I am very much on Team PC for video games, but the fact that consoles are a closed, locked-down system — something I typically think of as a drawback — can be a real strength for some game applications.

If you want to play a competitive multiplayer video game on a level footing, you don’t want people modifying the software on their system to give them an advantage. There are all sorts of companies with intrusive anticheat software on PC trying doing a half-assed job trying to make an open system work like a closed one. The console guys have more-or-less solved this.

And then there’s the hardware aspect. There is an entire industry on the PC selling “gamer” hardware that aims to give a player some degree of an edge. Higher resolution monitors with faster refresh rates driven by rendering hardware that can render more frames. Mice that report their position more-frequently. Hardware with extra buttons to invoke macros. A lot of that industry is built around figuring out ways to inject pay-to-win into competitive multiplayer video games.

I’m pretty sure that the great majority of video game players do not really want pay-to-win in the competitive multiplayer video games that they play. Consoles simply do a much better job there.

Now, if you take competitive multiplayer out of the mix, then suddenly the open hardware and software situation on the PC becomes an advantage. You can mod games to add features and content and provide a more-immersive experience. It means that I can play all sorts of older games and have a experience that improves over time when doing so.

But a lot of people do want to play competitive multiplayer games, and unless something major changes, consoles have a major area where they are simply better-suited to gaming.

Two ways that it might change:

• If single player gaming displaces competitive multiplayer. My guess is that single player games with sophisticated video game AI will tend to increasingly encroach on that, though not overnight. Multiplayer saw one huge boost in the past two decades or so, which was widespread, high-bandwidth low-latency network access. But I think that that’s probably a one-off. I can’t think of any huge future multiplayer-specific improvements like that that will come along. And I can imagine a lot of future improvements to video game AI.

• If PCs get some sort of locked down trusted computing environment, probably with its own memory and processor, that runs alongside the open emvironment. Basically, part of a console in a PC.

But absent one of those, I think that there are going to be gaming areas where the console excels that the PC does not.

US spending on video game consoles fell 27% last month, marking the worst November in two decades as tariffs and rising component costs pushed prices to record highs.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/05/trump-defends-toy-tariffs/83455040007/

Then Trump suggested children are capable of cutting back on a basic school supply: pencils.

“No, I’m not saying that,” Trump when asked whether Americans can expect to see empty store shelves in the future. “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

Nonetheless, Trump disputed that his comments should be interpreted as an acknowledgement that prices for Americans are going to increase as a result of his sweeping universal tariff on products imported to the United States.

“No. I think tariffs are going to be great for us because it’s going to make us rich,” Trump said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0fEyMPhDk0

We’re going to become so rich we’re not going to know where to spend all that money.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1720%2C7569%2C3839&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Games on Steam with tags Dungeon Crawler, First-Person, and Grid-Based Movement sorted by user rating.

[email protected]

Have you played the existing Legend of Zelda titles? I mean, there are a ton of them. Even if you stop at Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda

IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).

I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.

Oh, gotcha, good point.

I think that it’s the other way around — he’s fine with using a controller, is unhappy with the mouse.

Though if someone does want to play first-person shooters on a gamepad, I understand — I’ve never done it myself, that the preferred route by people really serious about the gamepad is the gyro-using flick stick. I understand that Steam Input plus appropriate configuration can provide support for it to games that don’t natively support it, and the WP article says that there’s some kind of direct support that went into Steam Input a few years back that I hadn’t been aware of.

If you’re playing PC games on a TV from a couch — I’m just guessing here, but if you’re (a) using a gaming controller and (b) having difficulty seeing the aiming cursor, I’m wondering if that might be the case — one other issue you might run into with PC games is FOV.

It’s pretty normal for FPSes (I haven’t looked at third-person shooters, though I assume that the same is true) to have something of a fisheye lens effect, because the monitor actually represents only a small portion of your visual arc, yet you want to let the player see something comparable to what the character would. Even more true for a TV (bigger, but also usually so much further away that it is a smaller portion of the visual arc) than a monitor.

https://expertbeacon.com/do-humans-have-120-fov/

Research shows the average person sees about 135 degrees horizontally per eye. Stitch our binocular vision together, and we get approximately 114 degrees of FOV.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Field_of_view_(FOV)

• PC games should be designed with a high FOV of around 85-110 because players normally sit closer to their display.
• Console games should be designed with a lower FOV of around 55-75 because their players usually sit further from a display; normally the distance between a couch and a TV.

Usually there’s still going to be some fisheye lens effect (the FOV setting is higher than the actual portion of our visual arc that the display takes up), but it’s not so dramatic as to make people nauseous or look weirdly distorted.

You can typically fiddle with the FOV setting in PC games, but games are also gonna be balanced for one FOV, so if you crank your FOV in a PC game down, it may make the thing more-difficult than the game designers intended.

I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse

You might also consider, if you’ve never tried one, using a trackball. Might be a benefit outside of just games, too, if you’re using a PC. There are some people who really strongly prefer them and dislike mice for various reasons (including some people who find mice to be more-problematic for some sort of repetitive stress injury they have).

I prefer a mouse as pointing device, but one can’t really use one if lying on a couch or in bed or something, and I keep a trackball around that I sometimes use in those cases.

Trackballs aren’t as common these days as a mouse alternative, given that laptops with trackpads have become more-prevalent, but I’m more accurate with one than with a trackpad, and if I couldn’t use a mouse, I’d probably spend a lot more trackball time.

