Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that's what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn't that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you'd see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the "last gen still looked good" game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn't believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays... well, like Silent Hill, and it's still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn't a zero sum game. You don't trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
Really? Cause I don't know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
Not everybody around me. Nobody around me has ever mentioned a touchpad outside of threads about the touchpad. It's not a thing.
Everybody on Steam seems to be playing controller games on sticks, though. At least from the data Steam shares. Which matches reviews at the time (and later, when people had to pay attention to them on the Deck), the way games on Deck are put together by devs, the low sales of the Controller, the changes to the Vive controller, the lack of other hardware manufacturers doing dual touchpads and pretty much every other piece of info at scale we have beyond anecdote.
Man, online chatter sucks and does bad things to people. I think I'm done with this. Have fun with the dual pads Valve bestowed upon you. I don't need you to change your mind about their popularity, but man, there's going to be a Smithers moment for you at some point on something else and it sure would be good if you thought back to this.
Hah. Man, you were fuming about that one for a while, huh?
I said at the very tippy top of this thread that
I know some people swear by them, I just don't think they're worth the space they take up as a pointer device
and later
People who like these do tend to be loud and proud about it, so they stand out more
It's no surprise that there are people swearing by them loudly and proudly. In fact, there are more people doing that than the opposite, because most people just... you know, ignore the whole thing altogether and haven't through about the Steam Controller in a decade.
The reason I was pulling quotes for you is that you denied the touchpad reception in the OG Controller was mixed and that Valve was presenting them as a stick substitute, which was demonstrably incorrect.
It means official full controller support with the default config. There are few games that provide official controller support over Steam Input in the first place, even fewer that have any touchpad custom inputs by default and I'm not even sure if there are any that are Steam Verified. At a glance it's... what, just Rimworld again? Maybe some first party stuff left over from the Steam Machines fiasco? Sims is only Playable. Civ VII, which you called out earlier, I suspect incorrectly, has official all-stick support, what with having launched on consoles day and date. I haven't checked it because I haven't bought it yet, so if I'm wrong let me know. Civ VI doesn't have default controller support, but it's only Playable as well. In fact, if you have a list of verified games with touchpad default support I'd love to see it. I'm genuinely curious.
Look, you get to live in this very specific alternate reality where the only difference is people love dual touchpads as a main input system. That's fine, you're not hurting anybody. I get hung up on it because blatant misrepresentations on social media are fairly upsetting these days and because I'm still not over having had to use the dumb touchpads on the Vive for a couple of years back there.
But man, is it exhausting to watch it act as a proxy of some much more important crap in real time.
Hm. That is an interesting read, I don't know if I see it. For fast iGPUs it's been all AMD for a while. Nvidia has been threatening to build a faster one, but it seems they may be targeting integrated, fully branded devices for AI instead of gaming or general use.
Intel has started competing there, but so far it's not been a popular pick with handheld manufacturers.
My understanding is this generation there are more powerful parts but they're expensive to implement and they many not be as good at low wattages, but I guess we'll have to wait a while to know for sure. Either way I don't see a reason why there would be downward pressure on prices. Less upwards pressure than Nvidia just throwing a number at the 5080 and 5090 presumably selected from a bingo card, for sure, but still not necessarily down in price to performance.
Not most users, not even as Valve intended (on the Deck, at least).
They literally reserved the green "Verified" badge for games with full controller support and are the only ones eligible for the "Great on Deck" tab. Mouse and Keyboard games get the yellow "Playable" tag instead and a warning on boot.
See, that's the sad part about actually looking things up. It takes time, people get to nitpick it to death and then some guys will just... you know, say stuff.
It's a different measure because Valve does not disclose full install counts at all, let alone per hardware type, but it does provide concurrent users. I work with what I have. In any case, the top of the list is in the hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, so that does show that the top 100 on Deck does run the gamut until fairly low in usage. That's not a surprise, gaming is very winner-takes-all right now, particularly on PC. Steam user counts drop VERY quickly, so your argument that the top 500 is all huge is not accurate.
As for Civ VII, I was going off the last top 100 list, which is yearly and thus covering a period before the Civ VII launch, but Civ VI was actually there and I missed it. It shows up at 37. That's now 3% of the list that is mouse driven. I stand corrected. You're still wrong.
