While I agree people’s experiences vary wildly, there’s plenty recorded gameplay video that shows it happening.

That aside, they can take their invasive measures and shove it up their cloud where it can and should operate, not on my goddamn machine.

Secure boot. TPM2.0. And a kernel level anticheat on top.

Yet, still hackers in game.

I legitimately have a meal before going to my hygienist appointments, the more random small bits it has like seeds or tiny nori stripes and whatnot, the better.

Supposedly makes their job more interesting when they have something to dig for.

Their words, not mine.

Thank you for reminding me. I went ahead and tossed it out just now.

Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.

Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.

Whatever that thing in the front is… you really need to find a better presentation for it, it ain’t great.

Good resource, thanks

I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.

But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.

Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.

Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?

Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?

That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.

I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.

But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.

Compare to lowest all time price on steam, not current price. Pretty sure it’s going to come out to the same.

Steam does force the sellers on their platform to not give better discounts elsewhere. So basically if you see a game that’s 20% off on steam and it is ATL, you won’t find it 30% off anywhere else.

Not necessarily a monopoly but definitely not allowing competitive pricing.

Now that I think about it, it’s probably why Epic has to go with the “timed exclusive” approach instead of just giving you a bigger discount.

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.