They came out of retirement to deal with a "threat"? Do criminal gangs go around dealing with threats? I mean, other than the threat that some nefarious bank might be keeping its money when that money could be doing good in the community (like, via us spending it).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: syylkI really, really want to like Nvidia.

I pretty much never want to like a corporation. And rarely find a lot of reasons to--corporations just aren't the kind of thing that's normally deserving of being liked. I'm really quite uncomfortable that I've ended up kind of liking Valve.
Certainly although I currently use AMD and if anything actively dislike NVidia, that doesn't mean I like AMD. As the relative underdog, they just have less scope for evil, more reason to actually cater to their customers, at the moment.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMm. Native, sure. But does Proton work on Mac OS?

I'd trade Proton for more native games.

Quoting: CatKillerNot by much. In 2022 there were 1,791 native Mac games released on Steam compared to 1,411 native Linux (and 12,706 native Windows).

Assuming your math is correct you would trade 380 native games for winning some dumb survey ? Is this really where the Linux gaming community is these days ?

So you'd trade 380 native games for around 10,000 Proton games? I get preferring native but that's ridiculous.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PublicNuisanceMac OS still gets more native ports for games. I'll take more native games over winning a survey on a site I don't even frequent.

Mm. Native, sure. But does Proton work on Mac OS?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: redneckdrow

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: sarmadI know you are just stating your opinion, and I was just telling you that your opinion is wrong. This is a gaming device, not a military equipment in order to think it should be banned on certain countries. People in the west should really quit this mentality of punishing populations for the mistakes of their governments.

Well, the thought is that these (western) countries cannot really do much against some "governments", but unhappy citizens might.
(I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, I don't know.)

I mean, hey, the only place that strategy didn't eventually work was Cuba.

Well, and Iran, and Venezuela, and Russia, and Syria, and Iraq, and North Korea, and . . . actually, has there ever been a place where sanctions DID turn the population against the government? After all, the first move of most bad governments is to find some enemy to point to and claim all the country's problems are because of them, and so any dissent is being a quisling for the enemy. US sanctions sure make that move easy and plausible and to some extent even true.
To be fair, I don't think that's the point of US sanctions in the first place. The point of US sanctions is to crush a country and its people so bad that nobody wants to be next. Which is evil, but not pointless because I think it does work fairly well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Guess I'm not going to get a pair of J-Socks for my Steam Deck any time soon.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomExclusive titles on Playstation are typically *not* small games by tiny developers - it's quite the contrary - highly ranked and praised AAA games with a massive team behind it.

And if we do consider these real life examples and compare them to multiplat titles, from a pure TECHNICAL point of view they usually stand out and shine and often even quite radically so.

Unless you disagree with this observation I can not fathom how you would argue against this benefit during the design and implementation phase of those games. It's not ONLY because they are damn good developers, it's also because they can FOCUS on one stack and make the most out of that.

I think it's been stipulated already that you can, in fact, optimize for the Playstation and get very good results. What the guy who has done the development is saying is, doing those optimizations doesn't actually make it harder to make the game work on other platforms.

Those highly ranked and praised AAA games are optimized for Playstation, yes. And they're exclusives, yes. But they're not exclusives for technical reasons, they're exclusives because they got paid to keep it that way. Those very same games could have been done to work on other platforms without interfering with the Playstation optimizations.

And of course Sony is going to arrange exclusives mainly on big, shiny AAA games that they expect to be highly ranked and praised. So any correlation there is from selection, not the innate nature of exclusives.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

One thing that always tickles the back of my brain when I see the Verified/Playable/Unsupported stats is that "Unsupported" doesn't actually mean it doesn't run. These days it seems like a strong majority of "Unsupported" titles do run, they just don't work well with the Steam Deck form factor. Or maybe they have anti-cheat problems. It was not so long ago that the big question using Wine or even early Proton was whether the game would run at all.

It's not like everything runs in Proton now. But that's what I always find myself wondering--how many of the "Unsupported" these days are actual examples of things that won't run in Proton?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: ElvanexI think Valve must be testing only games that work with the built in Deck controls. Some titles, such as Planetside 2, actually work perfectly fine despite being listed as unsupported. Just need to use mouse/keyboard.

The Deck doesn't have a mouse and keyboard.

I think he meant use the "mouse and keyboard" setting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I agree with Liam and with a ton of the comments thus far. Couple of related points

1. They're selling plenty anyway. And I think plenty of their sales are to people who also have (PS, Xbox, Nintendo thingies). Exclusives are a tool for getting more sales in a zero sum game, in which you have to pull people away from the competition in order to sell. That does not seem to be the Steam Deck experience; they are selling successfully without exclusives and indeed largely without peeling people away from consoles, the Switch etc. Given that a few posters have pointed out the major efforts and expenses involved in creating an effective "exclusives" regime, how is it worth it if they're not in the situation exclusives are supposed to solve?

2. For Valve, Steam Deck is part of the Steam ecosystem, more than it is a thing in itself. Steam Deck exclusives per se would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. The Steam Deck increases the value of your Steam library by giving you more places and ways to play the games in it. And it increases the value to developers of putting their games on Steam (yeah, sure, because the Deck is open you can play games from other platforms on it, but that takes a bit of work and at the very least, an active choice--where the Steam library is Just There). And while Steam doesn't do exclusives either, for practical purposes Steam has tons of exclusives--all the thousands of games that have never found it worth their while to go on any other site--and now with the Steam Deck, the reach you get from just releasing on Steam has expanded, reducing the incentive to bother with other stores and platforms by a little more.

Exclusives for just the Steam Deck and not the rest of Steam would break all that. They would reduce the value of players' Steam library, reduce the reach of the Steam ecosystem, instead of increasing it. It would be a really stupid move.

View this comment - View article - View full comments