Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

• to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
• to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

The download size difference of 7 GiB only costs me another 60-80s to download as long as the Steam servers are serving well. So funny enough the first option would be better for me.

some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

Name and shame:

• Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
• Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.

Since you mentioned GOG, another relevant thing about them is their game preservation initiatives. Games that get the Good Old Game stamp from them get some engineering effort to be packaged in a runnable way.

That reminds me of something similar my ISP said. “Don’t be afraid of the bandwidth”, if you give your customers more bandwidth they aren’t actually going to fill it, they’ll still run roughly the same downloads just more quickly.

Here it’s at 12:10 in this video archive of their talk at RIPE: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/video/797/

And here when they gave the same talk at SwiNOG they also mentioned how their network ring in Wintherthur is still pretty much equally loaded after 10G and 25G home connections became available: https://youtu.be/wXmJCzMeIBo?t=1195

The pictures of the people look generated too, so it seems likely the same person would generate text too.

Hmm, maybe it’s time to try out that game

cloud saves, achievements

GOG has those at least.

Subverse is really funny in its writing and the renders are high quality as expected of StudioFOW.

HuniePop’s main game loop with the “connect”-style game loop on dates is actually pretty fun to play.

I don’t even have one that expensive, even now that I earn enough. Anything above $2000 is just going into silly territory where the marginal improvement per dollar increase is weak.

You can run more than one OS with secure boot enabled. It’s just a pain in the ass.

Weird, for me it was just flicking the switch in UEFI and now Grub and through it Windows 10 and Fedora 43 boot in Secure Boot.

Secure Boot isn’t Tivoization because you can enroll your own keys.

I really like the Rome Total War Soundtrack by Jeff van Dyck

Metro Exodus. Opening up the map was a mistake. The linear levels were fine, that gives you tight pacing and you always know what’s next. The confined underground spaces were part of the soul of that series. I only played maybe 8 hours of Exodus and can’t be bothered to play more.

Agreed, Fable III was a brutal step back. You couldn’t even equip clothing pieces individually anymore, and the whole “you’re king now, better collect enough money in time” sucked too.

Up to the third comma, yes, but all the rest seems to go beyond that pretty arbitrarily.

When they say anything that “may damage the goodwill of the corporation”, and qualify that with “in the sole discretion of the Corporation” that just means “anything we don’t want to be associated with, and we will be the judge of that”.

That’s what makes it so vague, how is a Merchant or an Acquirer supposed to know what Mastercard might find damaging to the goodwill? They have to guess, or use trial and error*. Most will just err on the side of caution, which means customers get blocked from even more purchases, just to be safe.

* Or talk to Mastercard, which Valve apparently tried, but they wouldn’t respond.

Brilliant, just make your rules vague and force everyone else down the chain to self-censor. Surely this will result in the best outcome.

Fucking mastercard

Oh thanks, the second clip is actually here. I’ll fix it in parent in a minute.

His defense of Godot and his stance on the attacks, seem very reasonable and correct: Clip 1, Clip 2. Nothing like what you remember, OP.

Separating from Off Brand Games to protect them of the fallout of his opinions and public exposure also seems like a correct decision.

Edit: fixed second link

The argument is utterly stupid.

Ignoring that it is building on a fantasy reality for the moment. Even if you had free healthcare, and if only the financial costs of survival motivated people to get jobs, then the other costs of living, like for food and shelter, would still provide that motivation.

