“again”? More like “still”. I assume they needed extra time to rework art assets. I’m not shocked that they still work on the game, as otherwise years of work would be wasted. And Bungie would start from scratch. But they need something NOW.
I have no doubt it will be good in gameplay. The art style has some identity too to it. I think they are quiet, so people forget about the problems and do not talk about it anymore until its resolved. What I wonder is, if they will keep the same game name or will there be a new brand attached to it?
Oh it was a joke, and I fell for it. I know about the old game, but thought it was referred to the assumption the new game was cancelled. There was lot of talk and assumption about this.
Spec wise I can get there around $688 on pc part picker. I would imagine valve could hit a lower price point with selling en masse. That being said if you take in the price point of how small it is that could add some extra cost.
With the same form factor, noise level, CEC, wake on USB, optimized sleep/resume? Just having a set of component with similar performance on paper is not having the same device.
The final experience have to take into account all of that.
Sure it does, but that doesnt mean that you can’t make a comparison.
all those features may hold higher value than more ram.
The VRAM may actually be a deal breaker if you look at the trend of current games and how many games have problems with even modest settings especially at higher resolutions like they’ve said this will support.
It’s like comparing two cars looking only at the engine. Discarding of one has AC and the others don’t.
Not at all. Its comparing the engines understanding that they are obviously different, but selectively talking about one aspect. You can bring up the other aspects but its not unfair to make the comparison.
Maybe for a thinkerer that could be a sensible comparison but for a non thinkerer like myself now (I used to be) those features holds a lot of value.
This has nothing to do with tinkering and everything to do with if this can deliver a good value for money for any sizeable target market.
If it only applies to a small niche, it can’t be a successful product and wont do what they want it to do.
If it can’t adequately pass the baseline, its out of steam before the starter gun fires.
In case anyone doesn’t wanna wade through the terrible way notebookcheck presents information, I’ll post the numbers for CyberPunk High Preset at 1080P to give you an idea of the performance difference. Nothing particular about why I chose that game, it’s just the first I found that was on all 3 links:
RX7600M: 62.3 FPS
RX7600: 90.1 FPS
RX9060XT: 127.2 FPS
If we set the 7600M as 100%, then the 7600 and 9060XT are 144.6% and 204.1% respectively.
I think people believe the Steam Machine will be way faster and that’s why they’re coming up with these outrageous prices.
If olot really Is going to be priced like that then why? Like you Can Build a PC and Its even fun. You cant make a Powerfull PC that small easly but like…idk
I’m guessing the same reason people don’t always reroof their own house, or replace their own home electrical, or build their own bike. Sometimes it’s worth spending money to avoid doing a thing you either don’t want to or don’t know how to do. As I’ve gotten older and more financially secure that’s definitely been the case with me at least
It’s weird being on this site sometimes. Not everyone speaks computer, but it turns out that doesn’t make them dumb, they’re just good at different things. Personally I have no issues doing electrical work but know I would get incredibly frustrated trying to work a Linux machine. I have no interest in learning all that noise because it straight up is not interesting to me and is not worth my time. I had my fill of that nonsense in school. I’d def be a potential customer of something like this that ‘works out of the box’ - honestly that’s the real path to getting people off windows.
Eh, I don’t particularly enjoy building PCs, but I do it because it’s cheaper, esp. for upgrades. I’m really not the target market for this.
That said, this is the right product for a lot of people. Many don’t want to mess with their gaming system, they want it to just work. That’s why consoles are popular, and the Steam Machine being a bit more expensive than a console and get access to Steam’s catalog is very attractive to a lot of people, especially if it otherwise works like a console.
Yeah It works like the pc-console with steamOS ita Just i found that for me and some other people its a Little redundant, but not that people shouldnt buy it
There were some pieces mentioned on waveform about its set up being out of box ready to be turned on by tv remote and those few console like bits that people like me wouldnt know how to do if we built.
If you want a smaller form factor it actually costs you more than a normal tower. This is not a bad way to get a small form factor computer (if it’s priced like a normal sized PC)
Especially with the fucked up RAM prices recently.
That sucks. I hoped Valve would price it competitively to boost the sales and adoption. But why would I buy this “crippled” PC for the same price I can buy retail? The main gripe for me is Gabecube has no room for upgrade, not even second drive, nothing. Which obviously is not the case with self built PC.
Don’t get me wrong I still like the idea, but the price just must make sense.
I mean crippled like it is “as is”, no space to expand, tinker, swap parts. I’ve also seen a rumor it’ll have locked BIOS, but I hope that’s just a rumor.
Well, it technically is if you remove the current RAM chips, solder on new double density RAM chips, and flash the BIOS. But compared to a regular PC of just plugging the RAM sticks into the Motherboard slots they belong in, trying to expand RAM on the Steam Deck might as well be considered not possible. Even if you do expand the RAM, there is no noticeable performance gain.
