MudMan

Sure, and with the GPU sucking up a bunch of juice that’s plenty to get toasty.

It’s just I haven’t been using laptops that do that in the past few years and coming from desktop world it feels so wrong now.

On a 1660 Ti (MaxQ, I presume)? I can believe it. It’s the exact range of game that card is made for. At a glance I don’t see Skyrim AE benchmarks, but notebookcheck has it running Monster Hunter World, MGS V and Rise of the Tomb Raider maxed out at 1080p60ish.

Maybe I’m spoiled by just assuming Windows and Linux benchmarks are comparable by default? I guess it’s no longer a surprise now, so… congrats, everybody?

Also, man, is there something you can do about those CPU temps? It makes me nervous just to look at that 28% utilization at 90C. I’ve been away from gaming laptops since handhelds are a thing and I’m not used to that anymore.

I mean, for all the quotes you missed the one that explicitly does “all you ask”.

I know that’s not universal, and some people with similar accessiblity problems have the opposite experience. I don’t question that.

The thing with talking to each other on the Internet while disagreeing (respectfully) is that we end up having to parse which of the parts we disagree in to even have an argument about. I don’t mind people liking the Steam controller, but I’m also not shy at calling out the ways in which its rough edges are not a me thing.

I think it’s undeniable that it’s pretty plasticky. I think I can make a pretty solid argument about its setup and usability being overengineered while not getting to the ostensible goal (mouse and keyboard on a controller format, presumably). And for what it’s worth, I think the fact that it’s a pretty niche thing goes to show this is the consensus reaction to it.

All of that can be said without taking anything away from the people that like it, I think. But… you know, that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re wrong about it or that those are all entirely subjective observations about it.

I’ll say that my “hate it with a passion” stance is less about the Steam Controller itself and more about how it keeps sneaking into all of Valve’s hardware. I’ve said this before: I don’t know who’s still stuck on making touchpads happen, but it made my time with the HTC Vive much harder than it had to be and the Steam Deck didn’t need to have Dumbo ears, so I do think there’s a value to reminding people (and Valve specifically) that this isn’t going to happen and everybody else is not jumping into their touchpad fetish for a reason.

I would argue that the reason you haven’t found a controller with the same functionality as the Steam controller is most people don’t like using overengineered trackpads to try to replicate sticks and d-pads that are much better at the job they’re designed to do. Only Steam keeps messing with this concept and… it really doesn’t work.

The Steam controller was an attempt to bridge the gap of consolizing PC games back when people still thought of PC games as primarily keyboard and mouse. It’s… not a great way to play mouse and keyboard games on a TV and it’s mostly a step backwards from a normal controller for games with controller support. Which is the vast majority of PC games now anyway.

And yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. You do play mouse and keyboard games on it and love it, and you think it beats sticks because you can spend hours on Steam making overly complicated setups that allow you to macro all sorts of nonses into the trackpads and paddles and whatnot.

That’s cool, if that’s what you want to do. Go nuts, have fun. But there’s a reason it isn’t a particularly mainstream way to engage with PC games.

Gyro, though, is actually useful for first person shooters. It’s nowhere near a Steam-driven thing or a Steam controller-specific thing, but I do wish Microsoft would start building it into controllers so we could have it on Xinput as a standard and have an easier time using it at the Windows level instead of having to depend on Steam as a translation layer, particularly for non-Steam games.

I hate this thing with a passion.

Some of it is a me thing. The trackpads hurt me physically. I’m talking immediate pain. Even when it came out a decade ago and my writsts were less busted than they are now they hurt. I know that’s not universal, and some people with similar accessiblity problems have the opposite experience. I don’t question that.

Some of it is most definitely not a me thing. It was plasticky, flimsy, prototypey and trying to make a thing happen that was not going to happen.

I don’t blame people for swearing by it as contrarians. Hey, I am fond of controllers people don’t like (the joycon are the best controller this generation and people like the wrong Saturn controller, and I’ll fight you on both of those). But still, I feel when this comes up it doesn’t get enough pushback mostly because not enough people actually tried it. I own one, I tried it and it was not good.

I don’t regret having one, though. Bit of a collector’s piece. I should go dig it up and make sure none of the plastic has rotted away.

You know the real problem with this conversation?

It is not, and everything I said is sincere and honest.

I mean, unless it’s a confession, which I guess I could believe.

Who said “why aren’t you playing it”? I said you should play it. Very different things.

I know why you’re not playing it. It’s because you’re a sourpuss that doesn’t like good games and does like being angry on the Internet.

