I am a simple man. I read Shadow Tactics, I press "like". And it's native.

What were those other games about?

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Quoting: Thane

Quoting: Anza

Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijaWhen I look at the Steam catalogue and look at games like Tooth and Tail, The Riftbreaker, Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight.. in fact all indie "something-Knight"'s, etc.
I see more appeal for playing them in a handheld console and at the same time, I think the console increases the appeal of these games.
I mean I would play most them in my phone if I could, and if my phone had a gamepad.

That would be Nokia N-Gage. Not very popular product though and was discontinued back in 2006. Symbian did have some games, even commercial ones.

Android phones seem to have gamepad attachments though, which I'm even less familiar with. There's even some indie games without microtransactions available.

I guess Steam Deck can somewhat act as a phone as these days regular phone calls are rare. If Facebook and Twitter work, that's quite lot of things done on a phone covered.

I can't tell you how many times I wished my surface book 3, GPD win2 or switch had a 5g/LTE modem, I have the ROG phone but premium games continue to be mostly absent from Android. An internal modem is essential for a device to substitute phones.

Exactly. Nowadays we have phones with amazing displays, battery life, optimized cooling etc. But most "good" games are still in x86.
Also an indie studio will want to publish for x86 first (sometimes on x86 only), so that they can get visibility on Steam. For many indie games, the gameplay is the priority, and not the graphics, so a desktop PC ultra-wide screen is overkill, but a mobile form factor kind of fits perfectly.

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Sure, private company, selfish, gaming is not same as hardware, closed garden etc. BUT let's not forget:

- Sony had their own distro, as mentioned:

Quoting: LightkeyFor the younger folks around here, Sony has already released their own Linux distribution before.

- Installing Gentoo on PS4 was a thing for a while [External Link].
- As PS5 came out, we may not get the console, but controllers were in stores, and a Sony employee contributed the controller driver for the kernel [External Link]
- Due to Sony's open device program, Xperia phones have been the de-facto standard for Linux-based mobile OS, especially Sailfish which today supports up to Xperia 1 II.

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Maybe mainstream devs don't care so much because they have a huge market anyway. Kind of the same problem as with anti-cheat software, why should Riot care about a few hundreds of players anyway.

But for indie developers I think it's a different story. Suddenly this console gives their games more appeal, and I think these games give the console more appeal.

When I look at the Steam catalogue and look at games like Tooth and Tail, The Riftbreaker, Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight.. in fact all indie "something-Knight"'s, etc.
I see more appeal for playing them in a handheld console and at the same time, I think the console increases the appeal of these games.
I mean I would play most them in my phone if I could, and if my phone had a gamepad.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumCrash Bandicoot? Wasn't that Naughty Dog? (owned by sony?) :unsure:

As far as I know, latest ones:
- Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (Activision, to be acquired)
- Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! (King, to be acquired as well)

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Quoting: KimyrielleOk, and tbh, is anybody really going to miss what was one of the most toxic companies to work for in America?

Other than that, geesh, did REALLY nobody in charge ever read a Economics textbook to realize that market concentration is bad? Will this stop only when there is only MS and Sony and their two consoles left? Does nobody realize that for a free-market economy to work, it takes a think called competition. And does nobody realize that if companies can spend that kind of money to buy all their competitors, we're not taxing corporations nearly high enough?

Hear, hear.

I didn't see positives in what is a creative enterprise (making games) when one has such a boss, and now even less positives when one has such a boss who also has a boss.

I would like to see more opportunities for small indie developers. I am hoping that the Steam Deck makes certain games more attractive, like Tooth and Tail, Blasphemous, etc... and on the other hand, looking at games like that makes (for me) the Steam Deck more attractive.

In the meantime, the list of intellectual property that would be in the hands of Microsoft after this merge is chilling:

Call of Duty
Diablo
Warcraft
Overwatch
Starcraft
Crash Bandicoot
Guitar Hero
Tony Hawk Pro Skater
Fallout
Doom
Quake
Psychonauts
Elder Scrolls
Prey
Wolfenstein
Dishonored
Minecraft
Candy Crush

Not to forget the XBox franchises:

Halo, Forza, Fable, Gears, Perfect Dark, Age of Empires ...

There is grounds for some lawyers to at least look into this.

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It is big news, yes, but it's hard to foresee a positive impact.

I would rather have game makers get more independence, creatively speaking. That went already downhill during the Activision merge, so this is looking less promising.

Pretty likely, that they got them on the cheap: no presence in the games awards this year, no blizzcon this year. It is a very good move by Microsoft. Reminds me of Nokia...

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Is it perhaps a little odd to be so excited by a mouse?

Not odd at all. Intellimouse 3 came out in 2006-ish and since then the only serious alternative to it have been the Zowies, but even then I feel like some players have stuck to Intellimouse Classic until something like Vaxxee came out.

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Now I want to give the counter-point: what if this has more impact on Linux users than anything else, at the end of the day?

After all, nobody's got the consumer Steam Deck in their hands yet. And there is a good chance that there's so much demand that Valve cannot fabricate enough consoles anyway. Hell, it's been difficult to meet demand even for niche stuff like the Aya Neo.

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Yet another good example that champions the strength and resilience of a good community. These people are giving me vibes of sort of what OpenRA has been for Command and Conquer.
Understanding something like the fact that a game like this is meant to show battles between huge armies, and that should perform well, and without crashes, I mean something that one would think of as a basic requirement... and yet for some reason there are so many commercial projects that miss it...

Quoting: TheRiddickSeems like they've achieve more then what Ashes of the Singularity can do

Not so long ago (in RTS time) the BAR community organised a RTS triathlon [External Link] event together with the communities of Supreme Commander: FA and Planetary Annihilation: Titans. Casters, top players and developers from the three games mixed to try out the others.
Besides bringing the communities together, it was excellent as a showcase. You get to see where each game is at, and what happens when you try to cast, stream, team play, coach others, etc. My sensation from that event was that Planetary Annihilation still takes the cake (for me), but I can see that it's just a matter of time that BAR catches up in quality and you can see how/why that will happen.

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