What do people expect out of a desktop SteamOS that they can’t already get from any other distro?

Fighting games. I’ve been grinding Skullgirls for over 10 years now, without a single skinner box in sight.

CrossCode. I won’t spoil anything, but Lea very quickly cemented herself as my favorite protagonist of all time.

It’s basically the term for a AAA movie. Big budget, aimed at mass audiences.

Even if/when Switch 2 emulation is possible, there’s not a chance in hell it could run on Deck hardware.

Both systems have pros and cons. This article isn’t bashing on the Steam Deck at all, just making the case for what the Switch 2 has going for it.

They say up front that this article is a response to the frankly obnoxious amount of “my gaming platform can beat up your gaming platform” circlejerking that has been going around - which you’re kinda perpetuating.

The Deck does not “obliterate” the Switch 2, and a headline like that makes you part of the problem.

The Wii U was stuck working against itself in a number of ways. On paper, the idea of bringing the DS’s successful format to a console sounded great… but couldn’t actually work the same way in practice.

The first problem was that human eyes can’t focus on two screens at different distances from the eye. You can’t actually look at both screens together, you have to switch your focus from one to the other.

Then there’s just the economic reality of console development requiring developers to prioritize multiplatform development. No one wants to design a game around the Wii U and have it be exclusive to the Wii U. That was viable for the DS because the DS was such a massive juggernaut, and because handheld titles could be developed on a much smaller budget, but Wii U exclusivity could never be justified. Games that are being developed for other single-screen platforms and then ported to Wii U can’t do much with the Gamepad.

But perhaps the most ironic nail in the coffin was that the best use case for the Gamepad, Off-TV Play, could only be supported by games designed around a single screen. Developers shouldn’t make the second screen important or else they lose this feature!

Every Nintendo DS game.

The Stanley Parable, and similar “walking simulator” type games.

That’s very much not true then. Have you ever tried to set up a third party store like F-Droid?

Android requires you to dig into the settings before you can install third party APKs, and gives you several big scary warnings about it. If you download an APK from the web browser, it will then prevent you from directly opening it, claiming it’s to protect you from malware. Instead you have to open the file browser and find it in your downloads folder, then you can install it from there. Finally, it will give you even more big scary warnings about letting any app that isn’t Google Play have permissions to install its own APKs.

You didn’t explain anything. You said it’s easier than installing Windows, and then you said you weren’t talking about installing Windows. Huh?

Then why did you bring it up?

The average user already uses Windows and/or MacOS, and I would argue those installation procedures are far more complicated.

The average person has never had to install Windows or MacOS, they buy a computer with it pre-installed. And they buy phones with Google Play pre-installed.

Why’d you even make this thread if you were just going to reject any answers given to you?

Amazon and Epic both failed because it is not easy to move into a market that Google has such a dominant monopoly over. It’s not that simple.

No but it also wouldn’t be that difficult

Why would you think that? Of course it would be difficult, it’s a massive undertaking.

Amazon and Epic have both tried to launch their own Android storefronts. Neither one has been even remotely successful. Amazon will be shutting theirs down soon.

Valve is in the business of selling PC games. Moving into a new market wouldn’t be trivial, and Google has put up a lot of barriers to make it especially difficult for a third-party app store to challenge their monopoly.

There are so many multiplayer games competiting for players’ attention today. The biggest risk associated with a multiplayer game is the lack of a playerbase. F2P is the obvious way to mitigate that risk. Of course it’s not impossible for premium titles to succeed, but it will be very difficult to overcome players who might look at it and think “I’m not sure if anyone else is going to spend $30 on this, and if they don’t then I won’t either.”

By the looks of this game, I’m skeptical that it has enough of a hook to succeed. The market for sports games is dominated by licensed titles, can they really hope to compete with FIFA?

I absolutely love the 8BitDo Pro 2. Supports both wired/wireless, I just never unplug it.

It is less bad than code-in-a-box. That’s not a high bar, but it is less bad.

There are two main reasons to buy physical:

Ability to share, trade, and resell your games. These key cards still support this, whereas code-in-a-box did not. So, slightly better.

Then there’s the peace of mind that your games will still work in the distant future. I think if you ask most people who primarily buy physical, myself included, we’ll say this is the main appeal of physical games, and the big reason why key cards don’t feel acceptable.

Some day when the servers eventually go offline, these key cards will become bricks. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We have no idea how long Nintendo will support them for, and they’re not going to hard commit a timetable out loud for us. But we know it can’t be forever.

But even for standard physical games, there is some uncertainty regarding their long-term future that I’m not sure people realize. When those servers eventually go online, your cartridge only has 1.0 on it, you won’t be able to get patches. That’s better than a brick, but for a lot of games that’s probably not the version you want to play.

And then the even darker concern is bit rot. No form of physical media is permanent. Every disc and every cartridge will eventually degrade. Worse yet is that for many forms of media, we don’t even know how long they’re set to last for, we only find out once some of them start to fail. Cartridges are generally better than discs, but beyond that we truly have no idea how long Switch cartridges should be expected to last.