MudMan

Well, when the reward being dangled is a Fortnite-sized chunk of the industry worth billions by itself it’s hard to suggest that the real answer is more, smaller, less profitable releases. Especially with public companies with a mandate to seek endless growth. It’s not like big traditional single player games are a surefire thing, either.

It’s a bit of a rough time for the industry right now, frankly. So… on that note, happy holidays everybody!

I think there is absolutely a sense that some of these games aren’t worth jumping into because the longevity won’t be there. That doesn’t necessarily mean the alternative is people sticking around and playing traditional paid experiences instead, though. What seems to be happening instead is people sticking with a few “forever games” and getting stuck there, sort of out of the market. We’ve seen that dynamic before, when everybody was trying to come up with a MMO to replace WoW, or in the very stagnant mobile market.

A bit too optimistic, but hey, at least it’s a post pointing people at GOG, which has otherwise been losing big publisher support (SEGA and Sony used to put some big games there and don’t anymore, for instance).

I’m also not sure that the big failures of prominent games as a service are an indication of a return to appreciating ownership. I’m afraid it may be rather that the established genre leaders are taking all the oxygen out of that space, just as it happened for causal mobile F2P games a while ago.

If the perception makes players more likely to give up on their forever games and go back to buying piecemeal experiences they get to keep indefinitely I’d call that very good news, but I’ll need a bit more evidence before I declare myself optimistic on that subject.

For the record, I find it’s harder to get all display features working (HDR, VRR, HDMI 2.1 support and so forth) than to get Nvidia drivers installed. Linux’s display issues aren’t just Nvidia compatibility. Particularly on Bazzite, where they have a specific install for Nvidia with the drivers baked in.

Yeah, well, if I wanted to tell you who I am I’d write a bio, and I have no obligation to educate or reality check people one by one, which doesn’t work anyway.

You’re right, though, it’s dismissive and kinda rude and definitely not worth having the conversation because it won’t change any minds. Which is why people don’t have the conversation in the first place.

Made me check. This seems weird, though, because I did have installs of Mint, Bazzite, PopOS and Manjaro this year, and played some Steam games on all of them. I guess they’re not big enough to chart?

Those pieces don’t say at all what you (or the OP, I suppose) are implying. The first one is about working conditions and harassment, the others are about management choices, not at all in-fighting or jealousy among writers. Incidentally, that last one sucks. Go find better games reporting, holy crap, I promise you it exists.

Honestly, it’s a neverending source of fascination to see what people who don’t work in the industry perceive as the internal logic of these things. I used to think it was a problem of transparency, the industry not doing enough to show things behind the scenes or explain how games are made. But man, that part has improved A LOT. There are lots more resources now to help you wrap your head around it, but the weird fantasy world people imagine is still exactly the same. It’s very frustrating.

We really don’t talk enough about how the worst rated game of the Tomb Raider reboot from the B studio for the series ended up being the default benchmark for gaming for the better part of a decade.

Good for Eidos Monteal. Guardians of the Galaxy deserved better, too.

See above. Gonna need names and sources for that one.

No, it is not. Just isn’t. Not a thing in Bioware, to my knowledge. Not a thing in the industry at large, either. This is an extreme leap you’re making.

Displeased with management decisions? Absolutely. Frustrated by working conditions? Rarer than you’d think but it can happen. Abused and harassed by a manager or a coworker, particularly for a woman, and receiving insufficient protection from HR? Unfortunately possible, but definitely not my first or second guess when somebody announces they’re leaving a studio.

“My coworkers are jealous of my talent and are mean to me” is science fiction.

Yeah, no, I got the intent, it just seems like… a random thought? Why would that be the case? You just think the other writers are jealous of someone who was there for fifteen years and just… mean girl’d them out of the company?

That’s not a plausible scenario. Or at least not the first think you’d leap to.

There’s been a Dragon Age sequel in some form of development for a decade. It’s not that surprising, people are gonna churn. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t stuck around in a single job for 15 years ever.

I’m not her and I’m not there, but I’m not sure what “being pushed out by other employees” would even mean. That sounds like something that happens in a nature documentary about lions, not games studio.

There is a lot of confused misinterpretation in this thread. “Can’t be taken down” was a thing, but it was about how you can lose big chunks of the network and have the rest of it still work. That was misinterpreted at the time, in fairness, and it’s even less true now, where centralization in both the infrastructure and the hosting have a lot of things dropping at once and being disrupted, but it’s still technically true. Ukrainian drones are out there beaming up to satellite internet and being used in active warfare in the middle of a battlefield. Which hey, in that context, robust military communication was the original intent of the network to begin with. Given the previous baseline is wired telephone, the characterization isn’t that far off.

