
I can definitely understand why not selling a game on the most popular marketplace would detrimentally affect a studios ability to make money.
But a lot of the reason games aren’t successful has as much to do with the quality of the game and the amount of money spent developing it as it does with marketing. And plenty of developers/small indie studios assume that they can ouvert over-stretch themselves monetarily and with other resources like time, and still come out on top because Indies are becoming more popular.
But what it often comes down to is if what you’re selling is worth it to the consumer and they know about it. On steam an indie game is just as likely to get caught up in the influx of games and lost in the noise as it is to get noticed.
I believe it was their attempt to protect children from unknown people online. I have the app and one of the features is that you can talk to people online in certain games (Animal Crossing, Splatoon, SSB’s, Mario Kart, and I think Mario Party).
Edit: I’d also like to point out that those accessory mics didn’t work with first party games to my knowledge.
There was some public outcry about it specifically from parents who had to download said app and let their kids use it for games. You could later use accessories that would add a mic but it was limited.

Haven’t you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io’s whole schtick is selling indie games.
It’s nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren’t ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that’s Valve’s fault for reasons I have never understood.
It’s the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you’re fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There’s a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
I mean. Google literally just announced their new Aluminum OS. Like. 2-3 days ago I saw an article about it. Let me find it.
I see some suggestions on Reddit that it might be useable on phones. Nothing about that in the article so far as I read.

Technically not. But only technically. The only reason to allow side loading at all is to allow “experienced users” to put unverified apps on their devices. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to even make such a concession.
It looks like they’re going to have two different solutions: one for power users and one for hobbyists and students.
My main problem with this is twofold. They explain exactly nothing about how they achieve “experienced user sideloading”, they don’t explain what an “experienced user” is, and they don’t explain in any detail whether or not they’re going to allow sideloaded apps to be unverified.
The other part of the problem is that I don’t trust Google. There’s way too many instances of them backing down publicly from a decision they made and then implementing it in a different way over time.
The truth is this announcement doesn’t give us any details so all we can make are assumptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashoggi
The people who own the company that’s trying to buy EA are the people who ordered the assassination of Khashoggi.
Are there any updates for the vehicle’s unfortunately infotainment system?
Are there any updates for your phone?
Is your phone hooked up to Android Auto via physical cable or via Bluetooth?
Are there any settings on the vehicles infotainment system you can set or change?
Are you using a voice assistant like Gemini? If so, have you trained a voice model?

“VoLTE (Voice over LTE) is the feature that routes voice calls over a 4G LTE connection, a crucial function now that carriers worldwide are phasing out their 2G and 3G networks. Without it, you might not be able to make phone calls at all on many modern networks. Similarly, VoWiFi (Voice over WiFi) handles Wi-Fi calling, routing calls over a Wi-Fi network instead of cellular — a handy feature when you’re in a building with poor signal.”
Basically, some countries don’t have access to VoLTE or VoWIFI.
Since they don’t have official access they were using this to gain access (in places where pixel phones aren’t on the market/not sold in that country for instance).
If VoWIFi/wifi calling wasn’t available where I live I wouldn’t be able to use my cell phone to make and receive calls and texts while at home. My place is a dead zone.
Some places also have spotty 5G service. So VoLTE would work better in those areas too.

Nah. They literally billed the tablets to have features/functionality that didn’t work or wasn’t implemented not just at launch but a full year after the fact. I love tablets. Had both versions of the nexus 7.
But they keep trying to make tablets be other things instead of just making a tablet that’s useful for tablet things.
I loved reading on my nexus 7. The pixel tablet is a bit big for that. I like using it to watch movies or even just videos. Its pretty okay for that.
But all the effort went into smart features that would have been useful if they worked. But they didn’t work and google doesn’t seem to have even made strides to make them work. Finger print reader? Only useable with the primary account holder (so if you share this tablet the person or people you share it with can’t use the finger print reader to unlock their profile). Smart home features that were half broken because it doesn’t know whether it wants to use Gemini or google assistant. Smart home hub features that their own smart home hub from a previous generation far outpaces.
Google can’t just make a tablet and let it be a tablet and they aren’t trying to make a tablet that has feature parity with what IOS provides. I have never personally owned an iOS device but the ones I have used have apps that aren’t just scaled up phone apps.

