Quoting: gradyvuckovicI mean bloody hell, what was the dog damn point of all that?

Quoting myself from Discord:

When interest rates were low there was loads of investment money sloshing around looking for something that would create growth. The games industry took advantage of that by studios growing and acquiring other studios. Embracer already had lots of studios from buying studio groups at fire sale prices and had a hope that they'd all be able to cross-pollinate and provide steady income, so they continued to buy studios at market prices with the investment money sloshing around. They weren't that good at actually getting games released, though - they just had hundreds in the pipeline.
Then interest rates went up, and the "free" investment money dried up. All the studios that had been relying on that investment money were now unsustainable - hence the industry-wide massive layoffs and studio closures. Embracer was particularly relying on a $2 billion deal that fell through. They've been restructuring to try to cover that.

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This is the first act of an ongoing story event.

Hopefully they won't lose interest partway through, and leave it on a cliffhanger...

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Quoting: CreakWhat's the difference between RetroDeck and EmuDeck [External Link]?

Different project, different people, different goals, and so on, and so forth; but in terms of actual usage I think it mostly comes down to RetroDeck puts an entry in your gaming mode Deck, and EmuDeck puts an entry in your gaming mode Deck for each game.

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Quoting: SpurlosI wonder if every bit will fall in the right place for the OS like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to get it working, or people who are stuck with LTS releases would have to wait for another two years to get everything in the main repos?

LTS releases get newer versions of the kernel and Mesa every six months until the next LTS.

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The little one's established empirically that it works well on the Deck.

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Quoting: tuubiSounds like he might be old enough to resent being referred to as "the little one". :grin: 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.

I'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.

Just 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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