Yeah, all they need to rake in direct profits from the MS store and especially gamepass lock-in is to make it easier to do that than install software through other means. Don’t forget though, even if it’s possible to buy this WinXbox and completely remove Windows from it for SteamOS or Bazzite (unlikely), MS still gets to sell controllers and accessories for the thing. And also, just like installing Linux on a laptop or ad-ridden Smart TV homepages, most users are going to use it out of the box. Anything that’ll require plugging in a keyboard will immediately gate out any chance of a majority of users not using xbox storefront/gamepass/etc on this thing.

It’s also Microsoft. Their video games division is tiny compared to their business sector and other arms. Taking losses in video games just to push the concept of “windows is good and open!” harder to normies (you and i on fucking lemmy know that “more open than a nintendo switch” is a low bar to clear and Windows is far from “freedom”) might be worth it to the shareholders. After all, they spend how many billions on advertising every year and that’s a direct loss in exchange for more consumer awareness of their products. It could also be a targeted tactic to just obliterate Sony as a competitor in the console space. Sell something cheaper and stronger, with more games including your already-paid-for Steam games on it and compare that to vendor lock-in for the PS6? Where the PS6 only has timed exclusivity on most first-party games and the occasional Astro Bot style exclusive? Can’t even be open to anti-trust if they do nuke Sony, because they can just point at Nintendo selling a donkey kongillion Switch 2s in the same exact market space.

So imagine an Xbox Series X that’s also as open as a Steam Deck. Or, to put it simply, imagine a gaming PC with a comfortable couch layout, sold at a much cheaper price point than it’d be as a laptop/desktop because Microsoft can afford to sell it at (or below) cost of parts to push Gamepass subs and adherence to the Windows ecosystem. Mods, your existing Steam / Epic / GOG / pirated libraries. Assuming it’s not locked down, it’s the first time I’ve considered owning an Xbox product since the 360.

Don’t forget, an Xbox that’s just a PC is an Xbox that gets all of Sony’s cutscene hallways too. And all of Nintendo’s games through emulation. And the entire Steam library, and hell since it’s Windows (and thus plays nice with rootkit DRM) it’s a console that runs League of Legends. A console that runs world of warcraft if you want. A console that gets day zero access to those cool indie games on Itch. A console that’s immune to port beggars every time something like Balatro drops PC-first. That’s a console someone’s gonna buy, unlike the XSX which is a console with no exclusives (vs PC) and also doesn’t have the PC’s multiple storefronts and compatibility with your existing libraries and mods.

“why do you have a playstation instead of just a gaming pc in your living room?” Has very legitimate answers other than “i like sony exclusives”. More technical setup. Worse controller UI. More expensive. Bigger. Bulkier. Needs research to determine best parts. Doesn’t have the seamless ability to boot the system from the couch with a controller. All of these could be handled by an MS-backed PC-in-Xbox-Clothing. Yes, they could also (except price point) be handled by a well-researched custom build, but bringing PC to the living room for the kind of person that doesn’t know what an OS is would be a pretty big deal.

The ideal outcome (that’ll never happen) is a PS6 that is a PC. But shareholders would never go for tearing down a walled garden ecosystem. At least not when they can wait for MS to do it first and prove it does/doesn’t work.

Do you know how easy it would be, if money was not transferred, for the new and old owners to both outright say so? Yes they could also lie but that’s irrelevant. if this wasn’t a capital driven transaction, they’d assuage many fears by telling us it wasn’t. They haven’t done that.

The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.

+1 for Walmart Onn, very easy to debloat and degoogle, supports SmartTubeNext, S0undTV (Twitch), Jellyfin, Plex, whatever else you want.

Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.

So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.

The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.

People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.

The GAAS crashouts are the modern equivalent. Shareholders were sold the idea of “our own Fortnite! Infinite money forever!”. What they got was Concord. Anthem. Marathon. There’ll still be cash-grab GAAS out there, but eventually investors are going to put it together that it’s not a safe gamble.