By the way, speaking of using different metrics, "trending" games aren't built on absolute numbers, so top played and trending don't line up at all. I'm assuming Civ VII will make the cut on Deck whenever it does get counted on absolute usage, though.
Nintendo has done backwards compatibility before, pretty extensively. The Switch 2 isn't a departure. They put a GBA cartridge slot in the first few Nintendo DSs (they lost it in the DSi), and the 3DS was backwards compatible with the DS. They also did GC to Wii and Wii to Wii U (but not GC to WiiU). They even put physical plugs for GC controllers and memory cards on the Wii.
And they've done weirder stuff, like the ability to use a GBA as a controller on the GameCube and some cross-save bonuses between games in some platforms.
The Game Gear is a weird example for that, specifically, since it was basically a repackaged Master System, so there was a lot of game crossover. Sega also had a widely advertised adapter that allowed the Mega Drive to play Master System games.
Anyway, nerdy retro gaming stuff aside, there is definitely a gradient across Valve, that is mostly driving a software platform across a ton of third party hardware, the 4K twins, which are relatively focused on service providing and Nintendo, which is somewhat more focused on a single platform, at least so far. It's very much not black and white and very much not a new thing, though.
And in any case, the smooth gradient does mean that ultimately it should be fair to at least compare Deck sales to console sales.
Granblue Relink is just about closing that top 100 and has about 650 players right now. That's not on Deck, that's across all of Steam.
That's a big birthday party, but not an all-timer.
I know what a radial menu is. The menu you sent is a nine square grid, which is a neutral spot surrounded by eight directional inputs. So a radial menu.
You can make other menus, but you just happened to send me a radial menu, specifically. Which I suspect was chosen there because, like I said, the small touchpad at best suits a radial menu or a directional menu.
And the point isn't that controller-first games are more popular, it's that mouse-first games are quite unpopular. Several big mouse-first games are in the overall most played list but not on the Deck list. Others appear lower. DOTA 2, for one, which is at the top of the overall and nowhere to be seen on the Deck top 100.
And yeah, when somebody argues something iffy in an online discussion I'm the kind of person to go and check. I don't mind being wrong that much, but I do want to know.
I mean, "MANY" in relation to, say, how many people would show up to someone's birthday party. Not "MANY" as in "the size of a videogame audience". We kinda know that for a fact. For reference, Steam does show the most played games on Deck. The first game with no official controller support shows up at 79. It's The Sims 4. For what it's worth, the two most used Steam Input configs do use the trackpads, but they just map the right one as a mouse and have the left one mapped to four directional functions. If your argument for the dual trackpads was simplicity, let me tell you, both of these configs are complete spaghetti, so I don't think that holds much water.
Rimworld is in there, suprisingly, in the 80s. Made me count all the way there, they should really put numbers on that list. Those seem to be the sole two mouse-driven entries. There are no RTS games, tycoon games or city builders that I can see.
In any case, you're right that we agree on whether playing strategy games on a touchpad is fun. It really is not.
By the way, you do realize your counter to the radial menu thing was a screenshot of a radial menu, right? The fact that it's using squares doesn't change how that works (except for how a grid layout actually fits fewer things than a radial menu, but that's neither here nor there).
Hah. You're overestimating the potential of 90s gaming devices. No game console, handheld or not, had sold a hundred million units. Hell, the Game Boy didn't crack into the hundreds until the Game Boy Color came around, and it was certainly the first.
Anyway, mild exaggeration aside, I get what you're aiming for, but I guess my question is why people read that positioning on Valve devices in the first place. There's no obvious indication that Valve is any less ambitious than any other first party, or any reason why they would be. They went to AMD and comissioned a custom APU at scale, just like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft are doing. The only differentiating factor is they built the thing on top of a mostly usable pre-existing OS (which I suppose Microsoft also does, but hey). If anything their entire call to fame was to "consolize" Linux for SteamOS, which they'd been trying to do for a while anyway.
I agree that their goal is to set up an ecosystem that works for them, but I find it surprising that people assume they're disinterested in hardware sales. If I had to guess I'd say it's because they refuse to market too hard outside their own ecosystem, so their branding feels different than the more in-your-face releases of Sony, MS or Nintendo products and people assume that's because they're intrinsically or intentionally smaller, which I don't think is true. I do think that image is projected on purpose, though.