Looten Plunder is President of the United States.

They had word of mouth AND the difficulty of getting a film made and distributed. That meant very few movies existed. It’s easier to stand out in a small crowd.

Now anybody with a phone can film and distribute. Marketing is more important for getting your idea in front of people than anything else these days.

I know the source and the idiom. I just don’t know why it’s picked up in popularity recently.

I also don’t know why its use as an idiom doesn’t quite align with the story. It’s usually used to describe a situation where the threat of destruction isn’t random. For example, in the OP, the danger is the end of support for Win 10, not randomness.

I’ve been seeing it a lot more recently, too. IRL even.

Did it get used by sometime famous recently or something?

But at least that’s honest. They’re saying, “This is the real product” instead of “The real product is coming later if you give us money now.”

Until they shut it down, Buzzfeed News had become one of the better news organizations.

There’s a point in the third game that determines the fate of 2 different species that can play out very differently based upon actions you’ve made across the series. And the “best” version depends on your completing the loyalty quests of multiple characters in ME2 before a certain trigger point.

Mass Effect trilogy.

And without the fake frame bullshit they’re using to pad their numbers, its capabilities scale linearly with the 4090. The 5090 just has more cores, Ram, and power.

If the 4000-series had had cards with the memory and core count of the 5090, they’d be just as good as the 50-series.

It’s to make development easier.

With ray-tracing it becomes much easier to light environments in game. You don’t have to have devs adding artificial light sources or painting environments as of they’re lit.

Steam games are also 100% a license, and Steam has both removed the ability to download previously-purchased games and removed games from people’s libraries in the past.

And my main route to Steam AND Gamepass is my ROG Ally, since it’s basically a Deck that runs Windows, so it has greater game and marketplace compatibility.

With gamepass including online play, that’s not really a big deal. If I play 2 new releases a year on gamepass, I’ve saved money even with the online fees.

Yes, a PC can do more. That isn’t a positive for lots of people.

I have a small tractor with all kinds of implements. I can dig with the backhoe, grade with the box blade, cut grass with the mowing deck, clear brush with the bush hog, do all kinds of crap with the loader bucket, move brush with the forks, and much more.

I also have to know how to attach, maintain, and use all of those tools and the tractor itself if it’s going to be useful.

For someone wanting to just mow their lawn on their 1/4 acre of land, a push-mower is all they want or need.

First off, Steam has LOTS of hands that aren’t connotation with the deck. The storefronts on the other consoles don’t have that problem.

Secondly, the Steam Deck is a dedicated gaming machine that runs a custom OS designed for gaming, had limited upgradablity, so users will just have to wait for the next generation for anything but a storage upgrade, didn’t work with lots of PC games because of its operating system, and is designed and sold by the company that runs its storefront.

How is the Steam Deck not a console?

That’s because it’s a console.

Yes. The Steam Deck.

A dedicated piece of hardware with limited upgradablity designed and sold by the company that runs the marketplace/launcher/operating system that can’t run all games because of its OS, but performs beyond its specs because developers are designing products with is exact, known specifications in mind.

How is the deck not a console?

“Just pick one of the top 10 distros” is in itself greek to most people. You exist in a bubble where everyone knows what a linux distro even is. 90% of people do not. Your simple, overly-simplistic description of how to do Linux gaming can’t make it one sentence without losing normal people who just want to play a fucking game without having to learn anything new.

How is it substantially different from an everyday “I just want to play a goddamned game without jumping through hoops” perspective.

Is the person who doesn’t want to go through the trouble of activating dev mode and download an emulator or other custom software more likely to install a different operating system on their Deck?

The Steam Deck is a huge part of the rise, and it’s essentially a console. It’s a specific dedicated, known piece of hardware that can’t be meaningfully upgraded.

It launches into a custom OS designed for gaming using a launcher and game marketplace under the control of the manufacturer from which the manufacturer takes a 30% cut of all sales.

But that marketplace is also a PC gaming marketplace, so all its sales count as PC gaming growth.

It can, of course, run other software, but the dev mode on the Xbox lets it do the same thing. So if the deck isn’t a console, neither is the Xbox.

So what you’re saying is that people who aren’t interested in fucking around with Linux shouldn’t play games, even if they have absolutely zero interest in fucking around with Linux?

Let periods enjoy hobbies the way they want to. All that setup shit that’s easy for you isn’t easy for everyone, and learning more computer stuff isn’t something their interested in. They want to play a goddamned game, and they can unbox a Nintendo, plug in the game, power cable, and hdmi plug and be playing a game in less than 2 minutes.

That’s what they want. Their gaming hobby consists of playing the games. For many of us, all the setup and tinkering is part of the hobby, but we’re the outliers.

You’re asking a lot from the average non- computer person.

Things that are “just do this simple thing” for you are specifically what people don’t want to spend time fucking around with.

