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).

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?

Treated myself to an ultrawide and rtx 3070 during the pandemic for Cyberpunk and Battlefield 2042… and for work and study, of course. Cyberpunk was a bit choppy, but I got used to it–thankfully only ever crashed a few times during my playthrough. Played Horizon: Zero Dawn, Apex Legends, Star Wars: Fallen Order, Titanfall 2, and some other games, mostly FPS/shooters (NMS, hunting games)… then it became a glorified Fall Guys machine for a bit until I got a PS5… next upgrade may be when the 4090s come down in price, or whenever 24 GB of video ram is more affordable (I actually could use the extra ram for work-related experiments). Maybe a sidegrade to the steam deck?

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

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.