I don't see what's objectionable here. This isn't them saying they're going to start scanning every private chat you have to look for anything mildly controversial to take action against. This is saying that when you use their public-facing service and get reported for being an obnoxious douche to other users who are matched with you when trying to play their games, they have a standardized process so you know where you stand.
Because you argue with someone on xbox live and they report you and you now have a strike, it’s been proven they will strike you over the smallest shit imaginable. Not having social features in X games is shit but okay but no multiplayer?
They have it recorded. If they're repeatedly upholding reports through appeals, you probably deserve to be reported.
And yes, you absolutely should lose access to multiplayer period if they're forced to ban you. The idea that just losing chat access is a suitable punishment for repeatedly being a shitbag is fucking absurd.
I don’t play on xbox because I don’t support trillion dollar companies who’s founders were friendly with epstein. But I have friends who do and I’ve seen threads on reddit about the subject. I doubt they are trying very hard with the appeal system. Imagine a game banning you for being toxic and then steam banning you from all multiplayer games. Boggles the mind.
Imagine a game banning you for being toxic and then steam banning you from all multiplayer games. Boggles the mind.
If Valve had the staff and Valve was the one handling bans from games, that's exactly how it should work.
People who aren't consistently making the experience of everyone around them worse don't routinely get banned, and a proper appeals system is more than enough. Being online doesn't mean that there aren't real people on the other end that you're harassing and treating like shit and ruining their gaming experience. "If you make an alt and go online, you lose offline access too" wouldn't be an overreach. It would just be good policy. You don't have a right to harass people with impunity.
You can get banned from forums or the game itself by the gamedevs and you can get banned for breaking no rules I don’t see any advantage to such a system. People would literally get baited into arguments in games and end up getting banned because they argued with someones throwaway account or banned by a non involved third party just because they through the argument was toxic even if it wasn’t and wasn’t even directed at them. This is infinitely worse than community servers now you have another layer of useless abstraction with dubious quality removing access to all your games. If only people who harass people with impunity didn’t already get banned in games and were the only people banned in games.
You're conflating two things. This isn't developers. It's Microsoft.
If Valve was in charge of bans, a literal lifetime ban for you as a human being would be entirely justifiable and fair as a punishment for inappropriate conduct in interactions with other players.
I don’t think the third-party dock market for general consumers is too big. But of course, any example I quote would be anecdotal as I dont have any actual stats.
It also breaks other stuff like being able to output video to portable video glasses. A relatively niche use now, but something that will pick up considerably over the life of the console.
Having a floating 4k screen that you can put anywhere at any size is pretty nice. Don’t have to look down at your hands or hold the system up to a comfortable eye line.
I do hope that at some point they open it up a bit more. And maybe only exclude stuff that would damage the system, which is ostensibly the -given- reason for locking it down. While of course, the real reason is likely a licensing opportunity.
I do still buy their stuff. But it has been more and more often lately that I buy it and then feel ok about emulating it to add in stuff like 4k 120 fps or VR/stereoscopic or whatever.
I have an USB hub with a Type C to HDMI output. I switch with my laptop, Steam Deck, and Switch 1. Additionally, when I’m traveling, I prefer to take the small USB hub over the chunky switch dock. My biggest gripe is how petty it is to disallow it. That’s like HP levels of petty… Actually, they’re really starting to adopt a lot of shitty HP policies.
The second time my save games got messed up after doing the first mission for the janitor. Seemed my old cloud save games fucked it up. It became a mess.
The third time I deleted every cloud save, and it worked. Then, after ten hours the game crashed. And I lost three missions. And a lot of progress. None of the auto saves fixed it.
Dear Remedy, I have a PC. With a hard drive. I have room for thousands of save games. Let me fucking save my game myself!!
I had good memories of Control, but now my memories consist only of frustration. Why don’t Devs put in a reasonable save system in their games?
I had the same complaint about Deathloop. If I’m playing the single-player only version, then why do I have to restart the loop if I suddenly have to quit? And why does the game warn me that I will lose all unsaved progress? You literally can’t save!
