Sell me on VR. let’s say this is a mind blowingly perfect launch. Somehow Valve sells the thing for like $600 and meets demand, anything you’d wanna do in VR is possible with this. What would that $600 get me? The only stuff I really see online that’s hype for VR is:

HL: Alyx

Beat Saber

And… 3D/VR porn videos.

Aside from those, what else am i missing out on by not having a VR headset? The tech seems super cool but I don’t hear praises sung for any other VR games than those two (and the half-joking suggestion that it’s just jackoff goggles). People talk about VRChat but I don’t think I’m interested in a positional audio chatroom with random people’s vtuber models and none of the friends i do voice chat with would rather be doing so in a virtual space.

Am i genuinely missing something? People seem really hyped for the Frame, it can’t just be for two games and a chatroom and porn, right? The ARM translation layer is really cool but that’s cool because it’ll benefit phones and tablets and SBCs more than the actual VR headset. I can see why you’d rather have a Frame than its competitors: no Facebook, works on-device or as a PC accessory, price point maybe, etc. But what are people doing with their Quests and Indexes and Vives and PSVRs already?

1: nobody’s going to do it

2: this is completely boneless. It’s not even calling for people to cancel their PS+ subscriptions.

They can Tōkon deez nuts.

Tōkon deez nuts

I mean, if it’s actually an MMO the kind of person that likes SAO won’t be able to have fun being the only overpowered god tier main character in the entire universe.

Right, now get it “generally doable” on a device with phone level specs and universality (plus a three cent cable) and watch online competitive gaming crash to the point where there’s genuinely no rational argument for installing spyware. Force every game that cares to solve the serverside anticheat “problem” instead of mitigating “most cheaters” by mandating insane levels of system monitoring.

This is why I hope that cheats end up being MITM attacks with ai slop in control. LLMs can easily do basic pattern recognition, so a device that can “look” at the screen for you and click on people’s heads would be trivial to produce with no software running on the actual game device. Get that popularized and the only excuse for rootkit anti-cheat evaporates. I’d rather live in the world where people cheat at video games than the world where the average gamer has 5 rootkits on their system just to protect “competitive integrity”.

That ten minute boot time is not normal. Something’s very wrong with your PC, especially if other games or programs have minutes-long launch times.

This looks like every other over the shoulder mass effect clone ever made. Why does “shooting the thing” have to be the primary verb for every space-era game again?

No point in watching the ad parade when 80% of the games are hat stores or GAAS slop and 90% of the remainder are remakes and remasters. The games worth your time and money are ones you’ll hear about when they’re released.

If any workers in the games industry have the power to disrupt, it’s the GTA6 guys. This game is industry-warpingly big, other multimillion dollar projects are being delayed or rushed just to “not have to compete” with GTA6 and GTA6 isn’t even launching on all platforms. Threatening to cause another delay if demands aren’t met could actually work if they stick to their guns.

Yeah that’s kind of the point with dark patterns. That’s not a term I made up either. Warframe isn’t as rife with them as other games but the “forever GAAS” platform is nearly always leveraging patterns like this in some way.

Dark patterns are dark patterns, even if “the community” is more or less happy. Just means that it’s working. Being owned by Tencent actually does give them the freedom to “just be profitable” instead of squeezing each player for more and more revenue YOY, but the game still uses every retention mechanic in the book and leverages fake value by putting the MTX currency on “really good sales! Look how good the limited time deal is!!!” to keep people shelling out.

Tencent is diversified enough that they’ll probably never feel the need to tighten the screws on the Warframe studio directly.

Both chicken and egg situations say the same thing: live service GAAS is unsustainable at best and garbage at worst

Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no “opt out”.

Can you even buy this without a Steam account though? It’s the Steam Controller, sold through Steam, designed to work on Steam. A third party driver to convert it to Xinput will probably drop within a week of its ship date (just like it did for the first Steam Controller), but if you’re against having a Steam account I’d wonder why you want a Steam Controller in the first place. There’s plenty of non-Steam controllers after all.

Analog and gravity-based ones exist and only make you look slightly more like a tool than Smart Glasses

They made Slay the Spire 1, right? They pushed the anti-infinite changes to main after getting review bombed for a beta patch, right? I’ve seen some people say that the readjustments in the beta are “compromises” to placate the whiners, but it’s much more likely that they used their experimental weekly beta patch to “overnerf” and “overbuff” so that dialing in the final changes becomes easier. If the right number for some value in your game is a 7, you find it faster by changing the 10 to a 5 and then buffing it than you would by incrementally nerfing it one by one.

We can have nice things because mega crit doesn’t need to care about steam reviews at all.

Honestly it never ever made sense to price a digital download at the same point as a physical object. Providing a digital download is entirely infrastructure costs, the cost of delivering “a copy” to the customer is fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, for a cartridge, for every copy, Nintendo (for example) has to buy a bunch of plastic and EMMC, image that flash storage with Mario Odyssey, print labels and stickers and encase that chip in more plastic, wrap that plastic in more plastic, ship those crates of plastic across the ocean, all to sell them to walmart and gamestop that take a cut of the sale themselves. When a customer downloads Mario Odyssey, all sixty dollars go straight to Nintendo.