i mean, yea sure. but you could say that of any game that has like updated content.

the ai voices, even though the voice actors were paid for explicitly training an ai, and to allow on the fly changes and extensive callouts, were a point of contention with a sizeable part of the comunity, so this seems like a good thing all around to me. the voice actors get work, the voice lines they replace stop having that ai inflection. a win win.

steam? you mean EA, yea?

i got the server up and running on my linux mini pc.

the voice quality is great, and the video streaming is good, someone mentioned the resolution looked super smeared when they joined, but it corrected itself before i could ally tab look at it.

i have found that an important detail is that the text chat is either directly attached to the voice channel, and to see/manipulate it you must jump into that channel, or there are global chats that are separate entities from the channel, even if handled by the same ui. once you find your friend server, make sure to book mark it as it’s not an automatic thing.

also right now hosting your own server is preferable, as the explosion of users maxed out the us located servers, and japan is not an acceptable server spot.

what? if you have something to add please do. i do not see the benefit of federation in my voip

yea, but with the video streaming team speak seems better equipped for gameing, at the cost of the federated capability of martix, but i am not sure what these benefits would be

i mean… i will pay the license for it, AND i have to self host it, so they have a monetary scheme that will delay the need for enshitification. but it’s 5$ or something, and reportedly has better audio quality, faster transfer rates, and lower overhead then discord. and because i am hosting it, i will have complete control over it and its white list

already making plans with my battle group t move to team speak 6, which is only an option because they now have screen sharing

market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.

devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.

are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.

again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.

to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.

and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them

well i am waiting

you could try answering, but conceding works just as well

and why would gamers not buy their game elsewhere?

sounds like YOU don’t know what a monopoly is

if it’s not justifiable, then the game devs can go elsewere.

that seems like an issue that the makers of games can decide. they are not under any gun to choose steam. if the devs don’t see value in steam then they can go elsewhere. for me as a buyer it’s steam, or it’s the developers own website. i will not buy from another store front

i have a TUFF gaming motherboard. so yes i do have an asus motherboard. i may have to flash the bios, but that’s a bit of a yikes. i may want to replace my battery back up first

mine it set to never let the usb sleep. the hub or device ubs controls HATE going to sleep only to wake up on time

very same with me, yea. though i was having so many problems with easyeffects i was gun shy using another program to manage the speakers when i just wanted the one change. so i baked in a rule for that named speaker only into the os

from what i gather that means you reach for the 9mm when you don’t know how to say please?

i think the real issue is my computer has been silently suffering for all these years as windows just didn’t tell me my hardware is borked and old. and just has a shot gun full of code that fixes whatever it can stick to. and Bazzite either does not have that, or i fell into an exception in use due to hatred and old hardware.

but getting into the weeds was very difficult, and my desk is not as flat as it once was

i can only imagine the horrors of what button combination i need to save and close and get my terminal back on the next one…

i could not get them to play nice with the hardware, pipewire, or each other. and they don’t like being messed with

i’m my case i am using apparently old hardware, i ran into the following issues with my set up:

• my usb cable for the mic was crap. and because the signal was flaky, Bazzite put the port on low priority mode where it only checks in when asked
• the usb cable was insufficient to push the data, i swear it came with the mic. still thing this was a dubious conclusion, but a new cable was 5$
• Bazzite would ask my USB speaker and mic within milliseconds of receiving power what their designation was, and the controllers in the devices responded so slowly that Bazzite gave them new names and put them in passive mode. i had to bake in the command to treat that like legacy equipment (ouch) to sit and listen for a reply however long it takes.
• the speakers are flipped in meat space, due to outlets and the length of available cable, i can not change this, so i had to flip it in software, i was recommended easyeffects, but pipewire hated its guts, and i was better off learning to bake it in via the terminal after i was able to find the devices actual name once i got them out of passive jail above.
• i had to bin the flat pack versions of discord and my web browser Vivaldi. don’t want to get into a browser war i have had enough trying to siphon through redacted reddit posts about that

won’t lie i had to use AI to RTFM though chat GPT bricked my stuff more then i should have let it. gemini was better at this

i think i learned that there was a lot wrong with my set up that windows just shoved under the rug. and maybe windows is right to do so, figuring i was willing to dig in deep this time, but my friends… not so much, and i don’t think i have the capability to help them if they run into issues like i did.

the reason ‘I’ learned to dislike flat packs is that it puts the software in its own little isolation bubble from what i understand. and i get where people are coming from. but they REALLY don’t like connecting to hardware, or sharing nice with other apps.

keep in mind i am a fairly adroit user of windows, diving in head first, so a lot of this is learning the hard way (nano anyone?) and i learned a lot. but yea bumpy.

i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.