God, I hate shit like that! When it makes you wonder if you can quit the game because it’s late for example. Does it save? When did it save last? That’s just asshole design.
I’m playing Prey at the moment, it has quick saves aside of regular manual saving. It’s so comfortable!
It’s been a while since I played deathloop but I seem to remember you can only save the game certain times, I think only when you’re in the tunnels and time has passed.
Yes, when you make it back into the tunnels, the game considers it a finished loop and advances to the next day segment, which is sort of like a save point but you can’t save your progress during a loop and come back to it. When you make it back to your “save point” at the tunnel and the day advances, if you hit escape and exit the game, the game is all “Are you sure you want to do this? All unsaved progress will be lost” - as if there were some further action you could take, but there isn’t. It’s like they had a save function in at one point but decided against it, then never fixed the exit verbiage.
Gog, it has cloud saves there. Also I should have written a script to copy the save files every twenty minutes or so in the background. Would have saved me after the crash I guess…
If i am honest i dont have any games that DONT run on. It can run cyberpunk, baldurs gate, a lot other AAA / Indie games.
If it doesnt run, the devs did something SPECIAL to f*ck steamdeck / linux users.
The suspend game feature is probably the biggest player, especially when its idle it doesnt use any power ( except of course the common battery drain ) in comparison to windows “sleep” it just blacks out the screen and maybe run a little less background tasks.
Same, though I hope the SD2 had some more power, I would like to play on a 1080p (or even 1440p) monitor with mouse and keyboard without sacrificing framerate.
These are completely different devices for different use cases for different audiences with wildly different tastes. Nintendo hasn’t been in the “core” gaming space since before the Wii.
Yeah people forget that Switch 1 sold like hotcakes when scalpers were selling it for $500. And it was probably parents who bought them so they could be sure to have a Switch under the Christmas tree.
So yeah of course Nintendo has raised the price, they want consumers to pay them $500 and not a scalper.
Their demographic used to include families with multiple systems due to the hardware being cheaper than the competition. They’ve never sold a basic console for nearly as much as the Switch 2, nor have they charged $70 and $80 per game as a standard. Maybe it will go well for them, we’ll see, but there’s no precedent for the way Nintendo’s pricing things now.
You can spend more on mobile game mtx than a full triple A experience including the console and in fact most people do which is why the “core” is an ever shrinking slice of the pie that to GenA probably doesn’t even make any sense.
The price doesn’t really matter, my point is that you’re not buying a Nintendo switch to play GTA 6 and you’re not buying a steam deck to play Warioware Inc.
(Well, I am, because I’ve never given them any money nor plan to and think Nintendo peaked way back in either the SNES or the GBA era and I neither had nor knew what a Nintendo even was as a kid).
A handheld PC isn’t cheaper to buy, and most console gamers aren’t buying a ton of games either (like PC gamers do), so the total cost of ownership for a switch 2 probably still stays under the total cost of ownership for a handheld PC.
Edit: To clarify my point, the average Switch user owns 9 titles according to official Nintendo sales figures. This includes cheap indie titles. (Source: www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/…/index.html)
Outside of PC, it’s not normal that the average user has a backlog of hundreds of games.
PC is the number one piracy platform for starters, seeing as it requires no jailbreaks and the like.
Secondly, PC gamers tend to own a lot of games legitimately because our gaming library doesn’t expire with a console generation, and because our steam libraries consist of many many indie games that cost a few bucks each, not a few $50 AAA releases.
My steam library is about 435-ish games. But that’s since 2013.
The total value of the account per steamdb is like £1080, this is a vast over-estimate because I used to live in a country where the entire GTA series before 5 cost £0.20, but let’s go with £1080.
If I bought £1080 worth of standard £60 games, I’d only have 18 games. That’s actually less than I even had for the PS Vita, and most people would be surprised to know that platform even has that many games.
Between the online fees and subscriptions to PS Plus etc., lacking discounts compared to steam, and the inability to pirate even an extremely high end PC tends to be far, far cheaper in the long run than a console, especially since it also doubles as the TV, the music player, the work and hobby computer, etc etc.