Censorship is different, but also true. You can isolate a chunk of the Internet, and once you’ve done that if you have very centralized control you can monitor it, but that’s a high bar. And of course outside of those cases people struggle to limit communications they don’t want, from nazi chatter to piracy.

At the time I used to think that was a good thing, now… yeah, harder to justify. Turns out “free information” didn’t automatically make everyone smarter. I have lots of apologies to give to teachers and professors of theory of communication that were trying to explain this to us in the 90s and we were all “nah, man, their only crime was curiosity, hack the planet, free the information” and all that.

And the game itself was made by a Canadian, while we’re at it.

No, I’m not saying I’m cut off from running thousands of games. I’m cut off from thousands of games that I own already in other libraries and I can’t play on a Steam Deck out of the box.

Most of them would gladly run just fine if I bought them off of Valve. But since I already bought them I’m not buying them again. So I’m cut off. So I’ll default to Windows until that changes.

Yeah, man, I have a bunch of Windows handhelds and both Deck models. I… may have a problem, but I know how it works.

And yeah, I do realize that the Deck and SteamOS game mode doubles as an attempt to complete Valve’s dominance over the PC market. I just think that sucks. If GOG can allow you to integrate Epic and Steam then so can Steam. And until they do that, the Deck is less useful to me than a Windows handheld because I keep as much of my gaming library as possible within GOG.

For the record, your posts kinda misrepresent how Big Picture works in practice. Like I said, yeah, you can’t change power and screen settings (and bluetooth) directly on Steam, but most Windows handhelds have a shortcut button with those options in it that is, let’s be honest, just copying the Steam version. Depending on your brand it is more or less useful, but it’s not like you have to whip out a mouse to do those things. I still think most of those implementations are worse than SteamOS’s fully integrated version, and Big Picture over Windows is overall a bit laggier and less responsive… but I mean, it’s close enough and it absolutely beats being cut off from several thousand games.

I am aware of the set of steps, but a) I’ve had issues getting it to work in the past, particularly getting new games to install under Steam as opposed to adding them in Desktop mode every time and b) what I want is an official way to install and launch third party games, or at least third party launchers from within Steam, the way GOG Galaxy or even Heroic itself supports.

Right now, I play those on Windows handhelds instead, where the steps are:

• Boot the device
• Click on the launcher you want

Which is similar to doing this on Linux desktop, where the steps are:

• Boot the device
• Click on the launcher you want

Oh, and for the record, as I said above, Windows absolutely does have a Big Picture mode. You can set up Steam to launch on boot straight into Big Picture. If all you want is to play Steam games you never have to use the Desktop on Windows either. Because I do play a ton of GOG games and emulation over Retroarch I prefer to boot into Desktop where my launchers are pinned to the taskbar, so it’s literally one tap to open whichever launcher I want. But Steam absolutely goes into Big Picture after that. Like I said earlier the only functional difference is that the settings button brings up the proprietary screen and power manager instead of the SteamOS Game Mode alternative, but otherwise the Steam interface is much the same.

Why do people not realize this is the case? Big Picture was available on Windows (at boot, even) long before the Deck happened. I’ve been a longtime Steam-on-TV user, this isn’t new.

Cool? I mean, it changes nothing. Whether you run the ARM handhelds on Android or barebones Linux and the X64 handhelds on Windows or Linux the results are the same. Bazzite, JelOS, Windows, Android, whatever. Go nuts.

Heat is still heat and batteries are still batteries, though.

Well, yeah, I get that, but honestly, if you can’t get what you want on that front from a GPD Win 4, an Ayaneo Air S1 or Flip… well, then what you want is better Windows on ARM support. These are still laptop chips we’re cramming into handhelds, it’s not a matter of size vs performance at that point. There’s a reason the Steam Deck is that size.

Honestly, at that point I’d try streaming, which those smaller ARM devices will do just fine. But even that I don’t think is worth it. That’s mobile hardware territory.

To be clear, I’m not advocating to enforcing a minimum spec. I’m saying that there isn’t a need to add a performance rating to a SteamOS certification or to the SteamOS compatibility badges because if they’re all based on Steam Deck performance they will be valid for all the other certified devices by default. At least until a Deck 2 is released.

I love small handhelds. The Retroid Pocket Mini is great (shame about the bad scaling on the screen). But those are typically Android handhelds for a reason. I don’t think a PC handheld in that form factor is worth it. You can just run Linux on ARM and get the form factor without the whole thing running like a hot potato for 15 minutes before it dies. There’s a lot of native ports of small PC indie games in that space and ongoing work for per-game port support, too.

Now, all that could change if the upcoming mobile chips we get are great at running at very low wattages and somehow get amazing power management options on the software side out of nowhere. But… I just don’t think that’s a priority for anybody specifically because ARM chips already have a well established ecosystem to give you basically what you want without having to tie the X64 platform in knots for the sake of running this over Steam instead of Android.