Do you mean Xbox Game Pass Ultimate? It can be streamed out of a browser or mobile app.
Why would they need a hardware device when your probably holding a device that supports cloud streaming and they can milk you for a subscription fee?
Good idea waiting on Firebreak. I’ve dabbled thanks to it being included in the PS+ Extra tier and have some thoughts. It’s clearly a Double-A or even Single-A if that exists game that feels like a fun side project while Control 2 is in the works. There is fun to be had in it especially if you can get friends involved but it isn’t a game with staying power. I feel like I’ll keep it installed for a while and play a few rounds every now and again, checking on the patches, and just using it for a fun romp with no commitment. It is certainly light on content and buggy though so a few patches wouldn’t go amiss.
I keep playing it just because it’s something to do, but I feel it really misses the mark of what the Control franchise should be about. The world is interesting. It told interesting stories within the confines of a single player game. Firebreak doesn’t seem to have a story at all, and the action is pretty average with the same mininal enemy variety as Control. It also does not feel like a game from a company like Remedy; it’s half-cooked and janky. It works but it’s not quite polished.
the ability to log in via the Windows lockscreen with your controller
Seems like they’ve finally taken some notes from the Steam Deck, interested to see if they can actually make something decent. It seems unlikely, but I’m still interested!
Personally, I think the Deck is too big for my tastes, but the beauty of the ecosystem is that anyone can make one while still having almost all the Deck features.
I’d love to have a Vita or even PSP sized Steam handheld with a great screen for smaller titles, but that comes with its own problems
Yeah the one big thing Valve probably won’t touch is ARM because unlike WINE, that’s a whole other beast in which the only valid solution is for game devs to compile for ARM, because translation layers like Rossetta and Box64 will always have 20-30% performance losses.
There’s been reports of Valve looking at ARM for Proton actually but x86 chips keep getting better and more efficient. Not to mention Mali and Adreno are laughably bad compared to Radeon and Arc.
Honestly though I love the size of the deck but could even go a little bigger. Agree that as more manufacturers start using SteamOS it will be great to have options.
I think it’s perfectly sized. No need for change. And the OLED model is noticeably more lightweight than the original LCD model, so the newer one isn’t too heavy.
I’m with you, I have large hands but I’m a serious gamer. An hour in and I’m already feeling it’s weight and feeling the fatigue. It’s a very impressive device, but it doesn’t suit me and my needs at all.
Bought an r36s and it’s glorious. Playing all the classic SNES and PSX games I didn’t play back in the day. Can grind in an RPG for hours one handed and it fits in my pocket. Bonus is that it’s so cheap if it breaks or gets lost it’s no big deal.
People think Xbox is shit at the moment. Making things more like xbox isnt received as positively as it used to be. When I was a windows user and I saw anything Xbox related come up I knew I was about to deal with some clunky bullshit that was not wanted and poorly implemented.
Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, conditions which don’t currently exist in the GPU space, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.
Maybe on the initial release, but not for long after.
I’m not so sure. Companies were definitely buying many up, but they typically stick to business purchasing channels like CDW/Dell/HP etc.
Consumer boxed cards sold by retailers might have went to some small businesses/startups and independent developers but largely they were picked up by scalpers or gamers.
I work in IT and have never went to a store to buy a video card unless it was an emergency need to get a system functional again. It’s vastly preferred to buy things through a VAR where warranties and support are much more robust than consumer channels.
Apex was the game I played with my friends to keep in touch long distance. Guess I gotta find something new now. Sure as he’ll ain’t installing Win11 for it.
I guess it’s been a long time coming. The dev decisions and priorities the last few years have really made it feel like I’m the last person they want playing their game.
If you are looking for a semi competitive shooter, I’d highly recommend The Finals. Tons of fun and solid gun play. Game isn’t officially supported but runs great on linux.
I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very few units, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn’t count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it’s built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a “jailbreak” is released by basically an employee of analogue).
Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon’s cheap Mister Pi (retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It’s an open source project as opposed to analogue’s implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I’m super stoked for.
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
That’s super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)
They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.
