MudMan

You know what? Good luck with that, genuinely.

You’re still wrong, though. Or at least overconfident.

Oh, by all means, share your knowledge on the state of gaming. I am looking for investment opportunities right now and that seems like a hot scoop.

Hah. You may have accidentally come up with the new “this is the year of Linux Desktop”.

“Five years from now is the year of Linux gaming being financially relevant short-term” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though.

Honestly, I don’t have any predictions on this. So much is riding on how hard Valve is willing to invest on becoming a OS company and how receptive end users are to it. Right now the outcome falls somewhere between “Steam Machines” and “Nintendo Switch”, and I genuinely don’t think anybody can predict where in between it will fall yet. At the very least we need to see what happens to the Legion Go S and SteamOS adoption.

Nah, it’s always a cost/benefit analysis. If anything, many of them tend to be very shortsighted about fuzzy reputational impacts they can’t easily measure in dollars.

2% of users (and less of that in revenue, I bet, since some segment of Deck players will bite the bullet and play on Windows desktop anyway) may be worth salvaging…

…but only if it doesn’t cost you more than 2% in terms of additional dev cost or in terms of losing you players due to having worse security.

That math is debatable, but I guarantee it’s very likely how many of these decisions are getting made. Review bombing may or may not help there.

Most games I know about do both, but my understanding is it’s hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.

Look, we’ve been here before. I’m not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don’t care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.

I didn’t necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn’t like you and kicking you out. I’m guessing there’s a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.

But hey, I’m not a security software engineer and I’m not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I’m concerned.

We actually know this number. As per Steam’s hardware survey this group is around 2%, including Steam Deck players.

Best guess, Steam Deck sales are 5-10% of the Switch, which is in the same ballpark, so both numbers are probably roughly right.

Wheter you want to count that as “significant” is up to you, I guess. I bet the impact is very different depending on the game, even for supported games.

Meeeeh… at the cost of breaking up the experience pretty severely.

They did it that way in the days of anaglyph 3D because the color filtering made a mess of everything else about the movie With modern shutter or polarization you can just watch the whole thing that way with minimum issues.

And even those proved to be too much. Nothing short of perfect glassless seems to be enough. I can’t imagine people would accept paying 600 bucks of a bulky HMD, stop a movie halfway and strap that on just to get immersive VR effects when they could just be playing a VR game instead.

Maybe as part of a more expansive mixed media thing, like in a museum or a theme park. For movie watching I don’t think it’d take.

Well, 3D was a feature on many high end TVs, all the way to the start of the OLED era. It’s not like it was mandatory to use. But yeah, not everybody was into it, and I certainly would much prefer glassless 3D as with the 3DS. The big problem there is supporting multiple viewers at once. I would definitely take it for a monitor or a phone, all else being equal.

Well, not for me. I didn’t pay all that extra money to have my GPU and monitor do worse color reproduction. It took long enough for Windows to get their ass in gear for modern display support, I’m not keen on waiting another five years for it elsewhere.

And for as much as “having some level of support” is an improvement, it still doesn’t work properly on my setup, so Linux is just broken for me, even under the right flavor of KDE.

I do agree with you that I see Bazzite getting there sooner in terms of just widespread hardware support. What I see SteamOS doing first is pointing at specific hardware configs, or rather to specific prebuilt boxes and saying “this will just work”. And, you know, actually mean it, not like when Linux advocates say something will just work and then it doesn’t.

I think that’s a bigger deal than most of the Linux community likes to acknowledge, but I also don’t think the Linux community would have a big issue with the idea of SteamOS being paired to specific hardware and then slowly trading reliability for flexibility by one step through Bazzite and by multiple steps by adopting Proton and maybe Gamescope in other distros. That seems like a… very Linux state of affairs.

How would that even work? Like, small segments in immersive VR? That seems… very specific.

The idea with 3D TVs is they could do 3D on demand. They failed because even the lightweight 3D glasses were a bit of a hassle. It’s fine in a movie theatre, more or less, where you know you’ll be seated for the whole thing, but at home you don’t want anything extra sitting on your face, let alone putting stuff on and off mid-movie.

I agree on the VR filmwatching being ass thing, though. It’s hot, sweaty and isolating to do at home when your TV is right there, and it’ll take a whooole lot of normalizing before I pull out a HMD while I’m on a plane or a train without feeling like a complete idiot, regardless of whatever Apple was thinking about how the Vision Pro would get used.

I did it fairly often throughout. Left the 3D slider of my 3DS cranked up permanently, too, if you must know.

