TIL- PirateSoftware is not referring to piracy in general, but is the username of a twitch streamer who criticized the movement.

So they can go work for EA? Or Ubisoft? Or one of Take-Two’s dev teams? Or something owned by Tencent or Embracer or Epic?

This isn’t just “Microsoft bad”. It’s “Microsoft is one of many giant mega corporations that are ruining the entire industry”.

Maybe some of these people could join or found smaller indie studios, but there are reasons why they didn’t do that already.

The regulatory bodies of several nations really dropped the ball by allowing the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard acquisitions.

This isn’t the result of a market being “overextended”, and it isn’t about finding efficiencies. It’s about Microsoft doing what it’s always done- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Just one more offenses added to the pile of anti-consumer tactics employed by tech companies.

The EU is slightly further ahead than most, but globally most governments have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting consumers from anything digital.

Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?

I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.

Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b

I can’t hear Richard Horvitz without thinking of Invader Zim. He does a ton of random voices in the more recent Ratchet and Clank games and it’s very distracting.

FYI- you can also stream from your laptop to the Deck. Technically you can do it on a per-game basis through Steam (which you may have already noticed), but I find it’s even better to install Steam Link as a non-Steam game, similar to what you probably did with Chiaki. As long as you have a good local network it’s great and uses way less of the Deck’s power.

I have no idea why Valve hasn’t added Steam Link to the Steam store. That would make things so much easier, and you get way more settings and fewer bugs that way than doing the per-game streaming option.

Well, this isn’t about side-loading or alternative app stores though. The lawsuit is looking to force Sony to allow 3rd party key sellers. So you would have to use a different device like your phone or PC to go to another website, process your payment and get a code, then go to the PlayStation store and redeem that code to have the game added to your account and available for download. Just like there are 3rd party sellers for Steam keys. I know Nintendo allowed that for the 3DS, because there was a period of time where you couldn’t process payments on the 3DS’s eShop, but you could still redeem those codes.

What you’re suggesting would be akin to allowing Ubisoft, EA, or Rockstar to have their own stores on consoles where you could bypass the PlayStation Store/Xbox store/ Nintendo eShop if you want. Potentially 3rd parties like GOG, Steam, or Epic, but certainly there would be restrictions there. For examples, Steam would probably just be the Store without all the other platform features Steam offers. GOG’s anti-DRM stance probably would not fly.

Another key difference is that consoles have physical media. As far as I know, you’ve never been able to go to an Apple store or any other electronics store and buy a physical copy of an app. Even the digital edition of the PS5 now has an optical disc drive available for purchase.

This isn’t adding up. I’m all for consumer protections and I love European countries forcing global countries to behave, but this reads more like a console-war fanboy hit piece than legitimate criticism.

According to the article, Sony “is enjoying the position of a monopolist with 80% of the Dutch console market”. That number does not pass the smell test, and there’s no further details provided or sources given. I know Xbox sales are considerably worse in Europe, but the only way I can imagine Sony hitting 80% markets are is if we ignore the Switch and Switch 2 as “handhelds”, and also ignore gaming PC’s and the Steam Deck. Which seems like a bad faith argument to use when evaluating software markets.

The article also claims that “Sony can easily control game pricing in its digital store”. So is this lawsuit exclusively discussing Sony-published titles, or are they just ignoring the role of the publisher in this?

It looks like the goal of this lawsuit is… To force Sony to allow 3rd party platforms to sell download keys that can be redeemed on the Sony store. Which… Is fine I suppose but I don’t expect that to really help the consumer or have an impact on competition. The article doesn’t provide any data on that and I’m not sure whether any actual research has been done there, but in my anecdotal experience those kinds of sites either just follow the MSRP and sales, or are doing shenanigans with different regional price rates or FX rate arbitrage, which can occasionally lead to issues for users depending on how the game works and how important the region is to it. There might be some reduced fees from Sony in the transaction, but I expect that to be made for by similar fees from the 3rd party, or the publisher pocketing the difference. It doesn’t seem material enough to change the price consumers see. Digital “goods” don’t have supply restrictions, so this won’t increase the supply and I don’t see how it changes demand.

Also there’s a lot more questions I have about their methodology. Maybe things are different in the US than Europe, but Nintendo is famous for having fewer sales with shallower discounts than anyone else, with multiplatform games (both physical and digital) being more expensive. The phrases “Switch tax” and “Nintendo tax” have been around the Switch for almost its entire life. Is the Switch just being excluded as a “handheld”? And when they are looking at disc prices, does that include used copies too, or perhaps include a factor for resale value that is reducing the cost?

