Just wanted to drop you a thanks for starting this sub-thread. I also recently finished W3 (after a couple of false starts) and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I know it’s just a step-and-fetch game, but the storytelling has spoiled me for shallower content (plus I suuuuuuuck at aiming a firearm with the joystick so I’ve yet to get into Cyperpunk). Anyway, Nier GOTY is in my catalog so the responses to you have been illuminating.

Refund request time, you mean, right?

You know what’s funny - before I clicked through to see the context, I thought you were replying to a comment I made about the Houthis attacking it ships in the Middle East. We get attacked by terrorists all the time. Lots of people around the world hate Americans because, like most of the colonial powers, we’ve been reading assholes to lot of people. They also hate us because the rules of life that were made up in the name of our imaginary deity conflicts with the version of rules that they made up in the name of their imaginary deity. And we hate them back.

People are kidnapped and/or killed on a regular basis by “terrorists”. That’s a tragedy to everyone who hold them close. The lack of perspective is thinking that one particular tragedy is somehow larger because of the news coverage afforded.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

Americans have no sense of perspective. I have friends who were affected by the tower collapse in NY. We sent more service members to die looking for Bin Laden than were killed that day. And more than 10 times a many people die from gun violence in the US every God damned year than died in all four plane strikes. And every one of those other tragedies destroys families and communities.

It’s so overblown it’s practically a meme to everyone but the boomers and Christian “patriots” who need a way to make people angry about foreigners so they can ignore our home grown violent tendencies.

I was in the middle of Witcher 3 when I got my deck, and pausing during a cut scene (and some are feature film length, it fells like) caused the video to go slide-show and the audio to get choppy, and there was no recovering the game. I basically had to go back to the previous save and play back to that point. PITA. Something similar happened in one other game (can’t remember at the moment) and I just gave up suspend unless it was something simple / mindless like Yoku’s Island Express.

Usually I just suspend in-game to the game’s menu, then hardware-suspend. That’s pretty reliable.

It would be better if I could boot up and chose my launcher just like I choose Netflix, HBO, or Hulu from my Roku home screen. Of course, that could be accomplished with a custom front end / explorer in Windows, but since MS is pushing more into the OSX “we own the experience” with tons overhead and reduced customizable UI, and none of the other launchers support Linux, it’s pretty much just a pipe dream.

My experience with suspend has not been good - causing glitching and requiring shutting the game down and reloading from a previous save whenever I suspended in a cut scene. As a result I haven’t used it much due to those first couple of trials; maybe it’s better now.

By 2030? Fuck, I can get there by the end of next year if I put my mind to it. Rest of you are a bunch of damned slackers.

Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.

By default you only have access to Google Playstore apps

Yes, but for the purpose of video content, those aren’t “games” in the context of the steam deck. For the steamdeck (or any console) you have games and launchers instead of shows and apps. Steam loading Gog or Epic or Uplay as the interface from an initial “home” menu, analgous to the home menu for Android TV (not Android), Apple’s TVOS, or the Roku home page loading Netflix, HBOGo, Prime, or AppleTV+. None of those are “games” - you don’t do anything with them - they launch the content from their catalog - content which competes with the hardware/OS vendor’s own catalog. I can buy a movie from Apple or Roku or Amazon from within their launcher, even though I could have bought it through Youtube.

So I might load up my SteamDeck and choose Epic as my Launcher. Then the Epic Launcher shows me all of my games and allows me to buy new ones or collect Epic Points (IDK, I don’t use their launcher, tbh) and chat with all my Epic friends. If I want to play a Steam game, I press Home and select the Steam interface (which is the only one on the real Deck) and then I have the familiar Steam launch interface.

