Aight. You know what. I’ve been eyeing this thing for hella long. I’ve had a shitty few weeks. I can afford it. Just ordered one! Excited for December! I’ll def try your game out :)
My worry is that after a few days of playing around with it, it becomes a $200 paperweight. It’s a bit (and by that I mean at least 2x) too expensive for what it is.
Unfortunately it’s still ~$100 just to make the thing, so halving the price doesn’t sound likely. It’s definitely a device you have to use intentionally because of the screen, but I still play mine at least few times a week (and daily when I’m pomodoroing!)
Plus you get 3 months of included games! A bit harder to become ewaste so fast when you’re playing something new every week
Yeah, being a niche product without the economies of scale elsewhere in gaming makes the price really awkward. My hope is that will improve over time if the install base keeps growing.
I use mine just about every day, I’ve been fully obsessed with a game on multiple occasions, and I’m excited every time there are new things in the catalog. Easily worth full game-console price for the joy I’ve gotten out of it. But, that doesn’t really help anybody else, I know.
It really is a lot less of a gimmick than it might seem. The final game of the first season is a shockingly polished gameboy-zelda-style adventure that I’ve played start-to-finish more than once.
I get that. But at the same time I have a bit of an obsession with handheld devices. And there’s enough of a cool indie scene that I think I’d use it quite a bit, and develop for it myself. UFO 50 is my goty and I feel that same sense of discovery and fun I could get out of a device like this
Nice! I havent used lua before but will look at it when my system arrives as I’d rather use that than C haha.
I saw someone started / did a wario ware style game for the playdate but I really want to try my hand at something like that. With the accelerometer, crank, buttons, etc it seems like the perfect device for quick micro games like that!
All of this anticheat bs is still making the baseline assumption that the problem needs to be solved at the expense of the players.
It’s illegal to steal someone else’s property. We don’t enforce that law by cutting off everyone’s hands preemptively so that there is less demand on police to solve a problem that hasn’t happened yet…
If people are assholes and go against the wishes of society, you police and moderate them. If they can’t moderate their platform, that isn’t the fault of the community - it’s a failing of the corporation. It’s such a ridiculous mindset. It’s a fucking video game…
As a dev who recently released a game for the system (on sale now - only $1!), I’m pretty excited to see what gets included! It sounds like it’ll be all new games
Ayy, Pomo Post is super cute! Cool to bump into a dev on Lemmy.
I love that the Playdate is inspiring people to make tools that are also beautiful and fun like a good toy. The whole system makes me just plain happy :)
Hello, thank you 👋 The niche toys are my favorite! Someone made an orrery app, which is like a solar system simulator. I have this year’s eclipse bookmarked because it’s neat
Make fun of Apex all you want, it was the best performing game of its kind on the Deck and kept me from selling my Deck sooner. Now, I’m even a Linux convert because of how well games like Apex worked away from their Windows origins. Seeing a large game like this be killed off on Linux is awful. I’m not sure where the blame lies (with EA, right?) but it needs to be fixed.
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.
Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.
I was with you up until the shift away from multiplayer part. I do not see that happening at all, and I don’t even like multiplayer games myself. There’s no denying that more multiplayer has been the trend for the last 30 years, spanning multiple (people) generations, and I don’t see AI changing that.
Developers have full control over servers in most cases. A viable server side anti cheat should be a thing. For every case of “client sending false data to server” we can come up with a solution to verify that to some degree. Finally, it should help a lot to rely on player generated reports and utilize replay recording on server.
But no, developers will continue to rely on 3rd party solutions (made by people who never developed a game), even infect their co-op-only games with it, and complain “uh oh we can’t handle Linux cheaters”.
The problem is EAs business model for this game. It is free to pay, so EA need to extract money otherwise. They introduce some gamified resource collection and crafting with exponentially rising costs, etc. And hope that gamers circumvent that by buying stuff with real money. Now players don’t all want or can’t do that, and look for alternative solutions.
So EAs business model drives people to cheat. To cheat them primarily and other players secondarily.
And because of their business model, they cannot solve the cheating between players by giving them dedicated servers or just let them P2P match, because they would loose control over them and their ability to extract more money.
Nope. They had anti cheat that supported it, but they experienced higher issues with cheating via linux than elsewhere. Which sucks. People who cheat suck.
I’m curious to see how Valve will respond to this seeing as they have CS. I imagine they’d be interested to build a solution but I’m not sure how plausible that even is.
