I agree with all of that, pretty much.

If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.

Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.

If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.

This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)

Kinda wild that you could patent a super basic mechanic that pretty much anyone could come up with

Time to start a boycott movement against Black Ops 6 :)

Exactly, and that’s why I expressed the sentiment that client anticheat is a poor solution. If you really really want to stop cheating, you have to do it on the infrastructure that you as the game developer have guaranteed and trusted control over, and that is the server.

Mmn yeah. I described it as a translation layer also, which is more accutate, but I used The Bad Word because more people have an understanding of what an ‘emulator’ is in common usage and it felt appropriate in this context.

I’m sure what Intel are doing right now is having both their tech people and their lawyers frantically explore any and every option which might let them get out of this.

Which is why there is radio silence, because they don’t want to make any statement which admits liability, or even acknowledges the problem.

But yes, if the problem is real they had better suck it up and recall the whole lot.

The point here is that the anticheat solution needs to be written for a specific operating system because it runs “outside” the game in a privileged way to try and detect cheating.

So they have anticheat on Windows, and their own consoles will have a different anticheat system that is specific for the console OS.

Running games on Linux via Proton is effectively an emulation or translation layer, and the Windows-specific anticheat is not going to work with that.

If Sony wanted to provide multiplayer support on Linux they’d also have to provide a native Linux implementation of the whole game, rather than relying on Proton, which sadly not many publishers are doing at all. So its technically quite understandable why this isn’t possible.

Now, personally I think client anticheat is garbage and they should not be depending on that as a solution anyway, but that’s a separate argument!

I’ll be very disappointed if you can’t build the mouse civilisation up to the point where you throw off your feline overlords

From the image I assumed this was about a game called “10 minutes of gameplay” which was under threat of being cancelled, but it has loyal fans waiting and “Nobody wants it to die”

As for how my brain could assume even for a second that 10 minutes of gameplay could be a genuine game, I imagined it must be aomething with a time-looping mechanic that does the same 10 mins over and over.

I also thought the name must be intentional satire, and a self-referential poke at those people who believe the length of gameplay is what makes a game good, and want hundred-hour collectathons, whereas this is saying “Yes it only has 10 minutes but look what we can do with them!”

Sounds like a game I’d play honestly - and yes, I did play Twelve Minutes!

Oh cool. That’s good to know. I was mistaken.

Strange the article didn’t menton it, but searching further it seems like you’re right.

I guess they are going out of their way to “big up” the Quest release in the press coverage because that is a separate platform / storefront and so can garner extra sales, while PC and PCVR are the same sale.

Genuinely mislead me to think the PC version wouldn’t have VR, though!

Can we please get VR on something not owned by Meta? :|

Fair :) Glad I was able to share my experience if that helped a little.

I’d like to make the switch to Linux for my gaming desktop, currently still on Windows for that personally, but soon!

Proton is actually based on Wine so there’s a lot in common. And Valve contributes back to Wine via Codeweavers (who also make crossover)

This is something I know about.

The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.

That said, there are ways around it.

I’m personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky

Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native ‘Metal’ graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.

The result you get will depend on your hardware. I’m personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.

There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.

As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn’t need anything special :)

True facts lol

The article talks about factors like type of game and advancements in technology, but doesn’t mention what is surely a big factor - the age of their audience.

My personal intuition is that 10 to 20 years is the sweet spot because those people who played the original as a teenager will now be in their 20s and 30s, where they have disposable income and plenty of desire to spend it on reliving those happy childhood memories.

If you wait too long for a remake, the market will shrink again because those original players will be more likely to have family, other commitments, and less time to game.

My biggest problem is security updates.

The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.

But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.

With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?

The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.

It’s going to be a nightmare.

Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.

I don’t think so.

I think it just means they seemed like standards which were more prevalent in Europe, meaning support might be better for Euro hardware, or that the (presumably) American market was leaning in a different direction.

Yup, my comment mentions the parity disk :)

Good to emphasise that a bit more though.