The big reason I switched back to Nvidia was because I wanted to play with some local AI models, and doing that with AMD cards was quite difficult at the time (I think it’s improved a little, but still isn’t straightforward).

Worth noting that (at least for Red Alert 2) , they aren’t requiring you install whatever their launcher is.

Not even just AAA studios, but I’ve seen a lot of indie studios that used to provide Linux builds aren’t anymore in their newer games. Two games that come to mind are Everspace 2 & Talos Principle 2.

Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.

It’s not released yet but it’s one of Valve’s goals.

Source

I don’t think the poster is saying that we shouldn’t make these games, just that there’s a ton of competition.

Barely related, but this kind of relates to my fear of increased automation and unemployment this time around. In past periods, like during the Industrial Revolution, the jobs lost by automation were eventually replaced by new jobs as people used the lower prices to consume more. Making clothes needs less labour and so gets cheaper, so consumers buy more clothes, which needs more labour - this but on the scale of the whole economy. Of course it wasn’t this simple (jobs created in other industries, switching industries is hard, new jobs take a while to form, displaced workers never recover, etc.), but given enough time it worked out.

The difference this time is that consumers now spend a ton of money on digital goods for which there’s a weaker relationship between increased consumption and jobs. Unlike physical goods where increasing consumption requires new factories & jobs, digital goods are a zero-margin product. If you doubled the number of gamers in the world you wouldn’t have a ‘game shortage’, you’d still have the insane amount of selection you find on Steam. Yes there’d be more opportunities for profitable niche games but you wouldn’t double the number of game developers as the generic mass-market games would also double their revenue despite not needing to hire anyone new.

Add onto this that:

• As the world gets more developed there are more gamers coming in but also more game developers, often able to work for lower salaries.
• Older games can stay competitive long after they’ve been made. How old is Skyrim and it’s still selling well? How many game developers are being paid to work on it still?

To tie it all together, basically I worry that this time around we may not create enough new jobs as a result of automation. The current number of game developers is more than enough to satisfy market needs and making games cheaper isn’t going to result in people buying enough new games to make replacement jobs for game developers. I used gaming as my example here but this also holds for music, TV, movies, software, etc. The one silver lining that keeps me from despair is that this can be solved by shorter workweeks which would both help spread out the remaining jobs while also giving consumers more time to consume digital goods.

To summarize for people who don’t want to click in, different gamers are willing to pay different amounts for the same game. If you keep the price high then you earn a lot per customer but on a small customer base. Set the price low and you earn a little per customer but on more customers.

Price discrimination is basically finding ways to charge each customer the most they’ll pay - that way you earn a lot for the customers willing to pay the inflated amount while not losing the customers looking to save money.

There are a variety of ways businesses do this - sales are one way. Grocery stores often use coupons, as higher income consumers often won’t bother to deal with clipping coupons. Sometimes the exact same manufacturer will make both a brand name product and then the generic brand with a small tweak. For business to business sales, some companies do pricing per customer based literally on the most they’ll pay.

At the end of the day this is great news for Valve as they really only make their money on people buying PC games (through Steam). You were in a situation where mobile gaming was really only practical on the Switch or phones, both cases that would result in lost revenue for Valve. I can see the Steam Deck as being intended to kind of kickstart mobile gaming for PCs, in which case these other companies joining is a complete victory for Valve as is it provides more opportunities for consumers to spend on Steam.

Is there a reason they haven’t written a tool that auto-converts Oblivion data to the updated engine in Skyrim and then release their updates as a diff on that? I feel like that would get around legal issues and solve most of the tasks like the nav grid, no? I’m sure they’ve thought about it so I’m wondering why they rejected this approach.