This was super interesting, I didn’t ever think about expanding upon classic board games in this way. Thank you for making an effort to put up this post.

Valve was always waiting for the moment when Microsoft would be at their weakest, possibly during some kind of transition. They were too early with Steam Machines as a response to Windows 8 but this might be the time. Xbox is faltering and ARM threatens to end Wintel ecosystem. I wouldn’t be quick to applaud those developments though.

We have Google Linux for phones and it looks like we’ll have Valve Linux for gaming PCs. Valve is not your friend so this platform will be gradually locked down, for convenience at first. Then you’ll either use Valve Linux or you’ll be locked out of your games library - obviously not directly but alternatives will be too fiddly for mainstream. This will allow masses to be herded into Valve operated marketplace which was always the point.

The biggest corpo mistake of last century, computing Wild West for mainstream will die bit by bit unless this process is stopped with regulations. It’s ironic that it’s happening with money made from Windows.

I want this to be a thing now.

Can the French pick up the slack on this kind of game development please?

Hopefully they start supporting ARM64 on platforms that made the switch already too.

Unfortunately I get a feeling that Valve is going to make a proprietary platform out of Linux like Google did with Android and people will be clapping all along the way.

That makes it much more cruel. They are going to single out those two dozens of Xbox users.

Don’t forget about Xbox players, there’s dozens of us!

How do you stand image scaling on 3DS? It’s either poststamp sized or horribly mangled by non-integer scaling on a very low res display. It’s the reason I keep DSi along NN3DS.

Rare case of Valve updating anything to 64-bit binaries. Now do the client and not just server.

That’s not that long in the grand scheme of things. It’s been almost 20 years now since Steam was opened to third parties. Valve stopped most of the game development once Steam got into dominant position.

They wouldn’t operate this way if they didn’t have Steam. These days it’s just a bunch of people taking care of a money printing machine. They get bored and try other stuff sometimes. The problem is that this other stuff won’t make anywhere near what Steam does. The only real work at Valve these days is ensuring they have plan B for when Windows becomes less viable as a platform for them.

Agreed but Valve seems to be so lean that it’s just understaffed. It’s easy to have little staff when most of your products can keep running with next to no maintenance and you’re just there to administrate over a monopoly.

Nintendo business model, like any other, is a product of trade-offs. They sell hardware without subsidies. That hardware is outdated so it’s vulnerable to emulation and piracy which is why they are so intent on fighting it. Since they don’t need to make up for selling hardware at loss and don’t get into expensive development they have to compete on quality and fun. They seem to be doing very well on that front - you’re so sour about about how Nintendo is making it hard to get their old games but that’s because those games are still worth playing.

As to Pokémon, it’s not a very good example. Pokémon Company is 32% owned by Nintendo which could be argued is the reason that their games are so bad. Nintendo very rarely does sequels that don’t offer anything of considerable novelty. They’d probably be openly pissed at Pokémon Company for damaging Nintendo brand if it didn’t rake in so much money.

While it annoys us, they have always primarily served Japanese market and those guys seem to be enjoying limited drops and stuff like that. We need better laws on game preservation because public companies exist to maximize value and can’t be expected to do charity.

It’s hard to dispute that Nintendo is the only big player with a healthy business model. Their games are mostly fun, original and free of in-app purchases. They keep churning those games out at the time when everyone else is in a slump. Their litigious behavior is shameful but in other areas they are that idyllic model.

Turning all communities into auxiliary c/piracy circlejerk is proving detrimental to experience of everyone else though. I usually ignore posts that don’t interest me and downvote offtopic stuff only.

This place loses its function when people vote on posts based on whether they like companies mentioned rather than content value or newsworthiness.

I guess it’s fine as long as EPP led governments in Poland and Lithuania do this, just not Orban because he’s a bit of an ass.

So far we only have a corpo fedi-twitter in form of Threads. In that case non-corpo instance user has to specifically follow someone before their content is federated so that sounds like a bit overblown issue.

That’s why I keep saying it’s pointless to defederate corpos. They’ll just scrape everything before you notice.

I mean they have to make CoD multiplat, that was the deal with the regulators.

Glad to hear, thanks for the update.