That’s a big part of the reason why “AI slop” looks so bad. Inference is fundamentally not how people create complex and delicate art pieces. It’s like constructing a house by starting with the paint job and ending with the framing lumber, then asking an architect to fix where you fucked up.

This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.

A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.

Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted? To me this is like that. I use generative AI as a search engine and just like with altavista or google, it’s up to my own evaluation of the results and my own acumen with the prompt to get me where I want to be. Even then, I still need to pay attention and make sure what I have is relevant and useful.

I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever, but just like a photographer… a thousand shots only results in a very small number of truly amazing outcomes.

Gen AI can’t think for itself or for anybody, and if you let it do the thinking and end up with slop well… garbage in, garbage out.

At the end of the day right now two people can use the same tools and ask for the same things and get wildly different outputs. It doesn’t have to be garbage unless you let it be though.

I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today. I can’t babysit every single user’s every email, but it sure as hell can bring me a shortlist of things to look at. Something might get through, but before I had a tool a ton of shit got through, and we almost paid tens of thousands of dollars in a single bogus but convincing looking invoice. It went so far as a fucking bank account penny test (they verified two ach deposits) Four different people gave their approvals - head of accounting included… before a junior person asked us if we saw anything fishy. This is just one example for why gen AI can have real practical use cases.

Keep going. Handmade analog mediums only.

As long as the money keeps coming there won’t be any problems.

That’s always how it’s been!

Yeah the kushner share is a bribe to bypass regulatory oversight, didn’t you know?

Imagine having hundreds of millions of dollars, having this amazing creative vision, seeing staff under you getting fired… and remaining without resigning, publicly speaking out against the actions, or doing absolutely anything for the people under you.

But hey, I understand you simply disagree and think they are awesome. That’s great.

In my eyes it’s simple. His brother is not just an exec at rockstar, he’s the company president. They’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and both have been in positions to shape company policy especially around labor conditions within their subsidiary.

I can all but promise that a union busting culture is not new. The influence they’ve had as upper executives cannot be minimal, as these guys have been the ones making the golden goose.

Odds are both houser brothers are sitting on loads of take two stock. Their performance bonuses have probably been more money than anyone on here will ever make in their lives, their kids’ lives, or their grandkids’ lives collectively with few if any exceptions. The crunch time issues of the past are absolutely a symptom of the disease: fyigm. Why pay anybody or treat anybody fairly when you can just keep your money?

I’m not saying others are not also to blame, but anyone who is in a top leadership post at an organization usually has a massive amount of discretion especially for those under them.

fyigm, amirite?

60% of anticheat implementations need to be fixed. 682 total titles. https://areweanticheatyet.com/

You just need to convince developers of a handful of titles, like fortnite, apex, valorant, BF2042, bf6, rust, R6 siege, league of legends, call of duty 2025… should be easy right?

It’ll never happen. The ones who are fanatical about it like the rust guy believe carte blanche that linux support will only make cheating worse and not positively improve the community. He doesn’t care about linux sales, the windows ones throw so much dosh at him that there’s no “market force” incentivizing him otherwise.

When Linux market share hits 20% it would be a monumental achievement, and developers would probably still avoid it.

Don’t get me wrong, I moved to Linux this year. I want to see it gain traction in the gaming space.

It’s just not likely to happen any time soon. Loads of very basic use cases are a fucking shitshow because of a lot of reasons.

Just getting sunshine setup with a virtual display is a nightmare on Wayland without scripts to enable/disable displays and without being in front of the computer you want to remote to, because the simple logic of “if this display =off, then other display =on” is not a thing.

Still not going to convince some stubborn hold outs like the rust guy. Nothing will ever convince them.

I wasn’t one of those people who thought the switch 2 would fail though. I knew it would be a huge commercial success. Just like how every single zelda game that ever comes out will be a huge commercial success, same for pokemon, metroid, mario, and other titles with enormous multigenerational fanbases. They could release the worst game of all time and still get 9 figure revenues out of it from branding alone and reviewers would still slap a 8/10 or 9/10 on the game. At least nintendo generally isn’t another EA/sportsball/call of duty style yearly release churn like so many devs though. I’ll give them that.

Pokemon still sucks compared to Palworld or any number of other pokeclones that are less commercially successful due to lack of brand recognition. The last metroid game that isn’t a remaster was less than ten hours long, which also sucks.

