Old timer here, used to purchase Atari VCS cartridges at (the equivalent of) ~60 EUR in 1980. Considering inflation, that value would be ~350 EUR today.

But.

At the time, the size of the market and the physical item production were completely different from today's "download a file that can be replicated an infinite amount of times basically for free".

So, yes, he may have been right, but with huge caveats.

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How much useless stuff must run in background to cut battery life by a 2.5x factor? By any means, it's a colossal difference...

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This is a bad trend.

Especially because Valve may not be interested in reverting it, as long as games work on SteamOS/Deck.

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The consumer in me says "bummer" and pretends to ignore an issue that may become prevalent: the platform split Deck/Desktop that may hurt far more than we realize at first.

The hacker in me says "how hard is to fake a whitelisted device to the routine asking for it?".

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Discord is very popular indeed, and extremely hard to replace also for a specific reason:

API

It's amazing how easy and "deep" you can interact with your Discord server from outside. Having users already assigned roles, channels, permissions and the like based on external databases is a godsend for large gaming groups. Until FOSS replacements (or any replacement, for that matter) can't offer comparable customization, Discord is the way to go - unless all your gaming needs are filled up by something that can manually manage a few users.

The enshittification will be a serious blow for more advanced/larger/more complex gaming communities, or games heavily relying on Discord as an external service.

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we've seen a meaningful reduction in the amount of cheating recently.

Fair.

But until that phrase reads "we totally, positively eliminated all cheating in our game", then it's just smoke and mirrors.

It means that even with their best ring-0 kernel anticheat, cheaters are NOT completely eliminated. And if even a single system works to defeat deep anticheat techniques, it means the shallow anticheats are good enough.

80/20 and how to teach them to software developers.

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Support for elevating process privileges.

This could be very important considering the Squirrel installer *requires* non-elevated privileges to install its payload, and would stop if run as Administrator - like all software running under WINE is.

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I absolutely loved BL1 (for innovation) & 2 (for script), also because they were some of the first real native ports (done by Aspyr, IIRC) of blockbuster titles for Linux. You can't really find a more likeable main villain than Handsome Jack. TPS was a bit of "more of the same", with some clear signs of Lilith being the real villain of the saga. TFTB was nice, but a bit too "corridor" narration to my taste. I found BL3 rather bland, with characters trying too hard to be borderlandish while lacking the over-the-top features of their predecessors. After the movie, I'm positively afraid that BL4 will be the first BL I'm going to positively avoid.

Finally, I'm not sure about the graphic technology Gearbox will use, but this could be the last nail in the Pandora coffin for me: no cell shading = no Borderlands.

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Today they also released an hotfix, whose first item reads "Fixed an issue with mouse & keyboard controls when playing Enshrouded on Linux."

This dedication is something we should be happy about.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1203620/view/4182235001955652948?l=english [External Link]

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I note clearly that I'm interested.

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