On the other hand, even if they don’t “make back” the loss, you can look at it as: how much money is Valve willing to pay to become a “mainstream” living room console competitor? Lose a couple billion dollars on Machine, but get 400k “give valve money, probably” machines plugged into TVs. Sony and MS have other divisions and they AND Nintendo have shareholder responsibilities. Those conpanies cannot tank a single year of number go down. Valve can, and surely there’s a price that Valve would be willing to play to be “the xbox”.
This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.
I know there are some cool new ways to run PC games on stuff like this. If you have them, how does this run the PC versions of games like Isaac, Gungeon, Slay the Spire, or Vampire Survivors? I know these all (or mostly) have Android or Switch ports but for one reason or another (usually mod support) the PC version is superior. I’m looking into this device as a lower weight, lower power alternative to a Steam Deck, so support for 2D indie PC games is a must.
Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.
Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
I didn’t buy and don’t have the console. But either way, refunds wouldn’t “hurt” Nintendo the way they would on a platform like Steam - you can’t refund Nintendo digital products, and even if Walmart accepted a return on a Switch 2 with the digital account-based (non-transferable per TOS) Mario Kart redeemed, Nintendo already made their sale by getting the thing on a Wal-Mart shelf in the first place.
It’s just silly to see a comment about “keeping” giving Nintendo $80 for mario kart when the people affected by stuff like this… Already gave Nintendo $80/$500 for Mario Kart. The “support” has already been delivered.
Anyone who knows how Mario Kart World works well enough to be bothered by this change already gave Nintendo $500 for the game. What are they gonna do? Refund it to Walmart?
Well if you’re already a pirate you don’t need the MIG or benefit in any way from using it. Presumably you’ve got an Erista Switch or a modchip. The MIG is only for pirating stuff on modchipless Lite/Mariko/OLED/Apparently 2 (but watch out) consoles. It can’t pirate updates or DLC or eshop-only games so it’s always worse than CFW or modchips for those that can use CFW or modchips.
Do you know how easy it would be, if money was not transferred, for the new and old owners to both outright say so? Yes they could also lie but that’s irrelevant. if this wasn’t a capital driven transaction, they’d assuage many fears by telling us it wasn’t. They haven’t done that.
The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.
Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.
So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.
The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.
People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.
I’d take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple’s walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can’t just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into “gadgets” instead of “computers” with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).
Meanwhile, Epic’s greatest evil that affects me is that I don’t play some video games because they’re exclusive to Epic’s store, and also some video games are worse because it “just makes too much financial sense” for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple’s doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.
With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.