$90 per game. That’s an instant deal breaker.

This is one of those games that I love the description, love the sales pitches, streamers do a good job of promoting it. In paper I should love this game, but it just doesn’t gel with me. There’s something about video games that just cannot be conveyed through video or text.

Just because they are private doesn’t mean Gabe doesn’t like to make a ton of money. Dude owns tons of yacths and would like to own more. I love Valve and think they are the biggest ethical company in gaming. But they’re still a massive corporate monopoly. No one is perfect, and they did do things that hurt people. No need to be publicly traded to also be evil. Trust but verify.

It’s the carrier’s phone, not yours. That’s how they offer such low prices.

Again, doesn’t sound similar to me. There are plenty of exclusives both on the streaming and the videogames world. But the history on steam doesn’t follow Netflix’s history at all.

I think the problem is equating a public trade, stockholders driven service that is entirely in the gutter of service quality and shitty corporate behavior. With a private company that has a mostly solid ethic track record (with few exceptions) that offers unrivaled added value. Netflix already lost the streaming wars. Max exclusives will never go to Netflix, Disney would rather feed children to the pigs than share their IPs. While devs already negotiate time windows to end the exclusivity deals with Epic right out of the gate. Publishers will foam at the mouth about exclusivity just to release steam versions two years later. It’s a massively different situation to Netflix.

Again, not comparable. Prime video, Disney+ and Max are all similar in subscribers size to Netflix. Steam is ten times larger than GOG in number of active users and twice as large as Epic.

Netflix is utter crap. Way over the other side of the enshittification fence. They only subsist due to user capture. They were first thus everyone seems to have an account. More akin to Facebook to social networks than steam to online videogame stores.

What you don’t remember where the armies of bot accounts it brought into Steam. People would pay for votes and get scams and money grabs greenlit while indies couldn’t even get a foot on the door. YouTube channels made series about playing the shovelware and mocking the system. There’s a reason it was done away with.

Greenlight saw one of the biggests floods of shovel ware in Steam’s history. The store hasn’t actually recovered since.

Weren’t those accessories just wrist straps?

It looked like they were mimicking cars to me, not mice. Not saying that it wouldn’t be a cool concept if it has an optical sensor. But they didn’t show any visual feedback to imply they were controlling any kind of cursor. If that was the implication, it’s obvious it was a rushed marketing piece.

I think that’s still the DS. The Switch got close, but didn’t beat it, and now that attention is on the Switch2, it probably won’t.

Which mouse thing? they seem to be exactly all the same inputs the Switch 1 already had.

If you are open to try a more adventure oriented spin on this, then try Tunic. Where the main game mechanic is translating the game’s manual by learning the language of the world.

Typical infantile C-suite logic “I didn’t do X well, therefore X is impossible and no one can do X! It’s not my fault, I swear!”

Sure, but the support, both technical and reputational that a steam OS compatible machine brings would steer the market for more accessible and purpose made components. Bazzite is awesome and my daily driver, but it doesn’t have the fancy endorsement of Valve, the owner of the largest game store in the world today.

No system management. A set once and forget it system, ala console style, but with the potential of off the shelf high power components for PC games on the living room is a quality proposition.

Digging on Concord was funny for longer than its server were online.

True that, the tri-core PowerPC is quite a unique challenging mess. But underneath it is just the same processor.

I know it is hard to believe. But the gamecube, Wii, and wiiu are the same machine. Same architecture and family of processors (IBM’s PowerPC). That’s why the wiiu is just a Wii with a beefier CPU (three Wii cores slapped together), and then a newer more powerful GPU sticked to the side. Thats why a single emulator can target all three consoles. The switch 2 will just be a newer version of the Tegra chip.

Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.

By the third patent: Elden Ring, WoW, Everquest, Neverwinter, SW: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy, and many many others have infringed Nintendo patents. Fuck Nintendo.

SC is a scam. Of course they’re willing to break the law to keep the money they stole.

Just tried Heliboard, its glide typing support is experimental and requires hacking GApps to extract libraries or download someone’s else glide library from the internet. I guess my threat model remains for the time being.

It’s not connected to the internet and doesn’t send or receive any telemetry at all. It’s API is very minimal as well. I fear Gboard to compromise me far more than this app. Keyboards don’t need internet connection.

Openboard with swipe.

In this comment: Someone who is not familiar with the history of Nintendo selling pirated versions of their own games and ripping off pirate emulators then passing them as their own.

Rom pirates usually trim and sign their releases, specially if they have to break or decode any encryption. These pirate’s signatures have been found in official Nintendo releases. Some of their own emulators have also been found to run piracy emulation software. They are pretty much hypocrites.

Give GUN JAM a try. It’s a rhythm shooting game, the stakes are as high or as low as you want them. There’s only a minimal story and you just focus on the music, aiming and staying on the beat. Can be a lot of flow state fun.

In ten years? If I had to guess the average life span of live services games I’d say about 18 months. Heavily skewed by the survivors. The shortest lived one only worked for 13 days. Only the very popular ones survive past 5 years and there are a handful of 10 plus. I know it’s hard to believe, the average gamer is oblivious to how over saturated the videogames market is. Despite executive’s delusions, time and money are actually finite. Not all games can demand all of it, at the same time.

Undo is a function of the Android API, not the keyboard. All phones can do it. It is usually the app’s responsibility to implement its button because the feature extends beyond the realm of text input.

If you truly break it down, you’ll notice that AAA only actually makes two or three games, open world third person action RPG with parkour, open world shooter with looting and crafting, and live-service coop/competitive shooter with loot boxes. Every iteration of these same ideas are just varnishing the same bored gameplay concepts over and over with different coats of theming and slightly different stories. I only ever find original and stimulating gameplay on indie projects and the occasional small studio. They’re the only ones actually experimenting with innovative game design and varied concepts.

AAA games don’t have a production quality or even a development time problem. They have a far more existential one. A gameplay focus problem. These are games made with profit as first priority, not fun. They have confused engagement and addiction with gameplay quality. Live services poisoned their design language. This is why they want more, faster, at higher budgets. The fallacy is that more, faster, more graphically demanding, will magically make them all the money.

I want less games, with lower budgets, that take longer to make, have less graphic and animation fidelity, that pay better to their devs to do their job well. And I mean it.

The video games market is already overflowed for its size, yet somehow these companies are inflating their budgets like balloons instead and charging ever more and more for shittier games that somehow cost more to make. This isn’t sustainable. AI won’t fix any of these issues.

I will repeat, and I can’t stress enough with this reiteration, fuck Ubisoft.

It’s already being called the lowest price in a decade. Technically true, but honestly disingenuous since the massive price bump to over €100 was an anomaly caused by the pandemic that swept the entire industry, not just this one publisher. Also drivel to generate engagement. Just like this post, here we are discussing it, despite the fact that it is misleading and poor characterization of the entire picture.

Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?

I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.

If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s

Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.

Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.

And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.

I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.

That said, fuck ubisoft.