The Ubisoft trading community are coping to justify holding on to their tanking investments. It’s a gambler doubling down on losing.
Christ, how the mighty Ubisoft has fallen. They will go the way of EA and become a spyware company for the decadent Arab royals. I’m just crying that Ubisoft made some of my favourite games growing up and look what they have done to my boy-- a rotting zombie 🥲
I still recoil from the memory of Far Cry 3 dropping in the middle of the game because thier launcher had an issue, three times in one hour. Which reset my progress. Uninstall, never bought shit from them again.
It’s disappointing. I’ve been going through some of their older catalog recently and it just has a lot more passion behind it i feel.
AC Shadows felt like when i write an essay, where i get really motivated at the start, completely drop off and try to stuff the middle with as much as possible to reach the page count, then get motivated again at the end just to finish the conclusion. They always had their bugs, but lately it’s felt soulless.
In the Ubisoft trading community that I mentioned, some folks blamed UbiSoft’s downfall for “being woke”. As if Ubisoft’s blind chasing of money, abandoning most of their IP, selling broke products, and last but not least an executive telling consumers to get used to not owning games are not bigger factors.
Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)
My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it’s attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)
Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).
Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.
I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.
They start out small and can’t afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.
Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.
It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.
“Why remember the past, Just forget it and all the problems it had. They surely cant happen again, especially if we just ignore that they happened in the first place!”
Its no wonder the world is falling apart with people holding onto logic like this.
Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?
I had one of the old Alienware Steam Machines. I know it wasn’t a popular answer, but my answer to this was that Windows was atrocious for the living room just like it’s atrocious for handhelds today, and I had easily and cheaply amassed a large library of Linux-compatible games even back then by way of Steam sales. But this wasn’t even the only problem. We only had OpenGL ports rather than lower level and more performant APIs like Vulkan. Running a marquis Linux title like Shadow of Mordor would come with a sizable performance hit compared to the Windows version, even when run on exactly the same hardware, and that would also require a machine that cost $200 more than a PS4 that could run the same game just as well.
As someone who owned the Alienware one with windows 8 (and upgraded it to windows 10, and a 2TB SSD), I'm glad to find anyone else who actually bought one, especially the steam OS variant, and has expertise with it, rather than regurgitating what articles say.
So, funny story, I bought it as the Windows variant, because it was $50 cheaper for some reason. Bloatware subsidies, maybe? My roommate and I tried it for a little while, but using Windows from the couch sucked so much that I put SteamOS on it. My roommate only booted back to Windows to play Hearthstone. I just rocked whatever SteamOS would let me play local, since streaming games from my desktop in the other room wasn’t cutting it for me. I played through KOTOR2 on that machine, on SteamOS, and had a great time.
I was able to overclock it to a crazy level. Played all kinds of games on it between me and my roommate. It was finiky using big picture mode (I ended up buying a dedicated mouse and keyboard for it to use on a lapboard at the time), but BPM gave me trouble with controllers, refusing to quit to desktop, and hanging on launching games occasionally.
A lot of Dell's BS software went the way of the dodo bird as soon as I could get rid of it for similar reasons. The update to windows 10 I also seem to remember giving me trouble. MS didn't consider it supported hardware. But it all worked out and now that thing is my media center PC. It's still running after all this time, which is crazy.
I bought the i5 varriant from ebay for $150 in 2016 that someone I think tried to pass off the yellow ring of death to me, as the system failed shortly after I bought it, BUT, it was still under original manufacturer warranty. I sent it in to dell with no proof of purchase requested from me, they sent my system back fixed, and accidentally gave me another steam controller in the box back, haha.
After getting it back, I wiped windows and have been running Ubuntu on it since then. Still using it as a HTPC right now, though it is getting long in the tooth for web video like YouTube, etc. Probably gonna be replacing it soon with something else, but 10 years of usage for $150 ain’t bad.
Oh, man - I can do you one better. I still have one of these, still hooked up and running. We use it as a game server for some low-requirement stuff… currently Vintage Story.
The failure of the Steam Machine is why Valve hosted Khronos group at their office to kick off Vulkan and funded LunarG etc in the early days to get things moving quickly.
Valve took their time but this new hardware range is based on years of learning and solving the problems from their original foray into hardware and Linux for gaming.
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
Valve have enabled a critical mass of “target platforms” that enables both the community and developers to get things working on Linux, which all other distros are about to benefit from.