Either way I do own a bunch of 3D Blurays until they started making you choose between 3D and 4K and eventually stopped making them altogether.

You get to choose your format if you dump your own media. Plus you also get to host a media server and stop paying to not watch Netflix.

There are tons of options to play back 3D media on a HMD. Honestly my complaint here is that watching media on a virtual screen in VR kinda sucks. The quality just isn’t there and you still have a big thing strapped to your face. I’d much rather have good glass-free screens and leave VR for VR things, but it doesn’t seem to be the way tech is going.

There are two reasons I disagree with you there.

The least important one is booting straight into Game mode, which is good for TV top boxes meant to act as gaming consoles. I’m mostly fine with autobooting to Steam Big Picture on Windows, but people make a big deal of edge cases where you may need a mouse and keyboard, so the demand is there for a native implementation in living room situations.

The more important one, IMO, is SteamOS’s handling of displays, and especially of HDR. I recently spent a not insignificant amount of time and effort trying to get a fairly typical high end desktop setup (Nvidia card, couple of HDR monitors with high refresh rates and different resolutions) on an existing Linux distro and… yeah, it’s not good. Not only did I have to try multiple distros and do some manual configuration until I found the right mix to get everything going under Wayland/KDE Plasma, but the end result is kinda flaky still and struggles with going in and out of sleep without breaking everything.

If, and it’s a significant if, Valve figured out the sort of display reliabilty they have on Deck for desktop that would be a major step forward. Granted, that’s several steps down the line. An endgame solution needs to have out of the box support for all GPUs and their drivers (and good driver support in the first place), reliable support for VRR, support for multiple HDR standards and built-in monitor profiles, support for multimonitor with indepenent scaling and on the fly changes and more. Some of that is already in there on SteamOS, some of that is a long way away.

But it’s the bar for success here. That’s when I consider switching for real. If someone else figures it out before Valve does, even if it involves building on top of Gamescope, then great, but Valve sure seem to be the closest, at least for gaming-focused setups.

For now I can see them adding support for specific closed hardware specs by certifying third party handhelds and consolized MiniPCs (hi, Steam Machines 2.0), but I won’t really perk up my ears until that includes at least one device with a high end dedicated Nvidia GPU and external display support.

Hm. It’s a start, I suppose. At this point this seems like it’ll cover more or less the same handheld devices Bazzite was doing. The big game changer will be when they figure out desktop PCs, and specifically those on Nvidia cards, I think.

As it is, I may give it a go on my one handhled dual booting Windows and Bazzite to see if it’s any better, although Bazzite is just fine already.

I did try Bazzite on a desktop PC with an Intel card at one point and it was… fine? It kinda sorta worked, with enough rough edges that I stil ended up switching back to Windows there. I would like to give that a go with a official Valve distro if and when support is there, but it seems there’ll be some more waiting still.

Is this a big deal? I realize I have a skewed view because I dropped Google search ages ago, but… when I need maps results I go to a maps app, I never really relied on the search bar for that, even when I did use Google search.

Now who is confusing weather with climate?

It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.

We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.

Ironically that is genuinely all I’m asking for. And yet I don’t think that’s true.

Yes, we do, you wonderful unique genius of an angsty fifteen year old.

It’s not that hard to understand, you are not possessed of a unique insight that somehow has eluded every economist on the planet.

You just haven’t figured out that getting angy on the Internet about how everybody is dumb is not the game changer you think it is. Turns out meaningfully altering the collective behavior of eight billion people, each with their own individual set of incentives, is less responsive to an earnestly worded social media post that one may think.

Also, you may have to be more specific about who “we” is supposed to be. Whose economic model are we talking about? Everybody’s? Just how much granularity are you considering here, if any at all?

You think the pandemic shutdown was simple?

I mean, man, I am more of an introvert, too, but… yeah, I’m gonna say “humanity isn’t willing to transition to Covid rules permanently as a matter of climate change policy” is not the rhetorical killing blow you think it is.

You can’t enact global behavioral changes as solutions to economic problems. That’s the kind of adolescent social media thought process that ends with retirees radicalized into fascism. “If everybody agreed with me this would not be a problem” is not how large scale policy shifts happen.

On the plus side, you not quite grasping this is far less problematic than Elon Musk not grasping this, but the underlying issue is pretty much the same.

Yeah, for sure. I find it needs less of a defense because it was an early indie darling built on top of a fangame foundation, while Penny’s ended up being a bit of a bomb on the back of not having stuck to the license or the specific set of Sonic mechanics.

Both are worth a try, I’m just saying that Penny’s could use the attention more.