Valve really operates in a different market from Microsoft or Sony, but what hurt them was a couple of things:
Repeatedly skipping Gamescom essentially told Sony “Yeah, we don’t care about Europe.” And the sales numbers show it. Sony owns Europe.
No differential between console and PC. Launching the same game at the same time on PC and Xbox doesn’t incentivize people to a) buy games on Xbox or b) develop games on Xbox. Why bother if it’s on PC the same day?
Focusing on digital vs. physical takes games out of stores. On a recent trip to Target they had a nice big Playstation section and a nice big Switch section. Hey? Where are the Xbox games?
Yeah, and what I’m saying is that the original appeal of Xbox was that it brought a PC gaming experience to the living room.
Stuff like hard drives and online multiplayer, that was a PC thing.
Games like Halo, MechWarrior, and Fable—they were more culturally a PC thing. Then Microsoft made it a console thing.
In my opinion, what killed Xbox as a console is that PC gamers no longer felt a need to “go console”. And the only customers left for Xbox were dyed-in-the-wool console gamers.
Which you can’t really build a business off of since even in the best case scenario, consoles sell only 150M units per generation.
The Xbox One should have been a Windows box in a console shell.
I kinda had the opposite experience, I had been a PC gamer for years before the Xbox came out, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Aliens Total Conversion, Hexen, Rise of the Triad, Quake, Unreal…
By then I had kind of burned out on FPS, so when I heard about Halo I was like “I dunno… another FPS…”
Then I played a demo in the store and was like “Shut up and take my money!”
Re 2, I was and am angry about how MS handled the Xbox exclusives. They spent the 90s making games for the pc that were great, and then the Xbox drops and the pc market is ignored for years. “just buy the console” makes no sense when I have a far superior machine right here, and when multi-player is behind a subscription. I was gifted an Xbox a few years after launch, along with Midtown Madness 3, the only game I wanted - and never gave MS a cent of my own money. I stayed on Halo 1 for years, then when Halo 2 finally dropped for the pc, I got it and enjoyed my first playthrough on my computer. My first playthrough of H3, ODST, and 4 weren’t until the MCC dropped on steam. I got Forza bundled with the Xbox, but it wasn’t until Horizon 3 released on pc that I got into it.
I fucking despise the 15-year window where MS just abandoned their loyal customers on pc to milk people with their inferior box and subscription bullshit. The smartest move they have made was re-embrace the pc as a customer base. And 8 year-old me could have told those moronic C-suites in 2001. They isolated a core customer base for short-term profits, and they have earned nothing but resentment for it.
The Xbox should have always been a product for “I don’t understand computers, but I want to play games”, while the pc should have remained a “I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need a walled garden”. MS fucked up massively, and lost out on revenue trying to force their hand for a decade+. The fact that they release on both is nothing but positive, as they get customers from both camps, and they finally are undoing a bit of the hate and resentment they caused.
I feel like Microsoft was their own enemy. They kept slicing off small portions of their market in pursuit of vendor lock-in. Now there is nobody left supporting them.
They ran off even their most loyal players one by one with their asinine moves. Lame games, vendor lockin, nickle and dining.
I was die hard for Xbox. Had every one, dozens of games, more probably. Have fond memories of lan parties and friends coming over to play split screen. I remember playing through halo 3 the night it dropped into the early morning, and getting the beta from Reach.
Then they killed off split screen. And lan gaming. You had to use Xbox live to play with your friend in the room. Oh no they don’t have Xbox live. Oh no there’s an update. Now they don’t have their password. They can’t join my party. The audio doesn’t work. It became a hassle to play with people
In my experience it has always had an horrible experience.
Also pc gaming has always been a thing.
It’s just that consoles have been harder to justify not only because pc gaming have gotten better. But because consoles have gotten worse. It’s no longer plug and play, now you have to do the same steps of installing, downloading things, checking if your version of the console can run that game… At that point big consoles are harder and harder to justify.
Sony will go behind of they don’t do some changes. Xbox fell sooner because they had a thinner base. But sony is not out of danger.
Nintendo is probably fine as they rotated to handhelds, which are a different niche than normal pcs. And because they hold massive exclusive IPs.
Specifically, I have a desktop PC, with an RTX 3090, hooked up to my TV.
Now I don’t recommend doing it this way anymore. It’s probably better to buy something like a Legion Go, hook it up to an eGPU, while you dock it to a TV.
But probably your bigger question is, “Why do I use Steam Big Picture?”
Because I specifically want to play PC games on my TV. Half my Steam library natively supports gamepad. And of those that don’t, I can easily adapt keyboard controls to a gamepad—if community-built options have not yet been made.
Pretty sure Big Picture uses the exact same interface as the steam deck nowadays, which is a much better experience than the old thing. At least when I stream through Moonlight, I haven’t manually launched big picture in years.
When was the last time you used Big Picture? I have a micro ITX build hooked up to my TV running Bazzite desktop, and have Big Picture loading at boot.
It’s a console. And it’s fantastic. It also lets me mod it so I can make it look like a Wii U if I wanted.