When I played 1 and 2 in a similar mindset as you, I eased the burden with some mods. But that might be cheating :-)

ORB: Off-World Resource Base https://www.gog.com/en/game/orb_offworld_resource_base

I assembled the links for OPs entries:

ORB: Off-World Resource Base https://store.steampowered.com/app/281390/ORB/
Ookibloks https://store.steampowered.com/app/399910/Ookibloks/
Paper Monsters Recut https://store.steampowered.com/app/314540/Paper_Monsters_Recut/
Curse of the Crescent Isle DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/365120/Curse_of_the_Crescent_Isle_DX/
Space Moth DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/425340/Space_Moth_DX/
Z.A.R. https://store.steampowered.com/app/351820/ZAR/
Demon’s Crystals https://store.steampowered.com/app/454610/Demons_Crystals/
Hyper Sentinel https://store.steampowered.com/app/640880/Hyper_Sentinel/
Katana Soul https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028300/Katana_Soul/
Timberman: The Big Adventure https://store.steampowered.com/app/2589910/Timberman_The_Big_Adventure/

it won’t change shit if its Debian 2

So at best kernel 2.2.xx good luck with the hardware support. Flatpack is not a solution for everything.

If Randy Pitchford was a real CEO he would find a way to make $60 games

Wow Nvidia, it’s really that bad? You didn’t have to shout it from the rooftops with your actions like that!

Disco Elysium for me. Too many open directions. Too much player agency. I had no idea where I should go.

Yes same here. I did watch a bit of someone else playing the one with the two Mexican brothers running away, but never really had the motivation to play it myself. I guess I just found time power to be much more interesting.

Agreed, I played it the first time when I was 26, and I’m a straight Swiss and German man. Freaking love playing as Max. I played it two more times after that, and also the Chloe focused prequel.

Oh I think I know a good one! Haven, and it’s currently 60% off. You play as a couple who escaped a controlling society to a foreign planet. (Three gender combinations can be chosen)

There is a combat element, and I don’t think you can avoid it, but what you do is essentially clean the corruption off the local wildlife, instead of killing. Don’t know if that works for you, but it’s worth giving it a look I think.

I hope these CEO’s get their reckoning some way some day.

They seem to think it’s all just business and cruelly wielding power is no issue, but I think they overestimate how isolated they are.

Correct reaction, good on them.

For your convenience here is the interview he’s going over in the video: https://www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-16-nintendo-switch-2-part-4/

An interesting part is this:

Dohta: If we tried to use technology like software emulators, we’d have to run Switch 2 at full capacity, but that would mean the battery wouldn’t last so long, so we did something that’s somewhere in between a software emulator and hardware compatibility.

Sasaki: This is getting a bit technical, but the process of converting game data for Switch to run on Switch 2 is performed on a real-time basis as the data is read in.

Is it like having Switch games “simultaneously translated” for Switch 2?

Sasaki: That’s right. […]

So it sounds like they are doing some recompilation. /u/jonathansmith14921 had an interesting comment over on reddit, his suggestion is that they have to recompile the shader bytecode from Maxwell to Ampere to fit the new GPU. Makes sense to me.

Another interesting titbit from that thread, there are official (in)-compatibility lists: Launch-able but has issues and has issues even launching

And the old WCFAN (We Couldn’t Find A Name) servers, what was it called again, I think hillbreak? That was fun!

No worries, I just wanted to make sure. I could totally have missed stuff.

25 years so… Tarzan? Lilo and Stitch? The Emperor’s New Groove?

I’m aware of:

• Unbalanced power over 12VHPWR by design, inducing some melting in some cases.
• Missing ROPs on 5080.
• 5070 not reaching 4090 performance levels because that was just a marketing lie.

None of those really seem to apply. Were there any more?

Yeah that game was unplayable for me. I rebind my keys, but there were functions hard bound to keys, probably from like debugging or something, so pressing them would execute two functions. Specifically it was camera rotation. That was disorientating as hell.

For one of my friends it kept crashing, and since you can’t save during the intro he had to play it 3 times or so.

I don’t think you’re really helping laymen by using off-kilter terminology. It’s way more confusing if they go to find more information and stumble across other people using it properly.

They could improve this so much by saying something like “the last 2 minutes and 24 seconds of unsaved progress will be lost” instead. Just need to keep a time counter from last save, that’s not too much overhead.

No