Get one of those gamepad cradles with USB-C (but don’t cheap out on it).

The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.

They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.

Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers’ visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.

That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.

Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.

Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.

I thought these are still working?

I would expect Valve’s next headset to be expensive, complex and requiring extensive configuration by the user, just like their previous efforts. Pretty much the polar opposite of the Quest.

No, both of these titles are “halo games” (not in the Bungie series, but in the way that they are showcase titles) that sold poorly compared to their development costs - and their publishers likely knew that these would sell very poorly, but chose to publish them regardless, because they bring prestige to their platforms. They sold poorly, because they are niche games, not due to their platform exclusivity.

It’s kind of like a car manufacturer making an exclusive sports car that only a few hundred people will buy, but that is meant to elevate the entire brand, bring in customers for other products and wow journalists so that they think of the brand more highly. Most of Sony’s publishing strategy hinges on strong exclusive titles - since their hardware is virtually identical to Microsoft’s - and they started this by going down the “high art” game route all the way back with the PS1 (with extremely niche games like “The Book of Watermarks”) before creating more mainstream blockbuster exclusives like the Uncharted series.

I get your frustration with this, I have felt it myself with exclusives that I wanted to play, but couldn’t justify the expense of buying a console for, but there are solid reasons from the perspective of developers and publishers for doing it and outlawing this practice would result in a far less vibrant and interesting gaming landscape. Another comparison is how rich aristocrats used to pay artists like Leonardo DaVinci to create art for them. This was also an exclusivity deal of sorts, since most of the public didn’t see these artworks until centuries later (the platform exclusivity was being born to the right kind of family), but without these wealthy, selfish patrons of the arts, mankind would have been deprived of amazing creations.

Thanks for informing me about Monado, but it seems like it’s exclusive to Linux. That’s hardly ideal. Then again, it’s more than two years until November of 2026, so a lot might happen until then.

Do you see developers making games exclusively for one console manufacturer the same way? Are you willing to deprive the gaming community as a whole from these titles? Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Alan Wake 2 would not have happened without exclusivity.

I was going to call shenanigans, but then I looked at the details of the application:

https://i.imgur.com/J30SGAr.png

So it seems there is something to it.

They are anti-consumer, but for smaller devs in particular, they can mean the difference between between canceling and releasing a game, between bankruptcy and the studio’s continued existence.

A similar thing will happen with WMR headsets in November of 2026, by the way (they’ll work beyond that, but you can’t download the software anymore after that date):

https://www.uploadvr.com/windows-mixed-reality-headset-support-end-date/

Since these depend on Windows itself, I don’t think there will be an easy (or even possible) workaround.

Sad news, because these are cheap, high-res, fast to set up, easy to use and generally very decent headsets. Controllers are not top of the class, but good enough for almost anything. Ideal for people interested in tipping their toes into proper PCVR.

Let’s be honest, was anyone expecting any different outcome from Embracer’s hasty growth with cheap money? There was no way this would have worked out.

You actually went to the website and looked it up? Alright then, carry on.

I’m still not a fan of the placement of these. There’s a reason Valve placed their touchpads further up on the Deck.

Avoid the OLED model (due to the danger of burn-in) and get it. It’s a great device for portable gaming, both for games running directly on it and emulation up to and including Switch. It’s fantastic for rediscovering games in your library. Just be aware that the slick user interface gets replaced by bog-standard (and extremely unpleasant to use on the small display) Linux clunkiness the moment you need to tweak anything outside of Steam and games.

Exactly. That’s what nearly all of the competitors fail at. Sure, they might have more performance, are slimmer, have this feature or that advantage, but when it comes to actually getting games to work with them and the user experience, none are as good as Valve’s handheld.

What a perfect place for speakers, half-obscured by the user’s hands.

Not to be confused with the Remastered Collection.

Given Steam’s refund policy, I really don’t get what the plan here was. It’s safe to assume that everyone who fell for this would immediately refund.

Does it still contain remnants of Quake 3 or have they finally gotten rid of them?

This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.

I was expecting something a bit more substantial than the equivalent of a tweet.

Have you tried Flight Simulator 2020?

Haven’t watched the second one (not sure if I ever will), but I’m definitely stealing that.

Or populate a comment section on lemmy.

An anti-capitalist masterpiece that earned its creator billions. Someone’s playing both teams.

I got really indifferented, because I don’t even remember the plot of the first film anymore. Also because it’s the triple-whammy of awfulness, a mobile MMO by Tencent.

There were also TV shows that would have a little flickering box in the top right corner. You would attach a diode to the screen and by the end of the show, you had a working program recorded to cassette.

Programs were not just distributed on cassettes and via radio and TV broadcasts. There was software distributed on vinyl records as well. The very first programs distributed on CD were stored on CDs as audio.

All of this was done, because floppy disks and especially floppy drives were hideously expensive - and hard drives even more so. It wasn’t unusual for a floppy drive to cost more than the machine it was attached to. Everyone had a cassette recorder at home though and knew how to operate it.

If this seems cumbersome, consider that one of the most important software distribution methods for home computers in the '70s and '80s was through so-called listings: Magazines would print the program code and you manually typed it in, line by line. We are talking cryptic assembler code, not something an ordinary human being could actually understand:

https://i.imgur.com/NW4Mhp6.jpg

If you were very lucky, there were checksums. If not, have fun going through every single one of the hundreds to thousands of lines of code, trying to find that one mistake you made. In case you were a kid on a tight budget, it wasn’t uncommon that you didn’t actually have any storage media to save this code to, so if you wanted to play a game, you had to type it in anew every time.

Even if you stored it on cassette tape, loading times on for example the C64 were typically between 15 and 30 minutes, if it loaded correctly.

Early home computing was wild.

It sold reasonably well in Germany, just like other titles from this studio. It was never as popular as any of the Gothic or even Risen games though, but a small community still formed around it.

I had no issues with it when it launched, on fairly modest hardware. Quite an enjoyable open world game with great world design and somewhat clunky, if highly skill-based combat and movement, as to be expected from this studio. The way the jet pack is a core part of the game design is remarkable, if you actually make use of it as intended.

Mixing used and new hardware is the cheat code. A used RTX 2080 beats Xbox Series X and PS5, yet it can be found for only about 200 bucks. The rest of the hardware can be new. That’s how I did it.

Before online DRM, we used to buy games once among friends, dividing the cost, and then share them. At first, everyone got the disc for a few days each, but then we figured out how to remove the copy protection…

No, not almost every other mod. Only small ones. Total conversions like Enderal are not possible:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/976620/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories_Special_Edition/

This mod is essentially a massive (50 hours just for the main story) free AAA RPG with its own world, story and mechanics. It even comes with professional voice acting in German and English.

I first streamed from PC to a portable device with my PSP way back when. It did not work very well, but it was a neat proof of concept.

That said, Playstation consoles have had this ability since the PS3 as well.

The hardware, yes. You can build a console-equivalent system for only a little bit more. It is far cheaper in the long run though. Games cost less, after all.