Yeah punk. Living that 5700g life. Rocking 3700U as a daily driver, what? Yeah I have a fast graphics card, it’s called a 780m you might have heard of it from can barely play Baldurs Gate 3 but it counts as playable. Gaming on integrated graphics is cool because it’s a lower TDP option for the environment. Fight me. I’m...
We really don't talk enough about how the worst rated game of the Tomb Raider reboot from the B studio for the series ended up being the default benchmark for gaming for the better part of a decade.
Good for Eidos Monteal. Guardians of the Galaxy deserved better, too.
There's been a Dragon Age sequel in some form of development for a decade. It's not that surprising, people are gonna churn. I mean, I don't know about you, but I haven't stuck around in a single job for 15 years ever.
I'm not her and I'm not there, but I'm not sure what "being pushed out by other employees" would even mean. That sounds like something that happens in a nature documentary about lions, not games studio.
Yeah, no, I got the intent, it just seems like... a random thought? Why would that be the case? You just think the other writers are jealous of someone who was there for fifteen years and just... mean girl'd them out of the company?
That's not a plausible scenario. Or at least not the first think you'd leap to.
No, it is not. Just isn't. Not a thing in Bioware, to my knowledge. Not a thing in the industry at large, either. This is an extreme leap you're making.
Displeased with management decisions? Absolutely. Frustrated by working conditions? Rarer than you'd think but it can happen. Abused and harassed by a manager or a coworker, particularly for a woman, and receiving insufficient protection from HR? Unfortunately possible, but definitely not my first or second guess when somebody announces they're leaving a studio.
"My coworkers are jealous of my talent and are mean to me" is science fiction.
Those pieces don't say at all what you (or the OP, I suppose) are implying. The first one is about working conditions and harassment, the others are about management choices, not at all in-fighting or jealousy among writers. Incidentally, that last one sucks. Go find better games reporting, holy crap, I promise you it exists.
Honestly, it's a neverending source of fascination to see what people who don't work in the industry perceive as the internal logic of these things. I used to think it was a problem of transparency, the industry not doing enough to show things behind the scenes or explain how games are made. But man, that part has improved A LOT. There are lots more resources now to help you wrap your head around it, but the weird fantasy world people imagine is still exactly the same. It's very frustrating.
Hey, you do you. Just don't try to sell me a moral high horse about exclusivity. I grew past console wars when the kids in the playground were excited about Terminator 2 coming out. If we're going to bring the conversation back to that level I demand my knees stop hurting in the proces of de-evolution as well.
I don't know, I don't care. I don't often buy things on Epic, myself. Seems to me that "free games" is a pretty big thing to dismiss out of hand, though. That seems like a good thing, free games.
In any case the fact that Epic isn't my store of choice for anything but exclusives and free games also means I don't spend my time posting stuff about how much they suck. That seems like an undue amount of effort and attention for my what? Fourth, fifth favorite online games store on PC.
There's also nothing particularly bad about it. Bit of a simple, feature-light UX. Free games is nice. They are smart enough about allowing third party logins, so you can easily import your games automatically into other, better launchers like GOG Galaxy, Launchbox or Heroic. Seen worse.
Ah, the killer retort of the online argument. "If you don't care about this thing I'm mad about for no reason, why are you explaining how I'm wrong about it?"
See, the answer is "because you whining about it on the Internet bothers me more than the thing you're mad about", which doesn't make anybody involved look good. I didn't say I was a dignified commenter, I said the console wars nonsense is too undignified even for me.
Yeah, see, that's why my take on piracy is more nuanced than that.
Copyright is weird and broken, digital commerce is weird and broken and certainly the retro physical games market is weird and broken. There are ways in which that slogan works and ways it breaks, both in the direction of being pro and anti-piracy.
But that's a legitimately tough conversation with a ton of nuance and big implications that goes way past the other "Epic bad" nonsense.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess it depends on what you're using? I'm on Fedia and this is very readable. Good indenting and color coding and stuff. Some real 90s forum energy to it.
Oh, no, I'm talking about Windows native handhelds, which may be getting SteamOS support in the future, as per the original post.
I think a lot of people (reviewers included, weirdly) assume that you need to navigate those with a mouse replacement every time, so you get a lot of complaints about how bad using Windows without a mouse is compared to Steam OS on Game Mode. But you can absolutely set up Steam to a) autolaunch on boot, and b) launch straight into Big Picture mode. At that point once you unlock your Windows handheld you're straight in the Steam fullscreen mode interface and can do everything (within Steam) with a controller.
Not that I think tapping the Steam icon to manually open it up is that much of a hassle, anyway.