I’m likely going to buy all the new Valve hardware out of principle. The Deck is incredible, but I still have my beefy gaming rig. But my living room wouldn’t mind a Steam Machine (and my girlfriend is definitely after both a Steam Frame and Controller 2.
I’m taking time off work in a couple of weeks and I’m moving over to Linux completely - I too have felt the inertia of dual booting and find myself in Windows far too often.
My short review as I’ve been playing campaign for 8h so far: If you liked Anno 1800, no need to hesitate, game is super fun and more polished than 1800 was at launch 😍
That’s a good question, but for me Anno (even before 117) has been a very single player focused experience, so I don’t know the answer. Maybe someone else can chip in there
And what Valve will get themselves in again if they do not price this right.
Consoles are essentially time-based luxuries because the hardware and technology can be obsolete within 1 - 2 years at a given. That's why consoles remodel themselves after awhile to extend their life.
Valve seems to want to give people an alternative to prebuilt machines on the market. But, if they can't price right where it'll make someone think "I can build a better PC than that" or "I can find a better prebuilt than that" then the Steam Machine was a waste of everyone's time and labor.
This is exactly why they SHOULDN’T have named it Steam Machine. The Steam Deck was released and no one talked about Steam Machines. Call it Steam Machine and suddenly everyone is reminded of the colossal flop all those years ago.
Same. I don’t have any immediate need for any of the newly announced hardware products, but I’m hopeful they succeed because they indirectly benefit me as a Linux gamer.
There’s so few people that remember… Nobody cares.
And Steam Machine is going really hard as a brand and as a device name, really. I bet there’s a lot of salivating at this level of brand recognition in a lot of marketing departments.
Does it matter though? You can put it as a failure that got so bad Valve eventually cancel it, or you can put it as a product that got good from countless iteration. Its kinda like glass half empty half full kind of situation which eventually doesn’t really matter.
Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don’t focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don’t think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.
The goal of marketing is to get as many people as possible to be aware that a company’s product exists. These articles are doing just that, for free.
Initial sales will probably take a hit bc of the negative articles. I don’t think they’re being written bc valve decided to stick with the same name though. The articles are probably being written bc negative headlines get clicks.
If the new steam machine proves to be a solid product this time around then gamers are going to buy it. If it’s such a solid product that it manages to turn a product line that was once associated with failure and negativity into a product line that’s associated with success and positivity then I really can’t think of anything better the new steam machine could do for valve’s brand. The (hypothetical) articles comparing the huge (hypothetical) success of the new steam machine to the dramatic failure of the past will also be a bit easier to write a headline for. More free marketing.
It is. “From failed product to global success” will also drum up a positive vibe about this particular hardware. What i meant by it is it doesn’t really matter if the previous iteration is a failure, what people really care and what’s important is the current iteration and what Valve learn from their past mistake, and the marketing team of Valve know exactly that. It’s marketing after all, turning negative vibe to positive one is part of the marketing strategy.
A friend of mine thinks it is gonna flop (tbh nobody knows), only because of that prior flop, he refuses to acknowledge that they might have learned of their mistakes, and hardly acknowledge that the Steam Deck is a success, only because it is a different market (he truly doesn’t believe in Steam hardware).
I for one am excited as I don’t have any PC gaming at the moment (or Steam Deck lol), I have been a console (and mostly handheld) gamer since the old days, and this bet on Steam makes sense for me in this day and age.
what is someone gonna type into youtube/google/ or any other search engine?
what are they going to end up see?
are they smart enough to understand the differences in products?
I’m trying to think of a scenario where someone would think twice about purchasing a steam machine just because a product from 10 years ago bombed in sales.
This would require them to ignore the recent success of the steam deck… which is basically impossible.
Therefore, I have doubts that the name alone would have ANY direct impact on sales
I remember the flop, but since Proton and Steam Deck have been waiting for them to try again. In many ways it might be bad marketing and just adding a “2” to the name would probably help. But in other ways, it might just be them being transparent? Same with the controller. Like they’re owning their past and saying “we still want this, and the time is right this time”
This is the initial vibes I got but then again I might be bias because I’m already familiar with steam. Honestly, it might be better if valve added 2 to the end of their products. For example, The nothing phone company tried to do something “unique” with their earbuds but all that did was confuse the shit out of people. I think they reverted back to numbering them.
But then on the flip side, sony is infamously known to name all their products with a shit load of numbers… so tbh this can go either way lmao
Agree it has be price competitive with consoles. Though I wonder if making a docked Deck be on equal footing with the Machine would have been a better use of R&D. Maybe simply improving having the dock house an eGPU and bumping the Deck specs.
