On the other hand, even if they don’t “make back” the loss, you can look at it as: how much money is Valve willing to pay to become a “mainstream” living room console competitor? Lose a couple billion dollars on Machine, but get 400k “give valve money, probably” machines plugged into TVs. Sony and MS have other divisions and they AND Nintendo have shareholder responsibilities. Those conpanies cannot tank a single year of number go down. Valve can, and surely there’s a price that Valve would be willing to play to be “the xbox”.

This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.

Any chance for a self-hostable containerized version? I’d love to be able to spin up my own local instance on my homeserver.

I don’t pay for a domain and don’t intend to start doing so. Using “someone else’s server” removes the only reason I’d want to use element/matrix/whatever else.

How’s performance in Isaac with some workshop mods specifically? Locked 60 even with a bunch of crap on screen

I know there are some cool new ways to run PC games on stuff like this. If you have them, how does this run the PC versions of games like Isaac, Gungeon, Slay the Spire, or Vampire Survivors? I know these all (or mostly) have Android or Switch ports but for one reason or another (usually mod support) the PC version is superior. I’m looking into this device as a lower weight, lower power alternative to a Steam Deck, so support for 2D indie PC games is a must.

Or of course, each developer themselves becomes responsible for “registering as a developer” and thus loses all anonymity as a dev.

Google’s announced plans aren’t actually about restricting “sideloading” (aka installing). They’re about restricting actually running the code, and developing/distributing the code.

Content distributed through these “other app stores” and elsewhere will remain installable, but your phone will refuse to run the software if that content isn’t signed with the special Google’s Favorite Boy token that the developer got by providing personally identifiable information to Google. Get that “certification”? Your app can be run on Android no matter how you distribute it, including “side loading” (download APK file, install app).

Don’t have the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality Verified Developer token to sign your app with? The only way a user can run your code is by connecting to a PC and installing your app with adb (a development tool).

This would allow them to share their screen + system audio excluding Element’s own sound while playing a game, like Discord does? No extra hoops like installing OBS to function as a webcam? If it really is that easy, I’ll absolutely install this stack as soon as I can. But every time I’ve tried discord “alternatives”, there’s always either a whole series of steps you have to jump through to screenshare (and forget about screen sharing a single app instead of an entire monitor, and forget about sharing sound without causing the streamer to echo the viewer’s voice), or the screensharing has multi-second lag (no matter how good the client and server’s connection is - testing this was done on purely local setups on Ethernet).

You’d think a direct peer to peer connection or “server” connection that’s… Functionally a peer would have less lag than the one that needs to phone home over the internet and perform downscaling on the feed to upsell Nitro, but that hasn’t been my experience.

Is a domain name required for this, or can you replace all instances of “example.com” with an IP address and port combo?

If I run this stuff, what do my clients / less techy friends need to install to get a Discord-like experience for screenshare/IM?

The new Marathon isn’t gonna release.

Let the live service cattle subsidize the best platform for buying non-slop games. Easy math.

There’s a startlingly large quantity of meals that start with olive oil and seasoned meat in a pot and end in being served over a carb that you can make ten pounds of in less than an hour. I keep dried onion flakes and a jar of minced garlic on hand for when (buying and) cutting fresh aromatics is too many steps. But really, skipping enough “you should do this it makes the dish better” steps can turn everything from beef stroganoff to japanese-style curry to cottage pie into one-pot meals that provide “leftovers” for a week or more. If you crave variety, you can compress the effort and do the same amount of work “per week” but commit more time to one day: this lets you make three or four ten pound Meals that are then divided into freezer-safe portions that can be defrosted or reheated as desired. So instead of “red sauce pasta week, teriyaki chicken week, bacon and egg and hashbrown bowl week, etc” you spend a day per month prepping 3-5 meals and then just microwave those meals for the next month. This strategy basically requires a chest freezer though. Pairs well with compressing your month of grocery shopping task into one big trip to Costco where you can buy 40lb of raw meat to prep into meals.

Take shortcuts, be lazy, compress all the effort into one “task” (“meal prep for 2h a week” or “meal prep for 6 hours once a month” instead of “make 3 quick meals every day”). Basically ask yourself “what is actually wrong with eating hot pockets for three meals a day” (expensive, not actually that good tasting, lacks a lot of important nutrients) and fix that problem by making something better that takes just as little effort as a hot pocket does when you’re actually hungry.

For whatever reason, a game company can make your “physical copy” require a digital download to function. If a company decides they don’t want you to play a game (or version) anymore, it being on a cart or disc is not insurance against it.

And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc…

It’s a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It’s a bad practice even if it’s only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I’m of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of “you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that’s on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games”.

This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can’t be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that’s a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.

This is still yet another point against those people insisting that physical copies mean anything. Right now, it’s “just update the game and you can play it”. But that’s exactly as limiting as a digital copy - you still need an internet connection, an account in good standing, the company’s CDN to be online, and everything else to play the game that’s “on” your glorified $60 DRM key.

As more Switch 2s get firmware updated, this change means every “physical copy” of Mario Wonder has become a “Game-Key Card” retroactively. The only difference is that the download is slightly smaller for a GKC.

Plugging *arrs into public torrent trackers is always a losing proposition. Consider either paying for usenet or getting into some entry level private trackers (lurk on Reddit’s /r/opensignups)

Since nobody else posted it in the comments yet: 600 euros for the base version, 900 for whatever the X version is.

OP, remember this isn’t Reddit, we can put the actual number in the title of the post.

I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin’s Android TV client still can’t handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.