But unlike the ET “moment”, video games as an industry, product, and art medium are here to stay. Making the things is too accessible now for the entire concept to ever be at risk again. The ET moment didn’t just threaten Atari, it threatened the concept of home consoles. Trying to imagine a single steaming pile of shit or even industry trend “threatening video games” now is like imagining a movie so bad that it kills cinema. Even if every single shareholder-backed games studio got rugpulled tomorrow, there are plenty of other studios out there to pick up the slack.

I’d take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple’s walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can’t just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into “gadgets” instead of “computers” with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).

Meanwhile, Epic’s greatest evil that affects me is that I don’t play some video games because they’re exclusive to Epic’s store, and also some video games are worse because it “just makes too much financial sense” for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple’s doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.

With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.

Well, you have to buy the game to try launching it without Steam. Or ask someone who did, of course. It’d be nice to know before buying.

Do note that the default shortcuts Steam uses are Steam dependent - they’re “steam://” addresses that tell Steam to load the game, not shortcuts to the game’s raw executable.

Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.

And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.

If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.

Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.

I dunno about that. Plex has lots of market share and plenty of “well I bought the pass when it was $60/$90” people aren’t gonna be personally affected by them locking more and more functionality behind the pass. So they’ll keep using it and recommending it and talking about it, and the centralized account management stuff (which Jellyfin won’t copy, because not having that is the point of selfhosting) will always be more convenient than setting up VPNs or other tools like external auth for Jellyfin sharing over the internet.

Discourse about this everywhere always boils down to the same comment: “I bought the plex pass and honestly I’d do it again for $300 just to not deal with handling my own authentication system, plex remote play Just Works”. Or something like “I refuse to use a $20 HDMI android TV box instead of my ad-ridden smart TV or PlayStation 5, and those don’t have apps for JF”. These guys are literally in this thread, on Lemmy, the Reddit for people so FOSS-friendly they use Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Yes, that is correct. It’s because the people that read the email only, or read the email and click one (1) link, are likely to be less familiar with Plex as a platform than the server owner. Plex the company would very much like people to pay them $7 a month forever for literally nothing.

but it’s not, because “i got it so cheap for $60 ten years ago / $90 five years ago / $120 yesterday” and “securely opening a port and enabling OAuth for jellyfin takes more than one click”.

The “lifetime” Plex Pass was a genius marketing move, because people are permanently inertia-locked into the cost they sunk. For nearly a decade now the refrain is “I just have a Plex pass. I bought it for $30 less than its current cost and it works great for me, sucks that it’s now $90/$120/$240 but IMO it’s worth it :)”. Don’t forget that making you pay $60 or $90 or $120 or $240 to use your own GPU for hardware encoding was always a scumware tactic, even if they put up a $15/mo subscription next to that one-time cost so that the one-time cost looks like “a good deal”.

It’s scummy advertising, yes. Designed to prey on a Plex server operator’s likely-less-tech-literate users.

Yes, they’re being advertised to. In theory this is because they might be clients for non-Pass servers in addition to yours. In practice, Plex could easily verify Plex client accounts that don’t run a server or have access to non-Pass servers and skip sending this marketing email to those accounts. What they’re doing is trying to convince your users they need to pay a sub fee (even though they don’t), because it’s free money in Plex’s pocket if the users do click the thing and say “welp, still cheaper than netflix”

Any users of your plex-pass verified server do not need to pay anything to keep streaming it. You had to pay a lot more for the lifetime or subscription to enable it, but by doing so any users you share with don’t need to pay a dime. You reading this press release and seeing your users get emails and assuming that your users now need to pay for something isn’t you being stupid, it’s the intended result of their deliberately confusing messaging. One user shrugging and saying “guess it’s $7/mo now” is free money for the company.

Mihon is great right up until you’re trying to read ultra high quality manga with screentones. Mihon doesn’t have modern scaling algorithms, so anything significantly larger than your screen resolution will moiré like crazy.