Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou two. Always raising the bar, humour-wise.

HAHAHAHAHA! I see what you did there!

Alas, I have nothing else to add - I think we've run this joke into the ground.

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Quoting: StoneColdSpiderIt might be a Marathon....... But is it a Racer???.......

Now I'm snickering.

Anyway, good to see the Marathon series being kept in circulation!

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Well, it's not like Nintendo are inclined to make more Zeldas like this now that they've taken the series in an entirely different direction! Good on these guys for continuing on with something that there's still plenty of demand for.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeYou should buy one of these! https://www.shop.apollo-computer.com/ Amiga platform, they're currently working hard on getting Atari ST platform supported, and the Amiga side already can outperform emulating a mac classic as well!

I've never heard of these before! What are they, exactly?

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Quoting: KimyrielleThe excuse typically is something like "Because Linux users are evil h4xx0rs and because open source is insecure by definition! Only closed-source operating system can ever be trusted."

I always love it when they say that there aren't enough of us to be worth supporting and that we account for the majority of cheaters in their multi-million-user Windows games, in the exact same breath.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: PenglingI was never fooled by that whole attempt to paint the "AAA" label as representing good quality, when it's self-evidently always represented buggy, unfinished experiences

That's not at all what it means. "AAA" means "likely to make money" by analogy with the bond market. Blockbuster big-budget games with a variety of well-established mechanics, ideally as a tie-in to a popular brand or a sequel to a previously-lucrative game, are the safe bets that the industry has discovered over the years, since they'll draw in the widest audience. And since some people get addicted to gambling (which is very lucrative - ask the mafia) having mechanisms to hook some whales is also a safe bet for making money. And, yes, when you're min-maxing revenue you'll want to maximise non-refunded sales for the minimum of QA outlay. The term has never meant good quality.

Aye, I'm aware. That's why I said "that whole attempt to paint the "AAA" label as representing good quality" - and that certainly is a thing that happened, regardless of the term's true meaning, and there remain plenty of gamers out there who believe that it pertains to quality.

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Quoting: PyrateThat's basically been me these past couple years, a mix of emulation and generally older titles I missed out on. It's a good life; you'll probably never run out of good games, and your backlog will remain enormous for years to come.

Same here!

Modern gaming has offered me relatively little for an extremely long time - and it's not that my tastes are all that unusual, it's just that they're not what makes headlines and social-media buzz about DLC and subscriptions so that the publishers can milk people for more money.

My favourite series is Bomberman (it's the one and only series where I'm there for launch, because the games are dependable and complete, and I know what I'm getting), and the modern entries have proven themselves to be profitable multi-million sellers, but being brutally honest here, I accept that if Konami doesn't step it up with the marketing sometime soon*, then even that series will go away sooner or later, given what's likely to happen in the gaming space. I don't want that to happen, but I would be a fool if I didn't prepare for that possibility.

*They are seriously missing a trick here - they've got trademark filings covering merchandising and a streaming-show, both of which the series in its modern form is perfectly suited to, and yet they're not doing anything of the sort!

Quoting: PyrateThere's nothing especially important in getting the latest and the "greatest" of games if you think about it, once you wrap your head around that concept and ditch that FOMO feeling, you realise time doesn't amount all that much to art, and graphics aren't even close to being everything in a game.

You're preaching to the choir, friend! I was never fooled by that whole attempt to paint the "AAA" label as representing good quality, when it's self-evidently always represented buggy, unfinished experiences, and I've never had any fear of missing out, because an awful lot of games simply aren't aimed at me anymore (and for the sorts of things that I like, as long as good art-direction is in play, the graphical requirements really haven't changed in 20 years and rightly have no reason to).

To be quite honest, even way earlier than that I was never impressed by "It's 3D! And you can RUN AROUND IN IT!", either - it takes more than that to make a good game, regardless of format. And don't even get me started on folks who say that they want to get into the games industry and then proclaim "I've written the story and come up with all of the characters already!" but then give you a blank look when you ask about their dream game's rules, mechanics, and goals, or how everything will be structured and balanced.

... Man, now I sound like I need to go and tell a bunch of damn kids to get off my lawn.

