Yeah, GeoGuessr is an extreme example as Google basically did 95% of the work for them. Having to image large chunks of the world would mean a huge investment and I highly doubt GeoGuessr would even exist without Google Maps.

If Google would double their API pricing tomorrow there’s very little GeoGuessr can do except maybe switch to Apple Maps (they offer an API, not sure they offer one for their “street view” data though).

Make it uses 32-Bit PhysX /s

Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).

Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).

TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.

I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.

I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.

Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.

Many people buy games outside of Steam. Sure, relatively speaking it’s a minority and if a game is available on Steam and elsewhere, most will pick it up on Steam.

But part of the reason why Steam is so good is because these other platforms exist and there’s nothing actually stopping anyone from buying their games from other stores. Cloud saves, game streaming/remote play, online play, family sharing and many more features are all free/included with the game purchase on Steam and they also pioneered many of these features. Steam Workshop adds great value as well, there isn’t anything remotely comparable on any proprietary console.

Steam is good because it has to be in order for people to choose to use it.

And “deep discounts” are the same as ever, I see some games 90% off on sales events. Sure, successful AAA titles usually don’t get a big discount 2 weeks after release, but in the end the publisher sets the pricing anyway. Generally, even when comparing full price, games are just cheaper on Steam compared to PSN (10 to sometimes 20 $/€ for big titles).

Not being publicly traded makes this very different from Microsoft, actually.

That’s the biggest problem I have with consoles. They’re essentially expensive boxes that are tied to a single service, in this case PSN.

You don’t like their store pricing, DRM or other policies? Yeah, well, unlucky. Sell your box and buy a different one (or don’t). Too expensive to play online on PSN? Well unlucky, because that’s the only way to play online. If it’s more expensive tomorrow, you better pay if you want online play or you’ll be locked out.

Xbox now locks out uncertified controllers, maybe PlayStation as well? Even their own previous controllers (DualShock 4) don’t support playing PS5 games on PS5, so if you want to play a 4 player couch coop game you better own 4 controllers specific to that one console. I get it, the new controller has some new features like “adaptive triggers” - but that’s entirely optional. Heck, you can play the PS5 games ported to PC with a DualShock 4 on a PC/Steam Deck.

Isn’t “little” even now unless you always buy day one.

What the…? If this bug is “unfixable” (lie), then just release an update that unlocks everything for free for everybody instead of screwing everyone who paid before 2024.

Not even first batch as far as this connector goes. This has been an issue ever since this connector was released on the 40 series cards in 2022.

The sensible thing would’ve been to just rollback to the standard 8-pin PCIe power connector that has been reliable for many years. I guess requiring 4 of these for 600 watts would highlight how ridiculous the power draw of the 5090 is.

Instead they made small iterations to this 12VHPWR connector (changing sense pin lengths and other small adjustments) and they’re letting their paying customers test the new iteration with the 50 series.

Admit that 12VHPWR is bullshit and revert to 8-pin. Come up with a working solution or just stick with 8-pin long-term.

So then it’ll have native Linux Denuvo I guess…?

Denuvo is fully intact under Linux though. It’s actually even worse than under Windows or at least it used to be, because switching between different Proton versions actually counts towards the 5 machines within 24 hours limit.

With Denuvo DRM!

GPU that’s roughly on par with the Steam Deck.

…when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).

If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.

So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.

This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.

Reminder: this game will ship with Denuvo DRM. Include that in your purchase decision.

In theory “Verified” includes this:

This game’s default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck

But you’re correct, that doesn’t even imply locked 30 FPS sadly (Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 3 comes to mind).

Honestly - lack of large trackpads aside (it does have a tiny one on the right side) - the Legion Go S looks like a good deal. Price should be equal to the OLED Deck for the 512 GB variant, for that you get a device with a more modern CPU architecture and 50% more GPU cores. The display is quite a bit larger (8.1" vs 7.4", which is a larger difference than it might seem), it’s higher resolution 120 Hz and - most importantly - it has VRR, which the Steam Deck OLED lacks. Sure, it’s not OLED and some people are seemingly allergic to higher resolution displays (“think about the battery life!!!” or “not powerful enough to play games at this res” (upscaling exists)), but 2D games like Hollow Knight or Cuphead should look amazing on this display and font rendering should be a lot better.

Also, Lenovo might sell this in countries where the Steam Deck isn’t officially available.

So…Red Dead Redemption infringes two of these three patents?

• Throwing an object (lasso) to capture a target
• Player character being able to ride on another character (horse)

Is Nintendo afraid because Rockstar can actually afford the lawsuit?

Astro Bot looks pretty darn good though (in both art style and graphical fidelity), so not sure if it’s a good example.

Great to see Baldur’s Gate 3 made the list!

Or better yet: nix the Nvidia app :)

I actually fell asleep playing the original, so…

(not hating on the game, it literally happened though)

Yo Gaben, are you donating your 30% share as well?

A game can both be complete and have expansions later. While it is true that many games strip what seems like core content off the main purchase to sell it separately as DLC, there are many examples of DLCs expanding upon an already finished game.

Yuzu is also a citrus fruit, so it at least makes sense.

Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.

The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.

I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.

So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.

It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.

Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?

I guess you could sell a literal copy, yeah. But ironically, the lack of DRM binding that copy to an account by a user makes a “proof of original ownership” harder, if that’s what you want.

That’s not how it works with digital goods, but that’s a limitation of digital goods really.

They don’t even know what they want to do themselves.

If you’re talking about Steam, while it provides its own DRM system, games can be published on there without any DRM whatsoever, so you can do whatever you want with the downloaded files and then play the game without Steam.

I’m no expert here, but I’m pretty sure branch prediction logic is not part of the instruction set, so I don’t see how RISC alone would “fix” these types of issues.

I think you have to go back 20-30 years to get CPUs without branch prediction logic. And VSCodium is quite the resource hog (as is the modern web), so good luck with that.

While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don’t see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they’ve proven time and time again that they’re hostile towards their fanbase (and I’m not talking about pirated games here).

I also don’t see how the Switch brought a “fresh, intuitive control scheme” to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of “Pro” controllers.

And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we’re at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most “revolutionary” title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn’t much in there that truly surprised me.

YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn’t something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.

I personally think indie games or games from “large-but-based” studios are more important than ever and that’s where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.

Nvidia might be selling the shovels to the customer during this gold rush, but TSMC is making them.

There was a vulnerability in Project64 so a malicious ROM could escape outside of the emulator. So while unlikely, it’s certainly possible.

I waited for this so long that I eventually just played it on an emulator (that’ll no longer receive updates). I somehow doubt that the experience will be much better with a new PC version. I played it at 3x internal render resolution and at 60 FPS.

The absolute scenes if this guy wins.

Yuzu devs and others be like “we could’ve easily won?”.

(I know, not happening)

Probably Tetris Gym?

EDIT: The “kill screen” in NES Tetris is just the game getting too fast for most people to keep up. Then there’s some bugs that can crash the game in later levels, but Tetris Gym fixes these bugs. So you “just” have to be good enough to play Tetris for long enough at insane speeds.

Well, then you can’t be the next Tim Sweeney :(

You have to sue every single storefront first as well and go cry to the press that companies don’t want to do business with you when you break their ToS.

They can and they are making their own chip designs to do the job.

The cloud part of Apple Intelligence runs on their own designed hardware.