The switch 2 is also the first console release in many years to not have extreme scarcity. It’s been less than a year and I can pickup at msrp a switch 2 today at the closest B&M stores to my house. I’m right by a major city and we’re usually the last ones to have stock available due to population density. It took years to be able to buy a ps5 at retail without getting very lucky. Not surprised that nintendo has made so many sales.

Will say though I have completely stopped using the switch 1 ever since I picked up a deck in 2023. Monthly active users for Steam have doubled since Jan 2020. https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/#6y - there are more pc gamers than ever, and we’re seeing consoles start to fade away it feels like, like the arcade cabinets before them. I don’t think steam will replace nintendo in any way, but I do think there is way more potential for growth on the PC side than the nintendo side.

I’m saying Zelda Breath of the Wild and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. I figured it was implied. Those are both goty tier flagship titles for the old switch.

I’m asking if you think donkey kong bananza lives up to those or surpasses those. DKB is a 18 hour game according to how long to beat. Everything else in the running costs less and/or has way more play hours.

Ah cool, so it’s better than say either of the Zelda games? since multiple releases this year seem to be on that tier.

I know it has high reviews but I am always doubtful it’s more of a hype review especially when people are desperate to justify their $500 hardware+game bundle purchase on top of their $70 20-hour game

I kind of figure death stranding too. It at least has sounded like it deserves to be up there even though it basically just fits in to the “ps5 exclusive” slot.

Blue Prince sounds like it’s the Myst of this generation too, but that kind of game just doesn’t draw appeal in modern times. Everything i’ve heard about it points to it being a game that way more people should probably try, but they just haven’t. Puzzle games rarely get mass appeal.

For me, I found it to be a beautiful work of art and a heartbreaking story about family.

It’s not a mass appeal title that absolutely everyone will love though. The game is not particularly easy and it takes time to develop the story.

Every time you get to the end of an act in Expedition 33 there is so much emotion. If you aren’t following the story, don’t get emotionally attached to the games you play and the stories of the characters, and aren’t patient enough to enjoy it then obviously it won’t be for you. That’s ok. It’s all art. They all mean different things to each one of us.

I’m confident we’ll get another hades, another silksong, another death stranding. I’m sure they’re all the very best representation of their iterative releases and worthy of the highest of praises too. I don’t even know how donkey kong got in the list though, maybe they are being manipulated to include a nintendo title in some way.

I don’t know if i’ll ever be as impressed by another title as I did by expedition 33. Baldur’s Gate 3 amazed me in other ways a couple years ago and it’s a huge feat. Before that for me it was Elden Ring, amazing for other reasons.

I haven’t started kingdom come deliverance 2 yet, and I never played the first one, so I don’t want to say too much. All of the impressions i’ve heard sound like it is very deserving though. My assumption is that this and Exp33 have been the two GOTY contenders, but we’ll see.

He’s just another billionaire. Probably just not the typical sociopathic ones or a narcissist.

Once he had enough money for everything he could ever need he could have devoted himself to building a self sufficient non-capitalist future for valve/steam with irrevocable covenants in its governance that are not manipulated by the next sociopath to take leadership of the company, like Altman is doing with OpenAI.

Point being, he might not be a sociopath like the majority of them, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, but he’s not a saint either.

There’s also the platforms moderation issues with shitloads of bigotry. Feels like a blind eye but maybe it’s just me. They could take a spare billion in profits, throw it into low risks stocks with dividends or bonds, and pay a team to moderate it out of that in perpetuity without affecting his business or his life like how college endowments work. That is unless the goal for him is still more billions.

Can’t resell a physical game with a key code like literally every steam/ea/epic/whatever DD platform that almost all devs pigeonhole you into though.

IMO physical transfer rules should apply to digital.

They’re marketing where it matters, to people who use their platform.

They sent out all the demo units for reviewers to hit the wider gaming audience on PC.

This stuff is never gonna convert console users who don’t already have steam accounts.

Physical game.

Aren’t over 50% of game sales digital? I thought Xbox was like 80%ish and ps5 like 70%ish digital, with Nintendo being closest to 50% and then PC being like 99% digital.

I wish this was a likely outcome but realistically steam hardware is too small a userbase. They are most likely to get performance profiles for their hardware due to the standardization and free steam marketing of compatibility, but windows users are still a supermajority.

There’s no display, no battery, no controller included, no OS fees… I think it could be cheaper than $800.

Because it’s all custom hardware we don’t really have a great basis for comparison. I’m going to guess that the cheapest variant will be something like $650. Doubt more than $700 though.

This absolutely must be a skin for the fucking thing. If they want to be baller they can include a handle that sticks on too.