Maybe they are right, but this article leaves a lot more questions than answers, and I can’t find those answers from a quick Internet search.

Shining For e is a classic. Basically Seva’s answer to Fire Emblem.

Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern “retro pixel art” style games: the “pixels” can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn’t bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.

Banner Saga was pretty good. It’s a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven’t played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.

The SEGA Forever program was discontinued in late 2023

Kind of a poorly named program

You and I remember the press for the Wii very, very differently. Just look at the Wikipedia article listing all the awards it won before or around it’s launch. Game Critics, Spike TV, Golden Joystick, Popular Science, IGN, GameSpot, the Guardian, and much more. including awards and praise for the innovative controls.

Was there negativity? Sure, but it was a miniscule minority. The kind of thing only an extremely defensive Nintendo fan would notice. The Wii sold out instantly and was impossible to find for the first year or two, similar the PS5 except without the excuse of a global pandemic disrupting supply chains.

It’s not some anti-Nintendo bias. The press was pretty mixed on the Xbox One for example, with some outlets pointing out it was a bit overpriced, and of course the whole debacle about being always-online and the Kinect being mandatory caused a lot of backlash. The PS3 was seen as overpriced at launch and got a 6/10 from IGN.

And another important factor is that conditions change after launch. (The 360 probably would have had worse reviews if the press knew about the red ring of death before launch. The PS3 saw price reductions and eventually outsold the 360 despite having a worse launch. The 3DS floundered for its first few months until Nintendo dropped the price.

The press is neither monolithic nor perfect. I guarantee you can find some outlet somewhere with the exact take you are looking for, but to just dismiss the entire industry because you don’t agree with most of them on the Switch 2 seems like coping.

The WiiU also got negative press. That doesn’t somehow redeem it.

The Switch 2 being a bad deal and Nintendo having a VERY strong history of anti-consumer behavior has nothing to do with console wars. The person you are replying to is equally allowed to have a nuanced take.

What, are you expecting every comment critical of Nintendo to also include criticism of how terribly Xbox has managed it’s game studios just so we can be “fair and balanced”?

I think more general advise would be to understand the perspective you receiving and how it relates to yours.

Collectors are great for finding weird and evil things. Like “this cartridge had some special chip that makes it different from every other game on the system” and I think “oooh I kinda wanna try emulating that”. Or “this developer made this weird bad game a few years before they found success with their breakout hit series” which can be interesting to check out.

Also a lot of “gamer” reviewers have their own issues. Fromsoft is a great example- they purposely neglect areas of their games that they don’t want to focus on, and fans have interpreted their business priorities as genius design decisions that every game should copy. No more minimaps, no tutorials or onboarding systems, no explicit story. There are Nintendo fans who eat up every single thing they do and love to pay a premium for it- somewhat like Apple people.

Not to say those perspectives are “wrong” or shouldn’t exist, but it’s usually good to try to look at different perspectives.

I always thought it was weird how much attention people were paying to span messages. Giving them that much attention only serves whatever purpose they have.

That is the maximum size, but it’s also the most expensive size.

Street Fighter 6 is 60GB on Steam, so they probably could put it on the 64GB card if they wanted to. But it’s going to be a download.

Bravely Default is only 11GB, but it’s going to be a download too. Probably because it’s a much more niche game that SE doesn’t expect to sell a lot of units of. It’s probably more comparable to an indie game where the physical release is more of a collector’s item for hardcore fans than the main way they expect people to play the game.

It’s a combination of Nintendo following their tradition of using expensive and obscure formats, publishers being cheap, and some combination of publishers/devs for not optimizing for storage.

Imagine believing that Democrats are homogenous

Maybe if you live under a rock?

Exactly. The whole world suffers from that. And I’ve seen a LOT of Democrats get absolutely destroyed by their bases for supporting it. Fetterman went from being a folk hero of work class Pennsylvanians to a genocide-mongerer. Cory Booker just pulled off a pretty amazing feat of giving a 25 hour filibuster and yet the news cycle very quickly shifted to how he voted with Republicans to continue bombing Palestine.

This meme doesn’t make sense to me because I’ve never seen Republicans send that accusation towards Democrats. If anything, Republican criticisms tend to go the other way: that Democrats should mind their own business and that there is a moral obligation to limit the scope of government (not that they actually care about that, but they say they do).