You just had to put Chemical Zone as the first pic… Childhood horror unlocked. That music.
It was also truly novel at the time to use a secondary cartridge to enhance the first 3 games, injecting that unique echidna traversal into each one. Were there any other games that did that?
On the upside, the trailer for Mania was a real treat when it first dropped and it also got me to love Nitro Fun and Hyper Potions. I think I’ll jump back into it tomorrow 😁
So you’re wanting to eliminate as many of these games as possible from your wishlist? The only ones I’ve played here are A Short Hike and Animal Well, and I can vouch for both of those being incredible.
A Short Hike is very charming. I had such a fun time playing through it one afternoon and finding all the little secrets. It has a lovely artstyle and is the perfect length.
Animal Well is simply a great metroidvania with some really unique items and beautiful pixel art. There’s some tricky platforming there if you want to get the collectables.
Sorry if that doesn’t really help with your conundrum, but if you want to cut down your wishlist I’d recommend keeping those ones!
I added it when I saw someone praise that the trans-flag shirt gives you extra damage with bricks. Last-minute addition and probably going in my “closer-scrutiny” pile along with Tiny Glade and Dollmare.
In case you’re wondering, the graph looks like this. There have currently been 16k new signatures today. The required pace to make it would be 10k a day. Yesterday the count increased by about 30k signatures.
TL;DR Keep spreading this to people you know, and keep signing. It’s working.
Until last week I thought it was done, but somehow it flipped around. Things are looking pretty good, with massive youtubers and streamers taöking about it.
I’m glad the ball is rolling again. This can change gaming and set a precedent for other things as well.
It flipped around because the founder of the movement, Ross, of AccursedFarms on youtube… released a video giving a status report…
And spending a good deal of the video explaining how Thor, PirateSoftware on youtube… has basically been making up bullshit and spreading nonsense about SKG for months now, actively campaigning against SKG, again, based almost entirely on him jumping to hysterical, catastrophic conclusions without factual basis
After that video… basically every single AngloSphere Gamer Youtuber has been putting out videos spreading the SKG messsge, and dogpiling on Thor for being a confused, overconfident narcissist… and Thor is now double triple quadrupling down with ‘im the real victim’ and other such tactics often employed by manipulative narcissists facing the revelation of their public persona as essentially entirely hypocritical.
EDIT: Also, as of right now, I’m seeing 723k…
Which is roughly +20k in only 6 hours from the time this OP was made.
EDIT 2:
If you’ve ever heard of, or seen the Freeman’s Mind series… yeah, that’s Ross, basically being Freeman’s internal monologue, and turning the entirety of Half Life into an action comedy bonanza.
He had more recently been attempting to get through all of HL2 this way as well, in addition to doing esoteric game reviews… untill he got so pissed about Ubisoft being able to just murder The Crew, and what is going on with all games in terms of consumer rights… that he started the SKG movement, and hasn’t had much time to work on his other stuff as much.
To be honest, neither did I… and I may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment, could have sworn someone was asking ‘why line go up so fast now’.
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts and, y'know, contributing what I can to the state of human knowledge, or what remains of it anyway. I can't blame people for being defensive about it. It's the AIs themselves I'm offended by, they're the ones doing wrong. We're all just trying to cope with the avalanche of unverified garbage they're putting out. It's digital pollution.
Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.
Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.
Botting something like a citizens initiative, where every signature WILL get scrutinized by government would be seriously stupid. Or are you saying commenters like me are bots?
Is it really that hard for you to imagine the possibility… that people care?
Or are just not aware of the chain of youtubers doing a call to arms on this, getting millions of views, completely explaining the signature spike?
There is zero scrutiny possible for the form which is 100% based on trust that the signer is who they say they are adults where they say they are. If you want to be John Smith in UK, Paddy Murphy in Ireland and Jurgen Schmidt in Germany, you can be. There’s a reason none of these initiatives have done anything except keep people who care about something busy with dopamine graphing instead of doing something like boycotting relevant games and publishers.
And no, like to the EU, Youtuber noise is not relevant to me. Millions of views is literally nothing. You see the general state of the world, yes?
Right. Because caring about A means you can’t care about B. If you support legislation, you must be boycoting nothing, because no-one in the history of existence has ever done both.
You’re claiming mutual exclusivity where none exists.
You sound more like you’re scared of the implications of this passing, because you’d have us voting with out wallets rather than… actually voting. Nevermind that even games not worth buying should still also be preserved.
Pre-orders, micro-transactions and battle-passes are still a thing, no matter how much we’ve shouted about “big company bad”. This type of crap isn’t something we solve by any one method alone.
And you don’t need to engage with youtube or any other social media, to accept that the phenomenon they enable, occur. To dismiss that reality would be idiotic delusion.
Millions of views is a lot, when all you need to get started, is one of those millions to sign a petition.
Man what the fuck are you talking about, it requires an EU, country specific verification document(s)/id(s), or the intraEU digital ID to verify you are an actual real person who lives where you say you do.