If you were buying a car with zero knowledge about cars and how they work, and the only purpose of the car was to get you from “a” to “b”, would you buy one that required you to install the engine and calibrate the timing yourself, or the one that you could get in and drive?

You can launch custom apps on the Xbox. It’s officially supported through Dev Mode. You can even install emulators and third-party app stores.

Is the Xbox not a console now?

Deli slicer aren’t all commercial.

I have a $60 deli slicer on the counter. I also have chef’s knives that cost way more.

The knives can do everything the slicer can, but the untrained person can slice meat faster and neater with the slicer. They don’t need to k ow how to use a knife properly or how to sharpen a blade. It just works.

That’s a console. They’re cheaper than PCs that can run equivalent games for a lot of their lifespan, and they’re specialist devices that just fucking work.

But they can’t run cad, use excel, or do anything else but play games and videos just like a deli slicer can’t debone a chicken.

A steam deck is a custom gaming device with a custom gaming OS, custom, pre-defined hardware, limited upgradability, and launches into a gaming interface for a specific company’s game store and launcher.

How is it not a console?

Just install one of 300 distributions of an unfamiliar operating system not designed specificallyfor you use case along with drivers for all the hardware (that you also have to learn about), learn to use the OS to the point you can actually use it, install custom software so you can install games, then hope the games work or don’t get updated with anti-cheat software that keeps you from playing.

Or just buy the “plays games” machine and play the games.

It’s the “and much more” that’s the problem. A console is a deli slicer where a PC is a chef’s knife.

The knife can do so much more than the deli slicer, but if you just want to slice some meat and don’t care about the rest, then the deli slicer is perfect.

Because you can buy a consol3, plig it into the back of your TV, and be confident that it will work. You don’t have to worry about system requirements, storefronts, launchers, driver updates fucking you up, etc.

Power Cable, HDMI cable, and connect to wifi - that’s it.

I’ve been PC gaming since the mid-80s, and even I sometimes just want to sit on the couch, push the Xbox button on my controller, and get going. Is it lazy? Yes. But I work 2 jobs and get to be lazy when I get home.

Yeah. Valve runs the loot box system and the marketplace in which the winnings from those loot boxes are sold.

You pay Valve for a random chance at a rare item you can sell (with Valve taking a cut).

Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.

My point is that SteamOS is similar to Android from a business perspective.

They’re making an OS for free that anyone can install, but they’re doing it to get people to buy software from Steam.

Yeah, you don’t have to use Steam as your software provider, but Android users don’t have to use the Play Store.

Guess where almost all apps are purchased on Android? Valve wants to be the Google of the mobile PC gaming world.

I actually typed Origin when I meant to type EGS, which charges 18% to Steam’s 30%.

They offer a free operating system anyone can use that’s name after their company and designed to play games sold through the included store for a 30% cut of sales.

What saints!

If Google did something similar, I bet everyone would say they’re a great company and not at all evil…

Gabe is a billionaire monopolist, not your friend.

I really don’t get the love for Valve. They charge double the fees of some other digital platforms, and people flip the fuck out when a developer is like "we’re releasing on origin because paying Valve would cost more money than the entire net profit of the game.

Gelsinger didn’t do “nothing.”

He was clear from day one that it would take years for Intel to recover. It takes a long time for their products to make it to market, especiallyhlwhen they have to buipdnfab facilities. He was essentially fired for his predecessors lingering fuckups.

The biggest product that’s launched he actually had some control over was the second generation of Arc, which launced days after he was fired and has been a massive success.

Piracy being the only way to get a game isn’t beneficial to the dev, and Balatro is the kind of game that deserves our money. It could have easily been jammed to the gill with paid boosts premium decks, etc, but instead, they just made a good game.

18 is the highest rating. It’s equivalent to the ESRB “AO” rating, and many storefronts will not sell it, period.

And they didn’t even bother playing their planet card.

I think what he means is multi-player games are typically cheaper than single-player because the devs make 6 maps or whatever and let the players loose.

A full campaign requires a lot more work to keep it interesting for more than a few minutes.

The thing is gaming is a weird industry where the consumer price is essentially fixed tegardless of platform/marketplace outside of sales.

Ideally, games would cost more on Steam to make up for the increased fees. That would create a market where Steam would probably have to lower its fees to be competitive. And if Steam did that, EGS would need to improve the quality of its service to remain competitive.

Or maybe Steam could be a boutique marketplace where the games cost more but the UU is better, while EGS is an unholy mess of a UX, but the games cost less.

But what we have right now is neither. With the customers being shielded from the price differences, the negative effects of Steam are invisible to most people and the market doesn’t properly function.

Is a better launcher really worth 18% of the gross value of a game?

If a developer decided to cut 20% of their content, and their excuse was “we want to use that budget towards a better third-party game launcher instead of using it to develop the game” would you be okay with that?

Because that’s what you’re suggesting they do by choosing Steam over EGS.