You might want to check for software support if there are any programmable features.

A newer kernel does not automatically offer more performance. In fact it could be the opposite if it includes workarounds for Intel’s latest CPU security fuck-ups.

I don’t think a lot of people outside of Xbox console players played Halo.

I just discovered a game called Vintage Story which seems to have some pretty good looking landscapes despite being originally based on a Minecraft-like visual style.

Agreed, games that make you replay the entire game to see the 10% of content that were exclusive to a certain decision are not great at all. They are essentially just games with 10% less content for all practical purposes unless we are talking about something where restarting is part of the game play like Rogue-likes.

You have to be a special kind of stupid to think games that rely on things like immersion, mood, power fantasies,… can be improved by adding multiplayer.

In general there is nothing that quite destroys atmosphere and mood and immersion as easily as multiplayer if there is just one person not acting in character (and there pretty much always is).

I don’t need to make world changing decisions when I’m playing “hero.”

This is something so many story tellers in gaming and movies don’t get. The story doesn’t have to be about saving the world, the universe, the multiverse or the entire nature of reality. In fact, I would prefer it if the stakes are low enough that the protagonist has actual choices instead of being pushed heavily into the “of course I am going to save the world” option of each “choice”.

Second Life has restaurants or bars though mostly people tend to hangout in less food focused ways and not sure you would count it as a game.

Mystery boxes are another similar predatory business model that has brought similar predatory practices even to RL.

Nobody at Valve is preventing anyone from making a good alternative. Network effects are what makes one platform better than multiple platforms in this space, especially in the multiplayer match-making and other features where players are interacting.

Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.

You are forced to pay either way or do you think hosting (both installers/updates and some sort of multiplayer matchmaking), marketing, payment providers,… all work for free? Without something like Steam you would just likely be forced to pay someone just to manage all of that for you as an extra employee (or multiple part time employees or outsourced services).

Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.

Yes, but you don’t have to memorize the keys.

Well, I am not even talking about the resources used but literally about the fact that you can’t make that many graphics because of the number of combinations of different properties you would have to model somehow.

Plus there are some things you can describe in text that you can never portray graphically, e.g. concepts like “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”

Most things work via menus, the key bindings just speed things up.

Some bits of Minecraft can actually be quite beautiful (e.g. the caves where the axolotls occur) but the graphics are certainly not photorealistic.

I suspect the prettiness sells better in the investment meetings to people who have no clue about gameplay anyway.

The main problem with pretty graphics is that you actually lose out on the kind of variety a more abstract graphics style would allow, e.g. by distinguishing objects in a textual description you can have millions of distinct objects (e.g. in something like Dwarf Fortress with its item and character descriptions), much more than you could if you had to represent everything graphically.

Who knew that they just forgot the “sh” when they made their old “its in the game” slogan.

Seems likely for the era that game will be released in, yeah.

I would argue that by definition if the people shopping there are fewer and fewer every year it is not popular.

The motion sickness issue might be solved, maybe if you are willing to allow it to interfere with your nervous system on a deep level the bit where your body moves while you move in VR but the issue of being cut off from your surroundings will never go away.

At this point the evidence is mounting that the productivity boost through AI for software development is somewhere between negligible and negative.

VR is just not attractive for most people in the way you need lots of space and have to cut yourself off completely from the world and might only find out it gives you motion sickness after you already spent the money.

For that to become useful AI would first need to produce something you can use without a manual inspection round.

Or counting how many people are employed in Skyrim.

Because that is what the law and those licenses on the box say (the EULA if you remember the times when physical software came with a “read before opening” license agreements).

A lot of digital games can be sold for a cheaper “full price” than physical ones ever could though because of the inherent costs of the inefficient physical distribution network.

Mainly because only a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage (physical media buyers) of the user base would do that so it is not worth developing a solution for it.

Honestly makes sense since you can then produce the boxes much earlier and ship them and go through all that physical distribution nonsense without worrying about patching from whatever is on disk to the actual finished product. Especially since I bet physical gamers want the game on day one too.

It is and always has been only licensing with physical media too.

In my experience cranking one aspect (like graphics) up to 11 in terms of realism just makes all the other things that aren’t realistic even more glaringly obvious in an effect sort of similar to the uncanny valley or to the way suspension of disbelief is harder to achieve in a movie that takes itself too seriously.

The assumption that you need amazing graphics for immersion is deeply flawed. We have had decades of people immersed in e.g. RPGs with very minimal graphics or even text only interfaces.

Virtual worlds are affected by similar problems. If you look at e.g. Second Life, a relatively established one you will quickly realize it has all kinds of users with relatively minimal spec systems and use it in all kinds of contexts where they also do other stuff (e.g. work, watching kids,…). But people who try to build new ones tend to try to build them as VR which is completely useless to that entire user base because they can’t afford a system that runs VR and also won’t work in situations where you need to do other stuff at the same time.

Maybe what we need is more analysis and fewer visionaries.

Did they fix that bit where they forgot to put an actual game in there yet?

Self-regulation can work for safety but only if the measures needed to make things safer are cheap and pretty much don’t require quality control (e.g. do not install a slippery type of floor in front of your butcher counter) and the consequences are severe even without regulation (bad press, significantly fewer customers, medical bills to pay for the customer who does slip,…).

Self-regulation can work in cases where the incentives are set up just right, but when it works you have no real need to bring up regulation at all so whenever regulation is worth considering at all self-regulation has already failed pretty much by definition.

Among computing hardware companies Nintendo is really second only to Apple in making sure to remind us to never buy their devices on a regular basis. Well, unless you count Sony perhaps but not sure I would count smart TVs in quite the same category.