Haha same here, backlog is not going well. I made a bunch of folders in steam to organise it though so there’s that.

Crash Nsane trilogy and Stanley parable were cheap so I got those too.

CP2077 now feels like it’s what it was hyped to be before that awful launch, so I’m glad to have waited 5 years.

Oh they’d know. Everything at square when it comes to sales expectations is about ROI and E33 cost very little to make something better than FF7 Rebirth.

Same here. It hit my <$60 AUD buy point for the ultimate edition.

Urgh… I thought perfect dark was looking good

I think about as angry that Square Enix is that they couldn’t make an Expedition 33.

Two solo devs crushing the first two spots. Love to see it.

And typically the boycotters weren’t even the sort of people who were buying a switch 2 to begin with. Maybe there’s a subsection of them that will result in some loss of sales but it would be in the fraction of a percent. There’s no surprise to me when gamer boycotts fail.

With that said, the sales were unexpectedly high. Maybe people trying to get ahead of potential future tariffs were the reason. I thought cost of living was fucked and nobody could afford anything.

I’ll be waiting for the inevitable OLED refresh anyway.

Everyone has different cutoffs for what performance is acceptable to them. I thought TOTK was fun but the low resolution and regular FPS dips made me realise I’d rather wait for the switch 2 to experience it properly.

I think ESL could be a factor. Definitely LLMs have better English prose than this. I’m so used to seeing long running AI slop articles answering basic questions in 1000 words (rather than 10) and this reads similar.

Definitely pumping up the word count. The paragraph used to come around to the fact that Metacritic (not steam) is the site where SMKW is being review bombed gave me visceral feelings of anger.

Is this article written by AI? Some long running, poorly phrased sentences here.

Indeed. I think if you know about the other storefronts and isthereanydeal you don’t get a wrapped about steam summer sale. There’s usually some new ATLs that push newer/bigger game prices down a bit further than usual though.

Lot of people saying it’s Meh but ones that I’ve been tempted by are:

ATL 53% off for Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate edition

• this passes the $60 AUD threshold which I’ve been holding out for

Crash Bandicoot Nsane trilogy for 90% off

Stanley parable ultimate edition at lowest price since 2023

• deals for this game have been tepid since December 2023, but this matches the ATL

That would be a shakeup. If they released a Gaming veraion of Windows on a PC with quick resume that also played much of the Xbox library going back to the OG Xbox, that could appeal to a lot of people.

Its shocking to me that Xbox is run by the same company that has an operating system installed on 71% of the worlds computers, and they still haven’t figured out how to leverage that for Xbox gaming.

I think there’s a scenario where they had sufficient enough measures in place, but I guess that will be shown through the lawsuit.

12 is remembered more fondly than maybe it deserves. The Gambit system was interesting though.

I dunno. I think as a platform that heavily markets to kids, they have a responsibility to ensure that those kids aren’t preyed upon on their platform. If you took a child to a live action Bluey play, you’d be expected to keep an eye on your child, but you’d also have a reasonable expectation that the event holders have taken some measures as hosts to keep the kids safe from a variety of hazards including suspicious adults.

If you’re okay with buying from key resellers, the stores on Isthereanydeal.com beat Steam a lot of the time.

God this guy broke ToS while connected to the internet? Can’t MigSwitchs run offline? I thought it was just a cart dump.

Giving Outer Wilds another go from a new save. I played 5 years ago but got stuck and gave up.

That all sounds true to me. I’ve been with Sony for PS1, 2, 4 and 5 but had an Xbox OG/360. I’ve got to say I’m surprised that M$ hasn’t with all their trillions been able to create a platform yet that makes them dominate in either the PC or console space. That said, I mustn’t be the only one who thinks that the PS5 generation has been such a bad sign for the future of Sony. In 5 years I’ve played 3 good exclusive games on the system, the console has frankly been a waste of money.

And they’ve had 12 live service games in development. 12 great single player or couch coop exclusives would have been fucking great, but instead they’re chasing the live service dragon.

That could be compelling. I think they would want to design the OS in a way that strongly incentivises you to buy games through the Microsoft store, like SteamOS with the steam store. If they make it too flexible, they’ve just sold hardware at a loss to be someone’s steam machine as well as making the OS potentially too complicated for a normal person to figure out.

If they can make a windows machine that can play all of the old Xbox games, run other storefronts, and do quick resume/hibernate properly, I’m interested. I was kind of waiting out for SteamOS on desktop to get a console like experience on a PC.

Yeah, maybe. The OS will be built around Game Pass like how SteamOS heavily incentivises you to use Steam. I think they’ll have a unified game launcher like Armory Crate on the ROG Ally devices.

That way, it’s a PC that you can use steam on, but the choice architecture and UX will be pushing you to the MS store.

Broadly speaking, what are Xbox looking to do here?

They optimise Windows for gaming and open up the console for other storefronts, then is it just a Steam device? They won’t make money from Steam sales.

Is this a cloud streaming device? Can you cloud stream games from other storefronts? It’s all incredibly vague to me.

Urgh…

The lost crown was extremely refreshing.

Loll, people will never stop getting these confused

Gotta start somewhere!

Absolutely. True creative games are made by smaller dev teams that aren’t forcing ray tracing and lifelike graphics. The new Indianna Jones game isn’t a GPU-selling card, and is the only game that I’ve personally had poor performance on with my 3070ti at 1440p.

Indeed. I think the last 6 months have been great value for PC game pass. Of course it goes against the OP/thread sentiment that Xbox is ripping everyone off.

I buy on steam/key resellers at heavy discount most of the time, but game pass allows me to play new release games that are in the “looks interesting, but I’m not dropping full price to try this out” category of games.

I think if you’re playing 1 new release game every month or two, you’re getting the value. I’m enjoying Avowed and Doom the Dark ages recently, but I’m very glad I didn’t pay for Doom.

Xbox has kind of been on a roll lately with the games they’ve added.

Regarding BP:

I feel the same way but will put more time into it if I get it on steam one day

Clair Obscur was awesome especially as a big fan of both old PS1 Final Fantasy and Sekiro/Souls games.

The comment I replied to believed that both the console and the game price is a scam, that is their valid opinion.

They criticised OP for “half caring about the rip off pricing”. OP didn’t think the console had ripoff pricing. Why is that a character flaw of op like is suggested by the commenter?

I played Blue Prince and Clair Obscur back to back on Game pass and I’ve got to say that these were two of the best games I’ve ever played in their respective genre. Makes me want to go back and try Myst/Riven.

Didn’t realise that consoles were sports teams that you were either in the club or out of it. OP is allowed to have a nuanced take.

The deck is still a weapon.

The Switch 2 at 450 is still cheaper than Sony and Xbox’s launch pricing when adjusted for inflation. Kind of in line with previous generations over the last 30 years.

$80 games are more expensive than they have a right to be for sure, but the hardware I think is reasonably priced.

Bear in mind Switch 2 being a portable console puts it in a different category of device to PS5 and Xbox series consoles.

More Dead Cells doesn’t sound so bad to me! Honestly between this and the Lost Crown PoP is looking more appealing. Played the lost crown last year but waiting for 1.0 for this one.

It’s made by the developer who did the ongoing support for dead cells. Good observation if you didn’t know that btw.

I’ve seen some previews, looks cool!