Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.

The industry is deeply misguided.

The article puts the cutoff for “old” as being 6 years or more. Officially, Factorio was released in 2020, but we all know that any other studio would have considered it done years before that.

It’s AI at this point. Nvidia considers the gamer division to be vestigial. They were a $700B market cap company that was primarily known for gaming GPUs. They are now quadruple that with AI, and that’s even with some recent hits to their stock price.

IIRC, the steam release is based on a mobile port, and it’s bad. Maybe they fixed it since release, but I dunno.

PSX version added some anime cutscenes, which are nice. Problem is that loading times are horrible and happen as part of every battle.

I seem to remember the DS version being recommended. Otherwise, the SNES version is always good to find on the high seas.

It’s more approachable than most RPGs from the era. It has no random battles, and tends to avoid situations where you advance a character wrong and soft lock yourself. More hardcore RPG fans find it too easy, but it’s a classic for a reason.

Walking Death Simulator

Right, Dolphin had an encryption key in there for the Wii that was hardcoded in. That is apparently the one bit of legal leverage Nintendo has to keep it off Steam, though being Nintendo, they would likely fight it, anyway.

In any case, the key could be a user provided configuration option, or tools for ripping games could do the decryption on their own. Either should keep the code safe from Nintendo being able to win a case. Though again, doesn’t stop Nintendo from trying and exhausting your ability to fight it.

Maybe I should clarify that to “publisher”. EA itself doesn’t really make games anymore. They fund the studios who make games.

You can hate the company while accepting this. EA doesn’t have exclusive control over that game anymore.

The whole premise is “America: Fuck Yeah, The RTS”.

When I first played Red Alert, it was on a computer with a 6.4GB hard drive, and I had no idea how to fill up that much space at the time. I think we’ll be fine.

The GPL is a way to make intellectual property work the way it should by default.

Correct. The license (at least, the one I read for Red Alert) is GPLv3 with some additional stuff. The additional stuff is mostly about not using EA trademarks in your version or showing any connection to EA itself. So it appears that a clean room asset swap would be allowed as long as it includes the title screen.

I feel like at some point, EA became the least hated major studio by staying exactly where they were. The rest of the industry zoomed past them.

You can make complete conversions with your own assets. That’s basically how old id engines work.

It has to be something that fits in a relatively small package so it can fit in the space constraints of old hardware. Anything with true 3D levels and texture mapped models is right out.

It also can’t be predominantly written in assembly. Making assembly code run on a different architecture is practically a complete rewrite, not a port.

This leaves a very narrow window of games written right around the time of Doom.

They got the formula right on this space:

• Linux, not Windows–Windows provides little that can’t be done on Linux in this space
• AMD, not Intel–AMD just has better products at this level (any level at this point, really)
• 720p–going higher doesn’t provide much at this size except suck battery life and requiring a more powerful GPU
• Price

Now, price is partially because Valve can afford to subsidize the cost and expect to make it up on Steam sales. I’d be remiss to ignore how they’re making their money. Still, they’re also able to have a good price because they didn’t try to make it as powerful as it could be, but as powerful as it needed to be.

They’re not, though. There’s quite a few other offerings in this space, and the Steam Deck appears to outsell all of them combined.

Arguably, the whole mobile app store ecosystem became a shithole because we weren’t willing to pay a buck or two for a an app. It led to an environment where alternative forms of monetization are so common that a lot of devs don’t even bother making a premium, ad-free version.

Slack or the OS would need to support it directly, and I don’t think either of those have it.

The techniques you’re thinking of are for documents sent by email or some such. You add innocuous whitespace or typos that are unique to each one, and send them individually. If one leaks, you can match it to the employee who received it. That doesn’t work for screenshots of Slack.

Is there a Nintendo Power article I have to read to get past this one part? It’s not an authentic experience otherwise.

For $100, it better have a strip club achievement that comes with a coupon for a free actual lap dance.

Zelda 64 on the Switch was a mess at release, but the emulator has improved greatly since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-fYXwxuFxQ

Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.

Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .

Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.

The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.

No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.

And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.

Nvidia claims the 5070 will give 4090 performance. That’s a huge generation uplift if it’s true. Of course, we’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks to confirm that.

The best ray tracing games I’ve seen are applying it to older games, like Quake II or Minecraft.

Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, conditions which don’t currently exist in the GPU space, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.

Maybe on the initial release, but not for long after.

Agreed. They really limit how many enemies you face at once in that game. Any more would be unplayably difficult.

For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.

Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.

Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.

Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.

I haven’t played it, but based on everything I’ve read about it, that alone puts the headline to shame.

That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn’t get it, either.

The Talos Principle.

Right. I feel like they were a self correcting problem all along. They get buried in Sturgeon’s Law and that’s the end of it.

Except for that one guy who tried to copyright claim Steph’s channel. That guy needs something more. Like any kind of consequences at all for false copyright claims.

Plus, if you can get the right model, you can play PS2 and PS1 games on it. That’s a ridiculous library full of hidden gems.

Helps when that Intel “flagship” isn’t worth covering in thermal paste.

I’ve seen very little worth playing on any consoles. Conversely, my problem with the Steam Deck is finding time for all the games I want to play.

deck just fails at new games.

That assumes the PS5 has games worth playing in the first place.

I can’t wait to buy movies from Sony only to have them invalidated a few years from now.

It’s about the same as the inflation-adjusted PS3 price, but here’s the thing: the PS3 had a difficult first couple of years. If not for the Red Ring of Death, Microsoft could have come out ahead that generation. One thing Sony is good at is capitalizing on its competitors’ mistakes, and combined with price reductions on later models, they pulled out a victory. Being >$750 inflation-adjusted dollars at launch wasn’t why it won.

Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.

• PC Engine/Turbografx
• Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
• Atari Jaguar
• Neo Geo
• Amiga CD

Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.

Sony took a big gamble and won.