Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.

Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).

Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.

There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:

1. Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.

2. There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.

It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.

It has no meaning. It’s a meme purely for the sake of being a meme.

Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.

The hardware has to break even. The software already has.

Don’t forget aggressive rent-seeking behavior.

They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.

I have that and an ‘OnLive founding member’ T-shirt that I wear to tech events. Especially when I suspect there’s going to be something tone-deaf getting launched.

I got both for free.

Your standards are weird. Several of these games are considered the current pinnacle of their genres.

It’s not just Microsoft any more though. Practically any time you have a prompt for something in software/web pages that benefits the company, the only options are ‘yes’ and ‘maybe later’. It’s become so ubiquitous that I’m genuinely surprised when a prompt like that actually has a ‘no’ option.

The implication is that they’ll have to jump ship to Linux, and thus become a member of the unixsocks community.

If the server runs a significantly cut-down rendering model, you can do things like culling player models when you can’t see them. No more wallhacks.

Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.

It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.

AND it’ll be a self-contained headset. Want to play Beat Saber? Just put it on and hit the power button, no computer needed.

Want to play Alyx with an actually decent framerate? Just power on your main gaming computer and plug in the wireless dongle, and you can leverage the beefier GPU.

I’m excited for it.

The original Steam Controller has become my go-to HTPC controller any time I have a PC hooked up to a TV. It’s great.

This is a straight-up improvement. As long as the D-pad is good, it’s going to become my #1 way to interact with any computer that I’m not sitting at a keyboard for.

Even if the D-pad isn’t good, I might just hack it apart and put microswitches in it.

I have four of them, and I agree completely.

Then it’s not actually running games at 4K, now, is it?

SteamOS, the trackpads that drastically increase the breadth of games that are reasonable to play on it, AND the price-to-performance ratio that blows nearly everything else out of the water.

You’re not wrong; it’s possible that the SM will see a longer lifespan than its specs suggest. I do think it’s more likely to get bumped in less time than the SD though.

The trouble is that, despite noticing that everything else is a lie, they still believe that ICE is only deporting people who ‘deserve it’, rather than paying any attention to the constant reports of ICE throwing people who are legally in the USA in vans and disappearing them.

FYI the way to get around updates deleting everything is to build a flatpak with the things you want, and then install that.