EldritchFemininity
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I’ve seen estimates put the materials cost somewhere around the $425 - 500 USD range because of the specific, semi-custom hardware that they’re using. It’s also good to note that Valve will be able to get a better deal than any of us will because they can get bulk discounts and aren’t buying each part at a market rate profit from retail vendors.
Some people seem to be of the mind that it will be somewhere around the $500 - 800 USD range if tariffs and the RAM situation don’t screw with the price, and that it will probably price out the Xbox with Microsoft’s 30% profit demand and be slightly more expensive than the PS5 while having comparable but not quite as much power.
I just replaced that exact card in my machine last week in preparation for dual booting Linux for the first time (I needed a new NVME as a Linux drive and figured I’d future-proof my setup at the same time with an RX 9070 XT for the native AMD drivers), and the only games that I hadn’t been able to run on medium-high settings had been unoptimized games, bad ports, and early access stuff like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Cities Skylines 2.
IMO 8 gigs is plenty for the average person, all things considered.
I’d say the Deck isn’t stealing customers from the Switch because they are filling different market niches. The Switch is a portable console with portable Nintendo games made for it. The Deck is a portable PC that gives you access to your entire Steam library on the go.
The GabeCube, however, could absolutely pull some customers of the PS5 and Xbox depending on the pricing - especially with Microsoft’s demands that every part of the Xbox division see a 30% profit margin. The Big Three isn’t going to become the Big Four, but I think it will make some ripples. Steam running in Big Screen mode is effectively a console interface, and it plays Call of Duty just like the consoles. And with Sony finally moving away from console exclusive games, it means that Steam has almost full parity with the libraries of both of the consoles going forward while also offering access to all kinds of indie games that the consoles don’t. The GabeCube can play Call of Duty and Ghost of Tsushima, but it can also play Ultrakill and Bloodborne Nightmare Kart, and neither Xbox nor Playstation can say that.
Edit: And this doesn’t even mention old games. The Steam library has access to all kinds of old games that never get ported to new consoles when a new generation releases, meaning that its library grows in step with the consoles but you can still play your old favorites without having to keep buying them again or keep your old consoles around.
I’ve been waiting for Valve to release their new headset before I jump back into VR and decide what I get to replace my original Vive. I still have a few questions as well, like the price, but it basically looks like everything that I want in a headset.
It has eye tracking since it uses foveated rendering, the new pancake lenses that have made a huge splash in recent years, better resolution than the Index, and they’ve said that it’s built to be modular so that there’s the possibility of adding new features down the line - including stuff like a port on the face plate that allows for high speed camera info as well as data, so stuff like face tracking should be as easy as plug and play once people get to tinker with it. No need to pull off face plates or solder wires like people were doing with their Index.
The biggest question I have left besides the price is the battery life and the feasibility of having it plugged in and charging while you’re using it.
makes me wonder if people will go with whatever works well enough and for the least amount of effort.
This has always been the case. People want something that just works right out of the box, and familiarity will keep a lot of people from considering anything else.
I’ve been talking for a long time now with a friend of mine about how sick we are of Windows, and more recently about how I’m planning on installing Linux on a spare HDD I have before making the commitment to getting rid of Windows entirely, and he’s decided to go to 11 despite hating it because he’s afraid of trying something new and having to learn a new system.
And it’s not just a computer thing. People can and will hurt themselves by repeating the same mistakes because it’s the familiar habit and doing something new - even if it’s for your own good - is scarier. Been there, done that, plenty of times.
You mean Diesel Knights?
And I and the other guy just said that you misunderstood the original comment. You’re the one who doubled down after the first guy.
Me making a sarcastic comment because you doubled down on the first guy by just posting a quote of the original comment isn’t white knighting. It’s just a conversation. If that’s white knighting, then 95% of all internet communication is some form of white knighting. And I can think of much better words to describe the YouTube comments section (and I bet you can, too).
Anyways, hope your Monday wasn’t as hot, humid, and disappointing as mine and I think everybody in this thread can agree that Larian isn’t Ubisoft or Activision, the world is a better place because of that, and the “live service industry” can go suck a big one and keep shaking in their boots.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
Jesus you white knights need to calm down and let them respond for themselves.
Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.
There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.
I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.
This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.
I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.
Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.
People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.
When was the last time you saw a game that was more than that outside of porn games and maybe dating sims? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Cyberpunk 2077.
