No doubt in my mind M$ employs obfuscated layers of (contracted) marketing to astroturf, including downvotes of your cautionary comments. The line between a fanboy and astroturfer is blurred.

Gaining subscribers/customers while bleeding money, then charging more money once your competitors are forced out of the market or investors want to cash out, is a basic strategy… I doubt Game Pass was ever profitable, it was all an illusion propped up by accounting tricks and obfuscated/discounted internal operating costs (where M$ can shift xbox costs to money-printing cloud services division).

No doubt after years of failed xbox, that Phil Spencer is just a corporate suit executing the vision of M$ as a whole (in which Games is just an inconvenient detail). Expect more of the same, bundling of other services, no actual good in-house games. Activision acquisition in part of this strategy to pump up Game Pass, since M$ internal studios have not produced anything noteworthy this generation. I expect the next xbox to have cheaper hardware to undercut ps6, but to have increased game pass incentives to make up for it. maybe a random bundle with netflix. you gotta think outside of the (x)box for whats coming next.

Wow, that actually helps a lot, thanks for the tips. Holding it like you described helps a lot. I can tell this is more like I hold my Steam Deck (a looser grip, especially with the thumbsticks being higher on the Deck).

Yea, it’ll probably be fine in the long run or at night when I’m likely to use it. Gotta finish Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve probably spent as much or more money on my Deck than I ever did on Steam, and I haven’t even gotten it yet (tomorrow is shipping day!). The SSD upgrade and SD card alone cost as much as the base Deck (on sale)!

Most of my gaming has been on the Switch or PS5, but I’m excited for some portable PC gaming, emulation, and game streaming to the Deck. I used to be way into PC FPS games when I was younger, so I’m excited that the Steam deck can provide that Mouse & Keyboard feel with the touchpad (and/or gyro).

Doesn’t scratch the same itch yet. I have to cheat and go check out reddit every now and then.

I couldn’t even get pass the login screen since I only lurked and never made an account (despite spending over a decade browsing reddit). I remember they used to let you use the app without logging in.

Gilmore Girls has plenty of plotlines that can appeal to all peoples. If you can get past the teen romance plots, there’s something for everyone. And there’s always Kirk.

Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.

I don’t see what the big deal is even. Developers can just continue using the same tooling, and just target a higher graphics budget. Surely Nintendo isn’t so crazy as to introduce some backward incompatible changes?

Nice. I’d replace the plastic buckle lock with metal ones, too, if you’re already opening up the joycon.

No special features besides removable usb-c hub. I did replace the fan and thermal paste on my Switch last year, which may help if you’re overheating.

No complaints with the jump gate except that one time at a hotel where it overheated my Switch. Been using it for a while now with no issues on an OG Switch.

Multiplayer shrines, spin-off game.

Give me a Nintendo Phone. I already pay big bucks for a phone every few years; what if I pay big bucks instead for a Nintendo Phone that can also play Nintendo games?

I’d love to just whip out my Nintendo Phone and play a quick match or two of Splatoon or solve a few shrines in Zelda wherever I am. I can already imagine the increased netcode lag over cellular data in Splatoon already… maybe it isn’t a good idea…

7e-1, anyone?

It’s cool we all want the new community to succeed and get live updates on things being fixed or worked on. There’s some shared misery in growing pains/bugs as we all stress test the system, but I think that only somehow brings more communal joy when the problems are fixed.

M$ is a 2.5 trilion dollar company that can’t manage game studios because it’s not one of their core competencies. They prop up their failed xbox gaming division with enterprise sales and cloud computing. I honestly don’t think M$ even cares about xbox as a console; it’s just a vehicle for cloud gaming, subscriptions, and a way to ensure developers also develop for PC/Windows.

M$ is looking long term. They can afford to bleed money for another 5 to 10 years, as long as they buy brands/studios with influence; they’ll try to condition the next generation of kids to accept subscriptions and live-service games. It’s the worst of worlds; a regular gaming company would be forced to innovate, restructure, or sell itself–xbox can just fail and instead of improving internally, they have unlimited non-xbox money to spend.

I also think xbox, even failing, is just a marketing vehicle for M$. They want to influence kids and teens into associating M$ with cool things. They’ve failed to produce any games (yet) to compete with Sony this generation, so their last ditch effort is to just buy a studio with mindshare. You’ll never hear a straight answer as to how much money xbox is losing, because they probably hide it behind some cloud/services or marketing account.

There is one way I’d be okay with M$ buying Activision Blizzard: they need to spin off the xbox brand into it’s own company and let it stand on its own. Then, we’ll see if the company is really viable as its own entity or if its just a money-losing strategic brand for M$.

Over a decade lurking on reddit; never posted. Just made a lemmy account. I don’t need lemmy to be “the next big thing”… just need it to not be overrun by bots and astroturfing. Hopefully some of the smaller subs I visit move over.