i mean, there’s always animal crossing. the whole rust/ark/valheim ecology leans in that direction as well.
but it’s kinda weird that the major aaa players keep cramming into a narrowing ubiclone model when there are all these other genres that are wildly successful and yet still read as fringe.
Cue Busted saying something about huge teams and sunk costs and publisher money
I was exercising restraint, this time, but
so much path dependency comes from the team composition itself. Just like AAA has ballooned in art budget because that can scale in a way engineering or most design can’t, “add more quests” is something you can budget and hire designers for in a way that you can’t for “build simulation”. At scale, the prototyping and iteration needed to effectively design a reactive system is much more difficult than a smaller team. The typical path to getting something new and systemic like Fallout 4’s village sim is to set up a small isolate team and hope for success, while making sure the design can be amortized from the rest of the game if it fails. If it succeeds and is a good feature in the game, you can bake it more deeply into the DNA for the sequel.
There that’s the term I meant to make fun of you for, just couldn’t bring it to mind
i yam what i yam
if they made a yakuza game that had no random encounters, just a handful of scripted ones, and virtua fighter fighting, I could give a shit about a fighting game for the first time in my life
careful, that was the promise of tides of marinara, and the combat was somehow the worst part of it even so
isn’t that shenmue
Indeed it is
they only make one of those every 20 years or so though, they make yakuza games all the time
July 20th.
The Steam Punk
this is pretty weird imo
they’ve got so much evidence at this point that they don’t have much of a commercial platform without windows, the space is pretty crowded, a lot of the “good” solutions involve xCloud or moonlight using idiosyncratic combinations of Apple/Google/Sony/Microsoft hardware, you can’t really compete with nintendo…
I hope they realize this is a bad idea far enough into the project that I can buy one for five bucks in a 2025 steam sale like all their other hardware.
I suspect like Steam Machines you will be able to side load Windows
As for why now I think the core hardware is off-the-shelf and a Valve branded version of a Chinese OEM Switch form factor PC is a business they can at least try at
I guess they really do have infinite money to just be throwing it away like this
yeah but like even Linux ports of commercial games have fallen way way off since their peak in 2014 when consoles and windows were both at a nadir (and the unity ecosystem was pretty close to being turnkey cross-platform unlike now that it’s become like audio editing where even the “cross-platform” professional workflows are hugely dependent on closed source plugins that are only supported on Windows and maybe Mac for commercial userbase reasons, etc.), I think the media coverage of this really has to be overlooking that it’s meant to be a streaming machine first and foremost. that makes way more sense, there isn’t really dedicated steam link hardware in this form factor but steam is by far the best streaming ecosystem to use on existing phone + controller kits
theoretically there are fewer (big, F2P) games that they’d have to port in order to appear contemporary now than there were in 2014 but it still seems awfully stale
Yeah I agree, I think the play is to be some kind of hybrid between a Wii U and a Switch.
Is it? It’s just plain worse than Nvidia/moonlight for me. The UI is better, I guess.