I always think of this kind of stuff when these kinds of polls come up because they’re always by big corporate companies who put the most shallow of these themes in. People want this stuff like they want strong female leads: they want stuff that actually puts the effort in to make it good, not half-baked content just to maximize market reach or that one gay side character with one line of dialogue mentioning his husband who never actually appears in the movie.
I think when a lot of people talk about video games, the conversation largely revolves around the AAA industry. Especially considering how difficult it is still to get indie games on consoles, which locks the majority of gamers out of the space entirely. There’s definitely some good stuff in the AAA industry, but it often seems like sleeper hits rather than big-name titles. Compare Astro Bot to whatever Call of Duty came out this year, or my favorite to point out, the first Splatoon being the best-selling shooter in a year where both a Battlefield and a Call of Duty game came out. Both games that really came out of nowhere to critical acclaim rather than games people were excited for a year before release.
The games I play and enjoy the most seem to largely be from small developers that I never heard about until after they’ve already released.
As for Bloodlines 2, I’m not surprised. It’s in the same development hell as Duke Nukem Forever as far as I’m concerned, and I’d be surprised if it ever releases at all.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think more and more people who aren’t in the probably 80% of people who could be considered “casual” gamers are disnechanted with and turning away from the AAA industry and looking more and more to the indie scene. The industry is as stagnant as Hollywood, and for the same reasons. Some of the most popular games in the past few years have been projects made by a single dev that popped up out of nowhere.
Looking at my Steam wishlist, the games coming out this year on there are: Hyper Light Breaker, SYNDUALITY, Space Engineers 2, ERA ONE, KAISERPUNK, The Alters, Gravnir, The Necromancer’s Tale, MENACE, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (yeah, right), Paralives, Mecha BREAK, Dolls Nest, FBC: Firebreak, and Nightreign (and if that wasn’t FromSoft, I wouldn’t have even finished watching the trailer).
The only game on there that could even be considered close to a AAA game is a spin-off experimental game from FromSoft, who is really a AA studio that’s becoming popular enough to be debated as being AAA.
I won’t buy from most of the big companies on principle. EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Rockstar are all on my shit list for horrible business practices and worse working conditions, and Sony is conditional based on whether or not I have to deal with a PSN account - there were several games I was excited for last year releasing on PC that I didn’t buy because they require a PSN account for a single player game.
Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.
I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.
As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.
The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.
Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).
A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.
B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.
Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?
The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.
The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.
The worst part of this for me is that I remember when you could build a PC with better specs than a console for the same price. Now we’re coming back full circle to where that might be possible again, but graphics cards never truly came down from their inflated crypto mining prices. So that means consoles are just getting more expensive and everybody is losing.
And there are plenty of irresponsible parents. There was a story about 5 years ago I remember of a young kid (like 6 years old) who literally emptied his parents’ bank account on mtx in an iPhone game because they didn’t know it had mtx in it.
And saying that people with mental health issues need to git gud is like saying that people in wheelchairs need to git gud and use stairs. What we need to do is replace the idiots with people who understand how bad this shit is so we can get something done about it.
Unfortunately, the biggest group of people buying mtx are those with mental health issues/addiction issues and kids who have no concept of fiscal responsibility. And as the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute.
These companies have literally hired psychologists to tell them how to best exploit the human brain for maximum wallet extraction. They’re doing the equivalent of casinos pumping extra oxygen into the room to keep you more awake and not having any windows so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there (plus the easy booze to loosen the purse strings).
Nothing’s gonna change until we can hold these companies responsible for their actions. Ironically, I think review bombing on Steam actually helps since it can make people aware of the exploitative practices these companies are doing and make them avoid these games.
Whales are largely a myth created by game companies to create a false class war amongst us rather than holding the truly responsible parties at fault. No different than pitting the middle class against the poor.
Do whales exist? Absolutely. However, the vast majority of mtx money comes from people with addiction problems, mental health issues that make fiscal responsibility difficult, and kids who don’t know any better. Many of whom who are spending money that they can’t afford to spend but can’t help themselves from spending.
These companies quite literally hire psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s own brain chemistry against them to most effectively extract money from their wallets. Epic Games got in trouble because it was believed that they were trying to create a culture in Fornite that shamed kids for having default skins. Everything from daily login bonuses to seasons and battle passes to rotating stores are designed to keep you logging in and playing and therefore paying. They turn logging in into a habit and then hit you with the FOMO and completing your collection needs.
You’re not going to fix this by shaming people any more than you can cure drug, alcohol, and gambling addiction by shaming people.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.
But it’s okay, “because it’s just cosmetics.”
Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.