ampersandrew
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world
- Comment on Owlcat Games rolls back Owlcat Launcher on Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader after fan complaints 17 hours ago:
Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper
No, it doesn’t even get that far.
Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.
A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display at that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 17 hours ago:
But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.
And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 18 hours ago:
You would price out the closest equivalent in price and performance, if you wanted to make an honest comparison, and plenty of people have specced out builds like that, with the differences between the two noted. And for as “ancient” as the tech in the Steam Machine is, it’s still better than what 70% of Steam users are running. Considering that the most popular games by a wide margin on any modern platform right now are all 10+ years old, that’s not much of a surprise.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
I don’t think you’re making an honest comparison if you’re doing it with used parts. You can get lots of things cheaper used.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
Definitely not less than half the price. The build I see linked in this thread comes in around $950 with as close to equivalent specs as possible. The machines people on YouTube were building when the specs were announced, before the RAM and SSD prices spiked, were coming in a little under $700 at the time.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
The one build I see in this thread is within $100 of the Steam Machine with comparable specs, without the form factor. I’d call that competitive. But if you disagree, they’re also releasing the ISO for SteamOS, as they’re more confident in broad compatibility, so if you were ever in the market for such a machine, you can save the $100.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
How recently have you checked? Word I’ve gotten from elsewhere is that this is pretty competitive with what it would cost to build it yourself.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
As a realist, I don’t see any way cloud gaming services are an option that customers en masse will be willing to pay what the providers have to charge to make a profit. Stadia was not that long ago, and Google couldn’t make it work under what had to be a softball toss for that business model.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
The DRM on Linux browsers that all of these services rely on doesn’t let you stream any better than 720p.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
There’s an ocean of hardware requirements between the upcoming PS6 and what it takes to run pixel graphics games. Many customers are still happy on PS4 level hardware, and third party titles like Madden still got PS4 versions until just last year.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
They wouldn’t be licensing it to Valve for this device; it would be the DRM vendor updating their software for web browsers on what had been a niche operating system and is becoming less and less niche of late.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
I suspect the DRM those streaming services rely on will start to budge on Linux in the near future, as it gains market share. In the meantime though, I’ve mostly been using Jellyfin lately, which ironically works on Steam Machine but not the other consoles. I’ve still got my PS4 from 10+ years ago for the regular streaming services, when I still have a subscription to any of them.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
I think that risk is still reduced because the parent wouldn’t have their own Steam account to reserve one. For at least months, anyone buying one of these is probably going to be someone very intentionally doing so.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
I don’t think there’s a danger of that person accidentally buying this thing, as you can only buy it from Valve and not Walmart. From a casually overheard conversation on the subway last week, I can tell you that someone who is seemingly “the average NBA 2K player” is pissed off at the upcharge for PS+ just to make his game function in multiplayer, and that guy is aware of the Steam Deck.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 day ago:
AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that’s so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.
- Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists openstore.steampowered.com ↗Submitted 1 day ago to games@lemmy.world | 508 comments
- Comment on GOG when available, but what should I choose between PS5 physical and Steam when not? 2 days ago:
The type of change you’re talking about would have immediate negative effects on their customers, and they’d never recover from that. Even with more than half of their game sales coming from digital now, they’d immediately alienate the 20-30% that still buy physical, and they need every customer they can get right now as they bleed market share to PC.
- Comment on GOG when available, but what should I choose between PS5 physical and Steam when not? 2 days ago:
This would be how a business commits suicide, not to mention upset their retail partners that sell their hardware.
- Comment on GOG when available, but what should I choose between PS5 physical and Steam when not? 2 days ago:
I don’t think there’s a mechanism for them to tell if you’ve got a license for a disc without putting CD keys in the box. OP only needs them to honor ownership long enough to resell the copy.
- Comment on GOG when available, but what should I choose between PS5 physical and Steam when not? 2 days ago:
None of us can predict the future, so we don’t know which games will end up on GOG one day, but your plan seems solid enough based on what we know now and what you value.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 3 days ago:
Two plugins for Calibre and a free Adobe account.
- Comment on Halo : Campaign Evolved PS5 requirements 3 days ago:
By the way, the Steam version also doesn’t have split-screen for some reason. That’s how far we’ve regressed.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
You just posted 5 links in the span of 20 minutes, and the ones you posted on this sub were stories that were already posted here. Are you a bot?
- Comment on Ubisoft Co-Founder Claude Guillemot Dies In Plane Crash 3 days ago:
I did a search for his name alongside the sexual harassment accusations, and I don’t see his name listed anywhere. It’s suspicious that so many around him are accused, but I don’t see Claude named anywhere.
- Comment on Game Informer's Favorite Steam Next Fest Demos – Summer 2026 Edition 3 days ago:
I guess we’ll piggyback on this thread for demo recommendations.
The only demo I was wowed by so far was Project TurboBlast, which is the racing game I’ve wanted since F-Zero GX, with some CTR drifting mixed in. The biggest problem for me is the lack of split-screen multiplayer, but at least it lists the LAN tag. Something like Aero GPX in early access has everything but the online multiplayer, and this one has everything but the split-screen. Still, I’d recommend it.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 3 days ago:
Kobo is where I ended up buying from, because I can break the DRM there, but it wasn’t trivial to figure out.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 4 days ago:
I’ve been rapidly barrelling toward a DRM-free-only self-hosted future, and part of that is DRM-free books. In an attempt to get out of Amazon’s clutches, I looked for where I can buy DRM-free books, like Project Hail Mary. The answer I came up with was: nowhere. Everyone is following the same playbook. Why would I buy from your store if you’re doing exactly what Amazon is doing? I’m already shopping on Amazon, and I want something better.
(The answer is that I can break the DRM on other stores, but I can’t on Amazon. When it’s this difficult to get DRM-free books, I wouldn’t blame people for resorting to piracy.)
Why on earth would I buy from Epic if I have any other option? What are you doing better?
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 5 days ago:
I was a huge fan of the previous games. My friends were huge fans of the previous games. We all loved Infinite. Fallout 4 is another great example of that game being way better, and way better received, than the tone that you tend to see on forums. Perhaps because those people were so burned that they can’t help but talk continually about how upset they were with it? I see this all the time in fighting game circles around Guilty Gear Strive. That series never broke 1M copies sold of a game before Strive, and Strive has sold like 4M+ by now. Not only that, but tournament entrants are consistently healthy at every major. If competitors weren’t happy with it, they’d stop playing, and we know that from plenty of other fighting game scenes. Even if everyone who played a prior Guilty Gear also hated Strive (which isn’t the case), it should be extremely rare to come across those legacy players’ complaints, but even 5 years into Strive’s success, those voices are quite loud in forums.
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 5 days ago:
It’s the #72 highest rated game of all time on Metacritic with a 94/100. I don’t think BioShock Infinite really fits this thread.