Yeah, I agree with you on that.
If discoverability was better, I’m sure Android would get way more ports of good games. With the way it is right now with shovelware and Google pushing microtransaction-riddled crap over one time purchase games, though, it’s treated as a second-class platform because it’s not nearly as profitable as other platforms.
Which part of my comment was denigrating indie devs? Indie games are great. Android gaming is currently not.
If I’m looking for a good non-mobile game, I don’t go looking in the mobile game store. I go looking on PSN or PC, where the focus is on the kind of game that wasn’t designed as a phone-first experience.
The fact that Android has some good traditional games or ports of indie gems isn’t something inherent to Android. The overwhelming majority of those games were on PC or console first.
Oh, there’s no doubt about that. I’m not disagreeing that Android has some good-looking games. The problem is that games like GRID Legends Mobile are the exception, not the rule.
The Switch is crap, yes.
The Play Store is also overwhelmingly crap, though.
If you exclude all of the mobile games from both stores, the Switch simply has a better catalog of games.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
The mobile gaming market is leagues larger than every other market combined. That doesn’t mean the games are even remotely comparable to console games.
It’s an entirely different target audience. Mobile games are focused on quick sessions and design patterns designed to encourage spending money on microtransactions. Games made for the traditional gaming market are mostly designed for longer play sessions with more mechanically complex gameplay. I as well as many others prefer the latter.
Nintendo’s store is full of shovelware, but at least you’ll find more traditional games than just ports of indie hits. Or, buy a Steam Deck and enjoy something better than both.
The OP is really blowing smoke up Android’s ass when it comes to the quality of native Android games. Most “top” mobile games are freemium crap riddled with microtransactions.
What it does have, however, is emulators. Including one for the Switch itself. Paying $350 for decade-old hardware and $80 for games is just bad value compared to a $300 used S21 and $0 games.
5.6% of [respondents] users said they wouldn’t pre-order [on Epic] knowing it would influence exclusivity, 2.7% said they would.
They really brought in those big dollars with making Borderlands 3 a timed exclusive on Epic. A whole 9%. Meanwhile, 91.6% of respondents preferred Steam. Bravo, Randy. Bravo.
Disappointingly, 53.9% still would buy it on Steam if it influenced exclusivity going forward. Even if it is Steam—which has a record of providing better service than its competitors—exclusivity helps nobody.
GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.
It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.
Steam will end up pushed out of the market
This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.
Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.
EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.
And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.
Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.
or they will also become Streaming Platforms
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.
I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.
Nintendo: “hold my beer”
Game key cards are the stupidest idea I have seen in a long time.
To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.
To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.
They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.
Ok, now suppose you want to release a game for any of the modern Nintendo consoles.
You need to get a devkit. To get it, you need Nintendo to approve your request, and you need to pay them for a license to use the devkit hardware. And, to actually use the devkit, you need a PC running Windows.
Sure, to develop a game for PC, you need a PC. But do you know what you don’t need on top of that? A devkit and a Windows license.
Edit: Two downvotes in two minutes? Oh my, the sockpuppets are angry today.
The magic cable typically goes into ISP-owned hardware sitting in a box somewhere down the street. From there, it’s either converted into fiber optic signals or repeated until it reaches an ISP-owned building where the data can be exchanged with the wider internet.
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable?
It uses multiple channels (frequency ranges) in parallel, bonding (combining) them to increase throughput.
A surprising amount of bandwidth can be achieved this way. DOCSIS 4.0 can do 10 gigabits per second in download and 6 gigabits per second in upload.
Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.
When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.
one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites
That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?
Corporations drill it deep into your head that you do not positively promote your own products or negatively review competitor products without both making it clear that you (1) work for $Corp; and (2) are sharing your own, personal opinion.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Plex, they suck at training employees about social media policies.
Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack@lemmy.world said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.
Another great post as usual!
For people interested in what’s been going on with Limited Run, here’s a 90-minute video that goes into a lot of detail about the sketchy stuff they did before this latest controversy:
plus these are benches too it looks like
This part is the most surprising. For something meant to go in urban areas, where’s the hostile architecture? No railings between seats? No spikes?
Between EmuDeck and RetroDECK and having used both, I 100% prefer RetroDECK these days. It’s a single Flatpak install, it Just Works™ out of the box, and it doesn’t clutter my system with random crap sprawled everywhere. I also appreciate that it has a Steam Input template providing a way to do basically everything emulator-related that I could’ve ever wanted.
Major props to the team behind RetroDECK and the excellent work they’re doing. The future is looking bright, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store!
They did.
The Windows 10/11 “S Mode” only allows installing software through the Windows store. It was mostly relegated to OEM installs for cheap x86 and ARM laptops, thankfully.