If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don’t bubble down to PC).
I’m still waiting for a reason to get a PS5 at all, everything I’ve been interested still got released on PS4 too - except for one single game.
I really don’t care for better specs anymore, I probably couldn’t even tell PS4 and PS5 games apart without a side-by-side comparison. Not to mention, to see a difference at all I’d need a new TV on top of the console. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
One major improvement with the PS5 is the instant loading times. I don’t think this thing will be any faster in that regard but it’s a major improvement over the PS4. The other improvement over my original PS4 is that it doesn’t sound like a jet engine after 20 minutes of running.
Ray tracing is cool but what console games are even using it at this point? It’s like them advertising “8K capable” as if anyone gives a shit about that during a time that 4k is just barely becoming the standard for most.
Consoles are a dying breed, especially Xbox and Playstation. Almost every exclusive ends up on PC anyway now, even then I personally don't think there's any game worth spending this much on hardware to play. There's literally no point in buying an Xbox or Playstation unless you really really don't want to bother with a PC setup.
I bet the market will end up as just PC and mobile. I mean the PC market share has already overtaken consoles.
We will see when Playstation 6 releases, its unlikely to sell as much as PS5 did, let alone PS4. Microsoft already realised the decline and are jumping into games as a service for the Xbox brand, ideally they would want you to just stream their games, as shitty as that is. With Xbox gone, there's no competition and with Sony being Sony, they are going to abuse that to squeeze any extra money they can from people still willing.
PC became a lot more affordable and accessible in the last decade and it doesn't lock you into a closed ecosystem, you can upgrade when you want, you don't have to pay subscriptions to play online games.
Kids are more exposed to PC gaming than ever before, with all the popular 'content creators' primarily playing on PC, so they are naturally swayed to it more than consoles.
I hear so many stories of people switching to PC, friends asking me for advice for what to buy for themselves or their children.
Circana's May 2024 U.S. video game market highlights, the analytics company reported that video game hardware spending is down 40% compared to 2023. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have all shown "double-digit percentage declines," with the Nintendo Switch seeing the "most significant drop."
The writing is on the wall, it would take a big change to swing back the other way. There's a reason they are dying for GTA 6 to release.
Most of the replies about ps5 pro is complaining about the price. Your point is, PC is somehow a better choice while the video card alone cost this much or more.
So no, I don’t think consoles will disappear, more likely streaming will improve to the point of being a real alternative and that will take over the people buying consoles. In fact it could be an alternative to PC as well, for non-competitive gaming.
The sales decline is because console companies don’t provide good enough reason to upgrade, and the market is saturated, not because people moving to Pc. Here I am rocking my xbox one pro still with no desire to upgrade.
That's just not true. You can make an entire PC for the price of the PS5 Pro. You can get a GPU that is a bit more powerful than a PS5 Pro GPU for ~$300. People normally spend more on PCs though because of the longevity it provides and you can use it for a lot more than just games. Just looking at Steam data, there's a yearly increase of MAUs (their concurrent count just peaked 3 days ago at 37.6M) where Playstation has plateaued.
Time will tell, but I think consoles will fade away, either through lack of appeal or turning into stream boxes as you say. Thanks for the conversation!
If a PC GPU is only slightly better than a console counterpart, typically its games will run slightly worse - since it loses the benefit of devs spending time optimizing for that profile.
You can adjust settings on PC, so you can trade off some useless post processing and other settings to push the frame rates way higher than console games, which are generally 60fps (or 120fps in some cases, if you run "performance mode").
For someone as apparently intelligent as Mark, it’s amazing how stupid he is.
It doesn’t matter what you do or say, Mark, I will never buy something produced by or associated with Meta. Don’t care how groundbreaking or revolutionary it might be.
I see you, Mark. I’ve watched how you operate for the last 20 years, Mark. I’ll never give you a cent.
a lot of people dont have the same hate for mark that you have, and a lot of people dont even know that meta is facebook. He’s not a good person, but he’s not stupid
He’s done a mind-numbly large amount of brainless things. That money is in selling VR headsets and yet they haven’t done anything to make VR content interesting to the general populace.
