But they’ve been selling mid-range and budget GPUs all this time. They’re not adding to the existing competition there, because they already have a share of that market. What they’re doing is pulling out of a segment where there was (a bit of) competition, leaving a monopoly behind. If they do that, we can only hope that Intel puts out high-end GPUs to compete in that market, otherwise it’s Nvidia or nothing.

Nvidia already had the biggest share of the high-end market, but now they’re the only player.

From personal experience, I’d say the end result for framegen is hit or miss. In some cases, you get a much smoother framerate without any noticeable downsides, and in others, your frame times are all over the place and it makes the game look choppy. For example, I couldn’t play CP2077 with franegen at all. I had more frames, but in reality it felt like I actually had fewer. With Ark Survival Ascended, I’m not seeing any downside and it basically doubled my framerate.

Upscaling, I’m generally sold on. If you try to upscale from 1080p to 4K, it’s usually pretty obvious, but you can render at 80% of the resolution and upscale the last 20% and get a pretty big framerate bump while getting better visuals than rendering at 100% with reduced settings.

That said, I would rather have better actual performance than just perceived performance.

Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options

Which means there’s no more competition in the high-end range. AMD was lagging behind Nvidia in terms of pure performance, but the price/performance ratio was better. Now they’ve given up a segment of the market, and consumers lose out in the process.

As a matter of principle, I don’t save my credit card number anywhere. It’s a little more tedious when I make a purchase, but I’ve got my number memorized anyway, so it’s not a big deal, and it’s definitely more secure in that respect.

From another article:
"“We don’t really have a plan in terms of, oh we’re going to make more spin-offs or this is going to be a one-off time one-time thing,” Ishizaki told IGN. “This was purely sort of happenstance of me wanting to direct my own game and wanting to use Elden Ring and that battle design that I took part in as a base to this game, and my interest in online co-op games as well.”

I think it’s his first go at directing a game, but he’s worked on Bloodborne, DS and DS3, and Elden Ring previously. I don’t see this game having a long lifetime like Elden Ring, but it could still be interesting.

I would imagine that admitting fault is a bad look when it comes to fighting the lawsuit that inevitably comes after. Hard to claim you’re not liable when you’ve made a statement saying it’s your fault.

Literally the company that RDR2 portrays as the bad guys, that sued the makers of the game and lost because they objectively ARE the bad guys.

If you’re looking for pretty, Fractal Design have great looking cases. Not cheap though.

RGB on the back

Hall effect joysticks and should buttons are nice to have.

16GB RAM I don’t think is a big deal when you’re running a slimmed-down linux distro, but with Win11 it seems like a bad idea. Most people who buy this won’t be installing another OS on it.

The trackpads are one of the key features that makes a handheld’s interface so much more effective, and all the other Steam Deck competitors kept getting called out for omitting them. Nice to see here.

Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment?

Sure, we can do that, but we won’t because of the narrative and functional in-game purpose of the flashlight. It’s not meant to be realistic, it’s meant to make the game feel a specific way.

The devs were talking about releasing a private server. I don’t know if/when it’s actually going to happen, but when the game was released, it was getting a lot of attention on streams and the devs were out and about talking to all the streamers. Private servers/lobbies were the most common thing mentioned, and they said it’s something they were working on.

TSMC’s customers being multinational corporations, not end users.

BG3 was definitely a complete game upon release. This is just icing on the cake.

Not sure what the price is in Euros, but it’s also %41 off on Fanatical.

I don’t know get why they would make it with UE5 when they have their own in-house engine.

They tried something that they already knew people hated. Launchers have been the bane of gamers for decades already.

“Making things better” after first making them worse.

Weren’t the two episodes free?

I don’t know how to do it, but I know it’s possible to get your motherboard’s HDMI port, if it has one, to display the output from the GPU. Might help you hold out if you’re not otherwise looking to upgrade.

I don’t think it needs a remaster considering how good the game still looks, but it’s 7 years old now. That’s not exactly “new” anymore.

It comes with a free saltwater croc

That’s because the arbitrators are hired by the company. Unless it’s an egregious situation, who’s going to side against the people signing their paycheck?

Most disputes most likely fall far below the limit for small claims, where a lawyer is not required, or even allowed in many cases.

For most people, it’s a hobby for fun, not a job.

Those that want to make a job out of it tend to spread out the content creation to youtube and tiktok, and often sponsorships fill in the gaps.

The ones that actually make a decent living only from streaming are a fraction of one percent.

You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!

I thought it was the opposite, that they can’t sell lower on other marketplaces, but they can do what they want with their keys.

Sony still releasing games on PS4. Still remasters PS4 game.

and then required prices be 5% lower than MSRP on other stores

That’s something that Steam doesn’t allow, which means the only way to have lower prices is for Epic to pay for an exclusivity deal. Because who’s going to move to Epic if the only way is to lose out on Steam?

I think part of the Steam contract for publishers is that they can’t sell their games cheaper elsewhere. So anyone wanting to compete with Steam on price needs to sell games that are in demand but not already on Steam. And Epic is really the only company with the pull to get that to happen, but the only way for them to do it is to get exclusivity, which gamers hate.

Boycotts only work when the group boycotting is large enough to impact the bottom line.

Most gamers just don’t care enough about accounts and launchers to boycott a game or company. They just want to come home from work and play games.

Depends what you mean by good. Is it silly pointless fun? Yes it is.

Is it deep, compelling gameplay with a lot of replayability? No.

It plays kind of like Untitled Goose Game in a way. Short themed sections with vague goals.

I think most people aren’t even aware of the different forms of DRM and whether or not their games use them. For the majority of players, there’s no discernible impact to their experience so they have no reason to question any of it.

Nobody’s teaching these companies any lessons. They keep using Denuvo because it works, and the games keep selling because the number of people actually bothered by it is pretty small.

Why?

It was fun but a bit shallow. It had some fun bits and pieces of media like the fake ads, but the game was very easy and pretty short. I finished it in about 12 hours taking my time. There are a few things that I missed, but the game didn’t really inspire me to spend the time and effort to find everything or to replay it. Maybevone day when I’ve forgotten all about it.

I’d say if they expand on the concept and build a little more depth into the game, the sequel could be intetesting.

They can’t. He put extra hardware in it to make it work. But that doesn’t make for a catchy clickbait title, so they left that part out of it.

Nor did the comment you replied to previously. It was about how Nintendo innovates in other ways.

I don’t think their choice of chips was what they meant. The Wii’s motion controls, and the Switch’s portable/docked modes and removable controllers are.

That guy looks like the weekly bad guy on a episode of Starsky and Hutch from the 70’s

You’re not wrong, but that’s also just a persona he plays, the hair and mustache are both fake. I don’t know how close the persona is to the real person, but I’m sure he’s hamming it up to some extent, just not enough to be a good person pretending.

The concept behind short-term multiplayer in a long game is pretty cool. The invasions and the jolly cooperation are fun features.

But an actual 2-player session is a completely different experience, and something a lot of people are looking for