MudMan
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I’m not sure what that would look like, frankly. I guess you could go for a narrative Telltale-style thing? Making an Uncharted game with a Tintin skin would be missing the point. And you´d have to come up with almost entirely new story ideas anyway, the only story in the public domain in the US is the original version of In the Land of the Soviets.
But hey, I would have said the same thing about Indiana Jones and there it is, so… maybe somebody has a clearer picture in their heads than I do. I genuinely doubt the license was what kept something like this from happening, though.
Hard to kill something that never quite existed to begin with.
I mean, I own a copilot laptop and the only real integration was them popping up a browser with a chatbot through a keyboard shortcut (and switching that back to being useful took one checkbox).
I guess technically the auto captioning of audio is still there, which honestly is the best application for that sort of stuff. And I think you can still request some crappy image generation in some piece of software but I could honestly not tell you where that lives, if anywhere.
Yeah, that’s why Satisfactory is probably a better choice (I mean, it’s mostly “what if Factorio didn’t look like a 1999 Flash game”).
Honestly in 2025 (hey, happy new year!) things are platform-agnostic enough that the biggest thing to do when you switch to PC gaming is go check how all the games you know play when you run them at 200 fps or whatever. But even if you’re an action game guy I do think it’s work taking a few minutes to decide if you’re going to be a sweaty mouse and keyboard guy and it’s time to start browsing online stores for mice with ten grams shaved off the mouse wheel or whatever.
Man, for a console gamer coming over this thread has a bunch of pretty terrible recommendations. I can’t imagine a better way to send somebody back to console gaming than immediately dumping a bunch of fiddly mods and janky old stuff on them so they can play their OS for a while before having any fun.
I mean, if they’re into competitive, hardcore console stuff they probably will want to decide if they want to go down the rabbit hole of competitive PC gaming. Checking out a couple MOBAs or fast mouse and keyboard shooters is probably a good way to start (for Steam ease of use I suppose DOTA2 and CS2 are the obvious choices). That’s the fighting game equivalent stuff they’re unlikely to have played already. I’d say if they aren’t feeling it, it’s fine to step away, though.
Depending on how beefy their gaming PC is, it may be fun to go for crazy console-crushing visuals. Path traced games like Indiana Jones or Cyberpunk may be fun to check out even if they’ve played the console versions, if they have a current-gen expensive GPU in there.
There are a couple of genres that are also cross-over but play best on PC, like survival sims and the like. I’m a PC controller player, but I’ll switch to mouse and keyboard for, say, Satisfactory, although that’s less action-packed and timing-based.
And of course there’s upcoming stuff. VF 5 REVO is coming out in January, and that seems like a good chance to jump into a new thing on a gaming PC instead.
Well, when the reward being dangled is a Fortnite-sized chunk of the industry worth billions by itself it’s hard to suggest that the real answer is more, smaller, less profitable releases. Especially with public companies with a mandate to seek endless growth. It’s not like big traditional single player games are a surefire thing, either.
It’s a bit of a rough time for the industry right now, frankly. So… on that note, happy holidays everybody!
I think there is absolutely a sense that some of these games aren’t worth jumping into because the longevity won’t be there. That doesn’t necessarily mean the alternative is people sticking around and playing traditional paid experiences instead, though. What seems to be happening instead is people sticking with a few “forever games” and getting stuck there, sort of out of the market. We’ve seen that dynamic before, when everybody was trying to come up with a MMO to replace WoW, or in the very stagnant mobile market.
A bit too optimistic, but hey, at least it’s a post pointing people at GOG, which has otherwise been losing big publisher support (SEGA and Sony used to put some big games there and don’t anymore, for instance).
I’m also not sure that the big failures of prominent games as a service are an indication of a return to appreciating ownership. I’m afraid it may be rather that the established genre leaders are taking all the oxygen out of that space, just as it happened for causal mobile F2P games a while ago.
If the perception makes players more likely to give up on their forever games and go back to buying piecemeal experiences they get to keep indefinitely I’d call that very good news, but I’ll need a bit more evidence before I declare myself optimistic on that subject.
Yeah, well, if I wanted to tell you who I am I’d write a bio, and I have no obligation to educate or reality check people one by one, which doesn’t work anyway.
You’re right, though, it’s dismissive and kinda rude and definitely not worth having the conversation because it won’t change any minds. Which is why people don’t have the conversation in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get that it’s fun to dunk on EA, but from what I know they have a super engaged team working on accessibility across all games who are really passionate, into it and have solid corporate backing. This isn’t super new.
Hey, getting people to do better also involves recognizing when they do good stuff, not just being pissed when they do bad stuff. Get some carrots in there with the sticks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would it?
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.
“Gamers are used to fiddling”?
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.
This is cool, more options are better.
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.
Good call. Vita emulation still sucks, the device proper is very nice and there are some good games stuck in there. Less these days, when a bunch of them got up-ports to PC and whatnot, but still.
For the life of me I don’t understand why there’s so little interest in Vita preservation. I get that it wasn’t as well liked as the PSP, and all the custom features are tricky while also having the hassle of all the PSN integration you get on modern console emus, but… still, you know?