I’m saying you should change that and play good games. Don’t even need to spend hundreds on them. Just throw a tenner at them on sale, give them a look, maybe.

Also, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I am not a serious person. Wish I was even less serious. I’m a bit too stiff for comfort, really.

Man, you really should play the game if you’re trying to be mad about the additional content. It’s really good and it’s ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it.

The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle.

The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can’t argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just… remember to disable it if you’re going to stream the game, you will get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is that?

There is no exploitation in charging different prices for different things. Prices aren’t based on how much a thing costs to make, they’re based on how much people are willing to pay for it. Welcome to supply and demand.

Cosmetics are (relatively) cheap to make and sold at a high margin because they are subsidizing a game that is sold at very low price. Turns out the sticker price in DBFZ with its what, 24 characters at launch is twenty bucks or so cheaper than good old Street Fighter 2 with its eight characters.

There are a bunch of ways we’ve been shaving cost from games to keep that somewhat artificial price point. Selling people who are willing to spend more a bunch of non-game-relevant stuff at a higher margin is just one of them. You are extremely outraged by this for some reason, I am very glad.

Because yeah, sure, I spent like 200 bucks in my copy of the game (probably a bit more, I got the Switch version, too) and I subsidized a number of more casual players that only bought the base game.

That’s cool. I get more people to play against and they get a cheaper game up front. I played that game for 500 to 1000 hours, I spent 3-5 cents per hour. I have no regrets. Didn’t even have to pay a subscription for it, my physical version will live forever and I can still play my Steam copy with forty-plus characters.

You are commited to being mad about this on our behalf, turns out us spenders don’t need your protection. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You don’t have to get it. We’ll pick up your slack.

Which is not to say everything is fair game or that there aren’t predatory practices at play in gaming. It’s to say you’re obscuring those by crying wolf because you like being mad about things and have fixated on this in particular to an unreasonable degree.

I guess it depends on where your line for “gross” happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.

I’m also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?

So I’m not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won’t stop playing, and that’s a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I’m not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don’t make the experience worse. They do, in my book.

But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.

I’m more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.

That being said… man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It’s all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren’t currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one’s wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It’d be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.

Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can’t resell or download without servers).

There is a warning on the box for the two that don’t include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don’t particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.

I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they’ve done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.

Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn’t mean you must own it.

That’s the part where we’re not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I’m entitled to it, so it either shouldn’t exist or it should be mine.

That just doesn’t track. I don’t feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector’s edition. It’s faff some people may want, but I’m not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector’s edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I’m not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.

Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.

Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.

But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.

Nah, some thoughts.

But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.

Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.

I am genuinely baffled about why you think that’s worse than “pay me for the game every month or I take it away”. I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn’t make it make sense.

What’s “plenty”? 50%? 40%? 10%?

I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.

I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that’s not the case.

I wouldn’t consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren’t the same thing.

Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don’t like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren’t full physical releases. It plays Nintendo’s game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.

Hey, if latching on to the jokes helps you ignore the point be my guest, but the point stands with or without your acknowledgement.

I don’t “delight in their exploitation”, I am one of the people who buy this stuff.

I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.

So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.

And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.

I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I’m sure.

And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it’s going to be on purpose, that I’m not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.

So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don’t need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.

And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I’m talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don’t know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.

Wait, in what world is a subscription a “rational consumer purchasing decision” where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?

I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.

And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I’m concerned.

Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It’s not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they’re buying who the hell are you to tell them they’re wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?

I mean, it’s a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.

That’s the problem with this train of thought. There’s some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you’re going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to “games I don’t like shouldn’t exist” we’re going to disagree.

Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn’t like hearts being ripped out and I’m not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.

There aren’t anywhere near enough of us here for there not not be an “overarching culture and ethos”. There are few places on the Internet more ideologically consistent than this, frankly. Self-selection is a powerful force.

Yeah, no.

I like a bunch of games that do this. I’ve liked games that do this for 40 years.

I mean, technically you just banned all arcade games that ever existed. I liked a bunch of those.

And I like a bunch of free to play games. I spent a bunch of time playing Hearthstone. I’m gonna say that at least some of the millions of people in LoL would like to keep playing what they’re playing. I am looking forward to a bunch of new characters in Street Fighter 6. I kinda don’t want to go back to the days where I had to buy a second full price copy of Street Fighter 2 just to get access to 4 new characters.

I get that it sounds good to say this when thinking about the worst parts of the industry, but… yeah, no.