Openness is great, but there’s no financial reason to make specialized hardware to operate an open platform.
Historically, consoles have been sold near cost, and profits have been made on game sales after the fact. If you can just buy your games from Steam on console, the price of the console will go up. At some point, it no longer makes sense to buy the specialized hardware.
But we’ll get to see how that goes! It’s looking more and more like the next Xbox is going to run Windows.
We’re already seeing some of that with things like the ROG Ally. There are also specialized emulator platforms that can play cartridges from multiple consoles.
Seems like that is Microsoft’S new strategy, pivot to PC where their storefront is just one of several options for buying games. Their super premium console they are teasing is probably just a Windows computer. Unclear what will happen with older Xbox purchases/if back compatibility will continue to be a concern. Might end up being the sacrificial lamb to our open future.
I’m really hoping all my existing purchases can be played via PC one day. If “everything” is indeed becoming an xbox, then I’m hoping this becomes a reality. I’m disappointed they’re moving away from their traditional consoles, though. It feels like the end of something special.
I hate games journalists. I’m sure there are some good ones but most of them are corporate trash and their reviews are thinly veiled ads. They dont care about the games they write about. They dont take the time to learn the games and are just generally bad at games. Basically the entire industry is just shitting out the most dogshit video game opinions 24/7. I’d rather go to Lemmy or Reddit and read what actual players have to say about games.
Games “journalists” have always been awful at their job and the entire industry is so incredibly fucky with nerds power tripping on the tiniest modicum of power they’ve been given.
Personally haven’t really read gaming journalism even before. If I want to see what score a game has, I’m much more likely to check How Long To Beat or Backloggd, where users rate games.
Or, as has been mentioned in this thread, Youtubers, if I want a singular subjective opinion as opposed to a “out of 5” or “out of 10” score which, admittedly can be tricky when different people have a different view on what each number should mean. For instance, a 5 (on a 10 scale), is average for me when I rate anime. But most of the anime community uses 7 as the average, so a 6.2 show on MyAnimeList, which you would think is above average, is actually below.
I tried Bazzite for the first time last weekend. I was shook at how far Linux gaming has come. Some of the games I play actually saw performance increases.
I don’t see any reason to return to Windows for gaming, except maybe a sandboxed VM for the very rare game that requires kernel-level anti cheat.
I’ve got Mint as my main OS for everything except Windows, which I use solely for gaming. Would you say it’s worth just replacing windows with Bazzite? I pirate some games and only a portion of my games are on Steam, so I always thought it might not be the best idea to leave windows behind altogether. Also I’m basically a novice with command lines and such (hence why I’m using Mint)
I can’t make any recommendations yet, I’m still very early in my own evaluation. I can say with Bazzite, most functionality seems available by UI. They also include tooling to manage manually installed games, as well as other platforms such as GOG, etc.
I believe the final frontier for Linux gaming - apart from some niche cases - is multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat. They are literally impossible to play on Linux, so if you’re into one of those then don’t bother.
The other edge case is modding. A lot of mods work just fine on Linux, but some just don’t and some - like those relying on Mod Managers and the like - might require more fiddling and specific tinkering. If you do a lot of modding it’s probably easier to stick to Windows as you know everything just works.
Not to mention general support from software companies. I recently endeavoured to try Bazzite only to find out I can’t install my VPN’s client on it because there’s not a flatpak version. Given a handful of other programs I specifically like and would need to find workarounds or alternatives to, I won’t be jumping over anytime soon.
I use mint for gaming and it works just fine. Granted my computer isn’t particularly new, and I have an AMD GPU (nvidia is more finicky and some distros support it better than others out of the box)
Like, if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card you’d want to use mint’s built in driver manger GUI (don’t need to even use the command line) to make sure you have the best driver. If you have AMD graphics (ether iGPU or dedicated GPU) you don’t even have to do that. The main thing that Bazzite does is have the right Nvidia graphics drivers out of the box.
The main difference between the two is the package manager, the thing that downloads programs and makes sure they have all the dependencies they need to run. Bazzite is fedora derived so it uses DNF instead of the Debian derived APT for package management. Frankly the differences between the two are not really material.
Ether way, Lutris will get windows versions of games running as well as steam does, and any game can be added to Lutris regardless of how you got it, if not from one of the major store fronts you just have point Lutris to the files.
Would a sandboxed VM work for league of legends? Its the one game I occasionally play with friends that I haven’t been able to since moving to Linux. Not that I miss it much, just don’t want to be left out 🥺
If you don’t really have time to play and you buy as you play, that’s quite understandable. I also noticed this from my Steam friendlist: The people who play less and have fewer games, don’t care if there is a sale or not. They buy games if they want and start playing right away.
It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.
I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.
Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.
the problem with the mobile game market is that it is aggressively opposed to any kind of premium experience. Time and again, the market has proven that they are not willing to pay very much upfront for a premium gaming experience. Games that try to charge a “premium” price like $10 or $20 tend to suffer for the choice to charge that much. You’ve seen attempts to address this problem (like Apple Arcade), and they’ve seen moderate success, but it doesn’t seem to be changing the overall shape of the market. App stores are still full of free-to-play slop because that is what gets the most downloads and plays and positive reviews.
How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.
Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.
PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.
There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.
There really aren’t that many premium experiences on mobile that are worth a damn imo. They’re usually just ports of games from other platforms that control terribly on a touch screen. For me to be willing to pay for a mobile game it has to be a good game and a good fit for the platform. Apart from Balatro not much comes to mind.
But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.
So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.
It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.
If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.
I find a big impetus to mobile games (on phones) is the interface. Touch screens absolutely SUCK for most games. Holding a rectangle is uncomfortable.
Its interesting to me that playstation isn’t new to the mobile market.
They’ve had the accessories for the psOne to add a battery and monitor, the psp, and the psvita. They are one of the companies I’d be interested in another mobile platform.
It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
I at least like the idea that a console can act as both. I just can’t get behind this form factor of “handheld” consoles that are so large. Like, yeah, I can hold it in my hands. But a steam deck, or even a switch aren’t exactly easy to carry around.
Not in the way that my old DS or GBA could. Hell, there’s a reason I do most of my handheld gaming on a Miyoo Mini Plus. The idea of taking a full console experience with me, on the go, was a neat idea when I was 10. But those kinds of games just don’t lend themselves to riding the bus, or sitting in the doctors office waiting room.
Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.
There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.
I think people just go for the cheaper option which coincides with being a mobile form factor. If Sony thinks they can be more expensive than the switch they are mistaken.
I would really like to see a company go back and make unique handhelds. Handhelds have become portable consoles, which is cool, but I miss the unique games that were built around limitations or unique hardware like the DS and 3ds.
Also I would really like a handheld that doesn’t hurt when you hold it for extended periods of time.
videogameschronicle.com
Ważne