Meh. The original is great and looks great. A remake is unnecessary.

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I personally find these big events more than a little overwhelming. I fear I'm missing out on so much because masses of developers choose to only have their demos up for such a limited amount of time.

It is disappointing that devs are so stingy with their demos, but I am grateful to the Next Fests that we get demos again at all.

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I read those Microsoft pictograms as "business control clown." Seems about right.

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Steam is a case of "first out of the gate wins" business. It was easy being the first store out there. There was no alternative and Steam gobbled up all PC gamers.

Not really. Steam wasn't the first online games platform. It wasn't even the first online games platform that Valve used - Sierra (Valve's publisher at the time) had WON. Valve felt the necessity to make their own auto-patcher with the implosion of Sierra. There were other players around at the time that could have stepped into that gap. Valve's need for something that worked well for them as a game developer, and their preference for something that worked well for customers, certainly helped - rather than the need to appeal to advertisers that the others were chasing.

People have tried to replace Facebook, too. Same result. There is no room for another social network for the same reasons there is no room for another online game store.

Facebook wasn't the first social media site, and Google wasn't the first search engine. Network effects aren't insurmountable. What you need as a minimum, though, to compete with an incumbent, is to be at least as good as them in most areas and better in some, whether you're competing with MySpace, Alta Vista, Internet Explorer, or Steam. As you've pointed out, none of the potential competitors to Steam have bothered to do that, and they all have different motivations than "let's make it easy to match people that want to buy games with people that want to sell games," which is the thing that's given Valve a lot of success since they started having third-party games on Steam.

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Sweet. I've been waiting on this to pick up the game, since this style of cozy fits much better with "curled up on the sofa" than "sat at a desk."

They're hoping to get the game bumped up to a Steam Deck Verified status.

That won't happen till they fix

Our graphics driver warning/information screen doesn't support controllers yet.

Both the screen itself and the lack of controller interactivity are individually verboten for Verified games.

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It's a series of games I never got into, sadly. They have such a loyal fanbase, must be doing something right. I think it was MGS5 that I tried to play, but spent like 40 minutes watching cutscenes in a plane on the way to the first mission. I just remember thinking that I'd have been better off watching a movie instead.

MGS 5 is a bad place to start. It's in the middle chronologically, and the last developed one, so it's relying on the player already knowing what came before and what comes after in the timeline. Without that knowledge it's just a really weird open world game. And since you mentioned "cutscenes in a plane" rather than "obnoxiously long hospital section" that would probably be Ground Zeros rather than Phantom Pain, which was really a demo with a very small open world. Or potentially you were playing 3, but it's hard to forget that that's "Snaaa-aake Eaateeerrr [External Link]."

MGS 1 is the best place to start. The narrative is tight, and it was the first Solid game released (there were 2 top down Metal Gear games before, but the parts of the plot that you might need to know are summarised within MGS 1) so it introduces the story and gameplay elements. MGS 3 is the second best place to start, since it's the first chronologically, and it has the best music and particularly good boss fights. If you want a chronological run (I'd strongly recommend a release-order run instead) it's 3, Peace Walker, Ground Zeros, Phantom Pain, 1, 2, 4.

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Anyone know what these "unfavorable market dynamics" even are? From what I have seen, industry revenue in the PC/console segments seem to be more or less stable and mobile is still growing a bit. In other words, people aren't spending less money on games. I suppose it's more unfavorable shareholders complaining about their yachts being too small?

It's not about revenue, but more about the cost of servicing debt. The dynamics of making games are massive upfront costs with the potential for future revenue years later; unless you happen to have hundreds of millions of your currency in your pocket, that means borrowing. In recent times, investment money was essentially free - that's not been the case for the last couple of years, and everyone's on the hook for the debt they got into to actually make their games.

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Improved preservation of display brightness when transitioning to desktop mode.

Yay!

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Valve have paid developers to work on the AMD Mesa drivers for years at this point, to improve Linux as a whole and ensure Linux drivers are in a good state for upcoming and future AMD hardware. Valve invest in a lot of different areas for Linux, not all of it specifically just for their own hardware. A lot of their contracted developers just work on regular upgrades and improvements like this. Valve have done this for a long time now that we've been covering here.

Standout example: Valve made ACO as a better-performing alternative to LLVM for compiling shaders; it was sufficiently better that Mesa also switched to using ACO rather than LLVM. Just standard open source ecosystem improvement things.

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Meanwhile, waitaminute, Windows 10 is rising? How does that work? Are we talking rise in Chinese language (which I'm imagining is more likely to use probably-pirated Windows 10)?

Recall that last month was iffy (with Linux GPUs adding up to 132%, for example). Long-term trends are much more useful than the single-month delta value.

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