Track pads and gyros are major features of the first Steam Controller that were brought forward to the Deck, and they can be game-changing for certain genres that have typically never controlled well on traditional controllers.

Honestly, I think the Steam Deck has worse ergonomics than that last Steam Controller, but at least it has a d-pad and a second analog stick so that there’s always a way to play a game with no configuration.

Asset reuse happens all the time even between sequels.

It’s bigger than lots of full games and has a proper beginning/middle/end. In the old days, it would have just been a sequel.

Quality or sales, I meant it the same way.

The state of AAA gaming is that releases slowed way down, resulting in way less output, which means you’re going to have fewer winners, by the numbers. Not every year can be like last year.

Black Myth: Wukong would surprise me, but the other 5 all have a real shot.

Yeah, it’s no Baldur’s Gate 3, and I do hope they learn more lessons from contemporary CRPGs, but I’d say it has other strengths. I liked the combat, and I liked the story, characters, and world-building. Open worlds in most open world games are pretty shallow, and I’d say both this and The Witcher 3 follow that same template to the same ends, but at the very least, it allows you to approach an objective how you’d like after scouting it out, which feels satisfying. It’s RPG-lite, which manifests as a pretty good action game with some story branching, and I’m not upset about that, as much as I’d prefer they lean into the RPG stuff harder.

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It got noticeably worse in the summer of last year. I have no idea what actually changed around then, but that was the first time the Steam forums were so toxic that it may not have been worth asking your question.

Everyone was experimenting with their own lousy DRM, including those that had activation limits and would require a phone call to reset them.

My hope is that consumers have lost confidence in games that they know have no value if they don’t attract a massive audience. We used to get games like StarCraft and Halo that had single player, cooperative, and competitive modes. We used to be able to host our own servers. Without those things, the value proposition drops precipitously if it isn’t a massive hit. I hope that’s the reason it flopped.

They made a pretty big promise in Alyx, which he acknowledged in the documentary. It’s also been about 5 years since Alyx was announced and released around the Game Awards, so given that promise that they made 5 years ago, maybe this year is the year.

I’ve only got a few. Several of them don’t really track hours, but I know I’ve put over 1000 into them. Games like Super Smash Bros. (Melee, Brawl, and 4) and Rock Band 2.

Other than those, the only one I’ve measurably put 1000 hours into is Skullgirls, but Guilty Gear Strive will likely get there in a few years. Skullgirls is a game with so much depth that I can’t imagine ever getting bored of it. If anything, I’d just lose motivation because I can’t see the path to improving, but I’ll definitely never see every permutation of strategies you can employ by combining characters together. Guilty Gear Strive has so many creative ways to use its expanded Roman Cancel system that any Evo highlight reel is full of creative ways out of situations that you’ve never seen before.

You can pay for online multiplayer and not have an offline option on consoles. There’s no reason to believe that paying for it would make more games playable offline.

You don’t remember pre-Steam then, because it was already headed down this path. Piracy and used copies have been the boogieman for a long time, and doing anything they can to prevent both was always the natural destination of the industry, unless more people start shopping on GOG.

At this point, I’m aching desperately for that linear shooter. They have other strengths. Halo Infinite offered a ton more freedom than the old games, but it was worse off for it.

The project came before a publisher owned them.

They’ve publicly mentioned that they’re building a “preservation team”, and the thing that makes that make sense to me is forward compatibility for Xbox executables on Windows somehow.

I’d very much prefer to not even have them take up shelf space, but it’s the only way that exists to actually own a copy of a movie or TV show. I have ripped a number of them, but if someone made the GOG for movies, I’d move all of my purchases over there.