I mean like a v2 Steam Deck and Dock. Give the Deck a bump in CPU/RAM/storage specs and new external ports to facilitate having the GPU in the dock. It could technically even be an externalized PCIe connector instead of Thunderbolt/USB. In handheld mode you get the iCPU limited to 1080, but dock it on the big screen and now you get full 4k @ 60 FPS. Add an HDMI port so you do 1080 on a big screen without a dock.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
… I have no idea what that actually means, maybe its TFLOPs, who knows, but uh, yeah, if you’re making a 6x thing thats more stationary, I would think that would be the thing you’d make with an option or variant to just jam more compute into it via modularity.
I dunno. It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming, at some point, Valve’s whole actual video is basically making fun of how its not talking about the Deck… stay tuned, goth gamer nation…???
Either way, we always have this:
Oh god are there going to be some very very salty Nintendo fans, very soon.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
I hadn’t heard of OCuLink before, apparently it’s an external PCIe connector! Eh, that would seem like a waste of engineering team to build that into a stationary desktop PC. They can just build the PC case to whatever size is needed to house the GPU and related cooling, which they did. This is the second desktop PC they’ve released, no? They had one like 10 years ago that was a commercial failure? My impression as a console gamer is that the Deck is very successful and popular, but it’s under-powered for playing on a big screen.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
Right, my point was just bumping the chipset/CPU/memory would give a nice marketing tagline like that without designing a whole new desktop PC. Obviously, you can’t put a giant modern CPU and heat sinks and fans in a handheld. So spend that engineering R&D money on giving the dock a GPU so now the Deck performs as well as the Machine would have, and you have it using a successful branding rather than reviving a brand that already failed once.
It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming,
This is the second desktop PC they’ve released, no?
No. They have never designed a desktop before. The original Steam Machine was mainly a branding program for system integrators coupled with the release of the original Steam OS.
rather than reviving a brand that already failed once
Or do what they’re already doing and just call it something else.
But there’s one major thing you’re missing/ignoring: a big reason why the Steam Deck was a hit is because it has good price/performance. EGPU’s are the antithesis of that. They don’t scale well, and they add extra hardware and complexity, driving up price and limiting performance.
Right, that’s what I’m saying. Make a v2 Deck with upgraded CPU/memory, and put the GPU in the dock so it can do 4k on a big screen. I’m sure “Deck v2 is 4x more powerful than v1 and you can dock it for 4k @ 60fps on the big screen” would be just as good a marketing line as “Machine is 6x more powerful than a Deck”.
Though I wonder if making a docked Deck be on equal footing with the Machine would have been a better use of R&D.
No, it would not. Buulding a Steam Deck that’s 6x more powerful (the claimed comparison for the Steam Machine) is NOT possible with today’s technology. For anyone.
The Steam Deck has to be hand portable and get somewhat decent battery life. That leaves little little space for a cooling solution. You cannot beat thermodynamics.
My guess would be that around $800 sounds roughly right… if you try to approximate a small form factor pc with… roughly those specs?
You’d kinda end up around there, but… the architecture is so nonstandard, its hard to say.
You gotta think of it as an SFF PC not a console.
Because its closer to an SFF PC than it is to a console.
Right like, this thing is also a PC, its a laptop or w/e if you plug a mouse and keyboard into it.
I run desktop mode on my Deck all the time, use it as a laptop/tablet of sorts.
As far as tiers go, GN has said there are plans for a 512 GB and 2TB variant, so, there’s at least two tiers… I would not expect like, more or less GDDR5/6 RAM variants though, the whole thing is built too much around the exact power draw and thermal load.
But on the other hand, Valve have economies of scale, so they can build this thing cheaper than a normal person can build a PC. Plus, they don’t need to make a huge profit on this stuff. The purpose of the hardware is to sell games. At least that’s what I’ll keep telling myself until we find out more.
But on the other other hand, tariffs, and RAM just doubled in cost in like the last month, because… well this time its not bitcoin miners buying all the GPUs, its… the entire AI industry is a multi trillion dollar scam.
Hilariously, one way to read this announcement is that Valve expects the AI bubble to blow up by ‘early next year’, thus lowering RAM costs, ahahaha!
Holy shit, Valve is clowning on MSFT so fucking hard right now.
There’s no display, no battery, no controller included, no OS fees.. I think it could be cheaper than $800.
