This has been the trend since early 2010. More and more games made by small companies are exploding and outselling AAA games. Stardew Valley had its all time peak 2 months ago despite being 8 years old, Dave the Diver popped off last year, Helldivers 2 broke records before Sony decided to fuck it up and subsequently get dragged through the mud, and Hades 2 is apparently awesome.

The slow death of AAA games has been great to watch. There’s so much more variety than 5 years ago and you don’t have to give your money to soulless corporations to enjoy them.

There’s a few rough areas such as Boston which is trash for FPS on all systems (I got like 35ish there on Deck), but it’s easily remedied with mods. I run ~20 mods when playing “vanilla” and got a locked 50 FPS through an entire playthrough. The game makes sense to be Deck verified.

The 1.6 update completed the game extremely well. A lot of the quality of life stuff feels incredibly natural, and I’m loving the new farm so far. Especially since it’s forcing me to >!focus on animals instead of Uber optimizing crops!<.

My brain omitted that context for some reason, fair enough.

It’s not just read receipts. It’s reactions, replies, and immensely better image quality.

I get locked 30 on mine with some rare dips. As usual though it’ll get better as the emulators get updates. Still haven’t even finished BotW.

I feel the exact same way, except that id recommend it for many of the things you’ve criticized it for. The gameplay loop is pretty unique, and the build up to cooking every night implements a level of strategy to the preparations you have to make leading up to it including what fish to catch and how you invest your money.

The game feels all over the place, but in a really good way. It’s not just a repetitive, “fish, cook, repeat”. There’s a million random ass things that get thrown into the mix which is a complete 180 compared to most games made now. It’s good because it doesn’t really follow the traditional rogue-lite formula that we’ve come to know. It gives off the feel that the developers created the core game, (fish, cook, repeat) and then along the way took a bunch of, “wouldn’t it be cool if we did x” idea they had and threw it in there to mix the game up. It’s a super nice game to play while relaxing as the stakes are low, the story doesn’t require immense focus to follow, and you’re ultimately just fucking around under water as on overweight diver named Dave.

It feels a lot like a game made for those that don’t play many games, and I think that’s why it’s doing so well.

It is strictly due to power efficiency. ARM is insanely power efficient when put up against x86. Our phones run it, laptops are starting to run it (ever wonder why MacBooks have 20+ hour battery lives now?), hell AWS is switching their data centers to ARM because of the energy savings. It’ll save the world a lot of energy since 10% of our electricity is used for computers.

No one is forcing you to run out and buy an ARM system, and x86 is gonna be supported for a very long time. Software will be developed for both platforms in parallel as it’s going to be at least a decade before it reaches dominance.

Did you feel this was when we went from 32 to 64 bit computers? If so, we still write software for them even though many people, myself included, haven’t used a 32 bit computer since the 2000s.

BOTW was one of the first games in a while that hit me with that feeling. I had so much fun with it and I still haven’t beat it because I’ll be damned if I don’t 100% the game first. It was a little slow at first, but I came to appreciate the pacing more as I played it.

I’m also just getting back into Minecraft after not having played it consistently since 1.13, and I’m having so much fun with all the new shit.