It was put out that everyone should change their passwords. That kind of info for like 90 million steam accounts would fetch a much higher price or ransom than some personal info on a bunch of people like names, phone numbers and an address.
They're NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it's the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I'm sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I'd say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
We don’t really know this. It is possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo’s devices don’t really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
While we don’t have detailed info on the Switch 2 CPU, the original Switch CPU was three generations behind at the time of the console’s release.
Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It's kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a... weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn't make too many assumptions about how these things go.
If you primarily play CPU bound strategy games, you can very much make conclusive statements about CPU performance. For example, Cities in Motion 1 (from the studio that created Cities: Skylines), released in 2010, can bring a modern CPU to its knees if you use modded maps, free look and say a 1440p monitor (the graphics don’t actually matter). Even a simple looking game like The Final Earth 2 can bring your FPS to a crawl due to CPU bottlenecks (even modern CPUs) in the late game with large maps. I will note that The Final Earth 2 has an Android version, but that doesn’t mean the game (which I’ve played on Android) isn’t fundamentally limited by CPU performance.
It very much is a genre thing. Can you show me a game like Transport Fever 2 on the Switch? Cities: Skylines?
The OG switch CPU was completely outdated when released and provides extremely poor performance.
The switch was released in 2017. It’s CPU, the cortex A57, was released in 2012. It was three generation behind the cortex A75 that was released in 2017.
The Switch CPU had very poor performance for 2017, it was 3 generations behind then current ARM/cortex releases.
It is very likely the CPU in the Switch 2 will also be subpar by modern standards.
I.e. You don’t know that the Steam Deck has a worse CPU and considering Nintendo’s history with CPUs, it is not impossible for the Switch 2 CPU to be noticeably worse than the Steam Deck.
Nobody was complaining about the Switch CPU. It was a pretty solid choice for the time. It outperformed the Xbox 360 somewhat, which is really all it needed to do to support last-gen ports. Like I said, the big annoyance that was specifically CPU-related from a dev perspective was the low thread count, which made cramming previous-gen multithreaded stuff into a fraction of the threads a bit of a mess.
The point of a console CPU is to run games, it's not raw compute. The Switch had what it needed for the scope of games it was running. On a handheld you also want it to be power efficient, which it was. In fact, the Switch didn't overclock the CPU on docked, just the GPU. Because it didn't need it. And we now know it did have some headroom to run faster, jailbroken Switches can be reliably clocked up a fair amount. Nintendo locked it that low because they found it was the right balance of power consumption and speed to support the rest of the components.
Memory bandwidth ended up being much more of a bottleneck on it. For a lot of the games you wanted to make on a Switch the CPU was not the limit you were bumping into. The memory and the GPU were more likely to be slowing you down before CPU cycles did.
The Switch CPU performs extremely poorly as far as gaming is concerned. Case in point, you cited Cities: Skylines, a quick web search suggests performance is terrible on the Switch and it seems to have been abandoned shortly after release.
While I don’t doubt the Switch 2 CPU will be sufficient for games released by Nintendo, from a broader gaming perspective (gaming is not only Nintendo), it is likely the Switch 2 CPU will also be subpar and will perform worse than the Steam Deck (which is a handheld and its CPU is also subject to efficiency requirements). Whether Nintendo users know/care/don’t care about this is irrelevant. We are talking about objective facts.
What "standards" are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that's not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no "standard".
Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don't know that and can't go claiming it as fact.
All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck's 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.
OP claimed the Steam Deck’s CPU was definitely worse than the Switch 2 (this was an explicit, categorical statement).
Considering the Switch’s history (Cortex A57 used in the OG Switch being three generation behind in 2017), it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Switch 2 CPU is likely to be extremely weak from a gaming perspective (I never brought up compute or synthetic benchmarks).
Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it's behind?
The Switch 1 didn't use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that's what you're fixating on then you're missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.
Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn’t have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
So it's not a similar device. Comparing to phones is rather misleading, given that phones do not have active cooling and wouldn't actually be able to run the kinds of games the Switch hardware could without catching on fire in the process. They aren't gaming hardware.
It’s a portable gaming device. It is in the same market.
You can play complex strategy games that require strong CPUs like Project Highrise, The Final Earth 2, Mega Mall Story 2 on mobile.
You won’t be able to run The Final Earth 2 even with the standard mobile population limit on a Switch because it uses an ancient CPU and it’s a quad core.
Don’t limit yourself by Nintendo PR and marketing. The gaming world (portable or otherwise) is not limited to Nintendo.
I can’t tell if this is just Wizards of the Coast panicking and flailing because they are out of good ideas, or if they are actually carefully analyzing and re-evaluating older cards because the balance and synergy of the current cards allow for the use of these older cards without being game breaking.