• but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
• ghost usb profiles,
• usb cable choice,
• what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
• nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
• sink states,
• device name resolution,
• pipewire,
• pipe plumber,
• pipe wire holding devices hostage,
• usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
• the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
• out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.

my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.

…what physical games and hardware?

it’s been a minute since i played, but i remember pistol whipping enemies

oh they are talking about AAA and AAAA games, so then they are not buying/playing fewer games but moved to the indie scene.

i guess that is true, and probly the point

i mean, yes, but how far is just valve overreacting? i am usually cool with valve but i don’t worship them or anything

Painkiller is that you?

I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.

Outerwilds is also a must play in vr,

If you got vr is best played that way. Best horror game on vr.

So like the steam workshop? Cool.

He knows this is false. It’s bait, that even i see this time. There really is nothing to see here

My comment is germane to the post comparing the two devices in an aspect that exemplifies how they can’t be compared, and tries to spin it as a negative, while attempting to bury its positive.

The fact you say that the switch is not like any other computer is both true in the sense that i already argued, and false in that it IS yet just another computer, but with a walled garden.

If there was any a comment that was irrelevant, it would be yours.

How is that different from any other computer buying from steam, ever? In the history of all computer games? A steam deck is a hand held computer with a community large enough, and system specs stable enough to have a rating on potentially any PC, and most Nintendo games in existence. Compared to nintendo’s walled garden. Your comparing apples to oranges.

Wow, ok. This blog does not indicate any reason for it’s decline. I guess, someday for some reason Steam will be abandoned, nothing lasts forever. But the criticisms it does bring is

• steam got sued by Australia in 2014 because they did not offer refunds. Except neither did anyone else.
• Steam takes 30% of the profit. Yet the author even agreed that the competitor Epic games Store does not offer as good a shopping experience, does not have the player base, and the author does not mention all the other amenities valves offers.
• epic games store reports they do not make a profit at 12% and failed to mention that a lot of the disdain of EGS is how they treated customers
• the author states that steam market dominance is a monopoly. That game makers are FORCED to use steam due to steam holding its customer reach behind its service. Which is a terrible take. These game makers could publish on their own! They could publish on GOG or EGS. Gamers are free to choose their platform and so is game makers, and the fact that steams platform is so good its become the defacto PC game launcher, is a value to those shopping for a launcher. I literally bought some games outside of steam because they launched independently.

So, ok.

1. They introduced exclusivity requiring people to use their storefront. So some would argue that Steam did that first… though only with games they made. This in of itself may not normally be that big a deal… if they didn’t rug pull customers of a few anticipated games into thinking they were getting steam keys because they were advertised as being on steam.
2. The EGS is still not feature complete. This goes hand in hand with problem one. The exclusivity bars the “”free market”” from making a choice as to which platform is better. And the ceo blatantly said that he did not care about trying to make a good store front, he could just force people into a worse system with exclusivity.
3. The EGS was against the very idea of a refund policy. Its owners were very very loud about it. As a matter of fact the ceo himself has caused a lot of the hate for the EGS though they have since given up and i think they match steam now.
4. The actual user interface and customer service are terrible. In contrast steam has been outstanding in its implementation
5. EGS did not initially allow user reviews, and wile i hear that there is some form of it now, they take a much less open approach to silencing dissent. As opposed to stream who still keeps dissent, but will give context to the scoring.

The EHS has given up on most of its open disdain for the consumer, but it apparently is going to take a lot more than a few years and free games to win over the crowd. And i personally REFUSE to have competing launchers on my system, and stream has the best good will with me by such a long shot, i don’t see how it would be remotely possible to get me to consider adding EGS.

And the ducking difference is? What exactly?