It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.

I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”

You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.

The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.

Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.

Gilette gives away razor handles to men to encourage them to buy their blades.

Inkjet printers are often cheaper than a change of ink cartridges.

I think it was Standard Oil, gave away hurricane lanterns in order to sell kerosene.

Most video game consoles are sold for less than they cost to make because the company expects to earn more in video game sales.

I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.

Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.

I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.

Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.

Not sure about hate, but the entire Steam Machine thing happened because Microsoft was making noise circa Windows 8 that they were going to take the platform more closed and require sourcing software from the Windows Store, which would shut out things like Steam. So they said “Okay, we’ll make our own operating system with blackjack and hookers. We could take the PC gaming market with us, and we’ll even come for the living room console market and threaten Xbox while we’re at it.” And if anyone in the world is going to get that done, it’s Valve.

For new users, if it doesn’t exist in the repos, you’ve gone too far.

I don’t think this holds up under scrutiny. Theoretically sure, installing using your distro’s package manager is the beginner skill, compiling from source is the advanced skill.

The reality is, people transplanting from Windows often own hardware they want to continue to use, that require software that isn’t in a distro’s package manager. For me, this included a DisplayLink docking station, an Epson printer and a SpaceMouse. For some, it will include gaming keyboards or mice, stream decks, who knows what else. A lot of times, there are folks making open source software for these things, but they don’t package them. So you end up on Github as a beginner looking for the thing to make your thing work.

As you migrate into the ecosystem, you start buying hardware that is well supported by the Linux ecosystem, that problem starts to fade away.

by rpm vs deb, I wasn’t meaning downloading individual files…though I’ve done that. DisplayLink offered their driver as a .deb. At first, that Epson printer only issued a .rpm, and I had to use Alien to install a .rpm on a Linux Mint computer. With time, they offered a .deb, and eventually the printer was just natively supported by CUPS. I meant, I find that the Debian/Ubuntu repos (the dpkg/APT system that uses .deb files) have more stuff in them than Fedora’s repos (the DNF package manager that uses .rpm files) do.

Does Mint still not use Wayland?

When I built my current PC, Wayland support in Mint Cinnamon was “We’ve just now added it, it doesn’t work worth a damn but you can try it.” They’re coming along, but they’re behind.

Is an older codebase generally good for new users? The first distro I installed on an x86 PC was Mint Cinnamon 17. Quiana. On a then brand new Dell Inspiron laptop. For about 6 months, the kernel that shipped with the OS didn’t support the laptop’s built-in trackpad. I had to manually update the kernel through Mint Update for the trackpad to work. There’s problems at the bleeding edge, but there’s problems at the trailing edge as well.

At least some of the problems I reported about Bazzite are inherited from Fedora. Bazzite didn’t create Anaconda.

Fedora has the problem of being generally fine, but most of the world for the last decade has been targeting Ubuntu as THE Linux distro, so there’s a lot if Git repos out there that don’t include instructions for Fedora. Way fewer things are packaged in rpm rather than deb. I’ve never seen Linux Mint kernel panic unless I was fucking around with the video drivers, I’ve seen Fedora kernel panic.

The main reason I’m using Fedora right now rather than Mint is Mint tends to have an older codebase, and we’re at a point in PC technology where things like wayland offer support for video and graphics stuff that don’t work well under X11. like my 1440p ultrawide 144Hz monitor sitting next to a 1080p 60hz side monitor. Fedora KDE has it ready to go, Mint Cinnamon does not.

I had one fail fairly early, giving me a cryptic message because apparently it couldn’t cope with how I’d set up the partitioning.

I’ve had a Linux Mint install fail because it couldn’t cope with a BIOS setting, the error message gave a plain English explanation “it’s probably the XMBT (or whatever acronym) setting in the BIOS, see this page on the Ubuntu wiki for details:” and it gave a hyperlink, because the installer runs in a live environment, it had a copy of Firefox ready to go, AND it gave a QR code so you could easily open that link on a mobile device. THAT’S how it’s done.

Having played with it for a little while now that I’ve got it installed…I think it’s alright for a mostly or entirely gaming machine. I wouldn’t want to use it, or any immutable distro, as my main computer.