I hate facebook but i love vr. And it was the only one i could afford. I have it completely blocked off the internet though since i only use it for steamvr. 🥺
I feel you, and part of the reason we don’t have access to cheaper and better options is because of Meta’s monopolistic instinct. They bought oculus, which had been actively innovating, instead of competing with them and strengthening the market by developing their own product. It’s not like they didn’t have the money.
I don’t fault anyone for buying their stuff if it’s cool, my stand is purely a stubborn one at this point. I just won’t touch Meta with a ten foot pole.
Hey wait a minute, this guy is trying to trick us into getting out of our chairs too! Get a steam deck in each hand and write mean things about him on both.
I have a genetic disorder that causes my tendons and ligaments to be weak, so I get sprains and dislocations easily. I’ve sprained a finger pushing an elevator button before, and dislocated a knee standing up and taking a step. My hands are so stupid weak I couldn’t even get a Switch, I had to get a Switch Lite. I can’t use Xbox controllers because the D-pad and left stick being switched caused me to accidentally dislocate my thumb once.
The Steam Deck is just slightly too heavy for me to hold for long, because you carry some of the weight on your middle fingers when you’re holding it. When I was trying it, a middle finger joint started to go out of place.
The ergonomics of the Steam Deck were great; so I was so upset when I felt my finger starting to give. I had only played for about 10, 15 minutes before I started having problems, and I had to tape my finger after I got home from trying it.
I’m a rare case, I know, but usually new versions of electronics tend to be slimmer and lighter, so I’m hopeful.
On the plus side, you can use any Bluetooth or USB compatible controller that you find comfortable and a cheap stand to make your experience more comfortable. Steam’s controller support is fantastic.
Yeah, but that’s not going to be very easy to do on the train, or laying down in bed, and having to carry around a controller kills a lot of the portability, which would be the whole point of a Stream Deck for me. And if I’m going to play at home, I’ve already got a gaming PC.
If there's one thing the Deck is good for is customisation. It's not ideal but I wonder if it's possible to design handles that don't put so much pressure on your middle fingers or grips that wrap around your palms.
As you can tell, I'm not someone who specialises in ergonomic design.
I mean it has a place in the market. Even though facebook sucks, they are the leaders/pushers of VR at the moment. No new person wants to spend 1000+ dollars on something they may end up hating especially with the rumors around the quest 3 lite. Like meta makes up about 60% of the market-share of those who take part in the steam hardware survey.
So does Pixmax, HTC, Valve, or Pico no longer exist? VR is facing issues with adoption. I'm sorry but to the VR snobs even though I love VR having people argue you can't experience it unless you spend close to a grand on something that many people's feelings towards it are take it or leave it is a bit too much for most consumers. Meta is problematic with buying up so many of the vr game makers but at the end of the day these companies chose to sell themselves and lets be honest here the VR market isn't hot right now and prior it was fucking worse.
Yk a monopoly can stilll have competition and be a monopoly right?
And like by definition buying up all the competition is monopolistic, no matter if the companies wanna sell or not, they were influenced by the size of meta (and their financial backing), which gave them an unfair advantage against the competition. Entirely unrelated to hardware or software, both of which are dogshit in comparison - they were able to take a market share cause they can undercut all the competitors, exactly why their headsets are cheap.
Cmon man have like a single thought for yourself that ain’t propaganda
The irony of saying "Cmon man have like a single thought for yourself that ain’t propaganda" while just defaulting to "FaCeBoOk BaD" is peak. I already made mention of how facebook or whatever they are called is shit but you have to be braindead to see before meta entered the scene, VR was dead in the water. So yeah they tried to establish their little stupid metaverse thing and it thankfully failed. You aren't even addressing my point of no consumer wants to pay 1000 fucking bucks on something they likely hate. Most consumers drop off hard on VR. So cheap headsets are a net good thing for VR, even though the cunts who make them are dick heads.
