Quoting: tuubiSounds like he might be old enough to resent being referred to as "the little one". But I suppose that's a parent's prerogative.

Probably. I did consciously stop referring to him as "the tiny drummer" when he got too big for that. He's 8 now.

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The little one (who loves puzzle games, is a drummer, and has released his own music) is having a whale of a time with the demo.

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Quoting: AnzaThat sure will make any kind of games where players can't host their servers financially unsustainable. Not necessarily bad thing, though will cause major changes in the market.

For a start you'd expect every planned-obsolescence game to shut down the day before the law goes into effect.

QuoteI'm not sure if that kind of change is easy to push through.

No legislation is easy to push through (broadly by design), but the alternative approaches to deter the conduct would be, I'd expect, even harder to get done. Refund of money to make a customer whole is often used and well understood; getting specific other actions out of companies is trickier, and will need a whole lot of argument. See, for example, regulation of gambling in games.

QuoteJust knowing when the support ends might help like with phones. If you know that you get two years of support, you know not to buy phones that area close to end of their support period unless you know you can replace the stock OS with something with longer support.

With games things can be bit fuzzy, but at least some kind of minimum support period would be good. Especially with multiplayer and games with mandatory online component. With single player games if DRM allows, there are more workarounds.

Purchases coming with an advertised fixed expiry date would allow the market to price accordingly, and that's the kind of thing that might allow a company to avoid refunding everyone. If, at the point of sale, codblops77 says "this product will cease to function on 30 April 2025“ then the customer is informed and can choose to purchase, or not purchase, accordingly.

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Legislators getting involved in what you can and can't include in your game, and how a company runs their online infrastructure years after the fact is going to get quite messy, with companies still pushing boundaries and finding edge cases.

Full automatic refunds for every copy when a company kills the game is much simpler, and removes most of the financial incentive for that undesirable behaviour (you've still given them an interest-free loan, after all).

If you've sold someone something you shouldn't be able to take it away from them and keep the money; that's a principle that most people can get behind.

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Quoting: RomlokI think the chart would tell an even more impressive story if there were a "Linux growth before Steamdeck" trend line (ie. extrapolating using only data prior to the announcement/release), and then a "Linux growth since Steamdeck" line branching off from that - to the moon!

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/steam-survey-for-february-2024-shows-a-big-bump-in-simplified-chinese/comment_id=258957

If you want the post-Deck trend, shift the red trend up and then steepen it by the gradient of the green trend.

You can, of course, pick whichever date range you're interested in on the Steam Tracker to see the data and trend for that period.

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QuoteWhat have you been playing recently?

Horizon Zero Dawn. I also played a bit of Full Void and got Gabriel Knight and Gabriel Knight 2 working (but didn't play them through yet - I've played them before).

The little one played the demo of Preserve and some Potions: A Curious Tale.

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Quoteyou can now easily swap your primary ship in a space station

Oh, that was such a pain before.

You'd go to the station to sell a ship, and then it would spawn the ship in the lowest-numbered slot. Which wasn't necessarily the ship that you wanted to fly away, nor the next ship that you wanted to sell. So then you'd have to schlep out to your freighter just to swap ships, and then potentially fly right back.

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Quoting: Marlockcan any of the xbox players around here exolain the appeal of the left analogue being so far up, arguably less comfortable to use than the d-pad?

Not an Xbox player (and I don't like the controller either) but it's because it started as a Dreamcast controller (Microsoft and Sega had worked together to put WinCE on the Dreamcast).



Similarly the PlayStation controller was a SNES controller (PlayStation was initially a joint Sony/Nintendo project) with handles.



They've each then evolved from those starting points.

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Quoting: LoftyI imagine one of the reasons the steam deck is so wide because they had to find a way to make the track pads as usable as the analogue sticks.

Not exactly. It's wide to make it comfortable to hold. The modified handles to make the Switch (which has no trackpads) not awful to hold give that pretty much the same width as the Deck.

What having the trackpads means - and it's something that the other handhelds have failed to consider - is that the stick & buttons on the right, and stick & dpad on the left, are next to each other. You've got about 90° of thumb movement without moving your hand; the Deck puts all of the thumb controls within that arc. Which is why playing games with the trackpad on the Deck (many hours of point & clicks and RPGs here) is great, and would suck on the devices that lack them (most of them) or put them in the wrong place (this one, and was it the Kun?).

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Quoting: Liam DaweTrue in a way, but it is just the standard Xbox styled layout, so not really an issue and may change before release.

I hope it does. Their promo image is showing the user having to press a button that the machine doesn't actually have. It just seems sloppy.

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