The thing is, I play a ton of retro games, but I mostly mediate that through RetroAchievements. Since they keep adding new games and have leaderboards and so on it's a great way to have something to follow to help you prioritize your time, instead of standing in front of a wall of boxes paralyzed between replaying Sonic 2 or trying some obscure thing you got seven times in bundles.
But I still love having original hardware in working order plugged into a CRT. It's just almost an archeological pursuit. A shrine to what all these repurposed games I play on modern hardware used to actually look like. And it's fun to fiddle with them for maintenance.
It really isn't mandatory. I applaud the walking away. My day is average to decent, honestly.
And no, you're making excuses. This isn't Twitter, it's well threaded. I expect you to understand what you're replying to. Especially if you butt in two posts from the start of the thread.
You won't be shocked, though, because like I just told you there is already a couple of those and they didn't do well, only to be replaced by 7800U variants in the same form factor (plus a tad of battery chonk, perhaps). This is not a hypothetical.
Seriously, man, just read what people are telling you. If somebody is threatening to tase you unless you're immediately contrarian irrespective of the information being presented to you blink twice and we'll send someone.
I swear, online contrarians don't even bother to read what they respond to now.
GOG comes into play because you're arguing about the necessity of Steam offering third party store support in SteamOS game mode. Welcome back to the conversation you're actually having.
The GPD Win 4 is roughly the size of a thick PSVita and that ran on a 6800U as well and they released newer ones all the way up to 8800U without increasing the size. Ditto for the Ayaneo Flip, which is still chunky but it's clamshell, so I guess you could cargo pants it.
Ayaneo also makes the Air, which is supposed to be exactly that, and I think there is a model that targets a smaller APU and is super thin, but the next in line already jumps to the 7840U and is comparable to the Deck. I have to imagine that even small PC handhelds will match that performance going forward.
There are pocketable handhelds out there, but they're generally Android-based, which makes a lot more sense. I think for PC we'll see people trying to hit this level of performance in a compact form factor, but I'd be shocked if people tried to go back to sub-6800 performance on PC on new devices.
Again, the point of the Deck is standardized performance, and it quickly became exactly that. Things will get messier once the Deck is replaced by a higher spec, but in the meantime, if it's certified for baseline Deck you're either probably fine or in such a tiny niche (you own 5840u version of the AyaNeo Air? Who are you) that you probably know what you can do with it.
Not true. Or very incomplete, at least. By the newest reports the market is 49% mobile, 28% console and 23% PC, but that's by revenue, not player counts.
See, if you wanted to torture stats to shoo me away, you should have gone by the market share of GOG, which is quite small. Technically by the numbers they'd be smarter to prioritize getting Roblox and Fortnite working first.
Yeah, there are a bunch of alternatives. I don't even think it's as much of a problem on Desktop Linux, where having Steam and Heroic/Lutris going at the same time isn't a big deal.
But all the hoops to integrate other launchers inside Steam Game Mode and the friction in trying to use them reliably in that environment are just not mainstream viable or functional. As long as that works the way it currently does I'll default my handleds to autobooting into Windows Big Picture instead.
Which, by the way, is totally a thing you can do. People always act like there's a much bigger gap than there actually is between those two options. You mostly only lose the well integrated display and power controls, which may be a bigger or smaller deal depending on what your Windows handheld uses instead.
It's 100% true of all Windows handhelds released after the OG Steam Deck, yes. This is not because the Deck is bad, it's because they all are running the same two or three APUs, all built on the same AMD architecture. If it came after the Deck, it's a 6800U with a 780M or slightly better than that, and no new handhelds going forward will launch with anything significantly worse than that.
So beyond retroactive support for first-gen AyaNeo or GPD handhelds that are older than the Deck, I don't think this is a major concern. And if you're on one of those, which were incredibly expensive at launch compared to the Deck, I think you should be pretty well used to underwhelming performance by the time SteamOS verifies them, if ever.
It's really not a realistic scenario. Our floor for performance is well established and this is coming so far down the line that we shouldn't expect to return to it at this point.
No. Gamers are largely playing on Switch. And PS5, sometimes.
The residual amount of people playing on PC are annoyed by fiddling, with very rare exceptions.
Hell, I fiddle. I've been known to fiddle in my day. And I'm here complaining about the fiddling. I'm a representative of extreme tolerance to fiddling and I'm annoyed.
It does, however, make me REALLY want Valve to add official third party library support. I have thousands of games on GOG and hundreds on Epic. I don't need them to officially support all of them, but at least I need a better approach to integrating them than fiddling with Heroic or Lutris in desktop mode.
I don't think that's feasible. The current set of handhelds have the OG Deck at the bottom end of the performance tier anyway, that'll only become relevant if and when a Deck 2 releases, and at that point it will be the same problem to solve with or without third party hardware.
Free to play games do take your money, though. Especially Destiny 2, which is a free to play game that happens to cost about sixty bucks a year. And Rust did offer a refund to users, but not because Valve made them do it (my understanding is they had to actually negotiate with Valve how that would even work). They issued a refund because they announced a native Linux client and then backed out of that promise.
So yeah, no, I don't see what reasonable expectation for refunds there is, I don't see Valve having ever mentioned that Steam Deck compatibility being rolled back or removed would be grounds for a refund (at least outside their time limited no-cause refund policy) or that the reaction to compatibility changes with Proton or Linux would be any different across Epic, GOG or Valve at this point. Things may change if the Deck platform gets a lot bigger in the future and Valve decide to push for it as a closed environment, but that's not where we are.
To your question, the other big game that comes to mind having done the same thing as Apex would be GTA V, which to my knowledge is still listed as "Unsupported" due to adding anticheat, despite initially working on Deck. And I guess you could count the FIFA franchise if you see it as a single game, because I think there was at least one of them supported on Deck before they rolled out Anticheat and all the newer ones have not been supported.
So it's definitely not a one-off thing, and there has been no action from Valve.
Well, they refused to offer refunds for a long time after people like EA and GOG had already implemented it, and only relented when forced by regulators. And they screwed up their Green Light process for a long time despite every developer telling them it sucked. There's the ongoing use of loot boxes and monetized UGC, of course. Your tolerance for that one may vary.
I think Valve makes very good software and good hardware, and they have a way better handle on where they can squeeze users versus side with them than pretty much anybody else in the industry.
But, you know, they're a corpo ran by a reclusive techbro, they're still frequently sketchy.
Which is also very much true of GOG and CD Projekt, for the record.
Yeah, but that's not a reasonable expectation, is it? Because it's happened multiple times and nobody got anything refunded.
So there is no meaningful incentive and no reasonable expectation, demonstrably.
And, for the record, the Apex Legends guys at least didn't say they couldn't support Linux or the Deck. They used to, in fact. They actively pulled support because they said they saw disproportionately more cheating under those platforms. I have no idea if that's true, but it's certainly what they said. It sure doesn't sound like that'll change anytime soon, unless Windows enacts the same restrictions on Kernel-level access or Linux develops some equivalent.
I'd say that's probably a distant priority over, I don't know, getting decent Nvidia support, but knowing the way Linux progresses that may absolutely not be true.