Never heard of a steam backlog? PC is the number one piracy platform, but it’s also the only platform where people buy whole bundles of games in a sale or where you get at least one game for free every week.
Take for example the switch: 152 mio devices sold, vs 1391 mio units of software sold. That’s roughly 9 titles per device since 2017, or roughly one game per year.
Compare that to your 435 titles over 12 years, which equals roughly 36 titles per year.
You are a heavy buyer of games, in the order of 36x of what’s the average for a switch user. You just proved my point.
Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.
Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.
Yes, I’m a heavy buyer of games, but those games cost £12 on average, not £60, nor anywhere near to that amount, even if it’s lower due to the few indie games that get console releases.
€540 for those 9 games is roughly more than half of what I spent in the last decade on 430-ish PC games. It’s literally why I even have more games in the first place.
So even though I have more games on paper, I don’t spend more paper, capische?
And I certainly don’t spend more per game than the switch user, which makes your claim misleading.
In fact the opposite is true and most PC gamers are notoriously stringent in spending on games.
Price of the middle version of the Steam Deck: €569
Price of the middle version of the Switch 1: €284
So we got a price difference of €285 here.
€50 for the bundled Mario Kart upgrade plus 3 other full price titles, leaves us €55 to spend on another 5 indie titles, and then you got the average total cost of ownership for a switch for just about the price of the Steam Deck with a whopping 0 games on it.
The difference becomes starker if you go for the top-spec version: €679 for the Steam Deck, vs €329 for the Switch, a whopping €350 difference. For that difference you can afford Mario Kart plus 4 full-price titles and have another €60 remaining for a few indie titles.
Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?
Ironically enough a steam deck with zero games on it is still a way more compelling device if we’re describing a generic gaming device, because all games on PC are free if you want them to be, and that’s a library of hundreds of thousands of games. Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…
Plus, if you must buy games, you’re only a few quid away from one, not £60 + online fees etc etc.
We can go in circles forever though, but over the long term of course a PC or any Steam Deck will win in terms of ownership cost due to cheaper/free games. The issue is that we can’t really calculate an objective metric of value there.
That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.
But if we keep going, we’ll run into problems because of course it’s apples to oranges to compare the value because these are largely mutually exclusive target audiences I’d imagine.
because all games on PC are free if you want them to be
If you include piracy, that’s available on the Switch too. Worst case you have to chip in €10 for a mod chip, but that’s it.
Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?
Yeah, find me a deal to get Mario Kart for the steam deck legally.
Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…
You want to use a steam deck as a laptop? Do you really have no self respect?
That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.
That was exactly my point. Steam Decks/PCs and consoles are used differently by different people, and in the end a Steam Deck is not cheaper than a console, even if you never pay a cent for a game (but then again, why are you buying a Steam Deck?)
But if we keep going
I get the feeling you don’t actually want to discuss or talk about the topic, you just want to win. So yeah, no point in continuing the discussion.
You would do that probably because you have a huge Steam library but many Switch users have a huge Switch library and want that performance upgrade. You and me are not their target audience but it remains to be seen if the Switch 2 will flop or exactly what Nintendo fans want right now. There‘s a huge difference between paying 600€ and 1000€ for hardware that‘s pretty much toe to toe anyway. If I wanted a Steamdeck I sure as hell wouldn‘t buy one right now but wait a little longer.
Toe to Toe? At least the steamdeck can run Crysis. Switch not, easy Steamdeck win.
Performance upgrade on a already locked on 60fps ( some 30 ) games? on default on a LCD display? That they didnt even considered default on OLED display is just … cash grabby.
And the switch 2 can run the new mario kart and the steam deck not.
Both of these games don’t run on the other platform because they are exclusives, not because the hardware can’t handle it. So what’s your point?
It’s just confirming what the guy you replied to was saying: if you have steam games and want to run steam games, get a steam deck. If you have switch games and want to run switch games, get a switch.