I’ve attempted to stay out of the trendy distro of the month club, remember Garuda? Remember Peppermint? Remember Endeavour?

Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

1. The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
6. There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
7. If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.

And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!

Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

look up the life and times of Edward Teach.

Precisely.

Things like Minetest exist.

Mechanical/civil engineering software, music production, and digital art. Those are the big ones.

I was about to say, I loved Futurama, It’s run it’s course, I’m fine with Meanwhile being the series finale (especially since as broadcast it ended with them pushing the time loop button, and they aired the first episode after that) and I’m ready to move on.

Two occur to me: Chell from the Portal games, and Lufia from Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. And both of those almost don’t count.

I almost don’t want to count Chell because she’s almost not a character, but I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing as her.

Lufia is one of the rare SNES JRPGs not made by Squaresoft or Enix, it was published by Taito. Gameplay is similar to classic Final Fantasy, the story manages to be quite tragic. Lufia, the title character, is not the player character, Enter Your Name is the player character, and Lufia is a playable party member/his love interest/…well, play the game to find out. So there’s reasons why I hesitate to call her a “protagonist.”

I have to mention a fun thing that series did: Lufia 1 starts with a playable prologue/tutorial section where you play as some legendary heroes fighting an ultimate battle. Lufia 2 is a prequel, and it’s the story of those legendary heroes, which ends with that same ultimate battle as the final boss. In Lufia 1, the heroes speak very formally. They sound stalwart and brave and a bit old fashioned, as legendary heroes should. In Lufia 2, we know these characters more as real people, and the dialog treads the exact same ground but it’s much less formal, makes them sound less hypercompetent.

Desert Strike was my last.

You know, I didn’t doubt that for a single second.

What I’ve been told Haunted Chocolatier is going to be…is not for me. In fact, Stardew Valley has evolved into something that is not for me. I’ve played Stardew Valley, enjoyed my time with it, put it away, did other things, had some SV content come up in my Youtube feed, watched a couple videos, they’re talking about stuff that wasn’t in the game when I stopped playing, casually mentioning locations and items I don’t recognize, and I find I’m not curious enough to learn what those are. Eric Barone is a creative powerhouse the likes of which I will never be, I see Stardew Valley as nothing short of a masterpiece of solo game development, but I just might be done with his work.

If I hear the phrase “Lucas Pope’s new game” I’d probably get and play that.

I can’t think of any games I’m looking forward to at this point, since Subnautica 2 died. I have no planned video game purchases at this point.

I’m not really looking forward to anything at all, if I’m honest. Nothing. I can’t hope for the future anymore, every future I’ve ever met has been fuckgarbage because that’s what futures are. Putrid fuckgarbage.

The first thing that leapt to mind was Age of Empires.

I’ll allow it for smaller studios that have a big, offbeat idea. Games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Kerbal Space Program and Subnautica. All of these games had multi-year early access campaigns that were very successful, Satisfactory in particular. I think it’s appropriate for weird games like these that have uncommon mechanics like factory building, space flight or scuba diving.

Thinking about Satisfactory, I imagine their sales weren’t spectacular on launch day last year, but a lot of their customer base had already bought the game, so they got their $30. Maybe another way to phrase it is, who cares if it sells before or after launch?

Don’t you guys have phones 90-series graphics cards?

Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.

I remember when 7 expansion slots was pretty normal. Of course, one would be your video card, one would be a graphics accelerator, one would be a sound card, one would be a modem, one would be an Ethernet NIC, and one would be a SCSI adapter. now a lot of that shit is either obsolete or built right into the motherboard.

The Box Bra, by Croft.

Trackpad looked wrong is why I went PS4, but yeah you’re probably right.

She should be holding a mobile phone. because that is what mobile gaming mostly looks like.

“Researchers surveyed 1,000 women of all ages across the UK who play mobile games.”

Shows a picture of a woman holding what appears to be a PS4 controller.

Poifect.

I have an S4 mini, it runs LineageOS?

Actually yes, you got any oreos?

I have to imagine that Subnautica is a difficult act to follow because underwater assets are weird. There’s a lot of models and AI for first person shooters, but first person swimmers?

