Thats fair enough if it’s not for you. The thing about Stardew is that things build up and its up to you how you do it. Like you don’t have to farm crops if you don’t like it manually; you can fish or scavenge or raise animals etc. And as you progress you can automate some things and explore new areas.

But the core gameplay loop is you doing the stuff, rather than managing others. It’s not micromanagement as you’re not managing anyone, you are doing.

I actually didn’t think it was for me at first to be honest, but I got into it in a few hours. As you upgrade tools and can do more and more for less effort, it has its own satisfaction as you build your farm up. But if you’re not feeling that after a couple of sessions then it’s probably not for you and that’s fine.

The article speculates on why there is a difference. Part of the reason might be that it’s £60 for a remaster of a 23 year old game? I’m not really sure who this game is aimed at; it was always unlikely to be a huge hit on PC. But It’ll probably do better long term when the price comes down and with steam sales etc.

I have a mini PC running linux on my living room, which I use like a more powerful steam deck. There are distros designed to boot into gamescope modes of that’s your thin, so. “steam machine” experience is definitely doable.

Valve should look at bringing back real steam machines because the software is finally there to do it well thanks to Proton.

Intel claims to have caught up with the upcoming Lunar Lake series but still to be seen.

That may be too late for whatever new device Valve is working on as given the lead time for such devices they may already have committed to an architecture for devices next year.

Also running X86 games on Arm devices is not likely to be efficient. I doubt the energy efficiency of Arm chips would outweigh the overhead of X86 to Arm translation?

But it’s all speculation - even without hardware, getting Proton to work with Arm is good for steam regardless of any specific devices. For example it would allow steam to push the compatability tools onto Mac devices and even potentially mobile devices. Makes sense for Valve to do this without it meaning anything more that it being a god idea in itself.

Just another example of how broken the premium end of the gaming industry is. Ubisoft is an old fashioned publisher, trying to churn out big hit AAA games based on big IP but producing poor quality buggy games, which don’t turn a profit.

We keep hearing how the games industry is “in trouble” but its actually thriving with loads of smaller devs and publishers doing well. The problem is the behemoth publishers like Ubisoft who release games based on financials timelines rather than the games being finished or high quality.

Its not like Ubisoft are short of good IP. What they’re lacking is good quality control and an environment to foster high quality creativity. When you treat gaming like its just a production line to generate money this is what you get. Making AAA games is expensive for sure, but its pointless if you don’t get the quality and the creativity right too - they’re just making expensice games.

We’re seeing the same in the movie industry - big studios producing franchise movies on a financially driven schedule with poor quality and lack of creativity.

So far. Absolute failure rates is chips that are clearly non-functional and returned, so the builder is able to country it. The issue with the Intel chips is an inherent flaw that seems to affect all the chips but only manifests when the chip is pushed beyond a certain point. And up to now people have for example been blaming poorly coded software, while Intel gas been downplaying the issue.

This is an apples and oranges situation - its not about the absolute failure rate of chips which always occurs; this appears to be a fundamental additional issue for Intel’s chips that people may not even realise they have been experiencing.

I suspect the other big consideration is the IP. When they made BG3, the IP had lain dormant for years and D&D wasn’t a priority for Hasbro.

Larian made a hugely successful game and Hasbro sat up and has started talking about how its going to push forward with the IP. The terms for BG4 are probably not as favourable for Larian (maybe they weren’t great for BG3). That may be worse revenue split and may also be much more direction and involvement of the IP holder restricting creativity.

Why would Larian expend all that creative effort again on someone else’s IP? They can chose what they do next and it will get attention as they are the studio behind the biggest game of 2023. Probably makes sense from the studios perspective not to do BG3, and go back to developing their own IP. And the industry is littered with failed studios screwed over by big publishers or IP holders - I think Larian are very sensible to move on.

Then I’d definitely set up a test system in a VM on your own PC (I.e. not the actual server machines). Even if you don’t want to use Docker, you can set up a complete version of your new server and practice deploying Jellyfin and Plex, and then test accessing it “remotely” to manage it. You can then decide whether switching away from Win11 is worth it.

If you’re not familiar with the process of setting up a linux server then I’d actually suggest Debian instead of OpenSuSe. Looking at the Jellyfin guide for example it specifically covers the steps for installing directly onto a Debian host (while OpenSuSE set up means using the Fedora RPM guide). There are also straight forward guides for setting up a Debian server.

Personally I’m not a fan of Ubuntu (because of Canonical and Snap etc) but there may also be a good choice just because there are so many guides out there for setting up Ubuntu server.

