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There are people not using the official flatpak? Geez ...

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Quoting: HendrinMckay

Quoting: scaineWild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.

Sadly, this would not have helped. There are tons of old steam accounts listed for sale that botters and scalpers can buy and do use for stuff like this already.

Pretty sure it would have helped, and along with a cap limit of two units per account and the scalpers jobs just became much harder and profit margins much lower.

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I dislike Unity since they have build in the call home spy functionality: singleplayer games that send telemetry to Unity etc. Now they force beginners to create slop games with stolen data instead of learning how to make games. I am sure, that low level entry point will lead in more slop games pretty soon, where people think they can make money flooding the stores with generated slop games.

Could it be that too many serious game devs switched to Godot or Unreal Engine after their previous enshittifications, so they decided to pull newcomers with "here everyone can create games" or companies to tell "your game studio can do the same work with 5x less artists in half the time", not saying that many people don't want to play slop?

8 years ago I thought that neuronal network algorithm will be a great deal for game development, not because it can generate assets, but because it can change or calculate data on runtime. My hopes were that usernames can be voice generated by TTS while all static texts are spoken by actual voice artists. Other hopes were that animating clothes physically correct without clipping to a much lower performance impact than doing actual math will become a standard technique build in engines. Everything trained ethical correctly of course (because it does not require large models). The reality is, biggest companies are allowed to steal all data to sell them combined via a so called "model"-file ... or worse, just selling the access to it ... to generate the whole game instead. And instead of cool technical improvements to simulate visual physics we get double FPS fake images that increases the latency.

If technologies can be used in a good way and a bad way, why we always decide to use them in the worst way possible?

Edit:
I am not afraid AI will replace serious game development any time soon. But game stores will look more and more like YouTube: 80% slop and 20% actual games on the search results and for little Indies it will get even harder to get found. So less people can live from that work, even if these games are good.

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Saw lots of horror stories from people who were unable to buy a Steam Controller. Thankfully, I was able to buy one within just a few minutes of it being put up for sale. It seems Valve may have underestimated the demand.

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Great, looks promising. You can even buy it as a bundle/discount with Kaizen.

I'm stll waiting though until they release on GOG

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Quoting: scaineWild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.

Sadly, this would not have helped. There are tons of old steam accounts listed for sale that botters and scalpers can buy and do use for stuff like this already.

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Yeah, in North America here, tried from two minutes before release to an hour afterwards. No luck, just kept getting error messages. Going by various discords and what not, looks like scalpers were having a field day and grabbing up a large and relisting almost immediately on ebay. One of them even purchased 30 over 15 accounts from a screenshot I seen posted.

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Yep, Steam Controller all sold out in Australia at $149 (australian).

No idea how many they were shipping to Australia as opposed to the US, but might have a try next round.

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2026 is turning into the year of the deck builders, let alone Linux desktop. I'm really, really looking forward to this one. And after that earlier Rogue Voltage article, I ended up spending another 10 hours playing that too! And then there's Slay the Spire 2. Love it.

But this one is an insta-buy. At least I don't have long to wait now.

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Have been putting quite a bit of time into this since the 1.0 release. Quite good, with a few bad aspects.

The good part is the ease with which you can build your things. Almost everything works flawlessly and apart from the more "puzzle aspects", you won't have many issues building whatever you want. The main appeal of Shapez is still the same as it was from the original first game. Creating a fully automated MAM (Make Anything Machine) to deal with the random requests that open up after the last milestone. A challenge of controlling everything through wire networks while keeping everything tightly packed and without "stalls" it a fun time. The new "manufacture" game mode is a nice addition. Clearly designed to please those that don't like tearing down bits of the factory that are done with their task and it allows for very quick scaling.

That last part brings me to the "bad" part. Performance. Now, it's not bad that the game starts dropping framerate when you build to much as this is inevitable. But the game is made so scaling goes very quickly and with 20 hours in manufacture mode I exceeded 500k buildings. That's when the cracks start showing. There are a lot of details to the problem, but fundamentally what happens is that when fps starts dropping (usually only when being near certain setups), the consistency of production breaks. Whole production lines that had been working at 100% efficiency for 10 hours start stuttering because you have frame drops when you're working in a specific area. This is really bad for a factory game as this basically marks the end of what you can do.

So good game. I highly recommend it if you like to have a chill factory building experience. But be aware that your system will determine how far you can go before things break.

Unfortunately, the release has come with some instability. For example, simply doing ALT+TAB on the Linux version instantly closes the game, same happens across different fullscreen modes. Thoroughly annoying. This seems to be a problem in newer Unity versions, as I've seen several games now with the same behaviour. Proton 11 Beta does not have this issue and the game works much better there.

It also seems to be an AMD only problem. I don't have this problem (native version) on Nvidia/X11 and from the reports that mentioned GPU it was always AMD.

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Wild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.

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More Zachtronics is good. It's always a good time (even if a bit tough at times :D)

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Because faster is famously always better when it comes to game development.

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It felt like playing Cookie Clicker, but I managed to get two of them.

