Quoting: ZeloxIm confused :S. Can you even game on a chrome book, its cloud based right ?

Nothing is cloud based. I suppose in theory you could have something like an old fashioned dumb terminal that just got screen images sent from the cloud like some kind of universal Stadia, but such things don't exist. Chromebooks are just computers where the software by default keeps files in the cloud. But they have an OS and run software just like any other computer, they just sort of pretend they aren't, and a lot of the software is just the browser, like doing Google Docs and whatnot.
They would have problems with a lot of games because most of them are really wimpy computers. But some of the newer ones are less wimpy, and even a really wimpy-by-modern-standards computer can probably run quite a few older games.

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I'm very fond of Boxtron. I don't know just why, I haven't even used it, it just seems like such a nice thing.

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Quoting: mao_dze_dunMicrosoft and EA are both friends with Valve again

They are? I don't follow the broader news in this area; how did that happen?

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I'm really not sure I get the business model here. On one hand, they've got the premium service which is premium enough that I feel few will want to buy it. They can certainly make money on that, except not enough to make the infrastructure worth it because not enough customers.
And on the other hand, they've got the free service, where you pay a basically normal price for games and then play them on the network for free (well, except your internet service gets expensive from bandwidth), costing Google money as you use their server infrastructure like crazy. Probably people will go for that, with a decent marketing push. But can Google make money that way?

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: EikeThat's interesting!
Heard nothing of Siberian fires here in Germany!

Me neither, though to be fair I get most of my news from Imgur of all places.

We don't hear much about Russia unless there's something we can blame on them. And anything seems smaller if it's in Russia . . . it's like, fires the size of fairly important countries, yawn, kind of hard to find.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhy even bother mentioning Cyberpunk 2077? That's, like, more than fifty years from now. Talk about slow development.

I don't think it's going to be hard for them to port it around, if they are already using Vulkan. But there is no info at all on their current progress, so it's all really a speculation at this point.

I'm thinking you missed the joke.

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Why even bother mentioning Cyberpunk 2077? That's, like, more than fifty years from now. Talk about slow development.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Well i could of gone with retarded financially irresposible dumb fuck decision but i thought silly covered it theres a reason sega arent in the console business anymore and even nintendo had to be bailed out of going bankrupt after the diaster that was wii u. Granted it was never in real danger because of the amount capital the shareholders have but still. MS looses money on every xbox 1 sold still Sony i think break even now on every ps4 they all attempt to recoup the money in game sales. Wheres the problem steam has games i hear you say yes it does third party games that you can buy on epic store or gog the valve exclusives tap died out a long time ago.

"the valve exclusives tap died out a long time ago"? I doubt it. I've seen no real indication that Epic has made much difference to the market. Let me see if I can find some info to back my intuition . . . google google . . . OK. So, the total size of the PC game market in 2018 was according to one source $28.6 Billion, not counting browser games. Epic games just yesterday put out an article bragging about how much money their store has made. Ready for it?

$680 M spent by PC players in the Epic Games store

Sounds like a lot, although rather small compared to $28.6 billion. Hang on, wait a moment . . . they added another figure:

$251 M spent by players on third-party PC games in the Epic Games store

So like, more than half the sales in their store was just Fortnite. In terms of actually being a game store that people buy games from other than theirs, do some quick math, that would appear to be slightly under 1% of the market. 3% if you count Fortnite.
Steam has less to worry about than I thought. Even if you assume Epic's sales have been on a gradual upward slope from zero, so that their market share as of the moment is twice the average market share over the year, that's still only 2%. Gog probably has more.

So yeah, they probably could recoup the losses on discounted hardware from an open platform. Especially since sure, people could go buy outside Steam with a Steam Machine, but they were build with an interface setup that takes you straight into Steam by default. I don't see why that would change if Valve were making the hardware themselves. Hardly anybody would go to the trouble of making some other store their main go-to place after buying a Steam Machine that boots them into Steam. People would be as free to use other game stores as ordinary PC customers are to rip out Windows and install Linux.

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Quoting: ThetargosEdit, typos, darn phone keypad.

Sometimes typos are the best. I like "Netvook".

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80mmmm curious i wonder how much valve is making off linux gamers using proton it must be more than they are spending on dxvk development and mesa improvements otherwise one would assume their patience will run out eventually. I know they crap money but after dealing with big corporations aquistions for most of my career i doubt they are willing to lose money perpectually.

Not sure the mindset of normal big corporations works well when trying to predict Valve. Valve has a weird ownership structure.

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