Is it really that different though?

Lets say you get the 1 month pass, play any games you want and are part of that “service” for the duration, once it runs out you lose access to the games (unless you crack the downloaded files for them which would be like not returning the “rented” game I guess)

Personally just feels like the same scam cable tv was and now transforming into streaming services with ads.

Don’t microslop and friends peddle some game pass and similar subscriptions? Game rental with extra steps.

As long as there’s a quick check mark for steam deck, steam machine, steam frame and then “custom” this sounds like a great idea

I’ll see statements like this thrown around, meanwhile the PS5, Xbox series X and even the upcoming steam machine are all AMD hardware.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that their pleasure receptors aren’t the same anymore (or are willingly blind to that fact?) and even if you recreate scenarios that might be as enjoyable as the ones that were 20 years ago, for a lot of people the sense of “childhood wonder” is either dulled or gone entirely after so many years so the result still wouldn’t be the same.

One of those times where it needs to pivot to an entirely different approach to the genre to make it viable, and I don’t see anybody doing that… yet?

Very much of a similar mindset - don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

While GoG is certainly not without its faults or shortcomings, at the end of the day they’re trying to stay true to their mission and delivering on it consistently.

I actually went to look into the examples mentioned above.

Hitman was apparently playable with “some targets” and other stuff locked behind online functionality but the base game was playable without. So this part definitely feeds into the “screwing people in new and exciting ways” that you mentioned.

For Deus Ex MD - apparently the binaries themselves were actually the DRM free ones, but the package that they gave GoG basically redirected all the DRM calls to Steam, which… resulted in a weird situation where it’s half stripped of some DRM measures while the other half required an actual crack to kill those calls that were redirected to a different platform entirely… so overall I wanna chuck it to a lazy “let’s get some brownie points and release it on GoG but let’s use this intern to package and ship it cuz we can’t be arsed to do a proper release” type of scenario.

Do I blame GoG for not checking it throughly? Yeah, a bit, but at the same time the onus should be on the providing party to deliver an adequate product that’s up to the requirements of the platform and if it’s not, maybe have a financial penalty clause for non-adherence in the distribution contract or something, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer or anything.

If it was really mandated by the company and not a bug, GoG support would not have provided any workarounds to get around it while the situation was being looked into and hashed out with a permanent fix deployed in a subsequent patch.

If you’re talking about the phantom liberty DLC bug with the galaxy launcher, that’s been fixed since patch 2.01

Also they’ve been separated out of CDPR recently, we’ll see how that pans out for future releases.

Unfortunately up here the Benjamins to beaver bucks conversion rate sucks. And then we have to pay 15% tax on top.

So anything that’s trying to follow that logic breaks apart real quick, even when there’s 10% off on launch, still comes out to more than the full price would be… :(

Somebody make this into a free game on steam with some dumb achievements and being able to change the colour of the nub if you do it 100 times or something.

Micro transactions and pay to win: Not very much of but still there. (Who knows what it’ll look like down the line though)

As for the anticheat I saw people mentioning ACE, which, from what I saw, people really didn’t want.

While I agree people’s experiences vary wildly, there’s plenty recorded gameplay video that shows it happening.

That aside, they can take their invasive measures and shove it up their cloud where it can and should operate, not on my goddamn machine.

Secure boot. TPM2.0. And a kernel level anticheat on top.

Yet, still hackers in game.

Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.

Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.

And tarkov isn’t even on steam… yet?

Look Outside just had a major 2.0 patch. Solid horror game. And it’s 30% off at the moment.

Steam link

Both? Both. Both is good.

Fair points, but I’d argue to the contrary in light of the following:

• The steam deck was developed and released at the beginning of 2022. That’s a ~3.5 year difference in hardware and what was considered good value. (As a person buying a lot of hardware I might be a tad biased on this point so I acknowledge it)
• I did hear mixed things about the screen itself from a friend that has it, heard that it’s extremely scratch prone and that the battery doesn’t hold on for very long, but maybe that depends on the title you’re playing, the brightness and refresh rates.
• it can do 120hz, which is nice, but that’s game dependent and there’s no guarantee that it’s implemented or enabled for every game. From what I read previously, cyberpunk only does 30-40 fps on switch2 so that’s pretty much entirely out of the question for that title at least. I won’t make any guesses or misleading statements about other titles since I haven’t seen the benchmarks and haven’t been following the news on those.
• the fact that it’s robust and convenient to use in your hands is a perk imo, not a demerit, perhaps this is something more catered to the younguns which I don’t wholly understand though.
• also in regards to the above point, the controllers, albeit a little larger now, are still pretty bad and still experience the same issues as the previous generation thereof) subpar mechanism, no upgradeability, and no repairability besides having to send it to a repair center/replacement. Meanwhile should you experience any issues with your deck, the instructions and parts to fix it are available on the ifixit website at extremely reasonable prices should you wanna do it yourself.
• performance… I haven’t tried cyberpunk on my deck, so I can’t really comment on it specifically, but as far as a good chunk of the 100+ games that I’ve played on it are concerned, it’s been running extremely well in all aspects of the games, even the ones that weren’t fully steam deck verified… meanwhile even first party games like DK have lag spikes when you open the map on the latest and greatest… to me, that’s unacceptable.
• and while I understand the premise of people wanting to play first party games from Nintendo, similar to the above point the quality has been going downhill, and some of the newer IPs (Nintendo and even Sony) are being developed as more of cross platform release or ported to pc eventually (often with enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes)

I am going to briefly mention the subscription requirement for Nintendo online, some switch 2 versions of the games costing extra vs the switch 1 versions, as well the exorbitant prices (and lack of discounts even down the road) for any games sold on their store, and the fact that if you want to tinker with any of that, you can get hardware banned from online services entirely.

These are, as you mentioned, not hardware related, but are still quite hefty anti consumer practices and while not the main topic of the above hardware discussion, should carry a lot of weight in the decision to buy into that ecosystem.

Note that “a lot better hardware” is still hella mediocre given the price tag.