Hearthstone was doing this about a year ago when I quit. It was actually great for the game and really shook things up in the Wild format where you could play any set of cards. But Blizzard shit the bed on that one like usual, oh well.
Ohhh dammit. Of course. Man that sucks. Thank you for clarifying!
I was hoping they would make gold cheaper because that’s really all that I need. But of course they tack on every other thing and then raise prices even more.
As a rental service game pass is great. But at regular price it is too much for me. I’m gona miss converting 3 years of gold to ultimate, though, lol. I’ll be going back to the cheapest tier when I run out.
Seems interesting, I hadn’t heard of this before. She seems to have to imagine an image of a thing to get the control to register, like a cricket jumping to make her character jump, which actually seems more difficult than just playing with a physical controller or keyboard/mouse, since I don’t think I actually “think” about making those sorts of movements. It seems like it would be cumbersome having to imagine the movement everytime, but maybe it becomes 2nd nature for her while she’s playing like this.
I wonder if there could be a feedback loop on something like it too where if you see your character walking then they’ll continually walk because you’re actively seeing/imagining it?
I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.
But if I were to buy one, I’d like that every worker at the factory who assembled it got paid some percentage of the factories profits, and had some amount of input on the leadership of the company as a whole, not just an hourly wage.
Does it generally work like that? No, but doesn’t mean I don’t think that’s a better way to do things.
Unless the company is an ESOP, has some sort of profit sharing mechanism or is a co-op, they do not, they only get paid an hourly wage or a salary. If the company becomes more profitable, they do not see a consummate increase In their compensation. And they have no say on if the company is sold, and they are not compensated in anyway for the company they’ve contributed to being sold.
Where do you think the wages materialize? They get paid out of the product sold. Literally every time you buy something the company uses that money to compensate their workers for their time and skill.
Profit is revenue minus expenses. Wages are part of expenses.
Wages are used to ensure that people working there are able to keep working there, covering day day expenses of the workers.
Wages rarely reflect the real value of the effort put in by the people working at the company. They reflect the cost to the worker of choosing to work at the company.
I think that workers at a company should be payed some percentage of the profit of the company, with financiers and investors receiving some percentage of the profit in turn.
I agree, wages should be distributed more evenly with the bare minimum wage being so that fuckhead todd who never does anything and only works part time could still afford paying morgage/rent, food and transportation. Id also like managers and ceos be held responsible for any big fuckups of the company. How nestle is still allowed to exist is beyond me.
Honestly I prefer console to PC so much, even as a fediverse user, linux user, someone who has a degoogled phone and uses a home server instead of a cloud, because I just hate having to worry if games are compatible with my hardware, or if controllers are compatible with my game, or if graphical oddities in my game represent supernatural parts of the story or that I didn’t install the right NVidia driver. When it comes to games, which are leisure, I find I just can’t relax with PC games like I can with console games. As for emulation, I can’t enjoy my games like that at all becuse the worry that settings are wrong or emulation is wrong is just too much like work. So I love my switch and I’ll probably love my switch 2 one day.
Hello fellow kids, I, too, can not enjoy my steam deck video game PC. I prefer to pay my tithe to Nintendo, my best friend and surrogate parent. I love [Product].
Yes, to an extent, which is positive. I don’t know too much about the steam deck side of things, but I don’t get the impression that it’s got enough PC market share to do that. I have a steam controller and last time I used that (admittedly years ago when it was still pretty new) I found Steam Input really didn’t have good defaults at all, despite what they said. The only sort of good defaults had the drawback of just ignoring most of the device’s USPs. It was bad, and community profiles weren’t good either. Maybe it got better?
Honestly, as someone close to the game, it’s more of “we can’t make the casuals and competitive players happy while catering to collectors all at the same time” and Gavin is using Pauper to test something that has ramifications for the rest of the game.
But here’s the catch, Pauper has been incredible this whole time! These bans/unbans are dope! I think this will work and it does set the precedent for the idiot business people that you can manage a format independent of design teams and stockholders.
First time for a “trial unban” where they go back to the ban list if they don’t positively impact the format? Yes, this is the first time an official “trial” has occurred in the competitive history of the game. The only time they have come close to this was the original ban of High Tide when paper and online ban lists merged.
I’m not talking about unbans in general and neither is the article.
I concur that unbans are usually a reaction to power creep. However, Modern has always been a mismanaged format since it’s inception. The premise of banning the top decks so that Modern was different from “Old Extended” (because Extended at the time became a “Double long Standard” instead of a rotating Type 2 Format) damaged the genesis of the format, which inevitably led to Grixis Twin’s dominance. I do think the format back then could’ve benefitted from Fae/Sculpter/Thopter-Sword/Affinity being legal and providing variance.
Author’s website, which, after playing a little text game, takes you to a better place to buy it from than Bezos’s fetid swamp - curiousvideogamemachines.com
polygon.com
Ważne