If they subsidized it, wouldn’t that risk businesses buying it as a cheap-for-its-specs option for their office computers? It’s not locked to being a gaming machine like consoles. You can just install windows on it.
That’s a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn’t have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.
I’m not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we’ve seen, there aren’t going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.
At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some “from the shelf” to make some server farm and such.
Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.
The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.
IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.
That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
I think it’s a response to the sentiment that Sony somehow got bit by selling PS3 at a loss because it triggered some huge supercomputing purchases of the systems that Sony wouldn’t have liked, and that if Valve got too close to that then suddenly a lot of businesses would tank it by buying too much and never buying any games.
Sony loved the exposure and used it as marketing fodder that their game consoles were “supercomputer” class. Just like they talked up folding@home on them…
That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
Edit: replied to the wrong comment but I think it is still relevant. The risk of companies snatching steam machines in bulk is null, stop listening to LTT.
Businesses generally aren’t that stoked about anything other than laptops or servers.
To the extent they have desktop grade equipment, it’s either:
Some kiosk grade stuff already cheaper than a game console
Workstation grade stuff that they will demand nVidia or otherwise just don’t even bother
On servers, the steam machine isn’t that attractive since it’s not designed to either be slapped in a closet and ignored on slotted in a datacenter.
Putting all this aside, businesses love simplicity in their procurement. They aren’t big on adding a vendor for a specific niche when they can use an existing vendor, even if in theory they could shave a few dollars in cost. The logistical burden of adding Steam Machine would likely offset any imagined savings. Especially if they had to own re-imaging and licensing when they are accustomed to product keys embedded in the firmware when they do vendor preloads today.
Maybe you could worry a bit more about the consumer market, where you have people micro-managing costs and will be more willing to invest their own time, but even then the market for non-laptop home systems that don’t think they need nVidia but still need something better than integrated GPUs is so small that it shouldn’t be a worry either.
Just want to remind everyone that PalWorld is a really good game. Its still getting major updates and has an insane amount of high quality content to explore.
And so the endless cycle of the borderline CD projekt games continues. Everything is hyped beyond realistic expectations a decade before launch, the masses whipped in anticipation. The game developers are kneecapped by suits making technical changes and demands they don’t understand. The game is launched after sorely felt apologies for delays, as a messy distasteful buggy disaster. Then the devs get to finish the game during thn next five unars after sorely felt apologies for the buggy mess at launch. 5 more years later the game is hailed as a creative masterpiece, despite being held by bubblegum and paperclips under the hood and still being a subpar experience. Then CDPR announces a new game, and the cycle repeats.
We didn’t learn anything from “Bethesda’s magic”. What a mismanaged company.
Yes, you did. The last step of the cycle is that everyone forgets that this already happened before. The witcher, then the witcher 2, then witcher 3, then cyberpunk. Each was such a mess at launch that the press at the time thought the games would flop. Each time devs, not suits, pulled the games out of PR hell after the fact.
People forget that the console port of the first witcher game nearly bankrupted them.
Just look at this thread people are talking like cyberpunk was always a perfect masterpiece since launch and negative comments are being buried in down votes.
The difference between CDPR and Bethesda is CDPR games always end up being all time greats though. That’s why I don’t get influenced by the hype, and keep faith in them as developers, as well as their move to unreal engine
Bethesda’s games are also celebrated as all time greats.
Games are good, eventually, in spite of the mismanagement, not because of it. At one point they will run out of magic, just like Bethesda did. For said magic is just a ton of good writing and developers putting up with crunch.
Agree to disagree on that, I haven’t played a Bethesda game I’ve considered “good” since Morrowind personally, and on the other hand Cyberpunk is top tier for me.
Bethesda delivers just good enough for the modding community to pick up the rest and fix their shit. Unofficial patches, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, and all that.
CDPR fixes their own shit.
Both end up with solid games for patientgamers but damn you gotta be really patient.
I played Witcher 3 a few months after it released, and it was nearly bug free, and certainly lived up to most expectations. It had a massive world, every inch of which was crammed with fleshed out interesting stories and characters with character. It was a breathtaking experience from the start, and if it had a few things to work out in the initial weeks, I can understand that.
I just got 2077 after however many years. 50 hours, I know the end is like the next mission or two but I don’t want it to end. Easily my favorite game ever. Guess I’ll get another play through in 5 years before I play the sequel after its released and has a couple years of debugging.
I thought I saw somewhere that it was 150 hours for a full play through. I’m down to just a handful of cyberphycos and side gigs before the last mission. Almost 60 hours now. I’ve been trying to do literally everything but there’s not much left.
When phantom liberty goes on sale I’ll probably get it and do another full play through. I know there are multiple endings, tons of different builds, but its all still the same story that I know what’s going to happen so there’s only so much replay value after you know the story, kinda like skyrim.
This would 100% be the game I would choose to completely forget so I could experience it again.
There is no evidence that Guillemot or Deraine were directly involved in sexual harassment or bullying at the company, they are being accused of complicity.
Which has been said from the very beginning. They didn’t do it themselves, but they knew of it and didn’t do jack to stop it.
I thought Game Key Cards, while not something I would ever buy, weren't the end of the world if they were just meant to replace the existing practice of code-in-a-box for games that won't fit on a cart. It's actually less bad than that, so I didn't get out my pitchfork just yet.
But the sheer number of games being released in this format is alarming. Code-in-a-box was rare, this is looking like it's outnumbering proper physical games. And many of these games don't even make sense to be key cards, they can fit just fine on a cart. There are ports of Switch 1 games that already fit on Switch 1 carts in here!
Switch carts are proprietary and expensive. Rumor has it that 64 GB is the smallest cart you can buy for the switch 2. And corporations will do anything to save a buck.
I’m hoping that at least Nintendo will release their full games on the card. The truth is I’m probably not buying many third party games on Switch that aren’t exclusives.
Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.
At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.
Yes, Nintendo! Please paywall my nostalgia of the very first game console I ever played! Charge me an exorbitant price during an economic crisis to satisfy my childlike need to regress to a time before I understood what money was!
Hang on, Nintendo fans are into findom? That would explain a few things. On a related note, I think I finally understood why people keep giving Chris Roberts money for Star Citizen.
I mean, I bought the starter ship for SC which was 40€ I believe and I still play occaisonally. I’d say I definitely got my money’s worth out of that game.
I’m burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.
Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.
Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.
I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…
…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?
Yep pretty much. All games boil down to what you mentioned above but the execution can vastly differ. I guess the low end is the Ubisoft approach where everything is just a generic world and its go climb this tower/ capture this outpost etc and the high end is the Rockstar approach where it might be drive there, do this but things could be different in between that keeps it engaging. I guess it feels more like a living world.
Yeah I guess so. Less like a look here’s a world that I designed, how do we fill it approach and more like a what story do we want to tell and what does the world look like kind of approach if that makes sense.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
I have a very feminist outlook on things, but I enjoy some problematic things. I know it’s not very progressive of me, but it is what it is. I acknowledge they are problematic.
Which is just to say, I don’t like this. I understand, but I’m not a fan.
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