You know the PC vs. Console debate isn’t new. That one has been going on ever since PCs and consoles existed.
When I was a teenager, I, too, didn’t understand why anyone would buy a console over a PC because the PC can do so much more than a console.
Then I got kids, and I understood.
There are two main angles:
Parental controls
On a console, a kid can only play what I allow. I get the games, I can disable features (e.g. browser or social features) that I deem risky. It’s all easy, it just works. My 7yo won’t be playing Fortnite or Doom without my approval. Try locking down any kind of PC (Windows or Linux) to a child safe level so that the kid doesn’t have access to age-inappropriate content. It’s borderline impossible. My dad tried and failed, and if I tried, I’d most likely fail too.
Ease of use
Every second time, my wife and kids want to play something on the living room PC they call me to fix some issue. The controller isn’t pairing. The controller is pairing, but the game doesn’t recognise it. Steam link to the gaming PC doesn’t work. Or it does work, but the resolution is crap. Or all sorts of other issues. With consoles, you don’t have that. It all just works.
A PC is definitely the more capable system, and a power user will get more out of it than out of a console, no question about that.
But claiming there is no use case for a console is entirely wrong, too. A look at sales numbers for Switch (152mio sold) vs Steam Deck (3.7mio sold) should clear the question up whether there’s a use case for a switch.
I mean especially as a parent do i want to waste 80€ for a game? And i mean switch (1) is that what you describe the switch 2 is a cashgrab you cant tell me differently.
I mean, especially as a parent do I want to waste hours setting up the system, fixing misconfigurations and trying to keep my elementary school kid from watching porn or heavy violence on the system?
€80 is a lot, but not nearly as much as the time you spend on the device if you factor in your hourly rate.
And for most non-techy parents the choice doesn’t even exist. They don’t even know how they’d setup parental controls or fix issues on a PC.
Also: if you put €60 from 2017 into an inflation calculator and convert that to 2025 money, you get €82. Yes, it sucks that everything gets more expensive, but that’s just how inflation works.
My grandma also always complained that when she was young she could get a whole bar of chocolate for 0.50 Schilling (€~0.04).
If it’s too much for you, then don’t pay it. It’s not like there are no alternatives.
I usually just buy games years later for a fraction of the price. Or wait until a platform becomes abandonware and I can’t buy a game in retail any more (meaning the publisher doesn’t want to take my money), and then I pirate it.
There are a couple hundred of thousands of great games, I don’t need the flashiest, newest thing.
I’m just saying that the €80 pricing isn’t that crazy, it’s just inflation adjustment. In fact, the €60 price point for full-price games has been around since at least 2005. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around €100 in today’s money.
In fact, SNES games even cost up to €80 in 1993, which would be ~€180 in today’s money, and even the cheapest titles back then (akin to our current low-budget indie titles) started from €40 (~€90 today).
So, the price is really not that bad. And, as I said, you can just wait for the sale and get it cheaper anyway. Full price is only for people who need exactly this game exactly right now.
80€ is crazy nintendont games are just crazy priced and have fun getting one second hand games if nintendo allows it. 80€ for a AA game is much and a scam for a re released game because of a new poatform even tho old switch games should work.
And on Switch, it’s forbidden typically. Which is part of why people advocate for the Steam Deck instead. From Nintendo’s perspective, this very much is a vulnerability. It’s just not leading to custom firmware or ROM dumps from what I understand, so it’s not even close to the most significant vulnerability.
That is true, of course. But that’s a vulnerability from Nintendo’s perspective, not from a customer’s perspective. As in, if this exploit gets improved on, it might lead to people running unlicensed or pirated software on the switch, thus potentially hurting Nintendo.
It’s not something that might lead to people getting their Nintendo-accounts hacked or stolen or something like that.
On a Steam Deck, the former concept doesn’t even exist. There’s no Steam Deck vulnerability that might lead to people running non-steam software on the Steam Deck, because it’s allowed usage.
What I’m trying to say is that vulnerability is not negative for the user or indicative of bad platform security for the user.