Yeah, I said that in the second part of my comment. It requires desoldering the RAM chips and soldering on new ones, a step most people aren’t going to do.
Wow, the only games I want to see win anything are Dispatch and I guess Peak. Pretty much everything else did not click with me. E33 has really surprised me with how widely praised it is. I put it in the same area as Death Stranding 2. I recognize that people seem to really like those games but I just do not get the same enjoyment and I cant understand what other people like so much about them, other than that they evidently do.
Different strokes for different folks and all that. I personally couldn’t stand The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, or Baldur’s Gate 3 despite them being constantly praised.
I bounced off Witcher 3 too. Watched friends play a lot of RDR2, not interested.
…BG3 was sublime though. I don’t even like D&D combat, or ‘Tolkien-esque’ fantasy, but holy hell. It’s gorgeous, it just oozes charisma, and was quite fun in coop.
E33 is the only game to have ever made me ugly-cry, and it did it multiple times. That alone secures it a place in my personal pantheon. I didn’t love the combat system, but I will admit that’s because I have never liked JRPG systems, and I eventually grew to be okay with it. The game was a work of art and passion that we rarely ever see, and that came through.
So… im a big supporter of squeenix, buy everything they make… but this tells me the quality of their games is going to go down the toilet. Knowing AI it’ll come up with fake lists of bugs that didn’t happen and all the real bugs will not be listed and they’ll release the buggies shit. One thing I LIKE about square, being one of the few companies I do pre-orders from still, is that their products are fairly bug free on launch FFXVI had some graphics optimization issues, but I’ve been happy with most of what I got the past few years.
I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.
It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.
That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”
I ultimately don’t think he’s a bad guy so I’m rooting for him to show us wrong.
I think he always just believed in his vision too much and didn’t realise that he and his team couldn’t end up delivering on it. And then he’d be so excited about what he’s working on that he just couldn’t not share it with others. I don’t think he ever intended to mislead.
I know there’s the milo thing but with that I feel like he still thought they could do it in the end but Microsoft just needed something right there and then to show. I think that issue ends up more squarely on whoever sold him on what the hardware could do and he had not yet fully hit those walls of limitations enough to realise they weren’t coming down at all. (I also think this goes for Sean Murray too when he did the talk show circuit that Sony put him on - although without the hardware stuff and more on whether or not they could deliver on time since they’ve shown what they wanted was actually possible with future updates)
I’m taking the bait again for old times sake if nothing else. I hope he proves everyone wrong, it will be a fantastic end to his saga, and we’ll get something great.
When we’re let down again, we’ll still have something fun to play with and getting tricked by Molyneuxs big ideas will be like opening a time capsule from a more civilised age.
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.
Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.
Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).
I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.
IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
merch
game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans’ choosing
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
I don’t consume much gaming journalism because it’s largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
But weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.
I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
In America, they are legally required to disclose paid reviews. If the company pays for the review they legally must disclose it
If you receive free products or other perks with the expectation that you’ll promote or discuss the advertiser’s products in your blog, the FTC Act applies to you.
As someone who’s done this before, let me tell you it’d be much easier for Toby Fox to pay me to give Undertale a good review than it would for Ubisoft to pay me to give Rayman a good review.
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.
For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.
For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.
GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.
That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.
Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.
It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
That website has so much ragebait and I’ve never noticed it to ever have been anything better than that since I first started seeing articles from them. Once I noticed I stopped. Like 15-18 years ago I would read Kotaku but at some point it became click bait and weirdly gooner bait for a while so I stopped with that site 15-18 years ago. Like the site started good but then became the worst kind of geekdom pandering. Like Perez Hilton for fictional characters
It happens to every gaming site. Some worse than others. Gamespot post-Kane and Lynch and IGN at some point became a shameless industry advertising site. Polygon started real good and quickly devolved into a terrible ratio of clickbait to occasional good article. At this point the only games media I care for are official communications and gameplay videos from randoms on YouTube or twitch where the only narration I care to hear is about bugs and performance. Gameplay can show itself in video. I can judge writing myself
TheGamer came out of nowhere too. Back when I used faceboook almost a decade ago, I used to follow a gaming meme page. They post typical gaming shitposts of that era. They had massive followers, and big engagements.
Then one day every shitpost they post is branded with TheGamer logo, the page renamed to TheGamer. I don’t remember the original page name but it gave me disingenious vibe from both of them, I suspected the page has been sold & ownership transferred to TheGamer.
Back then I do have silly loyalty to stuff that I like, so I feel betrayed when they sold themselves to a sloppy article site.
Every once in a while they’d post buzzfeed-type of articles from their website. I eventually unfollowed the page.
They’ve been around so long but I don’t associate it with any major investigative article or any writer that made their name writing for them. It’s the most faceless notable gaming website and it’s notability to me seems entirely based around SEO and spamming social media with their blogspam articles
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