Nintendo has never sold their consoles at a loss. They sell them at a small profit which then grows to a larger profit as the cost of making them decreases.

Home video game sales peaked at $3.2 billion then fell to $100 million, a drop of nearly 97%. This collapse, largely blamed on Atari shoving out low quality games, lasted for 2 years until Nintendo released the NES in North America.

Definitely a shrinking audience for AAA games, but I don’t think it will be too bad gamers overall. Consoles will keep marching forward, as will Valve with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.

I think the highest of the high end graphics stuff has long since hit diminishing returns. You can do a hell of a lot with yesterday’s hardware and less-than-bleeding-edge process nodes for newer hardware. Consoles have never used bleeding edge GPUs and they’ve always done fine with sales (across the whole market, if not always individually). I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash.

I explained why it needs to be left running: because opening it is too much of a hassle to even bother with. Thus I don’t, and I don’t plan to open it any time soon.

GOG Galaxy is a nonsequitur. I’ve never installed it and it’s never been required to download or play any game. I use GOG’s website to buy and download games. Galaxy might as well not exist and I’m fine with that.

It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.

When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.

As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.

But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.

I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.

Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.

None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.

Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?

Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.

The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.

I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.

Not sure why “direct profit” is important.

Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.

Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.

Well for him, thousands of people is basically nothing. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies.

One of the problems with growth in popularity is a growth in expectations. A Morrowind remaster that sold even 1 million copies would be considered a failure.

If they revisit Morrowind, they need to go ALL IN on it. Keep the setting and themes but redo everything else. I love Morrowind as a world to get lost in but the combat gameplay in particular is quite bad, possibly the low point of the entire Elder Scrolls franchise.

I enjoy the combat in Oblivion, Skyrim, AND Daggerfall more than Morrowind, simply due to the feel of weapons connecting with enemies. Daggerfall probably feels the best, due to the crunchiness of it and the way you can do different types of swings in rapid succession.

The exploration stuff in Morrowind is just amazing though. Some of the dungeons are like Russian dolls of awesomeness! Also just love the music. So relaxing!

They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.

I think they’re trying to kill Patreon for some reason. Maybe they’ll launch their own Patreon competitor? Maybe they noticed developers were giving away iOS apps and getting crowdfunded on Patreon?

Depends on where you’re from. Hong Kongers speak Cantonese and write in traditional Chinese, not simplified. Simplified is dominant on the mainland due to being standardized in the government-set school curriculum, though you can still find traditional Chinese used for branding and historical uses.

And pay a $15 subscription for the poop cloud service.

I have my own espresso machine and make various drinks for myself as a hobby. That’s actually the easy part of being a barista. The hard part is keeping up with a high pace of orders during rush hour. I would not want to be a barista either, specifically because of the stress of that work.

The other commenter is right about the good coffee though. Making really good espresso from fancy light roasted single origin coffee is extremely difficult.

None of those preserve the shape of Antarctica!

Electrician? I do my own electrical work! This issue is pretty low priority for me though. I have a ton of other things to fix around the house!

There’s no driver. These are bulbs designed for traditional halogen fixtures which connect directly to 120V mains AC.

I prefer to think of beer as liquid bread. Delicious and nutritious!

I live in Canada (60Hz here) and I just installed a new range hood above my stove. It came with standard recessed halogen light fixtures with LED bulbs. Rather than being fully dimmable, the switch has high and low settings. When set to low, I can definitely see visible flicker.

I also have this same style of lights above my bathroom mirror and a dimmer switch there. They also display more and more flicker when dimmed.