I mean, I don’t. Believe it or not it isn’t mandatory.

KSP2 is a pretty apt comparison because it was fucked over by corporate acquisitions.

Someone had a vision, formed a studio called Squad, ran a very successful early access campaign and built a critically acclaimed game. Then, it was acquired by Take Two Interactive which of course has some parent company whatever, and then you start getting ideas like "We’ll make an expansion to the original game. No, we’ll make it a whole other game but it has to be based on the original code, which is a big pile of tech debt spaghetti. They put out some cool looking trailers, they show off some beautiful artwork, then the lizard people in the C suite say “Wait, we could make big profits this quarter if we shut down the whole studio, laid off all developers, and left the game as it is on sale on Steam.” Which is where the game is now.

This is the future of the Subnautica franchise under Krafton. Krafton, by causing this whole kerfluffle by being shitty dead souled businessmen, have already burned down Subnautica.

First question: Why is it okay for payment processors to conduct censorship of any kind? Why is it their place to decide what is and is not buyable?

Second question: What’s the next thing some right-wing death cult is going to pressure them into censoring? Anything addressing minority rights? Any adult content at all? What about sex toys, birth control drugs, abortion drugs, hormone treatments? What else are they going to cull from society by saying “Get rid of this or we’re not going to allow you to do any business in the world?”

Don’t the Japanese have to stab themselves in the liver with a sword if they resign from one of their soul crushing 18 hour a day office jobs?

That was my take.

Before the Krafton acquisition, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has produced Natural Selection 2 (the first was a Half Life mod, not sure it counts), which sold 300,000 copies, Subanutica sold “over five million” at a $30 price point, and I can’t find any sales numbers for Below Zero, but for back of the napkin math let’s say it sold about as well as Subnautica at ~5 million copies, again at $30.

So both Subnautica and Below Zero grossed $150 million. Subtract the 30% that Steam takes, and you’re left with $100 million, so $200 million between those two games would have been the net take.

Meanwhile, Moonbreaker happened, and I have no sales figures for that.

Everybody talks about what a massive hit Subnautica is, and while it is a successful game, Stardew Valley sold 40 million copies. Subnautica 2 stood a good chance of being a solid commercial success with tons of 2 hour Youtube video essays about how it compares to the original. It was never going to make $750 million. Even if it outsold Subnautica and Below Zero combined at double the price. Add in merch, Peeper plushies, T-shirts, ball caps, they were talking about a movie…Subnautica 2 was going to make a good chunk of that but wasn’t going to make it all.

As far as I can tell, they never intended to pay that $250 million bonus, it was probably offered in bad faith as incentive to sell the studio, and when it looked like they were actually going to pull off the conditions Krafton broke the contract in order to break the contract.

If I get my way, Krafton will never do business in the United States again, and since I’m a vengeful asshole that likes doing brain surgery with a backhoe, I’d probably ban Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Honda, and half of those aren’t even Korean.

Okay, they spent $750 million for a studio that has barely made $250 million in its history. I still don’t think the math mathulates here.

I mean, the publisher seems to be pretty stupid, because…how did they figure that $250 million?

There are two entries in the Subnautica series, Subnautica and Below Zero. Subnautica has sold “over 5 million copies” at a retail price point of $30. So that’s $150 million in gross revenue. For this back of the napkin math I’ll assume that the “over five million” and the number of copies sold at a discount come out in the wash. 30% of that gross revenue is going to immediatley go to Steam or whatever other platform, so the company got $100 million in net revenue before their own expenses like rent and power bills gets at it.

I cannot find sales figures for Below Zero, but it sells for the same price point and I don’t think it could have possibly sold more than Subnautica did, so let’s figure another $150 million gross, $100 million net.

Subnautica as a franchise netted its studio ~$200 million across the launch of two games selling ~10 million copies.

And Krafton had agreed to pay out a $250 million bonus for reaching a certain revenue target in 2025, which they were on track to do given the announced early access launch.

Just to put them in the black for that bonus, Subnautica 2 would have to sell better than both previous games put together at a higher price, and that doesn’t touch the purchase of the studio, operating expenses, or the dump truck of cocaine that must have been involved in these financial decisions.