I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
Got it into my cart within seconds, didn’t even get through more than the cart screen before I started getting 502 errors. Eventually went out of stock. But, showed back in stock a few minutes later and I was able to get my order in. My order email shows 12:29 (10:29 PST).
Already had a 512 Deck that I got in Feb 2022, but when you combine mainstream Linux gaming, OLED, and a translucent shell, apparently I have no self-control.
Well I didn’t first discover it on deck but I play a ton of Spelunky 2 on deck. Every time I boot it up intending to play something else, I see it there and go, “ooook just a couple rounds”
Fall Guys, have had it on steam since before it got bought by epic, having the SD and looking for good controller-based games right after I first got the deck convinced me to play it. I’ve played it almost every day since getting my deck in February of last year. Had been getting a bit bored of it just before the constructor update (user built levels), and the fact that it was broken for ~a week after an epic games services update didn’t help, but the new constructor levels sucked me back in. I usually play it in the morning to help me wake up, the whole bright colors & tight races thing really help my brain to start turning on.
Had a good playthrough of Dishonoured 2 and Death of the Outsider on my Deck. They run extremely well on the Steam Deck and I found a control layout that I liked.
Tried Hollow Knight for the first time on the Deck, it works so well!
I’m not even specially good at gaming but I thought Hornet (a Hollow Knight boss) was quite enjoyable and not that hard and I wonder if it has to do with the Deck controls, since everyone has mentioned how difficult that one is (I did find all other bosses very difficult so this is not a boast).
Edit to mention that Horizon: Zero Dawn is another one that I only tried with the Deck and it also works really well, though this one consumes a lot more battery compared to HK.
I am going to sound like an unpopular opinion but some games are just easier without keyboard and mouse. I personally have a controller for these games.
just want to say, if you have the choice to buy either the Xbox One or the newer Xbox Series controllers, it’s worth it to go for the newer one. Some of the buttons (the bumpers in particular) are way better on the newer controller.
Disagree on HZD unless there were significant updates. I was around halfway through the game when I bought my deck, loaded it up on there to see how it ran, and uninstalled after about 15 minutes of never being able to make it over 15 FPS on lowest settings.
It's playable, if stuttery, in town and in cutscenes. When you start combat it becomes a PowerPoint. Which is a shame, because I really really liked that game, but I finished it on PC instead.
Monster Hunter Rise has been scratching that particular genre itch for me on the Deck though. Rise was built for the Switch so it plays on the Deck like it was born there. Smooth as butter.
Now that I think about it, I had to tweak some settings for HZD according to some guide, but I don’t remember exactly what I did. After that, it worked quite well. Perhaps it wasn’t 60 fps but 40? For me that was good enough.
It could still depend on standards. For example people seem to say Rimworld is great on the Deck but I absolutely disagree.
Bloodstained is a top contender, I can’t say I first discovered it on the Deck, but it just feels right on a handheld, in a way that it didn’t with controller on desktop, and the Switch just isn’t good enough to run it at a passable framerate.
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