when Windows “challenges” others, they don’t compete on merit… it’s easier to blackmail game developers by threatening to kick them out of Windows / Xbox platforms if they develop for Linux… this is how we ended up with “windows is the only os for gaming” back in the 90s
Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, Microsoft never gave much of a damn about making Linux versions of games. They did have an Xbox parity clause for games that came to other consoles, but that’s pretty different than what you’re saying.
It’s all about how DirectX/Direct3D was launching and competing with OpenGL (the open standard).
In a nutshell, MS literally ported games for free to Windows (Doom95 being the flagship example) and/or subsidized the development of games for Direct3D so there would be no appetite for OpenGL.
This is equivalent to Amazon or Walmart selling their stuff at a loss until all competitors go bankrupt
Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it’s also more carrot than stick. There were efforts to make Linux versions of games after this adoption of DirectX, and they didn’t take; I have a Linux disc for Unreal Tournament 2004 that came in the same box as the Windows one. What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren’t working. They didn’t manage to siphon PC gaming over the Windows Store, and Windows handhelds are demonstrably worse and sell worse than the Linux ones. Consoles’ walled gardens are slowly crumbling from natural market forces to the openness of PC, and that includes a PC where almost all of those games work on Linux.
Microsoft does not have a position of strength here right now, and they know it, so they instead pivoted to just being an enormous publisher with a subscription service that’s lucrative but has already plateaued.
Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it’s also more carrot than stick.
True, I misremembered… however, this is anti-competitive practice 101 anyway
What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren’t working.
But the fact they keep trying these anti-competitive strategies and have no consequences for them is a problem. We cannot rely on “it didn’t work for them this time” as if that is a solution because next time it would work for them and then we are all fucked for another few decades
Yes but that’s it right, they are not developing for Linux, Steam is doing it for the developer. There is nothing stopping Windows of saying sell exclusively through my Store, though I believe they have tried.
But I do understand were you are coming from Windows is definitely not the most ethical company and definitely they are not up for fair fight, what I’m trying to say is that I hope the game developers focus more in the mobile market and optimize the games more.
A point made by HP’s SVP and Division President of Gaming Solutions Josephine Tan when talking to XDA Developers, Tan mentioned “If you look at Windows, I struggle with the experience myself. If I don’t like it, I don’t know how to do a product for it.”. Tan continued “If I’m buying a handheld, I want a very simple setup. The minute I turn on my handheld, it will remember the last game I played. In the Windows environment, it doesn’t”.
Okay, I’m not saying that HP shouldn’t do a SteamOS handheld, but…this seems like such a bad rationale. Surely, surely it is possible to write a relatively-trivial piece of software for Windows that simply remembers the last game played? Especially if we’re just talking stuff running out of Steam?
It costs more money to hire software devs to make a custom piece of software that needs to be maintained and fully supported with customer service than it sticking SteamOS on it and providing support and having customer service. Valve did all of that hard work and rnd and paid for it all, hp just needs to pay for an oem license —probably a very good deal for them
You’re probably right that they can put the os on their hardware for free, but I would think they do pay something for the rights to have the “powered by SteamOS” mark. I would bet that valve has some sort of hardware partner criteria to maintain valves image if you use their mark, like their old steam machine program.
Eli5: your PC has different access levels a program can run at. This prevents a malicious or badly coded program from completely fucking your computer. Kernel level anti cheat runs at the lowest level access that exists under windows. It can do basically whatever it wants to your PC, and if a backdoor is coded in (happens way more than you’d think), it gives malware basically total access to your PC.
I only own the game through itch.io, which I got through one of those charity bundles, and they contacted me by e-mail. Then people contacted GamingOnLinux about it, and at least right now, it seems to only be limited to itch.io.
EDIT: I actually do have the game via GOG as well, which is news to me, and I did not receive a similar notification about it.
gamingonlinux.com
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