Even if they gave it away for free, they probably wouldn’t hit that. Absolutely going to be used to justify layoffs.

I’m not really surprised. A phone can often be cheaper, can do a lot of the same tasks (and some a PC can’t do without special hardware), and generally has a better warranty program and tons of upgrade promotions. A lot of younger people have never needed to use a PC because they had tablets or phones.

I also think the concept of having to pay for an OS license is kinda stale for MS in particular because they’re money grubbers in so many other ways. Just give out the OS for free to non-enterprise users and call it a day; it’s not like they’re using the revenue to provide desktop support or add customer value.

I got the game for free in 2015 as part of a choose-your-own-bundle promo for the AMD R9 270X. Haven’t paid a cent for it and I still sorta feel ripped off.

It would be so cool if this meant Funcom had extra money to put into The Secret World (now known as Secret World Legends). Love that game, wish there was more. I know there’s a TTRPG now but it’s not the same.

Microsoft is not there to make computers for Palestinians. They are there to be military contractors for Israel.

ran perfectly

had some glitches

???

Oh, I didn’t know that about Warframe chat! That’s an interesting way to implement chat in an MMO. Uplink is an excellent game.

Just for reference, a year of full-time work is about 2000 hours. This dude did the equivalent of 5 years of working for this.

Lmao, whoops. Too early in the morning.

I remember feeling this way about Die Hard: Vendetta for GC. Strong meh/10.

They are heavy-handed and it comes at the expense of atmosphere and tension; a lot of their efforts come across as cheap even though there’re obvious signs of attention and care.

I think the remake of Silent Hill 2 suffers for it. They shouldn’t be given this franchise IMO. You can see it in Layers of Fear and The Medium, and even in The Observer and Blair Witch to some extent.

I like Bloober Team (I’ve played a ton of their games, obviously) but they just haven’t impressed me to the point of convincing me they can remake of Silent Hill properly. It’s an important franchise and they miss the mark on all of the subtleties that made the originals excellent.

Bloober Team again? They have the delicate touch of a rhinoceros on meth. Goddamnit.

Did you read this article? It literally says this:

As you can see, the number of Switch 2 titles not on Game-Key Cards is very slim.

The only games that will be fully available on the cartridge are the ones explicitly singled out. There are 10. How is that significant?

Not in 10+ years when you can’t download the rest of the game from the servers because they don’t put the whole game on the cartridge anymore. Not to mention patches and DLC aren’t on the cartridge either.

Steam has the games Nintendon’t. For everything else, there’s emulation.

That’s awesome, thank you, but the damage is already done and the mods are already broken. I am mostly interested now in hearing that it’s done being updated so that I can go through it at my own pace with all of the content it will ever have and QoL and visual mods that still work. I appreciate you though.

I want him to stop because he keeps breaking the mods that I need to make this game how I want it. I haven’t played anything past 1.4 or 1.5 because the update broke one of my favourite mods and I can no longer enjoy the game the way I did for years.

Work on Haunted Chocolatier or make Stardew Valley 2 so I can pick up the pieces and finish this fucking game. Otherwise I just can’t fucking play without immense fear that a really important mod will break again at some point. Literally the opposite of a chill time.

Edit: I’m mentally ill, if that wasn’t clear. I don’t expect him to stop, I just want him to. Don’t care if that’s unpopular.

You don’t need a patent to protect the IP of a game. That’s what copyright is for.

Maybe you’re just not an expert yet?

Me! They have a decent collection of Switch games and my wife will try out the games she’s seen reviews of at the library to see if she wants to add them to her wishlist.

Our library network is rather large so there’s often an available copy of whatever we’re looking for (unless it’s new).

Generally, I don’t buy games over $18 CAD. I’ve made exceptions (Temtem, Civ 6, Super Mega Baseball 3, My Time at Portia, Satisfactory, a couple of others) but never paid more than $40 unless it’s a gift for someone I really like (I pre-ordered Fallout 4 for my ex for her birthday).

I will happily wait years for something to come down in price. I have 600+ games on Steam: I always have other options.

I’m currently playing Research Story, that one is pretty cute. There are romances. I don’t know about combat since I haven’t gotten that far (just a few hours of play); it doesn’t really seem like there will be combat, but there could be.