Docker is pretty easy to use, and is easy to play with either on your own system (linux or windows) or in VM guest system. The learning curve isn’t that high and Jellyfin for example has a clear set up guide for docker on their wiki.

But radarr, sonarr etc can be installed directly within linux without docker. The Servarr wiki (that these projects use officially to share information as they’re so similar) has lots of straight forward guides for set up on Linux, Windows, Mac etc as well as Docker.

I have a Linux guest VM set up with a Radarr, Sonarr etc set up, VPN and torrent set up. It was easy to do and means its network activity is all securely contained away from my host system. The tools let me set naming rules and file preferences. The library is a shared n folder in my host system, and that is included in my Jellyfin library. So all I have to do is subscribe to something i am interested in and it will just appear in my library once downloaded. The servarr tools are extremely convenient and worth looking at if you’re adding to that 30tb library over time.

OpenSuSE is a good distro with nice tools like Yast that have a decent CLI interface, and has server releases. The leap edition is stable but relatively up to date.

But there are lots of viable alternatives, and if you’re going to use Docker then the host distro is probably not as important as you think.

Simplest route may be to set up a demo server within a VM and see which one chimes the most with your style of use and maintenance. You could have a functioning demo server with docker and deploy both jellyfin and Plex in 20mins.

Skyrim was fun which is why its endured. Starfield is unfortunately fundamentally a bit boring and feels dated - they didn’t learn from the RPGs that came after Skyrim and moved things forward (Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 spring to mind).

I doubt it’ll be fixed. Its not like No Man’s Sky -the developers only game and their number one priority. I think well get the usual small DLCs and Bethesda moves on to its next big project.

I hope they learn from Starfield and make the next elder scrolls something special.

I don’t think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.

Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.

The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.

I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that’s what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.

We’ll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn’t thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it’s damaged expectations.

Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it’s still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it’d probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.

That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.

It may be much simpler though - why work on someone else’s IP and make them money, and dance to their turn going forward when you can work on your own?

Divinity Original Sin 2 was also critically acclaimed even if not to BG3 levels, and they own that outright. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re going to make a new IP - nows the time to take such a risk.

That’s what CD Project Red did after Witcher 3 - and while it was rough initially in the end it’s paid dividends.

Independent IP and publishing only deals is how studies stay independent and can thrive.

The Verified tag is imperfect, and only means the game runs without any issues by steams criteria.

I’ve played plenty of games that get the next level down, “!” compatability warnings and it can be something as minor as the Steam Deck keyboard overlay appearing in game or even just the controller icons in the game not matching the icons on the deck or custom controllers. Having a 3rd party launcher can make the game not verified, even if the game runs flawlessly.

So not surprising that 30% of games are not verified.

There are open source clients like Heroic that download and install GOG games.

I’m more bothered about getting a good deal and DRM free than whether they have a Linux client.

I like Steam but I’m not using them exclusively just because they have a Linux client and Proton.

Judging by your post it seems both sides of this issue are toxic. This seems to just be a microcosm of US identity politics at play, with you just hurling insults and outrage at each other over… not a lot it seems?

A boycott of games that a diversity consultancy was involved in, some low quality journalism from Kotaku, and a lot of outrage on both sides?

The whole thing is a pointless time waste.

If you’re using YouTube then install the FreeTube client - it’s a better experience I find although you need to manually import your watch lists. But avoids advertising and is much more private.

You can also install software like Jellyfin to stream from your own video library. You can also install Kodi to access your own library or streaming services with a nice big screen interface (Kodi is perfectly fine for accessing services you pay for - it’s not a piracy tool unless you make it one. I’m in the UK and use it to login and watch BBC Iplayer).

Honestly, it’s a full PC so with a bit of tinkering you can get it to do what you want in desktop mode and slickly.

I have a desktop and a laptop but I don’t use my laptop at all anymore. I plugged my deck into my TV and use it as a home theatre PC, using wireless game controller and keyboard and mouse.

It’s honestly great - the big screen is so much more comfortable compared to a laptop, desktop mode let’s you do anything you want and you can sink into the couch and relax.

You could obviously plug youe laptop in the exact same way, although the decks gamescope mode gives it that but more versatility I think.

I’ve dual run Linux and Windows for ages on my main PC but the Steam Deck is what moved me over to Linux as my daily driver and started me using KDE. Since switching from Mint to OpenSuSE on my PC I now very rarely use windows - I basically use it for occasional games that don’t run on Proton well yet.

And agree on the HTPC use - I use my deck mostly plugged into my TV.

Weird, it works flawlessly for me. But I’ve only tried it in desktop mode. I find gamescope mode isn’t great for non games, even Firefox scales wierdly in gamescope mode.