It is called “going gold” because it is the gold standard for measuring the tolerance level for embarrassment from releasing the pile of garbage a project produced. Going gold is done at exactly the point when that drops from intolerable to tolerable to the stake holders.

Yeah, to rephrase my post the other way around, buying a console and just a few games is only really possible because it is carried by people who don’t carefully weigh if that is a financially sound decision.

Probably very few among the people who carefully weighed which system gives them the better bang for their buck.

Even if it can’t tell how much load you put on your system because that is a complex interaction of various bottlenecks, it would at least be nice if they labelled which settings are likely to contribute to the CPU, CPU, RAM, VRAM,… bottlenecks.

Those are individual games though, console games are just much more expensive on average. There isn’t as much available on the cheaper end of the market.

People are less likely to own a TV already these days though than they used to be so the price calculation for consoles favors them a lot less if you take that into account. Not to mention that console games tend to be more expensive than PC games, especially indie PC games now that triple A is more of a warning label than an indicator of quality.

only the first 10 are fun.

Or worse, a game where everyone keeps telling you that you need to put in 100 hours before it is fun.

I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.

One assumes they have to come up with some sort of strategy to keep players like me on a pvp only game.

And that strategy was to allow you to play against bots on purpose and with your knowledge. It has been around for as long as bots have been.

You might want to check for software support if there are any programmable features.

A newer kernel does not automatically offer more performance. In fact it could be the opposite if it includes workarounds for Intel’s latest CPU security fuck-ups.

I don’t think a lot of people outside of Xbox console players played Halo.

I just discovered a game called Vintage Story which seems to have some pretty good looking landscapes despite being originally based on a Minecraft-like visual style.

Agreed, games that make you replay the entire game to see the 10% of content that were exclusive to a certain decision are not great at all. They are essentially just games with 10% less content for all practical purposes unless we are talking about something where restarting is part of the game play like Rogue-likes.

You have to be a special kind of stupid to think games that rely on things like immersion, mood, power fantasies,… can be improved by adding multiplayer.

In general there is nothing that quite destroys atmosphere and mood and immersion as easily as multiplayer if there is just one person not acting in character (and there pretty much always is).

I don’t need to make world changing decisions when I’m playing “hero.”

This is something so many story tellers in gaming and movies don’t get. The story doesn’t have to be about saving the world, the universe, the multiverse or the entire nature of reality. In fact, I would prefer it if the stakes are low enough that the protagonist has actual choices instead of being pushed heavily into the “of course I am going to save the world” option of each “choice”.

Second Life has restaurants or bars though mostly people tend to hangout in less food focused ways and not sure you would count it as a game.

Mystery boxes are another similar predatory business model that has brought similar predatory practices even to RL.

Nobody at Valve is preventing anyone from making a good alternative. Network effects are what makes one platform better than multiple platforms in this space, especially in the multiplayer match-making and other features where players are interacting.