The fact that it’s immutable isn’t necessarily good for people new to Linux. If something does go wrong, or the user wants to change something significant, most of what they read online about how to do that will not work like many other distros.

For experienced users, sure, there probably isn’t much difference.

It used to be bad. In the last few years, it isn’t. We want other people to use Linux now.

Or literally any other distro.

Pop is probably much easier to be up and running vs. Bazzite.

I was probably 10 when my best friend (at the time) and I would play Super Contra on the NES for hours. We loved everything about it. We’d get as far as we could. We’d give each other lives. We could sing the soundtrack. When it was game over, we just restarted it.

Those days were simple and beautiful. I don’t think another game could give me anything like that experience, since it wasn’t really entirely about the game.

Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:

1. Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.

2. Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.

Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.

In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.

Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.

It is intentionally difficult, of course.

The real solution is not to buy the console.

The fact that consoles still get away with this inflated proprietary crap is shocking

They sell fine. Look at BG3.

What they don’t do is make money hand over fist without the need to design more product, as happens with subscription-based, game-as-a-service multiplayer titles. Some companies don’t want to make good games. They just want to make good money.

Same. Never looked back.

Damn I’m happy I went AMD.

*with PSN requirements. Don’t confuse money grabs with altruism.

Death Stranding isn’t about making deliveries. It’s about the quiet crunchiness of walking on snow or wet leaves. It is a beautiful game.

Yuuup. I waited to jump into modding until CDPR said there wouldn’t be more updates. Oh well.

If it had 16GB VRAM, I’d find it more competitive. It is a strange choice to stick with 12GB in 2024 practically 2025.

Yeah, agreed X-Plane is behind in VR. That specific use case gives MSFS an edge.

Except that you can continue to play whatever version you want without issue. X-Plane 12 is the current, but many people are still on X-Plane 11. You can remain on old versions indefinitely – because they aren’t games as a service. They’re local installs.

As a fellow simmer, all I can say is: please try X-Plane. It needs support and is the best way to make sure the MSFS approach does not become the norm.

Games as services aren’t popular – with a particular demographic. The disconnect here might be that people who tend to play flight sims are decidedly not in the games as a service group.

One reason why I play X-Plane is to avoid this silliness with streaming everything from servers (that, plus the flight and lighting models are better).

But it is just an animation. I want to be able to actually look at the model outside of an animation, like in a Rockstar game.

Edit: a better example is how you can inspect things in Bethesda games

I actually felt it was one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the story. The game is beautiful. I love the amount of immersion that is possible, especially with mods. I’ve played through it twice.

I really, really wish we could inspect weapons. One mod gets close, but it isn’t the same as a Rockstar-style weapons inspection. We don’t even get to zoom in on the models in inventory. A damned travesty because the weapons are gorgeous.

But overall, I find it hard to fault, especially given its state at launch.

Yes, agreed, it definitely needs moderation. But I don’t think it needs singling out (again, not saying don’t moderate).

The bigger picture is a proliferation of online extremist speech in general. And yes, Google may have done well to moderate play store reviews (anecdotally), but they certainly haven’t done well with YouTube.

But I would suggest that focusing on any one online forum / store / outlet / etc. will naturally miss an important trend, and the reasons for that trend should be understood – while concurrently doing everything possible to limit this kind of hate online.

your continued insistence that the problematic behavior is sourced from elsewhere

So you’re suggesting that Steam is the source of the extremist behavior we see across a broad spectrum of other media?

For someone literally arguing about argumentation, it sure is hard to see your point.

Then, good. I just hope they’re being tackled by order of affected users.

You literally said “what about” in your comment.

Do you legitimately think that any use of the words “what about” makes something whataboutism?

You specifically argued that the problem lay elsewhere

Again, you seem to have missed the point of the comment. I did not deny that Steam needs improvement. Things can be symptoms of larger problems, and calling that out is not whataboutism (to the contrary, the purpose of whataboutism is to suggest that there is no problem with item X – not that item X is a symptom of item Y).

Edit: clarity

I think you missed the first sentence of my comment. Games have been blamed above other media for years and years and years. That is not whataboutism.

Edit: or the last sentence for that matter.

It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.

I never suggested that Steam doesn’t need improvement. There is extremist content being posted. But it is definitely part of a larger (frankly, much more obvious) problem. Calling attention to a root cause is just not whataboutism.

Once again, a clueless boomer blames games.

How about YouTube? Why aren’t we going after Google?

What about Twitter? Musk’s platform is filled with extremist hate.

Plenty of extremist diarrhea spewing from the mouth of a President Elect.

It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.

Regulation? In the US?

Not in this timeline.

No trackpads.

Out of consideration.

The endgame of all these subscription services is always the same. They make you reliant, and then they jack prices and reduce service.

At this point, there are enough exemplars that anyone still buying in is just not paying attention.

Played on PS4 Pro. I really loved the theme and the visuals. The combat was quite nice too. But, I also remember it got very grindy to me.

No no no…Sonic and Knuckles was just Sonic 3, the other half of the cartridge that they sold you a second time, somehow.

It’s not though? Sonic & Knuckles has unique stages and story vs. Sonic 3. Unless you mean they were designed as one game and split at the end before release; that I don’t know.

There was a 2010 2D platformer released as Sonic 4 which was meant to be the spiritual successor.

I’d say the real spiritual successor on Genesis/Megadrive was Sonic & Knuckles, which came out after Sonic 3 and for all intents and purposes may as well have been called Sonic 4. But they had to push the Knuckles aspect because the cartridge had a passthrough that would accept another Genesis cartridge and allow you to play e.g. Sonic 2 with the Knuckles sprite, iirc.

$50 for a PS3 game.

The absolute state of AAA gaming is ridiculous.

Tons of people still play Skyrim.

Something tells me that, in 10 years, few if any will still be playing Starfield.

I don’t play multiplayer because I don’t want to be cussed out by a 6 year old.

I play games to have fun. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone.

Actually I just need to stop buying garbage (which I have done). The power sits with the purchasers in this case.

They could make so many moderate games that would sell amazingly if they just tried to…

100%. That’s the kind of nuanced thinking you won’t get from corporate America at this point.

They aren’t selling because they are designed as money machines first and games second.

Do I get to be the next Tim Sweeney now? As far as I can tell the bar is pretty low.

It is absolutely shocking to me how long it is taking for fans to turn on Nintendo. They’ve done this hardcore corpo shit for years. They should have a public image far worse than EA by now.

The nostalgic love runs deep, I guess.

At this point I could give up a lot in terms of budget. Give me text without audio all day long if the writing is good. I think we’ve lost our way on RPGs.