The worst part are all the games that have anticheat that totally works fine on linux, but they simply don’t allow it to function in their game. At least there’s a list https://areweanticheatyet.com/

It can’t really replace mouse and keyboard though. Not unless developers start designing games to work that way, and these touchpads are exclusive to an ultraminority of the hardware market share. The deck gives you that virtual keyboard which kinda works with the touchpads but it’s not ideal.

There’s no shortage of amazing games that are fully compatible with controllers though, thankfully.

Btw have you tried a trackball? i’ve been using a thumb based one like a logitech M575 for the better part of 30 years, ever since I saw one at CompUSA. Professionally 100% of my time is spent with one, and I used to have top tier KDR in counter strike 1.X back in the day (though I use normal mice for gaming usually nowadays.)

I think there’s also some overall ignorance about how linux works with drivers too. They assume they’re going to have a steam deck-like experience that is easy and just works, but they don’t realize the valve chosen hardware’s drivers are built into the OS by valve.

Everybody wants an OS that “just works” - it’s the least interesting part of computing for users. It’s simply the thing that lets you actually do what you want to do with comptuers. Be it a HTPC, a console-like experience or something else. Drivers ruin all of it though especially when you’re bringing your own hardware.

I don’t see any likelihood that we’re gonna leave the existing driver-hell for a more streamlined experience either. It’s definitely gotten better over the years but for all of microsoft’s attempts at getting it to “just work” on their own OS, it constantly breaks. They released AMD drivers earlier this year with weird fucking versions that fucked people with AMD GPUs, requiring some manual intervention of DDU + Reinstalling a proper driver version. I’ve seen the same thing over and over again in userland for Intel graphics, intel audio and wifi and other popular and unpopular brands too. It’s one of the biggest reasons I swapped to linux, because there’s no fucking windows update lol.

Because normies can’t get Fortnite running easily on linux (afaik anyway), or other popular competitive titles like battlefield 6 or call of duty 2025 to run at all.

Most of the normies probably already have a console with some licenses that will carry over. PC gamers have a desktop system (often in addition to a console.) It’s just not the same.

Consoles just work. You don’t need to understand much. The deck has definitely not been a painless process but obviously it’s pretty good, especially if you stick to green checkmark titles. Having to research what games will work, how well they work, and how to make them work if not by default is too much for a lot of people.

I’m glad it’s coming though. More people running linux means better support overall from hardware vendors and software developers. Gaming on linux is in a great place today but it feels more like how gaming was 20 years ago where you sometimes have to look something up to get something working, and installing an OS is simply too much for a lot of people.

GPU performance, unknown OS compatibility issues, performance profiles for normies.

I love NUC like devices and I already run linux, but i’m confident the steamos implementation will just work on their hardware because they’re building it for it.

If you’re on an AMD GPU and not at least dual booting linux you’re missing out imo. Only a handful of competitive online games need windows for anticheat/drm.

Why do you want SteamOS and not just linux?

I swapped over to pop a couple months back and things just work. Gaming stuff outside of steam works too.

There’s other immutable distros for people afraid of messing up their system but in the modern world of flatpaks, lutris prefixes and wine/proton I have found I really don’t need to mess with my system too much. I find it hard to justify the immutability because of that.

I doubt SteamOS will ever support most hardware versions. Nvidia by itself is still not where they need to be on the linux side, and that’s the majority of gamers’ hardware today (and why all steam hardware is AMD gpu based.) Then there’s all the weird audio and network gear that has very limited support because a system integrator chose some oddball model or brand that nobody else uses.

~$25 for an 8bitdo ultimate 2c! The price is just too good. I know it doesn’t have TMR or the extra buttons, but it just works and feels really good to me compared to the xbox elite controller that got the shoulder button issue within 3 months for me.

The trackpads are unnecessary imo. Games made for controller aren’t going to expect the deck touchpads, they’re gonna expect xbox and playstation controllers without it. The touchpads just fit a very specific niche of people who want to play with the steam deck on a TV in games that are not fully controller supported and don’t have a keyboard and mouse paired for that use case. Always better to have options I suppose.

You didn’t do that though. I said for a competitor to come along that they would need to sink tens of billions of dollars, like uber did. I fail to see how this is a ridiculous statement. Epic being incompetent doesn’t have any relation to what a real competitor would need to do to gain a foothold with say a meager 25% of valve’s share.

