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Worse. All games used to let you create your own servers to play with friends. That’s basically gone.
I miss the days of opening Steam and being able to search a million servers to find the specific niche type of game I wanted in CS. Warcraft, custom maps, zombie… So fun
There’s people actively working on bringing those to cs2, but you wouldn’t know by the massive shitshow that the server browser is with thousands of redirects currently, which is why the community also built a server browser if you search CS2Browser you’ll find it, you can go back to enjoying it ^^
Zombie escape is the best 🏃♂️ 🧟♀️
AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.
I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List
Just posting this here. No Reason.
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Stop making me more jealous.
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Are we really going to convince ourselves now that Sony wouldn’t have introduced a subscription at some point? Realistically the only reason Microsoft where the ones to popularise it is because Sony didn’t get there first
Meanwhile Nintendo was just waiting in the corner so they didn’t have to be the first to try and start charging for their incredibly shitty p2p serverless online service while changing literally nothing
We can at least be relatively sure Nintendo wouldn’t have been first because they were so fucking terrified of online consoles that they almost had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it at all
Nostradamus much?
Just don’t buy that expensive crap. If people where better at math they would buy PCs instead and we wouldn’t have any exclusives.
Steam deck is the best option for cost/value
Damn I want that limited oled though haha.
I probably won’t be getting it.
Laughs in PC.
I enjoy PC gaming as much as anyone but the simple fact is you can’t do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn’t even need a napkin. It’s simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you’re paying for online play or not.
you can’t do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn’t even need a napkin. It’s simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you’re paying for online play or not.
The consoles themselves are often sold at a loss because they know they will make that money back on games. Which is a better value proposition is arguable, especially once you factor in how much more you’ll be paying per game relative to steam sales, the ability of PCs to do things other than gaming, and the inevitable obsolescence of consoles. I can still play games on a modern PC from when steam was new.
Microsoft also offers a game pass for PC, but I’d rather own my games.deleted by creator
It was never going to be free forever, because that would be leaving free money on the table, which is unacceptable to any evil megacorp (which is to say, all of the big three). I imagine PSN initially being free was mostly a result of trying to bridge the gap between PS3 and 360 sales, given the multi-year delay and huge price difference.
It was never going to be free forever, because that would be leaving free money on the table
So… When will playing online on PC require a subscription on top of the ISP?
Probably about 2 days after Valve becomes a publicly traded company. While GabeN is alive I don’t think that’s a risk but after that who knows.
The biggest threat to gaming is Gabe Newell’s eventual death. I really hope he figures out the whole brain connected interface thing so he can upload himself to the internet and become immortal.
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They don’t have a monopoly. They don’t even have a natural monopoly like they did when it first launched and was the only digital store front for games.
Instead of trying to make the one good service shitty, how about the shitty services step up their game and stop being shitty?
I remember hearing it was originally gonna be paid, but Sony messed something up in their servers that made people angry and were forced to keep it free.
This is why I exclusively play indie offline games. Also because my PC is getting old lol.
Funny, I remember the playstation’s online being dog shit and offline a ton.
I thought WoW, RuneScape and the like pioneered online subscriptions?
They were not the first, either. But definitely the biggest in their day.
Ultima Online predates those too.
Everquest had a subscription. I think subscription models were common back then for being a member of a forum or getting a magazine or news letter.
I haven’t played multiplayer since the PS3 days, before Sony joined the greed bleed
Is the steam deck a console?
No, it’s a handheld PC.
To be fair, does that make a ps3 running Linux a desktop PC?
“PC” historically refers to devices that are “IBM PC” compatible, although nowadays that mostly means machines with x86 chips… except that powerful ARM desktops, laptops, and servers are becoming a thing too so that’s not accurate either. Plus there’s that whole “Mac vs PC” ad which also makes the term more confusing.
But even going by the recent historical usage, I’d say the Steam Deck qualifies since it has an x86 chip, whereas the PS3 has a weird custom PowerPC cpu (which, ironically, was made by IBM).
really at this point PC just means it’s not locked down to a highly specific software source and lets you change the OS
All consoles are computers, in the sense that their chips are turing-complete
Nobody has really come up with a computer that can only run things you like and none of the things you don’t.
They’re just computers locked down by digital rights management, opaque operating systems, or other protection measures.
