I mean, the whole video should be three images and a paragraph to begin with. Entire thing’s engagement bait

You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that’s now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or “first three months free with Discord Nitro”. This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you’ve been personally enshittified on, but there’s no “answer to your question” other than “mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam”.

See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and “cheap” aren’t compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5’s bootROM keys just leaked, it’s likely that’ll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.

You also didn’t really ask a question. You asked “how do i make games work with my budget” without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you’re playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your “future of gaming” might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was “how do you deal with this” - my answer is “I don’t buy apple products or use subscription services”.

Never paid a subscription in the first place.

Ps5 pro, ps5 slim, ps5 digital edition? Nintendo Switch (Erista), Nintendo Switch (Mariko), Nintendo Switch OLED, Nintendo Switch Lite?

Piracy never ever actually hurts big companies. Game consoles make their entire business on selling “just plug it in and click the prompts and play the game, ezpz” as a lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how fully hacked a console is or how easy it is to hack them, the percentage of users that’ll mod and pirate is always miniscule.

Look at sales numbers for Pokemon X and Y, which released when the 3DS was ironclad. Compare them to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which released when 3DS piracy required a $100 flashcart and an ancient system firmware with no downgrade route. Compare those to Pokémon Sun and Moon, which released when five minutes with an SD card and a magnet would let you pirate the game directly from Nintendo’s own fucking server, complete with fully functional online play. Notice a pattern? No you don’t, they all sold like hotcakes.

Every first party Nintendo game released after 2016 other than Super Mario Odyssey was available to pirates before legitimate buyers, until the Switch 2 came out. That entire near decade of Nintendo was exclusively releasing games for compromised platforms. Nintendo did pretty well financially during that period, I’d say. Wii piracy was trivial as soon as the Twilight Hack dropped, yet late life Wii games sold gangbusters. And on the Wii, pirates legitimately got a better product because they got to bypass the Wii’s dogshit DVD lens and disc load times. R4s and clones and upgrades existed for nearly the entire Nintendo DS lifespan. GBA games were playable on the PC before the console came out in the United States.

Eh. Nintendo’s been bumfucked like this for the majority of the Switch lifespan. detecting and banning modded consoles is a cat and mouse game that favors the cat. Piracy favors the mouse, because piracy happens in your home on your hardware. Online play is you trying to play ball in Sony’s court.

Softmodded consoles probably won’t even be able to play online, let alone cheat online.

Sony isn’t even cooked, man. Piracy is a non issue to the bottom line. The Switch had this plus fully functional pirate installers in like, month 2 and Nintendo still sold a morbillion copies of TOTK despite all the hackable consoles on the market (and the maturity of emulators)

“I have an oculus account”

Same thing. Facebook = meta = oculus. The ability to even have something called an oculus account is purely grandfathered in, lucky you for getting one in the good ol days and only giving facebook money once to use your headset as a pc display, but nobody else can do that ever again. It’s a “meta account” now.

“We don’t require a facebook account, we require a meta account”

“We don’t eat dairy, we eat cheese”

Can you install software directly to the device without a Facebook account? Can you update the device firmware without a Facebook account? If you buy a new one right now, can you play games on it without a Facebook account? Can it serve as a display for your PC without a Facebook account? Can you modify or alter the games and software installed on the system with third-party tools? If you get account/IP banned from Facebook for not providing/verifying your real identity when making the account, does your headset become a paperweight?

That’s what the “meta ecosystem” means. If you can’t operate the device without signing into a Meta account in good standing, the ecosystem is locked down. A corporation can break your toy whenever they want to. The Quest’s price to specs ratio is fantastic specifically because Facebook knows they basically have to undercut their competitors to that level to sell people Facebook accounts and make those people use their own software store, even if one or two Enlightened Individuals can manage to only make a Facebook account and use their store to download the PC connect stuff.

I personally consider the Quest at $500 to be an $800 headset that pays me $300 to make a Facebook account and that deal isn’t good enough for me.

Yes, but that’s Facebook. What i said was “either deal with Facebook or pay $900+”. Neither option is worth it to me for the novelty that VR provides. A Quest 3 at $500 or $300 with a completely open source operating system would already be on my shelf, but it’s Facebookware.

VR also isn’t worth “tradeoffs” like installing a proprietary streaming tool to kludge the Facebook thing into pretending to be a “standard VR” display. What Valve’s offering is something I can completely trust to:

A: not require any hoops to jump through to use with VR-capable software on my computer

B: work with any of that VR-capable PC software instead of requiring one locked down storefront (and the storefront it’ll be most compatible with is Steam)

C: work with any Android APK software on device, for the lower intensity VR toys like Beat Saber

D: be compatible with a variety of controllers and peripherals

E: not be connected to Facebook in any way

F: maintain an open source OS so that a community can fully maintain the software even if the original manufacturer abandons support for the device

For those promises, I’d buy in at up to ~$700. No other headset on the market currently fulfills this list for less than $1000.

The main (and big) reason to not touch Quest is Facebook. It’s Facebook hardware running Facebook software and everything you do is tied to a Facebook account. VR is a novelty, I don’t think it’s a novelty worth using Facebook or buying a $900+ piece of hardware for (and most non Quests have their own restrictions).

Plus as far as I know, Quest doesn’t work very well as a PCVR headset. So instead of my $2000 gaming PC, I’d be playing these ultra high resolution high refresh rate games on what’s functionally a phone. Frame is designed as PCVR-first.

Which DAC do you use? I’d love to have a decent machine for playing PC indie games on my CRT natively.

Which mini PC do you have that has native analog out for a CRT? Most of the ones I see only have HDMI or DisplayPort and scaling those down to component or composite always introduces awful lag.

Mmmm delicious meaningful Lemmy karma slurp slurp slurp, gotta spin up some bots for that delicious lemmy karma

Thread’s about the 3ds. For GBA you need DS homebrew and a Phat/Lite console. For GB you need a custom device or an n64 with transfer pak and flashcart.

This is part of why physical copies are not preservationist, by the way. Turning that physical copy into a preservable, emulated-accurately ROM is the end point. The only value physical copies have are as collectible knickknacks (which hey! Collectible knickknacks rule!)

Or you can just run some software on your 3ds and have it done instantly, without opening any cartridges or buying any products. Need help getting it running? Here you go.

Or yknow. The 3ds you presumably own to play these games. Takes about 20 minutes and an sd card to go from stock to clicking a button and backing up the save file (or whole game). No need to open carts or buy more products.

Firefox is a black box because you can’t opt out of stuff before you click the ‘update browser!’ button. They’ve added default-on data harvesting, telemetry, ads, and now chatbots to Firefox that you have to track down and disable every time it happens. All self-updating software is a “black box” like this, but Mozilla has lost my trust that their updates will have more good than bullshit. So now I use Waterfox and don’t need to worry that there’s some new scheme to monetize me every time I get a browser update.

Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.

If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is. They probably don’t expect Mina to be a phenomenal income stream either, since (like SK) it’s already mostly done making them money.

They got told “no, and never” by Steam 3 years ago. It’s absolutely a marketing move to bring it up now. The Epic and Humble removals were rug pulls, though.

Does it being a marketing move mean that it’s not worth criticizing Steam for having a one-strike-you’re-out system? I don’t think it does. If your game has (something valve considers reject-worthy) and you get rejected, you should probably be allowed to submit it again after removing the thing valve rejected you for.