Quoting: BeamboomThis is actually so common that people would probably be surprised. Over a certain timespan, purchase a stack of the same model of some computer, tear them apart and you *will* find differences.

And it's been like this since forever. I recall home computers back in the 80s when we had a ball tinkering with those things: The same model could even have different chipsets on the motherboard. All depending on what production line it came out of.

Absolutely. Those companies usually made no effort to communicate those changes at all too. So Valve is ahead by at least communicating the changes, no matter how minor they are.

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Great to hear Valve will be shipping more units. Single most important thing for the Steam Deck right now is building the size of the userbase. The more Steam Deck gamers there are, the more devs will feel the pressure to either begin supporting it, or increase their support for it.

Hopefully Valve can get to at least a million Decks by the end of the year. It's hard for game developers to ignore a device like the Steam Deck when it has a userbase of that many active users, and a million units in 2022 would set Valve up nicely for a target of shipping at least that many next year too, and hopefully clear enough of the backlog of orders to open up orders for shipping to more countries.

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Love seeing the Steam Deck continue to be a perfect fixed target Linux PC for game devs to aim for in terms of compatibility. The Steam Deck's impact in that regard has been fantastic. Greatly simplifies life for game devs, and it has resulted in so many positive changes to existing and new games, improving compatibility not just with Linux but also with gamepads in general.

This year more than ever, it feels like games that don't run on Linux are more the exception than the rule. It feels like almost everything I've installed lately has either worked perfectly or had very minor issues. It's at the point where I just don't think about it any more, I'm just downloading and installing Windows games on Linux and just expecting them to work and surprised when I encounter something that doesn't.

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Quoting: MohandevirFrom another pov, those that really wanted to play this game had plenty of time to get the game on Steam. I suspect it didn't sell much more, on Steam. It's just sad for those who paid full price to get mixed with free to play players... I just hope for them that they have some form of bonus, but I doubt it.

Edit:

I think that's what bothers me the most... A priced game that suddenly switch to F2P when it doesn't sell anymore... It feels like: "Let's try to skim our original fanbase again."

There is no way I'm going to support that.

That's the worst part in my opinion too.

Because there's a very clear distinction between what is a free to play game and what is a paid game.

There's an unspoken contract of difference between the two, that they both offer a different experience.

A paid game is something you pay upfront for, to get everything included, without paywalls or excessive grinding. Any MTXs in that context would be very limited, cheap, or mainly DLC for 'additional' content that was outside of the scope of the original game, but the bulk of the main content of the game should be unlocked, because you've already paid for it.

Whereas a free to play game, is free to start playing sure, to get a taste, a sample if you will, but most of the content will be behind some kind of mtx paywall, which is how the developers make back their money for the game. You 'play for free', but 'pay for content'.

I prefer buying paid games, because I prefer having a honest transaction where I know upfront how much money a game is asking me to pay to unlock 'everything', but mtx games hide that cost until you get deep enough into them to see it.

But worse than either of those two options is a game starting as a paid game then turning into free to play!

That's punishing the people who bought the game at launch.

Of course the obvious counter argument is:

"Well how is a game going permanently free any different to a game being given away for free for a week? Or a game being discounted 50% during a sale? Or a price drop? Obviously people who buy the game at launch will pay launch prices. That's the price of being an early adopter."

But I'm not objecting to someone else getting the 'paid game' experience for cheaper. I'm not unhappy when I see Skyrim deeply discounted, even though I paid full price at launch for it, because I haven't lost anything.

What I'm objecting to is having the paid game experience that I paid for, taken away, and replaced with a free to play experience for all players, including the original buyers of the game.

I'm objecting to buying a game, only for a short time later to experience everything being behind a paywall 'free to play' style, as if I haven't already paid full price for the game. And companies arbitrarily suddenly deciding that my initial purchase has been redefined and deemed to be nothing more than 'well that was the first season pass of content, from now on everything else is behind a paywall'.

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Sigh.

What a shame. Wasted potential.

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Prediction: Next month is going to be a new record high.
I'm expecting over 1.20%.

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Perhaps Valve going with Arch for SteamOS lit a fire under Canonical. Good!

Also..

On top of that we can expect more gaming on Ubuntu Linux improvements to come "such as providing easy ways to get more bleeding edge components like Mesa drivers, and even newer kernels and proprietary drivers"

This sounds very very exciting, and has great potential for positive impacts downstream to related distros such as Mint as well. One consistent issue with Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros has been, while it's a great basis for a distro and very stable, it takes far far too long for updates for things such as drivers and kernels to reach Ubuntu. It's probably the only real major downside of Ubuntu based distros, so addressing that would definitely make Ubuntu far more competitive to Arch based distros again.

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Hats off to GE for the fix for Fall Guys, and thanks Liam for the article, but at the same time, ugh..

Why is this even necessary? Surely if a developer cares enough to enable EAC compatibility they could at least put the EAC file in the right spot? Why did they even publish the update without at least testing it once to ensure it works? And why after weeks of it being widely reported that the file is in the wrong spot, have they STILL not moved the file into the right place? It's not exactly a 'major fix' to implement, it's literally just moving a file..

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A great application, the developer has done a fantastic job. It has a great UX focus on simplicity that I love.

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Looks like a good PC to buy to hook up to a TV, use for movies, light gaming (a mix of indie games / streaming from a main PC), music, web browsing, etc, etc.

Neat!

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