Epic v Google was about Fortnight and the 30% fees on in-app purchases which had to go through Google with no way around it. Same with Apple. This same problem might exist in SteamDeck if Steam required that any purchases made in the Gog or Epic launcher had to be processed through the Steam store and Steam took 30%. And, of course, the only reason this doesn’t exist for the steam deck is because you can’t even buy Fortnight on Steam. I don’t think, if you purchase a video through Amazon Prime on AppleTV or Roku, if Apple or Roku get a cut. If you subscribe to their monhtly license, they do - but not for discrete purchases made. The gaming angle - and fortnite’s fight with the stores, is about this cut applying to everything.

I still say it’s semi-walled. It has a bunch of gates in and out but and, unlike the Switch or iOS, there are no locks on the gates or gatekeepers. But the gates are latched in a way that requires specialized - if freely available - knowledge to open.

I can’t really think of anything other than somehow enabling anyone (e.g., GOG or Epic) to add their store as a Steam app

No, no as a Steam App, but as an alternate startup interface. I would say that the garden is open if there were a startup screen allowing you to pick the launcher of your choice. For argument’s sake, I’ll say Android TV. You can one-click download any content launcher with no technical ability. You can watch content (“play games”) purchased at Amazon, or on Netflix, or HBO Go (or whatever they call themselves now) and it’s the native store interface. You can do the same thing with Google’s in-house launcher. An acceptable alternate would be any other content player - like Apple’s TVOS, Roku, or Amazon’s FireTV. You can’t just load anything you want like it’s Linux or Windows, but the startup page lets you select a content provider and then you use their interface to navigate your content. It’s a good analogy as the same content is available from multiple providers, and all three (four if you include Google/Youtube) have their own in-house content libraries - which often overlap with competitors. I have both Roku and Apple actively on my TVs and I don’t purchase any content from either one of them except the hardware.

I should say that I don’t blame Valve for not including competitors stores. It’s a cleaner interface not to have a loading or Home screen. They also have customized their interface for optimal user experience. And, if they are still selling at a net loss (after engineering, marketing, and distribution) then this is a loss leader to drive gamers to their store. You could say, of course, they have done it on an OS that doesn’t natively support other game launchers and therefore it is impractical, but Linux also doesn’t natively support the vast majority of major game titles, so that’s a little disingenuous. And that partly wraps us back to the Fortnight topic at hand.

Sure. By default you get the Steam store. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s the only option to load games from the default Gaming interface. There is no option to load from Gog, Epic, Uplay, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, or any other 3rd party store. If you are not willing (or able) to manage the deck in desktop mode, you can’t install non-Steam games so - as a console - it’s a walled garden. I say semi- because it’s not terribly difficult to switch to desktop mode and install other applications, launchers, and games - but if you’ve never used Linux and are not computer savvy, Steam is the only way to get games onto the device.

Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard.

I’m with you on Valve trying to be more open (in a semi-walled-garden with Steam on Steamdeck, circumventable with some effort). But gaming on Linux - practically nobody is actually writing games natively for Linux. They’re writing for Windows (or a console) and the community is making the run under Proton/Wine on Linux. Is Epic intentionally preventing them from running on Proton? Well, effectively, yes - but that’s not a Linux-to-hard problem, more of a “we don’t want to have to police cheating on another OS” problem.

I fucking called it.

Of course I can’t find it because Lemmy can’t search comments, so you’ll all just have to take my word for it.

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Well I’ll be damned. TBH, I didn’t even know about the refresh - I enjoy mine enough that I’m not really in the market. Also, I snagged a TB ssd for $50 last month and installed it so, aside from the OLED I’m happy where I am. Besides, I’m such a casual I just can’t get bent about that last 5% of black.

My only real gripe is that the SSDs aren’t being refreshed as component prices drop. There’s no reason for the entry level not to be 256 now, with 512 mid range and 1TB top end. Retail - and I presume wholesale - prices on the parts have dropped by half or more since the deck was launched. There may be contractual issues involved, but - for Valve - it would make sense to make these machines as self-contained as possible. Yes, you can by a SD card, but at this point you probably shouldn’t have to. And, lets face it, 64GB on a gaming device is pretty limiting. Just start slotting in larger drives as the inventory breaks the previous price floor and inventory is cleared.

With or without rice?