I do have a Deck, but they never made good on their early promises to make it easy to use with Windows. Which they did make, I remember. But nope, if you have a Deck you should probably stick to Steam OS. Valve should just find a better way to integrate third party launchers.
To be clear, I'm not advocating to enforcing a minimum spec. I'm saying that there isn't a need to add a performance rating to a SteamOS certification or to the SteamOS compatibility badges because if they're all based on Steam Deck performance they will be valid for all the other certified devices by default. At least until a Deck 2 is released.
I love small handhelds. The Retroid Pocket Mini is great (shame about the bad scaling on the screen). But those are typically Android handhelds for a reason. I don't think a PC handheld in that form factor is worth it. You can just run Linux on ARM and get the form factor without the whole thing running like a hot potato for 15 minutes before it dies. There's a lot of native ports of small PC indie games in that space and ongoing work for per-game port support, too.
Now, all that could change if the upcoming mobile chips we get are great at running at very low wattages and somehow get amazing power management options on the software side out of nowhere. But... I just don't think that's a priority for anybody specifically because ARM chips already have a well established ecosystem to give you basically what you want without having to tie the X64 platform in knots for the sake of running this over Steam instead of Android.
Well, yeah, I get that, but honestly, if you can't get what you want on that front from a GPD Win 4, an Ayaneo Air S1 or Flip... well, then what you want is better Windows on ARM support. These are still laptop chips we're cramming into handhelds, it's not a matter of size vs performance at that point. There's a reason the Steam Deck is that size.
Honestly, at that point I'd try streaming, which those smaller ARM devices will do just fine. But even that I don't think is worth it. That's mobile hardware territory.
Cool? I mean, it changes nothing. Whether you run the ARM handhelds on Android or barebones Linux and the X64 handhelds on Windows or Linux the results are the same. Bazzite, JelOS, Windows, Android, whatever. Go nuts.
Heat is still heat and batteries are still batteries, though.
I am aware of the set of steps, but a) I've had issues getting it to work in the past, particularly getting new games to install under Steam as opposed to adding them in Desktop mode every time and b) what I want is an official way to install and launch third party games, or at least third party launchers from within Steam, the way GOG Galaxy or even Heroic itself supports.
Right now, I play those on Windows handhelds instead, where the steps are:
Boot the device
Click on the launcher you want
Which is similar to doing this on Linux desktop, where the steps are:
Boot the device
Click on the launcher you want
Oh, and for the record, as I said above, Windows absolutely does have a Big Picture mode. You can set up Steam to launch on boot straight into Big Picture. If all you want is to play Steam games you never have to use the Desktop on Windows either. Because I do play a ton of GOG games and emulation over Retroarch I prefer to boot into Desktop where my launchers are pinned to the taskbar, so it's literally one tap to open whichever launcher I want. But Steam absolutely goes into Big Picture after that. Like I said earlier the only functional difference is that the settings button brings up the proprietary screen and power manager instead of the SteamOS Game Mode alternative, but otherwise the Steam interface is much the same.
Why do people not realize this is the case? Big Picture was available on Windows (at boot, even) long before the Deck happened. I've been a longtime Steam-on-TV user, this isn't new.
Yeah, man, I have a bunch of Windows handhelds and both Deck models. I... may have a problem, but I know how it works.
And yeah, I do realize that the Deck and SteamOS game mode doubles as an attempt to complete Valve's dominance over the PC market. I just think that sucks. If GOG can allow you to integrate Epic and Steam then so can Steam. And until they do that, the Deck is less useful to me than a Windows handheld because I keep as much of my gaming library as possible within GOG.
For the record, your posts kinda misrepresent how Big Picture works in practice. Like I said, yeah, you can't change power and screen settings (and bluetooth) directly on Steam, but most Windows handhelds have a shortcut button with those options in it that is, let's be honest, just copying the Steam version. Depending on your brand it is more or less useful, but it's not like you have to whip out a mouse to do those things. I still think most of those implementations are worse than SteamOS's fully integrated version, and Big Picture over Windows is overall a bit laggier and less responsive... but I mean, it's close enough and it absolutely beats being cut off from several thousand games.
No, I'm not saying I'm cut off from running thousands of games. I'm cut off from thousands of games that I own already in other libraries and I can't play on a Steam Deck out of the box.
Most of them would gladly run just fine if I bought them off of Valve. But since I already bought them I'm not buying them again. So I'm cut off. So I'll default to Windows until that changes.
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Yeah, there are a bunch of third party launchers with integrations. Launchbox will do most PC storefronts.
I wish Galaxy was a bit lighter, though, because once I plug in everything it supports we start getting into five digit counts and the whole thing slows to a crawl. It's a bit better now, but it was borderline unusable at some points.
