And tarkov isn’t even on steam… yet?

Look Outside just had a major 2.0 patch. Solid horror game. And it’s 30% off at the moment.

Steam link

Brokkoli by Muffelwild

Well done, keep it up.

I have a feeling the whole retention thing is gonna fly out the window once they start feeding it to the ai models for “training” purposes.

Might just be my pessimistic ass tho.

Of

Foreshadowing for what happens next.

Both? Both. Both is good.

I sometimes get a feeling that the average person (that actually “made” a video game of any sort) and throws some semi-coherent but completely off the mark argument probably amounts to somebody who threw a few things together on rpgmaker or similar programs but never coded anything from scratch.

Kind of like framework programmers trying to identify or explain any low level complexities that they are just barely aware of, if at all.

Fair points, but I’d argue to the contrary in light of the following:

• The steam deck was developed and released at the beginning of 2022. That’s a ~3.5 year difference in hardware and what was considered good value. (As a person buying a lot of hardware I might be a tad biased on this point so I acknowledge it)
• I did hear mixed things about the screen itself from a friend that has it, heard that it’s extremely scratch prone and that the battery doesn’t hold on for very long, but maybe that depends on the title you’re playing, the brightness and refresh rates.
• it can do 120hz, which is nice, but that’s game dependent and there’s no guarantee that it’s implemented or enabled for every game. From what I read previously, cyberpunk only does 30-40 fps on switch2 so that’s pretty much entirely out of the question for that title at least. I won’t make any guesses or misleading statements about other titles since I haven’t seen the benchmarks and haven’t been following the news on those.
• the fact that it’s robust and convenient to use in your hands is a perk imo, not a demerit, perhaps this is something more catered to the younguns which I don’t wholly understand though.
• also in regards to the above point, the controllers, albeit a little larger now, are still pretty bad and still experience the same issues as the previous generation thereof) subpar mechanism, no upgradeability, and no repairability besides having to send it to a repair center/replacement. Meanwhile should you experience any issues with your deck, the instructions and parts to fix it are available on the ifixit website at extremely reasonable prices should you wanna do it yourself.
• performance… I haven’t tried cyberpunk on my deck, so I can’t really comment on it specifically, but as far as a good chunk of the 100+ games that I’ve played on it are concerned, it’s been running extremely well in all aspects of the games, even the ones that weren’t fully steam deck verified… meanwhile even first party games like DK have lag spikes when you open the map on the latest and greatest… to me, that’s unacceptable.
• and while I understand the premise of people wanting to play first party games from Nintendo, similar to the above point the quality has been going downhill, and some of the newer IPs (Nintendo and even Sony) are being developed as more of cross platform release or ported to pc eventually (often with enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes)

I am going to briefly mention the subscription requirement for Nintendo online, some switch 2 versions of the games costing extra vs the switch 1 versions, as well the exorbitant prices (and lack of discounts even down the road) for any games sold on their store, and the fact that if you want to tinker with any of that, you can get hardware banned from online services entirely.

These are, as you mentioned, not hardware related, but are still quite hefty anti consumer practices and while not the main topic of the above hardware discussion, should carry a lot of weight in the decision to buy into that ecosystem.

Note that “a lot better hardware” is still hella mediocre given the price tag.

https://www.gog.com/en/patrons

Launched the other day if you want to throw a bit of money to their cause

Releases in like 22 hours from the time of this comment!

The bazaar on bazzite is really convenient for the non-power user

Isn’t mint based on Ubuntu? So that should work without a hitch for you. Worst case just boot into the live usb without installing it directly and just try it there.

As for me, I dual boot on separate drives because I have specific software that requires windows sometimes. Otherwise it’s primarily Linux on all machines in the house.

Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.

The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.

Cat head bump.

Same

For M$ to subsidize some of the cost of the hardware seeing how it’s their “next leap” for the Xbox? Or something along those lines.

Never heard of the USPS approach but it does seem interesting as a solution, thanks for sharing