Game devs aren't just going to be developing games if there is no fucking audience to play/buy them. So yeah many of those devs got bought out since Meta was the only one handing money out for VR related tech/games. It was a devil's bargin as shown with Echo VR and many others but I can't fault the devs since getting food on the table pretty fucking important than sticking with the values of some idiot VR snobs who think the only way VR should work is via pc connection on a pc that is valued in the 1k to 2k range on top of the previously mentioned VR headset that can set you back another 1k to 2k. Like I have the opportunity to have a pc in that range and I see how the quest 2 is very inferior to many other headsets but you have to be a fucking moron to invest thousands on something you will play with for a fucking week. So I'm thankful Meta (who is likely spying on its users) gave me an opportunity to try out VR at a "decent" price so now I know I'm into it and can invest further into the industry but nah. You stick with your idiotic groupthink of "MeTa BaD" when I will say I'm glad exist since people can take advantage of this deal and see if they want to further invest in the medium. I can't wait for they to die out but I ain't looking a gift horse in the mouth when they are ones who are the only pushers of VR right now. Apple doesn't give a shit about gaming and while Sony pushes out a pretty damn good headset, they don't let you use them on PC where most of the enthusiasts are. Console players don't want to spend the price of the console they are playing on to possibly play a handful of games with little support afterwards.
Sucks they bought up most things but those devs chose that option and I can't fault them since lets be honest here, VR market is utter garbage, there is very little money in it. I don't like meta, they fucking suck but the quest series has basically provided the option of the common person to actually try vr. Not many people want to spend close to 1k to 2k on a thing they will maybe fucking hate. I wouldn't say they are the sole reason its dogshit but the reality is people need an entry point headset. The market wasn't providing that and now that it does, people can finally get into VR even though it may lead to technical downgrades since the market is targeting those users.
Hell even though the PSVR 2 is a fantastic headset, most console gamers aren't going to spend more money on a peripheral than they actually spend on the console they are playing it on. Hell I would love Sony to give the drivers to PSVR 2 to pc players since shit a bang for your buck for specs but that ain't happening.
I don’t like Meta for a lot of reasons but without them VR would probably be fucking dead by now. Yes, Zucks Metaverse is absolute garbage but the stuff Reality Labs is doing thanks to Metas funding is absolutely amazing.
I gave up on VR for years after buying a Rift in 2017 because it was a janky, horrible to set up, tethered, nausea inducing mess that i paid what, 700 bucks for?
Recently got a used Quest 2 for 200 bucks and it’s fucking amazing. Completely wireless, hand tracking, much better clarity and i can stay in VR for hours without feeling sick.
I wish they would push high quality content a bit more like they used to instead of their shitty Horizon stuff but if it wasn’t for the millions of headsets they sold, no one would be able to develop shit right now for VR.
To say they ruined VR is absolutely delusional imo, sorry.
You got it for $200 because you're paying with your privacy. It's an absolute dumpster fire of a deal that's not remotely worth it. They could pay you $100/hour to play it and requiring an account with them, in and of itself, makes it the worst possible theoretical version of VR.
Facebook is absolutely the reason VR is fucking terrible. Their involvement, in and of itself, completely destroyed the community, many of whom abandoned the space entirely when they took away viable options to replace with privacy invading crimes against humanity. Turning enthusiasts from advocates into activists against their product is the reason there's no money left.
I’m not paying anything, my Quest runs completely offline. I use a separate router for streaming and the Quest is mac address blocked in my main router (just to be sure). ALVR is side loaded onto the Quest so i can play Steam VR games without the need for the Oculus app on my PC at all. It’s not that hard to do if you care about your privacy.
I’m not exactly sure which community they “completely destroyed” but your whole reasoning for that sounds extremely subjective to me. Facebook controls 90% of the VR market, followed by Pico with 4.5%, which is basically a Chinese reverse engineered Quest with ports of Quest games.
Without FB there is no VR market and there is no scenario where Oculus could have managed to sell a similar amount of headsets if Facebook hadn’t bought them.
That being said, i sincerely hope Facebook loses this race and I am pretty terrified of the future when it comes to VR.
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