231–240 of 258 posts
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Valve is such a weird company. They've been raking in the dough for years with Steam and they still act as if they're on a shoestring budget.
The margins with the 64GB Steam Deck are likely razor thin
> My wild guess is that there’s between 1 and 2 million units already shipped out there. While there was a lot of initial hype around the Steam Deck, it almost sounded as if it emerged as a serious Switch competitor. Unfortunately that didn't happen. Its sales are around an order of magnitude below the Switch, which sold 13.12 million units in its first year (and 122.5 million total). So despite its modest success, t…
Nintendo is a household name with a widly successful portable history and an insane amount of IP. The Switch was day one buy for a lot of people and it's on the road to become the best sold console of all time. I don't understand how you can call a product that is one magnitude off it a niche product. Valve probably didn't dream of being this close.
I guess I'm the minority who's Steam Deck is gathering dust. It is a nice device but it failed to get me to game more (which is what I wanted out of it), mainly because it's rather fiddly, in a similar way to a VR device. It takes effort to get me to pick it up, I have to make sure it's charged, I have to make sure my key bindings are configured correctly, etc. What actually has worked far better for me is Xbox Game…
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The PS Vita was ahead of its time. I own a secondhand OELD model and the hardware is AMAZING, considering it is a decade old. The home brew community added lots of value with the emulation ability and the fact that sony abandoned the console. Yes, the vita was a flop at the time but i am convinced that if sony released a modern equivalents, it would sell like hotcakes. Where i am less certain is of what this means fo…
They even released the Playstation TV, which was a tiny little box (smaller than most portable hard drives) with the Vita internals and an HDMI port. Plays most Vita games, you just use PS4 controllers with it (and maybe also PS3? Can't recall for sure). Really, take a Vita and add a cradle for TV, and you've basically got a Switch. And the Vita was developed and sold in parallel to a full Playstation console, so it'…
I'm catching up on the last 20 years of gaming I've missed for not having a Windows machine :) Bonus points for most of the old games being super cheap now. I'm really happy with mine. Games just work, no tweaking or weird configurations necessary, gamepads and other controller schemes work well, and; it's running Linux in the back! Once you configure something like Syncthing in desktop mode, it carries on working in…
Valve provides a very simple (and easy to bypass) DRM which many games on steam use, this is likely what you're referring to.
Other games use third party DRM such as Denuvo which is hard to bypass and generally hated (can cause performance issues). These games have warnings on the store page.
Ultimately Steam had (has?) a monopoly on the PC distribution market and didn't really take advantage of it to do anything anti-consumer (instead this period introduced a number of prosumer changes like refunds) so while it is a company it's one I trust more than most.
The next generation of gaming platforms is really going to be heated. We basically have two philosophies in the field now. The Switch and the Steam Deck sacrifice high end hardware for portability and versatility. The PS5 and XSX are about as portable as a LAN party, but can theoretically push 4k@120hz for the cost of a graphics card. Is there room for everyone next gen? Each of Valve, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo h…
Since January GeForce now supports 4k@120 and the hardware required to render that is probably going to be much less than the next gen kind of switch will have. I would not be surprised to see tv sticks + controller given away for basically free. Like stadia but properly this time.
It won’t be for everyone and I have no idea how quick they can scale this but it’s nonetheless an interesting development.
Currently there’s a bit of a hybrid thing going on with ideas that combine cloud gaming with Xbox or PlayStation but here the consumer still has to pay for more hardware than necessary for streaming only
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I’ve been casually hitting their website for a year. I can’t buy one even if I wanted to.
Australia? Otherwise, I ordered mine on a Thursday and it arrived the following Tuesday.
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It's still not a target platform (either native Arch Linux or Proton) for very many games, so updates have broken a number of games that were previously rated "playable" or "verified", rendering them unplayable. TBF in every case I've heard of this happening, Valve has been quick to address it, so you may or may not consider that an issue. I don't game much these days, but when I do it's exclusively on my Linux deskt…
which updates break games? doesn't Steam have the ability to choose a different proton version per game? so if a proton/wine update breaks a game, you should be able to go back to a different version for that game. granted, it may be a UI issue to make this easy.
Game updates are what I have read about breaking compatibility with Proton. In this case AFAICT Valve's only option is to try to fix it with a Proton patch. I don't think Valve's standard distribution agreement gives them the right to distribute whatever old version of a publisher's game Valve feels like. Most games I've seen, Steam enforces automatic updates to the latest version. Pinning a previous version is such a rare use case, it is confusingly under the "Betas" tab of the game properties when it is even available to the user.
Even when Valve has the rights to arbitrarily pick an old version of the game to distribute, the only way to find out if an update is breaking is to test it, so if the developer doesn't test it, the players do. So either way, if Proton isn't a target platform, you have a higher risk of breaking bugs making it in front of players. I guess since serious bugs make it into release so frequently on supported platforms, this may not seem like an issue, but there is a very real psychological phenomenon where when software breaks on Windows, it is the software's fault, and when software breaks on Linux, it is Linux's fault.
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which updates break games? doesn't Steam have the ability to choose a different proton version per game? so if a proton/wine update breaks a game, you should be able to go back to a different version for that game. granted, it may be a UI issue to make this easy.
Your reply is conflating two different things: updates to games, and updates to Proton. IME Proton updates almost never result in regressions (I think I've heard of it happening once, maybe twice ever), and Valve has and uses the ability to prefer specific Proton versions for specific games. Game updates are what I have read about breaking compatibility with Proton. In this case AFAICT Valve's only option is to try t…
holding games back because of proton bug is not acceptable (yet), although from the players side it would of course be nice to choose an older version if the new version fails to run.
there is a very real psychological phenomenon where when software breaks on Windows, it is the software's fault, and when software breaks on Linux, it is Linux's fault
of course, that is unfortunately going to remain a problem for some time to come.
The next generation of gaming platforms is really going to be heated. We basically have two philosophies in the field now. The Switch and the Steam Deck sacrifice high end hardware for portability and versatility. The PS5 and XSX are about as portable as a LAN party, but can theoretically push 4k@120hz for the cost of a graphics card. Is there room for everyone next gen? Each of Valve, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo h…
Steam deck is an extension of the already existing PC gaming market. I suspect that almost all Steam Deck owners already have a PC they game on. Steam Deck just makes it so those PC gamers will care if a game runs well on Linux. The point isn’t to take over the console market but to defend the PC gaming market from console exclusivity and Steam itself from e.g. Microsoft Store
I guess the target audience is those previously gamers with an extensive collection of games to play "someday" who now have kids that would like something to game on. The deck fills this market very nicely and Switch has already paved the initial road.