Because it’s all custom hardware we don’t really have a great basis for comparison. I’m going to guess that the cheapest variant will be something like $650. Doubt more than $700 though.
GLaDoS may or may not flood your home with neurotoxin if you try this, but uh, you could run a local LLM on it, and thus just have your own AI catgirlfriend or maybe lightweight coding assistant w/e.
I’ve futzed about with OpenLlama on a Bazzite Deck, there aren’t too many models lightweight enough to run, but some of them work!
I have a PSVR2 and I don’t consider the capability of VR to be its failure. I have to assume it’s just that much harder and more expensive to develop for VR. Like the FPS genre is hugely successful, and that’s such a natural fit for VR.
I think it’s just an accessibility thing. VR is expensive, and it takes people pushing through some disorientation/nausea to really enjoy it. Many will simply feel sick the first few times they try it, decide it’s not for them and leave it.
Just place a fan on the floor in front of you. Bam! No nausea. Because now your body instinctively knows your position and orientation in the space you’re in.
As someone who experienced nausea. I’ve tried all kinds of tricks. They all help, just like Dramamine or those bands with the beads that 1/10 pain.
It took quite a while to get over the nausea. A lot of starting and stopping with slightly longer sessions each time.
I fully expect that most people would not be willing to do that but I received the system as a gift and I really liked it. I wish they had more longer games. I’m so tired of the games that are 30s of concept and then do it over-and-over.
Gamdevs should get roylties based off contribution like a number so small for indie games its meaningless unless it does well, but for bringingg us longlasting moneymaking games like gta they should be making way more
Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.
I mean they can do that and quality assurance will struggle even more, making indie games look even better in comparison. Let publishers keep shooting themselves in the foot in their endless greed. It will only speed up the destructive cycle.
I pretty much only buy indie games these days, maybe one AAA a year and I used to buy multiple a month. Most stuff doesn’t feel unique enough, like I’m just repeating experiences with slightly different themes and controls.
Uhh, going to need to see some evidence of that. Literally never heard of non indie devs getting royalties or continued payments based off the success of the game.
Actually I’ll correct myself, rockstar is the only company I’ve heard of that does big internal payouts post launch. Most of Rockstars game launches have resulted in new houses for some of their teams.
Unfortunately for larger games individual devs don’t have that much control nor can have a mensurable impact. For example, I wrote a few lines of code for a large game, those lines will be executed every single time the game runs, but if they weren’t there no user would notice. I was told to write those lines, and it’s not something I personally wanted to add to the game, there was an issue, I was sent to fix it, I did. This is true for the vast majority of the game code, most devs are pointed to issues to fix or features to implement, they have some wiggle room in the how to do stuff, but the what to do has been approved by the boss of the manager of your manager’s manager, and unless there’s a good reason it won’t change.
Think about it this way, have you ever watched the credits from a AAA game? The vast majority (as in there are likely only a couple of persons who didn’t) of the people in that list contributed something to the game, either directly or indirectly, it’s hard to measure how much each contributed, a small but critical fix might be more important than a large but unused feature, how do you measure between the two?. Not to mention past employees who did stuff for a previous game that got re-used.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice idea, one that I would personally benefit from, but I think it’s just not feasible for large games. In short it’s impossible to be fair doing that, and people would get hurt because John from accounting got the same share that he did. And if you do it in any other way that’s not everyone gets the same share, you’re essentially playing favorites with the people whose job is to do the stuff you’ve ranked higher, even though the other person’s job is just as important.
That is true. However, you can still solve it and i have seen it work in practice: allow every employee to buy shares of the company. Fixed limit of shares per year of employment. Shares cannot be sold on the free market, they are bound to employment. Shares are kept after departure. Shares give dividends as usual.
That’s an interesting approach, but eventually you’ll run out of shares to allow employees to buy, and you’ll have to dilute the ones you’ve already sold. You need to think that AAA studios have hundreds of people working there, and certain games have thousands of people working on related stuff that’s not directly the game but contributes, like engine, servers, social, etc.
There is no problem with diluting. It’s not guaranteed amount passive income :) but if more people work there, you would usually also have higher gains to distribute. And old shares eventually disappear, they are not inheritable.
the problem is that companies will find a way to screw devs with that too. Imagine figuring out a solution to track every single bit of contribution to keep royalties as low as possible based on STATS BYATCH. it will literally turn into “your grass texture will bring you 0.00000000000000000000000001 cent off each sale” kind of fuck around.
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