I'm not angrier at something being absent from Steam because Epic paid for an exclusive than I am at any other reason why a game wouldn't make it to my storefront of choice.
Which is, let's be clear, very lightly angry. This is choosing a store to buy videogames, not seeking revenge for my clan in holy war.
Because not having a game available is not having a game available. You still, and I can't believe I have to type this twice, don't get to play the stupid game.
For the record, I blamed Steam for nothing here. Some guy said he feels more assured that Steam will keep Linux compatibility, I pointed out that this is not the case. It's not even Steam's fault, compatibility is being dropped either for technical reasons or due to anticheat, and there is no indication that it will be any different with Epic going forward.
The level of quasi-religious fervor is... kind of scary. Especially given that it's over this one billionare techbro. I mean, good for them, they have a great product and a better understanding of how to make money with only light enshittification, but still...
Those are pretty similar deals, honestly. In many cases the exclusivity deal gets signed because without the up-front cash the game can't get done. You give up some long-term sales for the up front money and the better revenue split. In both cases it's about resources.
And, again, in both cases that decision can be reviewed later. Either because it's baked into the timed exclusivity or because all contracts can be amended.
But also, there isn't a moral stance here. As a user I care about where and how I can play the game, I don't care about the reasons. I don't need to approve your business agreements before I play your videogame, I'm not your lawyer.
Oh, it's nicer for them, I assume, but again, I'm not your bizdev guy. Their lawyers can do the paperwork, I just care about the game.
Plus, I think you're misjudging PC ports. The "obstacles" are actually for shipping on consoles, which require expensive dev kits and complex certification and submission requirements. PC ports are easy, you probably have a PC build running for development anyway and PC platforms really don't give a crap about compliance requirements.
If it's not on PC it's a business decision, not about complexities. Having to sign a contract in exchange for money isn't an "added obstacle", it's a motivation to do it in the first place.
Yeah. Because Steam has DRM. Steam IS DRM. That's the problem it originally solved, back when Amazon was still a bookstore.
So screw Steam and other overprotective corporations, I want my PC games DRM-free, since physical copies aren't an option (which is my console solution, thank you very much). They can come meet my requirements or I will continue to prioritize GOG where I can and be annoyed at the lack of a GOG release otherwise. I don't want GOG to give up on the DRM requirement, I want them to get so popular that publishers have to comply with it whether they like it or not.
So from that perspective, if Epic and Steam want to have a pissing contest, I'm in full "let them fight" mode. Who cares.
All else being equal, yes, I prefer games being platform agnostic.
If I have to choose, though, I only care about them being available on PC in the first place (and on GOG, DRM-free, if at all possible). And I certainly, certainly, am nowhere near getting mad at them signing a deal to get money from Epic in exchange for exclusivity. Go hussle, game devs. Do what you gotta do to get by. If anything, it sucks how much less commerically viable doing that seems to be than just launching on Steam alone, going by the performance of recent Ubisoft releases.
We actually used to be a bit generally mad about it. Plenty of big declarations about skipping Half-Life 2, when that used mandatory Steam authentication for the first time. A bit of a feeding frenzy to crack it in retaliation, too.
Being old makes it harder to get super mad about this.
Who wants Steam gone? You can't have competition without competitors.
I want Steam to exist. And Epic. And definitely GOG. Wouldn't mind at all if GOG was the leader of that pack, or at least if Steam implemented similar policies to theirs.
What I don't want is Steam dominating 80% of the market and making it impossible to make PC games without giving them 30% of everything you make. That's bad.
You can go that way. I'd rather have a front-end to manage it, but having the option means you can do it manually, rely on Galaxy or use a third party front-end pretty interchangeably.
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.
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.
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.
yeah, I game on APUs (beehaw.org) angielski
Yeah punk. Living that 5700g life. Rocking 3700U as a daily driver, what? Yeah I have a fast graphics card, it’s called a 780m you might have heard of it from can barely play Baldurs Gate 3 but it counts as playable. Gaming on integrated graphics is cool because it’s a lower TDP option for the environment. Fight me. I’m...
The Writer Of Dragon Age's Emmrich And Josephine Has Departed BioWare (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Balatro is rated PEGI-18 and Among Us inspires disgruntled people with medical needs. What other video games have been secretly eroding the very fabric of American society?
Title.
Responsible Adult say no to Store Exclusive. angielski
'Powered bv SteamOS' gaming handheld validation leaks in Valve documentation, Asus ROG Ally may be among first handhelds with official SteamOS support (www.notebookcheck.net) angielski
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world) angielski
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.