We do have a trackball community here: [email protected]

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=3814&controllersupport=28%2C60&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Steam list of third-person shooters sorted by user rating for which controllers are preferred or full controller support is present.

I was gonna say that he might simply not have been around when Red Alert 2 came out, but

https://www.whitepages.com/name/Samuel-Sott-Axon/Los-Angeles-CA/Pl8a1drMk8b

40s Age Range

So he’s gotta be born no later than 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert_2

Release: NA: October 25, 2000

So he couldn’t have been younger than 15 at the game’s release (and could have been as old as 25).

That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won’t have been born when it was released. Can’t just assume any more.

I actually think that, while it’s maybe a fun topic for idle conversation…it doesn’t have a huge impact in the way traditional console pricing normally does.

With a traditional console, what the console vendor chooses to do on hardware is what you get. Maybe, as with Microsoft on the Xbox Series X/Series S, you get a high and low end model, but that’s as much choice as you get. All the games are made for that hardware, and whether the platform lives and dies depends on it.

But…that’s not really true of the Steam Machine. It’s just another PC, albeit preconfigured for Steam and HTPC-oriented. If you want to get a lower-end PC or a higher-end PC, you have the option of getting one and plugging it into a TV and running the same games on it and save some money or with a bit more visual bling. The games for PCs are already more or less written to scale up and down with hardware.

And it’s not like Valve’s platform is gonna live or die based on the Steam Machine the way a traditional console generation is, where success of a hardware console is high-stakes for the manufacturer and the players in successfully getting a game library going. I’d guess that it might help Valve make strategic inroads into gaming in the living room. But even if it completely bombs, Valve is gonna keep right on selling games to people to run on PCs (and the Deck) and their huge game library isn’t going anywhere.

In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.

It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).

Valve willing to sell at a loss

I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.

Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?

Two reasons.

1. They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.

2. They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.

You could probably put a 400 Wh powerbank in a backpack (search for “power station” on Amazon).

depending on their sales expectations they could legit make this a loss leader.

I don’t think they will. The problem is that the hardware is open.

Closed-system console vendors can sell at a loss because if you’ve bought the console and don’t buy games from them for it, you’re going to have limited use of it. It’s maybe an expensive Blu-Ray player or something. Not a sensible purchase. You’re gonna buy games for it.

So they can just crank up the price of games and make their return over time from games.

But if the Steam Machine is sold at a loss, then people will also buy it to use it as a regular mini-PC, and Valve doesn’t make a return from them.

Ah, gotcha, so it’s middleman overhead. Thanks.

https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

Thanks, but I don’t think that it’ll do it for me. I’ve tried similar packages before, and the problem is that I also want the ability to input a bunch of Unicode characters and use keys in terminal emulators and so forth. Even Anysoft Keyboard, which I’m presently using, is occasionally lacking, and it’s pretty comprehensive. I’ve considered doing a soft keyboard myself, even, but I just can’t work up the will to go develop for Android with Google slowly closing some stuff. I think that my long-run trajectory is to move what I can to a Linux laptop and hope that GNU/Linux phones eventually become a practical alternative to Android.

That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on thr Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.

I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/

The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.

Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.

I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?

I’ve seen other people request SteamOS-as-a-general-OS on here too, which also surprised me.

I’m thinking that it’s one of two things:

• People just want something that they’re sure is easy to use.

• People want an HTPC-oriented configuration.

I have it off on my phone at the moment because my soft keyboard is enaging in shennanigans, and I will say that I didn’t appreciate how many errors that I make on tiny phone keyboards that it fixes until now. I mean, damned if you do, damned if don’t.

The steam machine sounds intriguing but there is already a big market for mini PCs and I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box. I’m most skeptical about this one

You might not be the target audience. I’m comfortable building an HTPC and putting an OS and all on it and configuring it, but the benefit of a console is that someone just gets an all-in-one setup that works out-of-box. Well, and that game developers are specifically testing against.

Like, if it weren’t a barrier, you’d probably just have everyone using PCs instead of consoles in their living room. Might open the gates to let console-only folks do Steam.

stressed

I think maybe based on the rest of your comment, you intended to write “addressed”?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/games/815061/valve-steam-controller-hands-on-deck-frame-machine

Dang. The new Steam Controller has a D-pad, buttons, thumbsticks, gyros, and trackpads.

And the thumbsticks are TMR (like Hall effect, but nicer).

As long as it’s comfortable to reach all that stuff, that’s gonna be a new bar for PC game controllers.

EDIT: and grip sensors.

EDIT2: and four haptic feedback motors, two in the trackpads.

I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that’s an important element of how humans interact with each other — provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn’t want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.

kagis

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So they could develop their own “fake” accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm — I imagine that that’s probably its own industry.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood — you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a “fake account”, and I don’t think that I’d consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn’t rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.

If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.

They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.

An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that’s meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.

The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.

The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.

What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:

Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent “was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future,” and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.

“This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way,” Beresnev said. “We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused.”

https://www.trapplan.com/about-us

Trap Plan by The Numbers

We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate 
with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok

2023 Trap Plan Founded

$10M+ Sold Games

20+ Clients in 2024

The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.

Poem_for_your_sprog

https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/

That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.

The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.

I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.

Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.

I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:

• More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.

• More missions on existing map.

• More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.

• A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.

• The city changing more over time and in response to game events.

So I’m playing Outer Worlds 2 instead rn.

Oh, thanks. I didn’t know that that was out until you mentioned it.

I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.

Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Forever

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.

That’s a quarter-century ago now.

It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.

Almost as long.

I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.