MudMan

You… may not have been following the news for the past couple of years.

Doesn’t quite look like “quiet death mistaken for peace” out there, and it seems like the world destroying is very much being done with guns, as per usual.

Endless capitalist growth and wealth accumulation is still bad, though, don’t get me wrong, and oligarchy is, as always, tied to all the rest of it. That’s just a bit of a reductionist take.

The “underlying value” isn’t much of a concern if you’re someone seeking funding or a small investor. It’s also not much of a concern if the “unchecked moral hazards” are still funneling money towards a small group of capitalists. Or if the political ramifications of the reporting are impactful in other areas.

It’s not a media conspiracy if all the real world consequences are based on the same consensual reality. “It’s all fake reporting anyway” is not a valid response here, even without disputing the base assumptions, which I probably would.

Man, the hysterical, unhinged US market just has no chill.

Someone came up with a better chatbot-- “OMG, superintelligence is here and is inevitable, all hail our robot overlords and their broligarch creators!”

Somebody outside the US had an idea to train a chatbot for cheaper-- “OMG, US tech is doomed, they have no recourse against this and all the hardware is now worthless!”

Maybe if the markets weren’t constantly freaking the hell out about any semblance of technological innovation in search for the next Google or Apple they woldn’t have to deflate like a balloon each time reality sets in.

You were talking to it in Portuguese? Because I definitely managed to get R1 to freak out using less frequent languages and just spout gibberish.

In any case, that’s not unique to this model, either. People need to stop taking chatbot statements about themselves as if a person was self-identifying. Most declarations of a chatbot about itself are either enforced manually or wild guesses. The chatbot doesn’t know about itself any more than it knows about any other subject.

I do think fighting games are a special case because the DLC is so obvious that the seasonal microtransaction stuff is not as much of a focus.

But hey, SF6 did add a battlepass, so… it’s moving in that direction. We’ll see.

Sure.

And the natural conclusion of that is why have the up front charge at all. You do the 2XKO thing or the Multiversus thing and just let people play and charge for the characters. Of course that may mean being online for purchase authentication, right?

I don’t like where that goes.

I think SF in particular is pretty sure it can pull a decent chunk of cash up front and not impact sales too much, so that’s better for them, since they’re monetizing all the casual players, but sitll. It’s a dynamic that’s in play and I don’t like it.

You already spend more than 100 for Street Fighter and always have. The full roster for SF6 is currently 100/110 bucks. Not counting MTX and extra cosmetics.

Sure, you didn’t pay it all at once, but that’s no different than me buying SF2 and then Super SF2 the following year, each for seventy-ish bucks.

Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.

In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.

But it’s true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there’s no way to cut costs on distribution (you’re already subsidizing storage, it’s just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there’s no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.

And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.

Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn’t prices will “evenutally” go up, it’s that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That’s probably more likely.

Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?

Gonna guess the tens of thousands getting laid off who are anxiously waiting for money to come back to the business so they can get hired again.

VERY educated guess, there.

This is some weird reporting.

For one thing, I’m not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I’d be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.

For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called “retail packaged goods” games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That’s 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.

That’s two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can’t even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that’s 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.

So basically GTA or no, I don’t see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It’s MTX-fests or nothing. It’s pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you’ll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.

So… pick your poison, I suppose.

I mean… yeah, give it a long enough time and it will be. Kinda how inflation works. “Eventually” is a pretty expansive word.

I don’t even know if “good deal” makes sense in abstract anymore.

At this point I’d look at it the other way. If you want a PC you want to decide on a budget first, then see what mix of parts gets you the features you want. A good deal for a 1K build may not look anywhere near the same as one for a 2K machine. Or a good deal for someone into competitive FPS at 1080p on a 1K build may not look the same than a single player person looking to put games on a 4K TV.

Display tech and even software design is so wildly different now it’s all a bunch of interlocked decisions. Building PCs in the 90s and 00s was easy: games did one thing, which was put some frames on a CRT monitor. You bought the best thing you could afford to do the thing on the thing. These days it’s more flexible, but also more complicated, unless you’re going for top of the line, money-is-no-object stuff.

I thought the Xbox didn’t have a full jailbreak this gen yet, but maybe I’m wrong.

In any case, yeah, absolutely once consoles get jailbroken they become a vector of botting and cheating. Which is one reason why I have very mixed feelings about it. I welcome news of jailbreaking consoles because we do need it for preservation and emulation, which are important long term, but it is a bit of an issue for multiplayer, so sometimes it’s fine if it starts happening a few years in rather than right away. It matters less since crossplay is a thing and you get all the PC stuff anyway, but still.

On the grand scheme, though, cheating is a numbers game. It’s one thing to every now and then encounter some scammer or overly dedicated nerd and another to have an army of twelve year olds cheating trivially on every session you play.

Of course when it comes to Linux support the question is whether you can get Linux/SteamOS to the former state, or whether the volume of players is not enough to trigger the latter. I don’t know, frankly. Each game probably has a different balance and figures out that math for themselves based on it.

Good call. Vita emulation still sucks, the device proper is very nice and there are some good games stuck in there. Less these days, when a bunch of them got up-ports to PC and whatnot, but still.

For the life of me I don’t understand why there’s so little interest in Vita preservation. I get that it wasn’t as well liked as the PSP, and all the custom features are tricky while also having the hassle of all the PSN integration you get on modern console emus, but… still, you know?

The 3DS screen feels like magic every time I go back to it.

Yeah, I hear they’re not allowed to watch porn until 18 either and that works flawlessly.

Beyond questions of implementation this to me sounds like maybe we’re replacing Instagram with Fortnite, but it sure will be interesting to see how it plays out. I guess trying something is better than trying nothing.

It does, but it depends on how many and how they emerge. If it’s a review bombing campaign it’s more likely to get moderated out or ignored. If it’s an organic thing it’s more likely to be perceived as a genuine PR problem. And in any case it depends on how many people are actually complaining. 2% can be a lot of people if the overall number is big, but if the game in question has a serious bug that’s a lot more people willing to write about it than… you know, whatever percentage of 2% happens to be Linux-focused enough to go write a review.

I guess I’m trying to impress that a lot of people play games and of those a fraction get activist and of those a fraction play on Deck or Linux desktop and of those a fraction are going to complain.

The best path to solving this is less a review bombing campaign and more having a larger audience that is just obviously profitable to support. That one is mostly on Valve, Lenovo and the rest of the official SteamOS adopters, whoever they end up being.

Well, and on finding a reliable solution for proper anticheat on Linux that keeps it as secure as at least Windows, let alone consoles.

You know what? Good luck with that, genuinely.

You’re still wrong, though. Or at least overconfident.

Oh, by all means, share your knowledge on the state of gaming. I am looking for investment opportunities right now and that seems like a hot scoop.

Hah. You may have accidentally come up with the new “this is the year of Linux Desktop”.

“Five years from now is the year of Linux gaming being financially relevant short-term” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though.

Honestly, I don’t have any predictions on this. So much is riding on how hard Valve is willing to invest on becoming a OS company and how receptive end users are to it. Right now the outcome falls somewhere between “Steam Machines” and “Nintendo Switch”, and I genuinely don’t think anybody can predict where in between it will fall yet. At the very least we need to see what happens to the Legion Go S and SteamOS adoption.