On the other hand, even if they don’t “make back” the loss, you can look at it as: how much money is Valve willing to pay to become a “mainstream” living room console competitor? Lose a couple billion dollars on Machine, but get 400k “give valve money, probably” machines plugged into TVs. Sony and MS have other divisions and they AND Nintendo have shareholder responsibilities. Those conpanies cannot tank a single year of number go down. Valve can, and surely there’s a price that Valve would be willing to play to be “the xbox”.

This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.

If you’re comfortable with your current privacy settings (no desire for LW’s hardened approach) and just want to ditch Mozilla corp, Waterfox is the fork for you.

It definitely works that way for Waterfox. LibreWolf has very stringent privacy-focused defaults (like disabling form autofill and purging history and cache on every browser close), so unless you want to manually find all those settings and about:configs you’ll be overwriting with a migrated FF profile folder you’re kinda defeating the main purpose of using LW over WF. Same for if you were gonna disable the potentially “annoying” privacy defaults in LW.

Yes, “essentially firefox but without mozilla corporation or data harvesting / ad partners” is exactly what you’d want to use instead of firefox. Waterfox in particular is so “essentially” firefox that it is firefox. Copy over your profile folder. Click the blue icon instead of the orange one. Congratulations, you are migrated and never have to worry about sponsors or ai in your browser again. Waterfox doesn’t even have telemetry to opt out of.

LibreWolf is very privacy focused and hardened by default in ways that impact convenience. Waterfox on the other hand? I’d say switching to that is easier than turning off all the shit you’d have to turn off in a fresh FF install. You copy the profile folder into the spot where WF stores its profiles, and you’re done. All your everything is intact. History, cache, bookmarks, cookies, extensions, login sessions, settings (though your opt-out settings for garbage like homepage sponsored links or AI don’t do anything anymore because there’s nothing to opt out of).

I’d been using Firefox since it was Netscape Navigator. One toggle too many got me on Waterfox a few months ago. I have noticed absolutely no difference in my heavily customized browsing experience from the change, other than not having to go menu diving to turn off the new data harvesting anti-feature of the month.

Switching to de-Mozilla’d Firefox (Waterfox) is as simple as copying your profile folder from FF to WF. Everything transfers over, and I mean everything. No mozilla corp, no opting out of shit in menus at all.

Any chance for a self-hostable containerized version? I’d love to be able to spin up my own local instance on my homeserver.

How’s performance in Isaac with some workshop mods specifically? Locked 60 even with a bunch of crap on screen

I know there are some cool new ways to run PC games on stuff like this. If you have them, how does this run the PC versions of games like Isaac, Gungeon, Slay the Spire, or Vampire Survivors? I know these all (or mostly) have Android or Switch ports but for one reason or another (usually mod support) the PC version is superior. I’m looking into this device as a lower weight, lower power alternative to a Steam Deck, so support for 2D indie PC games is a must.

The new Marathon isn’t gonna release.

Oh no, it’s gonna steal all my crypto. the crypto i totally own. my crypto. you know, the crypto i use so frequently that i need an extension in my browser to manage it. that crypto.

For whatever reason, a game company can make your “physical copy” require a digital download to function. If a company decides they don’t want you to play a game (or version) anymore, it being on a cart or disc is not insurance against it.

And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc…

It’s a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It’s a bad practice even if it’s only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I’m of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of “you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that’s on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games”.

This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can’t be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that’s a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.

This is still yet another point against those people insisting that physical copies mean anything. Right now, it’s “just update the game and you can play it”. But that’s exactly as limiting as a digital copy - you still need an internet connection, an account in good standing, the company’s CDN to be online, and everything else to play the game that’s “on” your glorified $60 DRM key.

As more Switch 2s get firmware updated, this change means every “physical copy” of Mario Wonder has become a “Game-Key Card” retroactively. The only difference is that the download is slightly smaller for a GKC.

I’d love to see an extension that, instead of removing the client ID tracking information, instead randomizes it - and does so on inputting a link too. Removing tracking parameters needs 100% certainty, a single link clicked while signed into Google or whatever on another browser can be enough to establish a connection between you and the friend who sent the link. If I show up as clicking one link from Bob and 9 links from null, I’m still connected to Bob. But if my 10 links are from Bob, Jane, Alice, Fheism, Bggur, Daxi8, Michelle, Sssssssssss, Mgke7d, and BRomgi, good luck targeting any ads with all that noise. Especially if the systematically replaced clientIDs are recycled within the addon’s database and end up creating ghost profiles on the advertisers’ end.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says “we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.”

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the “better” tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio’s stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it “right” instead of doing it “easy”, they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But “pushing” smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn’t the way. It’s the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with “good enough” defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to “do the lighting”.

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like “before you hire anybody” early, and it’s a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn’t the “best, most capable, free-est” one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn’t need all the other features he’d get out of something like Unity or Godot.

Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.

Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.