I don’t have a Steam deck, but from what I’ve seen and read online the Z1 Extreme processor in the Ally is more powerful than the Deck, but the Deck’s batter lasts longer. Personally, I’d say they’re both really good choices. I got the Ally because I was playing a lot of Destiny 2 on it.
Now that it has been three years, while I’d like to have one, I feel like I’ll just wait until whatever the next version is - even if that means waiting another year or so.
I don’t need one, particularly, and I don’t want to be caught at the tail end of this hardware.
I was on the fence of asking for one for my birthday late last year for exactly this reason.
What tipped me over was that I took a look at my Steam library and realized I literally have hundreds of indie and AA games that I’ve never played or have less than 4 hours in that I always meant to go back to. And that was it, I decided the Steam Deck was going to be my indie gaming experince platform. It has been amazing at doing this, and I’ve been chewing through my indie game library like crazy, and have picked up so many more that I’m loving gaming again! I can see myself keeping the current steam deck around and will be used regularly for at least the next 5 years.
If you’re looking for a portable machine that’ll tackle most modern & higher end games, either look at the alternative SteamOS portables or wait for the next Steam Deck (the touch screen, D-Pad, Sticks, and dual touch pad make it the best choice for best I out options for game compatibility).
However, if you want a great machine for indies, AA, older AAA titles, and console EMU, the current hardware is amazing and worth the price
The price increase is insane. That does not seem to scale in comparison with what you’ll get in return over a regular PS5, especially if you’re gonna be forced to buy the digital editions from the PS store, which are outside of the sales often the most expensively priced versions too, I’ve practically only bought second-hand discs for my PS5 because of that.
So either games will start running at higher framerates on real 4K, like 60FPS and up. Or developers will get lazy and stop bothering to optimise for the older generation of PS5, which will then be an excuse to upgrade to the more expensive edition to play at 4K and/or 60FPS.
I really hope the latter won’t be a thing for the sake of both players and game development, there’s been enough unoptimised shit lately and I hope we can move forward again.
Yeah I’m afraid that stuff like GTA6 might run like absolute dogshit on the old PS5, because they will see the opportunity to make use of the better hardware to sell the 4K and 60FPS. No doubt even Sony will try to push this, trying to sell more of these Pros.
I do hope we will move forward, but I think money and greed will play too much of a role in this. We don’t even really need a PS5 Pro right now, looking at the current line-up of games that run fine on the old PS5, even in 4K and 60FPS, as long as developers spend the time to optimise their games instead of throwing everything on to raytracing (which I find is still in a very experimental phase).
They need to pump out more games to justify this. I see no reason to upgrade as mine already sits and collects dust. The controller is super awesome tho, use it all the time for my PC.
I pretty much only use mine to play the exclusives since I don’t have a good PC and watch films on 4K blu-rays. My Series X gets far more use (more storage, more games in my library since I’ve been using Xbox since the 360 and a more comfortable controller).
I mean sure, someone needs to make a decent Left 4 Dead 3, yeah. But that should not be Resident Evil, especially considering how mediocre the action-centric titles were in hindsight (they were good for their time though, granted).
To be fair, Resident Evil has been action oriented since the original Resident Evil 2. The developers themselves literally said they wanted the series to be more similar to Hollywood action movies.
I’m not sure whether you’re kidding, but I wouldn’t complain either.
Five and six are not good games, but played in co-op, slightly drunk, they are a riot of cringe, ridiculousness and camp.
We laughed our asses off in the Ada story sections where the second player constantly pops into existence as a faceless “agent” because Ada doesn’t normally have a companion, but they had to make her sections somehow playable in co-op.
The remakes are fun but I’m with the other commenter saying that I’d rather see Left for Dead 3 get made by a different company and not have to sacrifice a good horror game for a mediocre class based shooter.
There are tons of games with different classes and play styles. Resident Evil those are not.
I’m kind of okay with them going whichever way they have creative ideas. Even RE’s action design has been really fun except when they tried to “streamline” it in RE6.
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