This is an official EU webportal for formal citizens initiatives petitions.
Like, ok, I guess you could just spam it with a bot/script, and then INTERPOL comes after you for fucking with an official government website, potentially hundreds or thousands of counts of attempted impersonation / identity theft and lying on a government/legal document.
Like sure, go do a DDOS on I dunno, whitehouse.gov, or your US’s state’s unemployment assistance application web portal.
Those are approximately equivalently stupid things to do.
OK buddy, cybercrime never happens and interpol will come arrest your python script if it did because you messed with an EU “government” form that might have resulted in them having to get a 60 year old Greek politican to ask what a EULA was
That’s entirely backwards. I’ve boycotted these online kill-switched games pretty well, but that means fuck all because the general public is incapable of collectively caring about anything. Regulation on the other hand does have an effect, and should the initiative pass, EU is required to properly answer it.
Answering doesn’t mean doing anything, and all they have to do is generally wave in the direction of the overwhelming popularity and profitability of the products compared to the online petition that 0.2% of the EU’s adult population will have signed.
If the general public does not care, legislation will not follow. Filling out and promotinh a glorified change.org form is energy wasted on actually popularising your viewpoint instead of trying uselessly to get it in unpopularly.
Entirely discounting the fact that the EU has a track record of consumer friendly regulation. I agree, instead of doing what has the highest chance of success, let’s do nothing that could have an impact instead.
What on earth makes you think an online petition, which has never led to any of the consumer friendly regulation you mention, has the ‘highest’ chance? Or that the alternative to a petition is doing nothing?
All of that regulation came primarily from legal cases.
It does mean doing something: they have to spell out whether consumers should have rights on this or not. Currently it’s undefined, which is equivalent to “not.”
popularizing your viewpont
And the initiative works against that? You say the cause could have gotten more publicity without it? I really don’t see how that could happen, or understand the point in guilt tripping over it.
energy wasted
I’m starting to think this argument is energy wasted.
These are just the ones released this year. Next year there’ll be more. And there are games from last year I haven’t gotten to (and the classics on top of that). Leaving the list too big means I miss a lot of them and the ones I do play would be based on gut instinct.
Perhaps at this point there’s no better option than gut instinct, now that I’ve exhausted basically all other criteria. I guess there are more fundamental questions I should be asking myself about how to handle the post-scarcity world of art.
Yup. Personally now that I’m an adult and have Responsibilities, I spend less time playing games. I hardly even follow new games coming out, and just work on recommendations from friends, or stuff from developers whose games I’ve enjoyed in the past.
Are y’all trying to lure me to the dark side (i.e. hermit life)?
But Tactical Breach Wizards, I played the Next Fest demo and enjoyed it but removed it from my wishlist because they took down the demo. More than games that just never put out a demo, a game that puts one out and then consciously decides to take it down, those tend to be bad more often than not.
They put the demo back up so now it’s back on the list. Not a fan of complicated time-travel plots, I’ve been burnt before with them, but I’m intending to give it the benefit of the doubt.
It’s been a minute since I last played it, but the time travel is mostly just a story reason for the ability to undo moves in-game. The story is more character driven.
While I agree with you that it should be an option to turn it off, who is telling you that you need to send a full message if someone sees you were typing?
We’re the ones making the rules for this world full of technologies and we create the social rules for them daily with our own actions. Fuck that expectation, I’m sure other people can surmise what happened even if they noticed you were typing for just a second, they’re working with the same limited software.
Lol. The amount of times I’m actually typing something and then think “nahhhhh, not worth it” and delete the whole thing anyway I think my friends are all used to this 😅
I think the “typing” status is debounced to a few seconds only. You won’t appear to be typing if you stop actually typing. At least that’s how most messengers work that I use.
Unless they were looking, they wont have seen it. And as far as I know, just the cursor being active sends the “typing” indicator in some apps. When I see it for just a second I just assume someone hovered over the chatbox for a bit.
No-one thinks it’s weird for it to pop up for a second and then go away. Or for it to appear for a good while and still not get you a message. Sometimes I’ll write a first draft of a response right away, then leave it there for hours while I think about it some more, before finalizing it.
It would be smart if chat apps implemented a minimum, where “typing” won’t apper until you’re three words into writing a response or something.
That way it wont go off over nothing. It’s still useful, it lets you/them know whether you’re getting/giving an immediate response, so you/they know whether the conversion is continuing right away, or later.
Some of these games actually have demos you can try to get a feel for yourself if you actually want the full game or not.
That said, Tiny Glade isn’t really a “game” so much as a chill town/castle builder that you take screenshots of. It’s cool, it’s pretty, I have it, but only get it if you’re wanting something like Townscaper or Dystopika.
I’ve played a lot of the demos, but either I’m still undecided on a lot of them. After playing the Tiny Glade demo, I put it in my “undecided” folder and then moved it to my “want” folder. I don’t do well with structureless games but Tiny Glade really seems like one of those must-haves.
Tiny Glade is definitely gonna be one I need to think more about.
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