Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there's a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won't install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they've had to change their incentives from "we'll give you a huge lump sum that's about equal to what you'd have made with a successful Steam launch" to "well we'll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam". Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
Personally I'm hoping 1030 isn't even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn't need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there's no reason to think they'd fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship "standard" unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.
There's no such thing as a "Linux PC" though. A PC is a PC. Your PC can run Starfield with proton, or it can run it by installing windows, or it can run it by putting it in a windows VM.
Even if a game can only run on Windows and Xbox (say one of those GAAS shits that has invasive anti cheat), that's not an exclusive either. It runs on more than one platform. There's a developer endorsed way to buy the product on more than one platform. Exclusive means one platform - you can't buy and play the game unless you own one specific device.
I don't think there's currently evidence that this new "Deck" is a Deck at all. Releasing a standing console box with the Deck's internals but better cooling, ethernet and better wifi, HDMI/DP out, 3.5" SSD support, and SteamOS 3.5, but no screen / integrated controls / battery would make a lot of sense for Valve. And I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't probably buy one - the docked Deck has been fantastic in that role. It would probably be cheaper than the Deck since durability, battery, and screen are all likely expensive investments for them on the actual Deck.
Steam Machines failed because there wasn't a successful base model for companies to clone, and because Big Picture mode sucked. The modern Deck UI and UX are on par with Sony/MS/Nintendo's and you get to sell the console as "it works with the controllers you already have and the games you already bought".
I grabbed my first nzb from drunkenslug, but Google results for an nzb client seem to be SEO-spammed and full of clients that are their own indexing platforms. Is nzbget good? It's the only one I could find that doesn't look like it's trying to sell me something.
People already mentioned VVVVVV here, so I'll go with the classics angle: the Donkey Kong Country series has phenomenal music and super tight platforming. Difficulty is a bit on the low side compared to something like Celeste, but there's absolutely a mastery curve.
This includes Returns for Wii/3DS and Tropical Freeze for Wii U/Switch.
People would have to buy and refund this one to bomb it, versus overwatch which was f2p. It'll probably settle at "mixed" or "mostly positive" until blizzard does something to try to squeeze more purchases out of the playerbase again.
Pokémon is an exclusive because you have to pirate it / break the console's DRM to play it on PC. Also, Proton and Wine are explicitly not emulators - that's actually what WINE stands for (Wine Is Not an Emulator). Starfield is natively available for more than one platform and not only does the Proton compatibility layer handle it but it's being sold on Valve's store and the top played game on the completely Windows-free Deck. Games that are released on one console and PC aren't exclusives. God of War just isn't on xbox and Starfield just isn't on Playstation.
Do you need to buy a console to play it legally? If no, it's not a game exclusive to that console. I have a PC. I can't play exclusives like Demons Souls Remake without buying Sony's $500 DRM machine. I can play non-exclusives like Starfield without buying Microsoft's $300 DRM machine.
Linux runs Starfield with no problems. If it's on a computer and doesn't use restrictive DRM to control how and under which circumstances you run the software, it's not an exclusive. Microsoft doesn't have exclusives anymore, which is a giant pro-consumer move that doesn't get enough applause in the gaming community. That doesn't mean they need to develop stuff for one specific DRM box owned by their biggest competitor to be "anti-exclusive".
The part that makes it confusing is that all of that also applies to a stiffer open-world western RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Nobody's calling Skyrim (or more recently Starfield) an immersive sim. Half-Life often gets included and that game is completely linear and your three interaction choices for combat are "shoot with gun (including wacky woohoo gravity gun)", "whack with crowbar", or "sneak/run past".
Is Elden Ring an immersive sim?
Honestly, the defining thing that modern "immersive sims" have that "rpg shooters" don't is usually just "physics gun". Gravity gun from HL, goo gun from prey, telekinesis in Dishonored. Sure it lets you "use the environment" instead of just shooting the zombie with a bullet, but you're often just using the environment as a bullet.
That's about using emulators in retail mode which nobody with half a brain thought was gonna stick around. You pay $20 to unlock developer mode and do all your emulation stuff in there. Retail is for playing actual xbox games.
So there was no way for individual servers (chat rooms?) to disable the anti cheat and let people "steal" models and potentially crash other users, but also benefit from the variety involved with mods?
I don't run anything on the server because I don't need to. I have my home server mounted as a network drive in Windows, so I just point Kopia's database at a folder in there. It's stored as an encrypted backup, and I've got the config for Kopia backed up in a few places (and the encryption key as well) so if the worst case scenario happens to my PC I'll just reinstall Kopia on a fresh windows install + HDD, restore the config from the backup, then restore the backup.
I also have a backup target to an older 8TB drive that I leave with a friend and update whenever he visits for extra safety, if my whole apartment with my PC and server burns down I'll at least be able to have an outdated snapshot and lose only a month or so instead of decades.
pory @ pory @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 269Joined 2 yr. ago
It's more or less a stage in Smash Bros Brawl for some reason.