They have applied for and received Patents in the US recently that pertain to their case against pocketpair
Nintendo obtained yet another just last week, it seems, as reported by Games Fray – and one yesterday. The new US patents include one related to a “smooth switching of riding objects” mechanism, and another that’s far more concerning, as it could change the way that non-Pokemon creature collectors work forever: a patent covering the summoning of a “character” (in Palworld’s case, that would be a Pal) and using it in combat against others.<

Off topic: As someone who just got a verbal reprimand at work for “language” due to having an outburst of irritation where an explosive expletive was used (which is a common enough occurrence in the hangar where I work), I’m seriously about to start auto censoring everything in the most gen Alpha way possible just to annoy the others.

He also sells a lot of his “good side” via short form videos on Tik Tok and YouTube etc. So when you only get a snippet or two of him talking or answering questions, and he seems like he’s encouraging people to learn to code or do game dev etc it sounds nice. It sounds like he’s being supportive of his audience. It seems like he’s just a dude. But when you get right down to it, that doesn’t bear out who he is, even his actual online persona in his long form content or streams.

I’m not sure they should be assuming that you’re going to install Bazzite with a windows partition still in place at all. So it’s less confusing and more streamlined (and I suppose novice friendly) to not include that. It’s more complicated to do the partitioning process (which their installer also doesn’t do and does provide a means for — gparted isn’t included in their installer for instance) so you’re relying on windows or other tools to even partition the drive in the first place.
Their tool is setup the way it is to make installing only Bazzite, and I’m not sure that adding extra options to it is going to make it more usable and understandable for someone who’s just starting out in Linux but can if the added utility is there.
The tool doesn’t give you options to really amend your install after the fact, add or remove features etc. But should it?
Edit: For charities clarity’s sake I’m going to point out that if you make a partition for it EFI boot you can use their tool to set that up but it involves going into advanced features and you still have to create those partitions (Linux partition separate from windows and EFI boot separate from windows EFI boot etc) in order to do so. If you do select advanced options you will get more information but it’s been awhile since I did this and I don’t remember specifics. I’ll check the guide probably sometime today and try to report back.

I find this annoying. I have three different 8bitdo controllers hanging around my house. I have the original 8bitdo sn30 pro, the pro plus, and the pro 2. After I bought the pro 2 they came out with the Xbox variant. The difference between the pro 2 regular and the pro 2 Xbox variant? The additional rear buttons on the Xbox variant work and are mappable in steam os. Where the ones on the original pro 2 are not. Do both of these controllers have the ultimate software? Yes. But unfortunately one of them doesn’t contain the hardware to make those physical buttons work as physically and programbaly different than the other buttons on the controller.
I can buy this. I could buy the Xbox variant pro 2. But I don’t want to have to keep buying essentially the same controller to get functionality it should have had in the first place.
For those who don’t know, this streamer is only tangentially related to the stop killing games petition because he made a comment about it being BS because he misinterpreted what it was supposed to do. He used his misinterpretation to spread false information about this petition leading to it not getting the support it initially should have.
When the guy behind the petition made a statement saying he didn’t think the petition was going to get enough signatures in part because of the misinformation being spread about it, PirateSoftware doubled down on his false claims and all of this lead to people doing the research they should have done in the first place and deciding to support the petition after all.
What we should probably be learning from this is that we should do our own research, and find out things instead of taking the word of random people online.
Edit: electric has brought to my attention that it wasn’t just one clip, but in fact a whole video dedicated to spreading misinformation that was made by Thor from PirateSoftware. Just wanted to be clear about that.
Yeah I saw. There were a lot of complaints from consumers about the features that existed in the 3DS/other DS’s that didn’t exist in the switch including this one. Pretty sure they started rethinking the idea that they were only marketing to kids after that. And even then I think those people have to be your actual friends on the switch 2 rather than just random people.