I’d also recommend Apico, Mudborne, Littlewood, or Fields of Mistria. I’m sure I’m missing a ton. I think Steam has “Cute,” “Romance,” and “Slice of Life” tags if you wanted to browse those on the storefront.

This isn’t a 3rd party tool, it’s a separate Steam Support page that lists your total purchases. It basically takes the data from the Purchase History section (assuming that you usually pay directly and not using Steam gift cards) and totals it so that you don’t have to do that manually.

It’s also an embarrassing testament to how low-budget this project must be, because any fucking engineer or technician with even a taste of the HVAC industry is aware that a system that passively recycles already heated or cooled water is one of the easiest/cheapest ways to solve the overheating problem.

Nintendo said it might not be compatible. People reported on what Nintendo said, with the caveat that they have said similar things in the past that did not turn out to be true.

So it’s a $10 tutorial? Don’t care how expansive and cool it is, that’s just fucked. The project scope should’ve been adjusted to make sure it would be free.

No, it’s not just developing countries on older hardware

I was talking about Counter Strike specifically, because you used it as an example.

Microsoft doesn’t own Windows

They literally do. Look it up. Windows is developed and maintained by Microsoft. They own all trademarks and intellectual property related to Windows.

Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.

I never disputed this, but you are arguing that PC games are all shit for some reason or another unless they’re ported either from or to PS5.

Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works.

Newly standardized? Xinput was created in 2005. It has “just worked” for ages, because it is officially supported by Microsoft through Windows. Because they own Xbox, Xinput, and Windows.

Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn’t and they wanted full compatibility

So that they can support other controllers that aren’t Xbox…

You’re talking out of your ass here and not even paying attention to context which you yourself brought up. Not to mention you aren’t even aware of why Xbox had such stellar support (Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies in the world and own the PC OS with the largest market share by a longshot) and how that support translated to the modern rise of PC gaming.

The average PC is an old-ass laptop used by a broke-ass student. Presumably that still is a factor on why CounterStrike, of all things, is Steam’s biggest game.

It’s because of the high percentage of players from developing countries, countries where high-end electronics aren’t accessible, or countries with weak economies. Russia, Brazil, etc.

It sure was a factor on why WoW or The Sims were persistent PC hits despite looking way below the expectations of contemporary PC hardware.

When Sims 4 came out, people upgraded. They cancelled Sims 5 so Sims 4 remains, with largely the same specs. That’s not something consoles can change. WoW is similar, which is why there’s no WoW for PS5.

The beginning of competent console ports in the Xbox 360 era revolutionized that. Suddenly there was a standard PC controller that had parity to mainstream consoles and a close-enough architecture running games on a reliably stable hardware.

That’s because Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox, not because Xbox revolutionized gaming. They had the ownership of 2 platforms with significant lock-in. It’s like if Nintendo owned both the Switch and PlayStation (which they almost did lol).

Sure, there are PC exclusives because they rely on PC-specific controls or are trying to do some tech-demoy stuff or because they’re tiny indies with no money for ports or licensing fees, or because they’re made in a region where consoles aren’t popular or supported or commercially viable.

So there are 14,000 titles new to Steam in the last year and your conclusion is that they are all either keyboard-only, tech demos, indies, or from a poor nation? Wild. You just said that the Xbox controller opened up a new world over 10 years ago and yet you also believe that these new games just aren’t usable with a controller?

With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs.

Are we just ignoring all of the PC-exclusive games PS5 players will never get to play? And the games that were PC-exclusive until their success prompted a console port? The PC catalog dwarfs the PS5 catalog by hundreds of modern titles, and thousands if you count retro games. Steam (just one of the PC software distribution platforms) added over 14,000 games in the last year and there are fewer than 3,500 PS5 games in total. I can tell you that “targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs” has never really been a priority in the PC space; you can see this trend even before consoles like the SNES existed.

That’s why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.

A lot of PCs couldn’t do Crisis. It was a hardware seller because a lot of people significantly upgraded just to play it. Games in the 2000s looked like that because highly-detailed 3D polygonal models used too many resources (mostly CPU at the time). It made more sense, for developer and user, to limit the polygon count for everyone’s sake.