Epic didn’t do enough to gain serious market share. They haven’t given up but I don’t see them making any inroads without further investment to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They literally need to build up their platform to be substantially cheaper (e.g. by offering subsidies) while also making it fit for use (by spending way more money on quality devs.) They haven’t… and nobody cares except folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor as justification for white knighting for valve. lol

Epic’s incompetence doesn’t matter to me. Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.

Fortnite makes exponentially more than their DD platform.

GOG is the closest thing to a competitor imo but their philosophy restricts them from really competing on day 1 game sales outside of a minority of titles.

Everybody else is a seller of adult games, indie titles, or simply a key seller for steam games.

285m in revenue is not 285m in profits. Their publishing deals with companies probably don’t leave much left for actual income, and i’d be surprised if they operate with profit if you exclude first party titles.

Anywho… Why are you so hyper focused on epic, and not the market as a whole?

They’re one company and everybody hates them. I don’t give a shit about them. GOG is rocking ~40m in 2024 revenue… and they have a bit of a unique offering with 0 DRM and offline installers. Their nature keeps developers away since there’s an assumption that without DRM you won’t sell anything.

What else is there that is even remotely relevant compared to steam? I don’t know of any for PC games (windows/linux/mac) - mobile may make more money but that’s a separate market.

I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.

Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.

“everything else is shitty so they aren’t any worse” is not an argument man

My steam account is from 2003. I’m vividly aware of the overall DD market and it’s changes over time from a user perspective. I was here before it existed like so many others.

The last really good alternative to steam we had was Stardock’s Impulse… which they sold out because brad’s a tool and couldn’t stand up a team internally that was separate from his game development aspirations. If he did, they would be as big as valve today. Instead we have more shitty elemental games and more shitty galciv games and all their DLC.

Anywho, you’re still fucked no matter how much you suck valve’s dick once they enshittify. Can you truly say they will not enshittify?

Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.

There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.

I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.

Potential enshittifications:

• Subscriptions. MBAs love them!

• Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.

• Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

My magic 8 ball says they’ll release an oled refresh to up the price $50-100 and not much else before switch 3, which is still many years away for either to happen.

As-is the thing has sold a ton despite no new games existing really.

The monkeypaw says they will stop updates for the java edition or release a new version that doesn’t work on the java edition.

They probably see how many sales are generated from the free work done by modders though. If someone wants to come along and do for free the thing you might have to actually pay designers, developers, artists and all the support staff for and they still need to pay you to play it, you’d be foolish not to encourage the exploitation of free labor.

MHWilds suffers from a lot of weird decisions.

I don’t like crossovers or scifi stuff in games that are supposed to be hardcore human-vs-dinosaur “monsters” - I know this is widely popular but it’s just offputting for me, a veteran from the OG PS2 release. I’ve played FFXIV and still have no interest in FF content in MH or any other game I play. It fits in games like smash bros though or other games that are all about crossovers, MH has never been that for me.

Also not much of a fan of the current implementation of open world. They could have done so much more, better things with it. You should be able to setup a hunting party and chain-hunt monsters and have rewards pile up for whenever you cash out with bonuses for sticking out beyond an initial hunt. They could have had hunts that include more than 4 players and even included a mode where it’s a competition between different hunting parties to rack up the most kills - with all players getting the rewards. There’s so many possibilities in this kind of open world, but as-is there’s little reason to engage with the open world at all. Even the story doesn’t utilize the open world elements effectively imo.

The forced story/tutorial with loads of unskippable content was infuriating. I’m so glad I finished the main story… I will never start over unless they patch in some way to skip all the childish reaction shots and other bullshit. I wasn’t a fan of Rise but being able to rush through the ranks was a better experience.

The performance doesn’t bother me so much because I have bleeding edge hardware but most of my friends are alienated. I do believe in modern games being able to deliver graphics settings that current hardware cannot support when all is enabled to the fullest - but you should also support a good looking quality setting that runs on older hardware, which this just doesn’t. The highest settings do not look great. It’s capcom’s own engine so there’s no excuse, it’s not like they’re some tiny indie studio using an off the shelf engine.

We also haven’t seen a new weapon type in a long time (charge blade and insect glaive in MH 4.) Why?

I suspect in a few years when the inevitable expansion drops accompanied by the next generation of GPUs and CPUs we’ll get some good framerates and a lot more content to help this shell of a game.

If game performance is what makes games better then consoles will never reach the heights of PCs.

Is anyone actually using glorious eggroll exclusively?

I usually swap between this, a cachyos version, and newer proton versions - but i’ve been finding more and more that GE doesn’t support things and cachyos versions typically just work. Not sure if it’s just my unique build or what others are going with in general.