I stopped buying consoles and moved pretty much exclusively to Steam because it gives me many more options. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. Consoles are great for some people, but I need more flexibility. I sometimes wish I could (legally) play Nintendo first party games, but it’s really not that big of a deal.

Nintendo has spent decades building an extremely loyal, multigenerational consumer base. They also release very popular, high quality games. I have no interest in owning a Switch, but I get why so many people do.

What’s wild to me is that these games were all developed to run on Windows, not SteamOS or any other Linux distro. This is with the games requiring a compatibility layer to run. Imagine what they could do if the games were made to run on SteamOS.

They’ll charge whatever they think people will pay, and I’m pretty confident that many millions of people will fork over the $80 - $90 at launch. Prices come down when people stop buying.

If I have to sign into a rockstar account through a launcher to play it, I ain’t interested.

What other legal way is there that doesn’t require you to pay full price for the game?

I agree that Nintendo was ahead of the curve when it came to expanding portable gaming, but the only reason the switch sold so many units, and ultimately got so many games ported to it, was because of Nintendo first party titles. If you look at the best selling switch titles, the vast majority of them are Nintendo games. Without Nintendo first party titles, the switch would have been far outsold by better devices.

It’s not convoluted at all. It’s extremely simple: if you want to (edit: legally) play first party Nintendo titles (or other exclusives), you MUST buy a switch. If you don’t care about Nintendo exclusives, there’s absolutely no reason to own a switch. That has been true of every, single Nintendo console ever released… except for the Wii. People bought a Wii so they could play a motion control game with Grandma once or twice, and then just let the console sit and collect dust.

I recently played through New Order, Old Blood, and New Colossus again. God, I love those games.

Awesome. I’m glad to hear it because I think that’s the way things are going. Arm, or maybe even one day an implementation of RISC-V, just make more sense for handheld devices, where power management is very important.

Dude off the top of my head Balatro (won many Game of the Year awards), Vampire Survivors, Terraria, and Minecraft all have Android ports.

Well, then you should be able to play those games on smaller handhelds running Android, of which there are several.

I wonder if Valve plans to release an Arm version of SteamOS. They’d have to for it to ever show up on a device like the Miyoo Mini Plus, which uses an Arm based CPU, instead of the x86 based CPU in the Steam Deck, and other Windows handhelds.

Right now I think the OS of choice for Arm based devices is Android, which works well enough, but I don’t think very many PC games are ported to Android.

I haven’t played it, I’ve only seen clips on YouTube.

I thought there already was a spiritual successor to Minecraft: Vintage Story

The switch and the steam deck have really changed the game.

Of course parents not taking appropriate precautions doesn’t absolve the companies of responsibility. Unethical behavior is unethical behavior, even if there are things consumers can do to protect themselves from it. After all, the precautions wouldn’t be necessary if the companies didn’t engage in this behavior in the first place, so these precautions aren’t really solutions only mitigations.

The irony is, something like this probably would have been a lot less expensive to make, while also appealing more to fans. It’s funny how so many people in the movie business are not very good at, you know, the movie business.

The level of paranoia is kind of crazy.

One of the many games just sitting in my steam library, waiting to be played.

We just got a leaked image from inside Team Cherry:

I think greater access to game development tools has been a very good thing for the industry. These days, I’m generally much more interested in what’s coming from indie developers than any of the big companies, with a few exceptions. I think that’s the best way to increase the diversity of games and game developers. Greater access to game development resources will help to democratize the gaming industry.

I wish I hadn’t installed the update. I was hoping it would make the game run better on the steam deck, but it’s actually worse. I think they’ve increased the graphical fidelity, but it’s come at the expense of the battery. I found a work around to get the game launcher to come up so I could lower the graphics settings to improve battery life, but that doesn’t fix the bugs. They seem to have gotten worse with the update. Never change, Bethesda. Never change.