Even in the modern day, World of Warcraft is an MMO and the textures and other assets are deliberately less detailed to optimize performance, so this isn’t really a fair comparison and doesn’t really demonstrate that consoles prop up the PC market (especially since WoW wasn’t available for consoles during the peak of its success and was also a hardware seller due to that exclusivity). It’s like comparing Plants vs. Zombies and Half-Life 2, or Destiny and Alien: Isolation.

Hmm, I suppose the big difference between Fedora and Kubuntu is that Fedora is a fixed point release distro (similar to rolling release but less frequent) that applies updates only on restart, so it’s possible that it needs a moment to ensure that everything is compatible.

It’s certainly a weird choice to kidnap your desktop, so I don’t blame you for being annoyed. If that’s causing this, then you might want to try a stable release distro. This is part of why I like Debian, because it doesn’t change very quickly and updates are unlikely to need special care to ensure stability. Debian also doesn’t have the issue you’re talking about, it updates right away in the background.

Kubuntu is Ubuntu-based (duh) so if you like how it behaves, you could try Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) or try another flavour of Ubuntu. Pop!_OS and Zorin are both Ubuntu-based and should definitely be on DistroSea.

I’m not familiar enough with KDE to know what you mean by a Windows-esque update step, but if you can explain further I’ll see if I can find something for you.

Alternatively, someone else might pop in with some options.

For gaming, people often recommend Pop!_OS, Bazzite, or Zorin, but you can use whatever you want if you are a tinkerer. I use Debian and have a great time gaming.

Outside of gaming and if Windows software compatibility isn’t really something you’re worried about, you can use any distro you want.

You can try some of them out using a web browser with DistroSea if you feel like it, though they don’t have every distro because that would be nuts.

Ah, damn. I did buy it many years ago, but it’s unfortunate that new users can’t access it.

Not all open world, but:

• Dying Light 1 has a really fun parkour movement system (haven’t played Dying Light 2)
• Ghostrunner, also kind of parkour-based, really gets you into a flow state once you get the hang of the movement
• Vanquish is always pretty satisfying IMO, both movement and combat
• Jet Set Radio or its spiritual successor, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (different dev, same idea) are really fun, especially with friends
• The remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is pretty damn good

Are “plenty of people” enough to make a game commercially viable? And not in an indie way.

I zone out, completely cut off from others, while playing games all the time. What I don’t want to do is fork over more cash for things that will collect dust (like a headset for a single game).

Given how different it is to other, normal 3D games, I think it’s a bit much to stake your franchise on something most people will never have. It’s obvious Valve knew that, they’re not idiots and have put out good hardware that didn’t see mass adoption in the past (Steam Controller, Steam Link, etc.); it’s clear they wanted to try out something new even if it wasn’t a huge blockbuster. They have lots of revenue from other sources to fall back on.

They probably hoped that some people would take a chance and get the hardware to play the game, and some people did. But to expect that most would do that? Lol. They’re not that dumb.

“The idea” was to do something no one had done before with a beloved franchise. Not to sell headsets.

The idea of sinking $500 into a headset and then another $80 for one game is pretty crazy. Not like Valve doesn’t have the ownership numbers from the hardware survey. It was never going to sell like HL2.

Five years and I still don’t have a VR headset lol. These things are enthusiast tech and I am not that enthusiastic about having one.

Half-Life Alyx wasn’t called Half-Life 3 because it came out on a platform most people don’t have/can’t afford. It’s essentially a really cool spin-off that I will never play.

Cool that you liked it though, love that for you.

You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I’ve used it before when I can’t pick what to play. You can apply filters too.

Reminds me of Bethesda’s storefront for paid mods that they tried out for Skyrim’s special edition in 2023. Hopefully they don’t pull a bait-and-switch on their players and it’s just a platform for free mods.

They sell the hardware at a loss and initial adopters are more likely to be able to find an exploit that allows the console to play pirated games. If a Lite comes out early enough, there’s hope that it might be exploitable.

It’s my understanding that the Steam Deck is not performant when it comes to running Switch games via Yuzu/Ryujinx so it would probably be even worse with Switch 2 games, which are probably more taxing to emulate.

All that said, I have a Switch Lite that I share with my wife and I like it. There are so many companies you’re “not allowed” to buy from according to Lemmy lol, I don’t have the time for that. Almost all publishers are ass, should I never buy a game again?

Edit: As pointed out, Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.