MudMan

It’s just nostalgia. The vast majority of those were either entirely devoid of content or entirely unusable.

Also, mostly Flash, so disqualified for human consumption by default.

See, that’s the type of justification that doesn’t sit well with me and that the article is doing all over the place.

Is the Steam Deck a very successful handheld PC? Sure. Compared to the boutique stuff sold on Indiegogo by Chinese manufacturers it’s probably an order of magnitude larger.

Except it’s also not priced like one of those (or wasn’t at launch, anyway), it’s priced like a console, with the LCD model (while it lasted) priced right alongside the Switch OLED and a bit cheaper than the Switch 2.

And by that metric it’s done poorly, with best estimates placing it right alongside the PSVita at the absolute best, lifetime. The bar for success on that scale isn’t “selling millions”, it’s selling tens of millions, which the Deck has struggled to do.

So, all fanboyism aside: The Deck did well for a handheld PC, but kinda failed in the attempt to bridge the gap between those and handheld consoles. That, if you’re keeping track, is “reporting, not an opinion piece”.

This?

Valve’s Steam Deck has been a runaway success. While the beloved handheld has sold less than most major console handhelds, it’s become a valuable system for many to take their PC games on the go.

This is an opinion piece.

I’m confused, is that supposed to be good or bad? A lot or a little? That article seems to be making a heck of a lof of excuses. The hard pivot from “the Deck is an unmitigated success!” to immediately, quietly admitting it hasn’t outsold any actual handheld console is… kinda weird.

I like the Deck, and its influence in the market is clearly outsized… but it’s still a fairly niche product, and for the price I’m actually a bit surprised at how not-mainstream it remains.

It integrates better than Bazzite on it.

Which weirdly makes me annoyed at Valve’s lack of interest in expanding SteamOS beyond first party hardware.

It does mostly work, though.

I definitely advocate for some key tweaks to Windows 11, for sure. Just one specifically as a manual registry edit, two perhaps, but absolutely.

Still, depending on your setup, your hardware and your use case you may or may not need to mess with some configs beyond what you’d do on Windows. Back when I moved into Bazzite I was more annoyed by this argument because I had all the setup tweaks fresher in my mind. These days I’m more part of the problem because I tweaked the tweaks and I genuinely forget all the things that needed tweaking, so in my head it was more straightforward than it was.

I’ll say that I do regret somewhat going with KDE Plasma, which is a bad fit for Bazzite, but that I haven’t reinstalled with Gnome because, man, do I not want to go through that process again. So that’s probably a good gauge of whether that sounds like too much or not.

After today, of all days, I will be taking no memes/strips about this from anybody that doesn’t keep blood-soaked ties, scalped hair inserts and shattered cufflinks as serial killer trophies.

Or is running for office, at the absolute least. But bloody ties are better.

Sounds about right. Console install counts start being “relevant” after 20-ish million unit sales. The Deck itself isn’t close to that, and the overall Linux install base on Steam is maybe what, a third of that?

But I’d argue you need more for Steam, because a lot of those Linux users also have Windows available as it is, given that about 20% of them are on a Steam Deck and many of those likely have a Windows PC on the side rather than only using Steam on the Deck.

Having daily driven Bazzite for ages now…

…nah, you still will tinker.

Linux advocates just don’t parse what “tinkering” means for most users, and frequent distro hoppers tend to think anything that doesn’t break in the install process is “tinker-free”. Neither is even remotely accurate.

Bazzite is alright, but it defaults to autoupdates, so you may want to understand how rolling back on a Fedora atomic distro works if you don’t want to be confused later when something fixes itself/breaks randomly for no reason.

There’s only one mention of the word “slop” attributed to Nadella in the entire piece. It’s this:

“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,” Nadella laments, emphasizing hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as “cognitive amplifier tools.” “…and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.”

Now, that’s entirely meaningless corpospeak, but it’s also very clearly not “Nadella wants you to stop saying slop”.

But the article needed bait and nobody reads past the clickbait headline anymore. The intellectual laziness fuelling the slop isn’t exclusive of AI usage.

We suck at this.

I propose an oath, ok? You commit to not using GenAI in 2026… and also to not EVER comment on an article or social media post you haven’t read in full.

Deal?

They didn’t, they used a sprite with a single pixel to hack together a visual tweak (that just happens to be part of Guile’s leg).

But watch the video anyway. Despite the clickbaity thumbnail (blame Google) it’s a passable account of an example of having to fix a visual bug in code after an asset lock because of how the production process of old games was structured.

MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.

Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.

For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.

The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.

Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.

Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998. BG1 you can make the case (but given that it was an Interplay-published, licensed game meant for relatively performant hardware, it was absolutely in line with AAA PC releases of the day). BG2? Absolutely not. Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all. And of course neither were independent games by definition.

For sure BG3 is absurdly large and the historical comparisons break down a bit in the sheer scale of what that thing is. But nobody in the late 90s was buying a top down D&D CRPG with the production values of BG (or an action RPG in the vein of Diablo the previous year) and thinking they were slumming it in the dregs of small budget gaming.

Well, yes it is.

That is exactly how being things and not being things are.

If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.

I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.

If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.

Nobody ever cheered for Windows. I was there at the Windows 95 launch and everybody hated it and its problems were “impossible to ignore” and it was an embarrassing failure in tech circles and the BSOD was a meme.

Remind me again how that went.

“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?

What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.

This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?

I hate this century. This century sucks.

Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.

As opposed to what?

Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.

“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.

I am screaming internally.

We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.

Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.

At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.

Literally everything “remains to be seen”. I’m confused about the source of distrust there.

I mean, the guy is taking this fully private. Technically GOG currently answers to even fewer people than Steam and has no financial commitments with anybody.

What “remains to be seen” in that scenario?