For the purposes of this conversation I would say yes
Then again I would count the steam deck more as a console than a PC in most scenarios
I count it as a portable mini-PC because the games I’m playing on it are the same I own on PC, using the same account…
I guess that depends on your definition, but really I’d lump it into handheld computer, I’ve owned several, such as the GPD Win series
You can install desktop Linux software on it with no need to perform any types of “jailbreak” so while steam os is a proprietary skin for Linux, its not really locked down the way traditional brick consoles are.
Console doesn’t have a hard definition, so anyone could come through and make a case for why it is.
Edit: you can see the people replying after me all have different definitions and standards for the word, it’s arbitrary really
It runs desktop Linux natively, steam button, power, switch to desktop.
So was a launch ps3 not a console because you could install linux as an “OtherOS” before sony revoked thr feature?
Again, it’s a loose definition and it’s pointless and purposefully contrarian to argue about it.
Yes. It’s a mass manufactured consumer product with gaming as it’s intended purpose
That’s a console.
Consoles typically lock the player into their ecosystem, though. You don’t have to use steam to play games on the deck.
They don’t have to though, that’s just what most consoles do.
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very difficult to jailbreak
Getting an Xbox into developer mode, booting retro arch, really whatever you want then doing literally whatever you want with it has never been easier. The 360 was far more difficult and continues to be difficult to hack and mod in meaningful ways. The series consoles you can crack open in like 30 minutes with an article and a YouTube video.
What’s the GP32?
What’s the NGage?
What’s the Ouya?
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What are they though?
Are they
?
Depends at what level you define ‘console’.
Is it a device purpose built for playing games? Yes.
Does it have its own bespoke gaming platform? No. It plays games and applications made for the x86 PC platform.
does it have its own bespoke gaming platform?
Sure steam doesn’t fit that definition exactly but I mean…it kind of serves the same purpose.
Steamdeck is more console than x86 PC is a platform. I get what you mean, but PS4 and PS5 are too technically x86 PCs. Most modern games’ tightly coupled target are actually APIs they are using.
It can be one click in a compiler to compile the game to ARM PC, but it’s a different story when you port your game engine to console, where you have to implement the same features using different APIs. (E.g. Raytracing, storing game data, connecting to profile, implementing multiplayer etc.).
In the example of SteamDeck, the platform is Win32 or Linux ABI compatible OS.
If MS didn’t do it, someone else would have and it would have become the trend anyway. The problem isn’t the particular sins of a specific company (though to be clear, MS is heinous), the problem is the profit motive.
Reject modern gaming, return to quake 3 arena.
Video games could have had a single version for the entire world which contains every localization that the user can freely choose between (you know, like every other software with an international market), but Nintendo popularized the geolocking model that other competitors also started using. (And no it’s not because it would take too much space, that might have been true in the ROM cartridge days but now most game cards are just overpriced proprietary SD cards with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and it’s not like game studios are particularly conservative with file sizes nowadays.)
Phones also could have had removable batteries and could be disassembled, but Apple popularized the throw it in a dumpster and get a new one model that other competitors also started using.
The tech industry is especially brazen because two thirds of the users literally value convenience and “polish” above data ownership and device repair rights and literally anything else and the other third is just ignored and everyone calls them stuck in the past, paranoid, amish, etc.
I don’t think folks remember how truly shitty Nintendo‘s online service was when it was free. The fact is these companies will not put meaningful resources into them unless they are directly generating revenue. I hate it, but that’s reality.
It’s still shitty even now that you pay for it. The free retro emulation doesn’t offset the connection issues and massive lag, nor does it excuse the god awful store.
I still think they’re 10 years behind but dude it was unplayable prior.
…It’s improved? Doesn’t it still handle communication weirdly (needing a separate app for voice chat), or is that on a game-by-game basis?
It was awful prior. The netcode was terrible, MP was a joke on virtually every game.
I really don’t see how this is any better, they are using the same peer to peer netcode they always have. Maybe the general quality of Internet has gone up, but there is nothing I can point to that Nintendo has fundamentally changed between previous free MP and NSO, except giving some ROMS and DLC occasionally. Smash bros is still a lag fest with wireless players, splatoon still delays collision detection, Mario kart still has weird rubber banding and desync… they just slapped a price tag on it.