Anyway, hopefully this stuff will lead to more activity in the emulation section of the GOL forums!

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Quoting: slaapliedjeTime to fire up those Amigas, Atari STs or DOS systems and play the loads of games that released for them that you never had time to get to! Or even the loads of new games that have been coming out for them!

With how the industry is going to have to lie in the unsustainable bed that it's made for itself, I'm currently preparing for an emulation-heavy approach to gaming in the future until things right themselves again, so I'll certainly be checking out the new stuff alongside revisiting old favourites and digging into stuff that passed me by!

Quoting: PhlebiacI don't know if there are newer stats available, but anecdotally I think tablet use peaked around then, and has declined a lot since.

Edit: here's some recent browser stats, which have it at around 2%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet

I didn't look exhaustively, but I think it peaked at less than 7%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2014

And was already on the decline when mobile overtook desktop
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2016

I struggled to find more recent ones because I didn't know where to look - many thanks for digging those up.

It's still just as sad of a picture, though, since for all intents and purposes "Mobile" and "Tablet" are the same thing here, with people opting to use phones and tablets (all running the same mobile OSes) interchangeably for internet tasks, instead of PCs - when you put the two together, you get 60% of the market in favour of the mobile/tablet side (with an unknown amount of the PCs also being portables themselves, I'm sure).

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Quoting: artixbtwThe original Switch was announced back in 2015??! O_O

Time flies.

No, it wasn't - that's a bit of gaslighting on Nintendo's part, there. It was announced at the end of 2016. They merely confirmed that a successor to the Wii U was close to completion in 2015.

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QuoteTo me, handheld gaming like this is the future. You may think I am heavily biased, and in many ways I am (obviously, I run this website) but I'm a tech-fan. I have a PlayStation, a Switch, an Xbox and more. But it feels increasingly weird to have a dedicated solid box permanently attached to a single TV. I actually don't like that at all now. Being able to take a much smaller device with you to play anywhere, and additionally have the ability to hook it up to a TV whenever you want just feels so much better. Nintendo definitely had the right idea, as did Valve.

They made the right moves, and the reason this happened is because the gaming market was quite strongly portables-leaning for some years before that.

People forget this or try to pretend that handheld consoles "aren't consoles", which is thoroughly illogical, but for the longest time, the front-runner in the previous console-generation was not the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 (which eventually took the lead), but the Nintendo 3DS. And its forerunner, the Nintendo DS, is a very close second for the best-selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2, and some figures I remember seeing some years ago (so I'm afraid I don't have them to hand anymore!) suggested that the DS had in fact overtaken the PS2 around 2012 or 2013, if I recall correctly (I remain unsure if they were slightly off-base, or have been buried by folks who don't want to accept that handhelds are consoles and one of them outsold the PS2, hahaha ).

Meanwhile, PC sales have been declining since 2012, with these figures from 2016 painting a rather sad picture, along with a note that by 2014, tablets accounted for 40% of the home-computing market.

Quoting: grigiThe 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.

Quoting: Liam DaweIt's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.

But even so, the Switch is very close to becoming the best-selling console of all time globally (it's currently third, with the top three being very close together), with it having been such in some countries for several months now, so it hasn't hurt it that much! (It's also been more profitable than all of Nintendo's other consoles combined .)

Quoting: ToddLMy take on this is that I won't buy the Switch 2 because the Steam Deck still satisfies my gaming without whatever restrictions that Nintendo likes to do with their console. Also, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm not giving anymore money to them for all the crap they've been pulling for decades on and even their games do nothing for me nowadays.

They lost me and I will NEVER go back. And that's really saying something, as I used to play some of their games competitively and was extremely invested in their ecosystem - not the sort of customer that you want to drive out, but by God, Nintendo found a way of course, and I'm all the better off for it. Good riddance.

Going by all of the rumours about the Switch 2's specs and Nintendo's own official statement that the Switch's successor is less like a new console and more like a souped-up "next model" of the same product (noteworthily using the very same language that they used to describe the ill-fated Wii U), I don't imagine that we'll need a revised Steam Deck for a long time yet.

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