That would just cause legit Linux players to generate negativity by always being stuck with cheaters. It’s way easier to just remove support if it really is most of your cheating problems for such a small player base.
I think apex legends is still one of the highest concurrent player games on Steam. I think top is like csgo, apex legends, rust, maybe deadlock? I haven’t been online in a while but this is probably how it is based the last time I checked.
Huh. I had no idea you could play it in VR. Doesn’t really seem like a game which would be at all enjoyable in VR tbh, too much movement - especially vertical and sudden. I do not enjoy the idea of facing a creeper in person lol
I didn’t even know Bedrock had a VR mode. I’ve tried the Vivecraft mod for Java and it worked very well, albeit required some settings changed to make the controls more natural
I knew and even tried it before, but I completely forgot it existed because it sucked so much. Nobody can see you moving your hands and tilting your head, which kills all the fun of a VR multi-player game IMO. It’s just a glorified controller binding for VR headsets. Considering all the other wacky things they added, I don’t see why they didn’t add actual VR support.
Probably because VR gaming is basically dead. It never really took off and it’s a waste of time and money for them to devote resources to it. Probably like 0.1% of users are in VR.
That being said, part of why it’s dead is because no developers want to take chances on it, so it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Valve was the last one to gamble on it.
If VR gaming is dead, then what does it say about Linux with about 5 times less users? Like, a low poly game about monkeys has a daily playerbase of a million people there. Mind you, Mincraft has 1 to 1.5 million. Not bad for a “dead” platform. Also, Valve isn’t even the last one to enter the market.
I think what you’re actually trying to say is that it’s too niche, which it absolutely is.
Lemmy is niche. VR is niche. Gaming is mainstream.
You can’t call a niche dead just because there aren’t that many people into it. It’s a niche for a reason.
Linux is booming, even though it’s “dead.” Lemmy has never been this active in its entire existence. Why do investments from large companies matter?
What truly matters is growth. Negative growth is what kills a platform/industry/company/whatever else. VR is growing, Linux is growing, Lemmy is growing. It may not be fast, but they all have active userbases that support their development.
You cannot call a child “failure” just because it never achieved anything in life, can you? They are growing. They can get sick, they can recover. They can also regress due to that illness and die. Only then they’re truly dead.
It’s math. The amount of money they’re spending on supporting the VR platforms is less than the amount of money they make for the people on those platforms. They probably have to dedicate several multi-person teams to manage the clients.
Linux has some pretty good hedging going on with steam deck.
Well, I’ve decided to check the financials of a couple of VR companies since your counterpoint sounded reasonable. The only one working at a loss is Meta. I could argue their business model is in Death Valley right now. After all, they have major capital expenses, which aren’t easily covered unless you have a big userbase.
But that’s their VR sector. Overall, Meta’s profitable and can easily cover all the expenses several times over.
Also, what do you mean by “they have to dedicate several multi-person teams to manage the clients?” Firstly, who’s “they,” secondly, if I understood you right, that sounds prepostrous, unless you’re talking B2B.
I’m not talking about VR companies I’m talking about Mojang.
The teams that Mojang keeps to work on the platforms cost more than the income from the people using those clients.
If you make a game, and you decide to support Mac, and Mac only brings in $500 a month but you have to pay somebody $3,000 a month to maintain the client, You’re losing $2,500 a month for that particular market segment.
Nothing says you have to get rid of those people or that client, But it’s a fiscally sound decision.
I been playing bedrock with my brother for a week now and it is good, mobs actually feel like a threat now and there are very small details to game. Like swords doing more damage to mobs than axes but when the mob is wet or is raining the axe does more damage.
TBH it was pretty barebones, but I did enjoy seeing some of my worlds in stereoscopic 3D. It also scares me for the future of VR (minecraft is a REALLY popular game. If it is dropping VR does that mean adoption isn’t going that well?).
Also, this is specifically regarding Bedrock minecraft. Java has never officially supported it, but there are mods that add the functionality.
There is a game called cyubeVR on steam and PS2VR, built from the ground up for vr. It is a great fun game with a solo dev. Highly suggest checking it out, there are quite a few videos on it and it is highly modable. It is sad that the big cos are dropping support
Damn I wish they would sell in Europe directly. Ordering anything from Analogue would have ridiculous shipping costs and customs duty so I never got around to ordering the Pocket either. I know there are cheaper options especially for game boy hardware but Analogues is just so sexy.
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