Unfortunately not Starlink: Battle for Atlas, which was one of the games I was hoping would have improved support implemented before Nintendo took down Yuzu and Ryujinx. There’s the Steam version, but being able to play as Fox makes it feel like the Star Fox game that the Switch is missing.

While I originally did get the game on my Switch, I’d much rather play it with the rest of my games on the Steam Deck.

I imagine it’ll run much better on the Switch 2, given how well it runs on my Steam Deck, though I imagine that it would take a lot of adjustment to get used to using joystick controls versus the touchpad controls of the Steam Deck. Perhaps however the new ‘mouse-like controls’ work will be more helpful in that regard, but I can’t imagine even that would match the precision of a trackpad.

Don’t intend on supporting Nintendo’s crazy price increases myself, and will only get a Switch 2 if a way to hardware mod it becomes available, but I think it’s a bit ironic that the one non-first party game someone would specifically want to play on the Switch is also the one that not only never goes on sale, but also got a price increase.

Nintendo opting to forgo selling retro games piecemeal and instead expecting consumers to rent access to them in perpetuity is an anti-consumer move.

I have no problem paying for games when they’re sold at affordable, reasonable prices, so until that’s the case for Nintendo’s library, better to just emulate as much of it as possible.

Their decisions seem to conveniently become ‘mistakes’ whenever there’s public backlash…

“Shareholders want them to pump out loot boxes, not novel content!” -Exec, probably

As long as scarcity increases revenues from enterprise customers, they have no incentive to increase the supply of gaming GPUs back to a level that fulfills all demand at a price that doesn’t rip off consumers.

They probably made more than $20 million from kids buying loot boxes without parental consent, making the fine just a cost of doing business…

While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.

The worst culprits though are the EAs and Paradoxes of the world that sell dozens of DLCs for games that cumulatively cost far more than the base game itself.

Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.

Valve could still operate as it currently does, including having sufficient profits to account for R&D and long-term costs, at a lower cut of platform sales (as another commenter mentioned, Gabe Newell’s billion dollar yacht collection is demonstrative of the platform’s profitability, especially when one considers how much it costs to maintain ships). Products such as the Steam Deck make money for Valve too, as Steam Deck users (myself included) statistically buy more games on Steam as a result. I don’t support profiteering efforts by game publishers either, such as the Factorio price increase attributed to inflation, $70 game releases attributed to inflation when digital releases have reduced their costs, and micro transactions in general. In any case, however, given that cost increases are always the consumer’s responsibility, cost decreases should not simply be a means for companies to bolster their profit margins.

Just because there’s an outdated industry standard doesn’t mean it should be perpetuated, let alone supported, for eternity. Valve’s server hosting costs on a per-installation basis have fallen substantially since they first launched Steam, so there’s no reason why the 30% cut is still necessary; even 20% would leave them a sizable profit margin. I’m not a fan of the Epic Game Store for bribing companies to not release their games on Steam for a set amount of time, and choose not to use it as a result, but it’s time that the 30% industry standard be dropped. In purchasing a game I want to support continued development of that franchise, and $15 of a $50 purchase going to the storefront is not only excessive and inflationary, but harms developers as well.