Or on the stock market or gambling which this is basically a mix of.

This assumes people are rational and that what they say they are willing to pay matches what they are actually willing to pay. And that is just the people not trying to abuse the system.

Anyway, yeah why would I watch someone else play a game when I can just play it myself?

I think some of it is watching people do things you cannot do. Competitive play, in both sports and gaming, is quite a different thing to watch people with skill vs what you could do yourself. Plus I suspect there is a lot of the psychology that goes with routing for a team and the feeling of being part of something bigger or something.

Personally I don’t really get it myself but I can see why people would. IMO it is not much different from why so many people like watching sporting events rather than going out and playing themselves.

For games I haven’t played yet, I would spoiler it for myself. Games I’ve already played… well, don’t need to watch that anymore, right?

That is true for single player games, but not for match making/competitive ones. I suspect that people are more so watching competitive ones than single player story driven games.

With teams like MS and Apple also working on it, I expect this to be figured out on a faster timeline. Months/ few years.

That assumes they will share a meaningful amount of work. I do not see what Apple have done to help much at all - completely closed ecosystem with their own custom chips that they are not going to want to share.

MS have done a really bad job as well at getting ARM to kick off and have not been putting a huge effort into it that I have seen. And especially since valve is doing this in part to get away from MS systems why would MS help valve with this goal?

So yeah, if they did put in and share the effort it would take less time. But I don’t see them doing that. Plus, it takes years to develop a product like this. And all evidence ATM suggests they have barely if at all started on the next version. Which does suggest that the next deck is likely more than a year away, likely two. Which does increase the chances that it could be arm based.

I wouldn’t sound so sure. There are a lot of blockers to getting a working ARM based steam deck. First Arch Linux (which steam os is based on) does not offer official ARM binaries. This would mean they would need a new base os or work on getting Arch Linux to support ARM. With their recent donations to Arch Linux were focused on unblocking some issues with supporting Arch on ARM (notibally stuff needed for better automated builds) would suggest they want to stick with Arch.

Next you need good emulation layers for x64 and x86 as that is what all games are written in. Which there are leaks that say they are working on this as well.

But that is two big blockers that could take years to solve. So all comes down to when they want to release the next deck. Within a couple of years and I don’t think it will be arm based. After that the chances go up quite a bit.

I think their though process is more along the line of:

Hey, Microsoft is getting all the bad attention ATM, let’s see how much shit we can sneak in while people are distracted.

You are forgetting about Nintendo. And that is only mentioning gaming companies… look outside gaming and there is a whole shit-show going on at the moment for that position.

Players get sustained access to the game.

That should be the default for any game you have brought… not a compromise… Forcing everyone to have an account only serve to benefit Sony.

If they can make it such that you can have a placeholder Sony account that can’t access all PSN features, for the sole purpose to play this and other Sony games on Steam, that anyone in the world can access, that would be an acceptable compromise to me.

If they did that then what is the point in requiring a login at all… just remove the damned feature that is not required and very few want. We know it is not required as the game has been working fine for months without it. There is zero need for you to need a login for this game. Except that sony wants more user information they can sell to others.

Never seen anyone change it for the mouse, but I think for a joystick and especially gyro it is more common to have them different. Same basic principal applies to all three inputs though.

In first person games the distance you need to move horizontally is often far more then the distance you need to move vertically, quite often only needing to look up/down a small amount. So you can get better accuracy in the vertical direction by turning down the sensitivity without sacrificing the ability to move quickly up and down. But in the horizontal direction being able to move quickly is generally more important than better accuracy.

Not sure how important the difference is for the mouse though, likely why people don’t use it. But it is an easy setting to split up for the developers so why not give players control over it and set it however they like? Would be nice if you could lock them together, but that is a little more complex and requires more thought to do. And I don’t see game devs giving that much thought about the minor user experience improvements in their games settings when they have a load of gameplay still to worry about.

What is sad is that 6 of the 12 platinum games rated by top revenue are free to play games - so must be making money on micro transactions. Sad that model works so well for extracting cash out of players.

Many hyped up games fail immensely at some parts

Well, yeah… that is so vague that it cannot help but be true. Almost all games fail in some way (especially more complex ones), they can all be improved by making some changes somewhere especially when everyone has different preferences for how things should work and what annoys them.

And by definition almost any hyped up game is going to fall short of expectations. Hype is born by imagination and has no limits, but games are delivered in reality where compromises need to be made, especially when time pressure is involved. And by nature the more hype a game is the more likely it is going to be over-hyped and fall far shorter of the expectations.

I am wary of any hyped up game. Hell, I would be wary of any AAA game on release day these days. Wait for real reviews to come in and not what the prerelease hype says about it. And even after remember that what games one person enjoys a lot another might absolutely hate.

But, I will not be purchasing another AAA game from CDPR until at least 6 months post-release

FTFY, unfinished release day games seems to be more than just a CDPR problem.