While the whole thing is still very frustrating for everyone, I´ve gotten the impression, they have imrpoved the process a whole lot. When preorders for the Steam Deck began, you could get stuck at ANY point of the process, having to start at the beginning over and over again, sometimes after reaching (and failing) the final click. I actually never saw a "order complete" page. I was still desperately trying to get a deck when suddenly a confirmation email arrived xD
This time, the process was smooth until that one point where everybody got stuck and once you got beyond that point, everything was just working as well.

Sorry for everyone who didn´t get one. But I don´t think we have to wait long for them to restock.

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Managed to get my order in. The really a much of a controller player, but my xbox360 controller is starting to its age and there are some types of games that I do play on controller.

The perpetual Steam store payment processing mess makes me wonder what "could services" are good for when they can't even dynamically handle a large spike in requests. And this time it was not the store itself, but just getting a slot in the payment provider.

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Bloody scalpers.

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Somehow, I was able to get a purchase in within the first 30 minutes. Took a lot of tapping in the Steam app on my tablet. No clue when it will get here, but at least I'm getting one.

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Anyone else find headphone jack on the PlayStation controller annoying. My sound is always connected to external speakers on my computer. As soon as the PlayStation controller is connected I loose all sound.

On Windows it is a pain finding the setting to disable controller audio every time. Hope Steam gives us a setting that stays on if their controller gets audio out

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Quoting: ZlopezI was trying to order the Steam Controller for 3 hours with checkout failing for me and then it was gone. :/ Hopefully I will be able to buy it in next wave.

Same here. Now I hope there will be a bundle together with the steam machine when it finally comes out.

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Quoting: vic-bayThat's why we need intellectual property laws to be improved, so entities like HDMI cartel shouldn't have control over software implementations. You produce physical connectors, take your $0.99 and get lost, from people writing software support for it. It is twice as bad as it should be, as not only HDMI cartel doesn't write software support for Linux, but also forbids others to do it. What's the point? To make the world a worse place? This is plain evil.

What perse said.

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How many controllers did they actually sell I wonder? (not hand out to YT'ers)

Was seriously considering getting one but if we gotta wait another 3+ months for stock... meh

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I was trying to order the Steam Controller for 3 hours with checkout failing for me and then it was gone. :/ Hopefully I will be able to buy it in next wave.

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Say it with me:
Redacted REDUX released
Redacted REDUX released
Redacted REDUX released

I just tripped.
🤪

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Quoting: kaktuspalme

Quoting: EWGSo wait, I don't get it. Are they just updating the ISO to ship with the latest kernel that's regularly available to update to? So, basically, during install it'll have broader and better support for hardware depending on the kernel? Is that it?

Yes and I think that's a good idea. Since people who already have installed it probably don't need newer Kernels. But new users might need it. This makes perfect sense.

Aye. It does. I think distros should be doing this on a monthly basis. A user shouldn't have to install 1-3GB of updates during install... especially if there are more than security changes to the kernel or drivers because, as the post states, that has a practical affect on hardware performance or if something will work or not.

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Quoting: YasriHey Liam question, how loud are all the buttons. I use the DualSense now and the PS4 controller in the past. All other modern dualstick controllers that I have tried have been louder. Help a can only play games when people are sleeping gamer out.

Hmm. It's mostly quiet. The thumbsticks have an audible click, as do the triggers when you pull them right down to the casing but neither are particularly loud. The back buttons have a slight click to them, but it's reasonably muted.

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Quoting: Craggles086Think Borderlands 2 had native Steam Controller support. Had to do some work for Borderlands 3 to get Steam Input configs to work well with the first Steam Controller, but since Steam Controller 1 was basically unsupported by this time hardly surprising.

Really? I think I always played it with 2 xbox controllers. And on windows: the game had no local coop, you needed a crazy hack where you had to start 2 local instances at the same time, connect them via multiplayer and shape the windows to use half the screen. And even like that the HUD was not scaled correctly.

It was a to messy solution to setup everytime (just starting windows was woah) and I think we never went past the first boss.

Games that I remember were better with SC were Portal 2 ofc but also Magika 2. Which also was using steam controller api btw. It was awesome on any controller really (every player had the actual controller layout on the hud: like player 1 steam controller buttons, player 2 xbox buttons, player 3 dualshock buttons. At the same time on the same screen. Awesome.

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Thank you for that very cool review! I got lucky yesterday, even if it took 20 uneasy minutes to get over the order screen. Hope for everyone that they stock up very soon!

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Quoting: JarmerI absolutely love Town to City and think it's a wonderful game (from the demo) ... BUT ... this whole thing gives me pause. This is a very small dev studio who has a current game (town to city) in early access, and is making announcements and starting work (I guess not "starting" but rather way into) into a completely different separate game? I know they say this is a separate group of devs but still. I don't think it's good. Time will tell.

Obviously it very much depends on the specific situation for the studio, but I don't think it's unusual for them to be planning production of game N+1 while game N is finishing up. That keeps people employed, rather than having those horrible cycles of layoffs and onboarding new people.

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Oh Liam... Gyro aiming is the best! I use it with the original SC for some time alraedy. But yeah not as mouse emulation as you realized in your review.

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Please PLEASE bring this to all the iGPU's as well and not very specific cards. Got a pretty recent NUC/Mini-PC here and I tried the patchset out earlier and well, it didn't work.

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