Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?

The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.

If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.

Came here to say this one. It’s been ~30 years and there still isn’t another game that quite hits in the same way. The perfect combination of jrpg, weirdness, emotion, humor, horror/dread, and lightheartedness. Earthbound has it all.

The Typing of the Dead

I highly doubt Nintendo is attempting any kind of gap closure with the deck, because how could they and why?

The only thing they share is a form factor. Nintendo is well aware that the reason they sell consoles is as a dedicated platform for their own games. I truly believe that is their bread and butter and all they really care about. If the system gets popular enough, then it will get some third party support which means it will have some very limited library crossover with PC/PS/Xbox, but I think we are past the point where Nintendo intends to rely on that as a selling point for this or any future generation of consoles. Ports of games that come to switch are pretty uniformly the worst version of the game to play, and it’s pretty clear that doesn’t bother Nintendo at all.

Which is all to say, I don’t think Nintendo and Valve think of each other as direct competitors, because they serve entirely different markets. I have both a switch and a deck. I love them both. I use my switch to play Nintendo games, I use my deck to play pretty much anything else. I don’t think I’m unique at all in that regard, and frankly it never would occur to me that these devices have anything to do with one another.

Huh. I always heard 3 copies, 2 locations, 1 of the locations offsite. Yours makes sense though.

The term “mid-generation” is pretty meaningless here as well. This is a first gen product, we have no idea how long they intend this version to remain relevant. We have no idea if they ever really planned a direct sequel device. We know really nothing. All these articles about a supposed follow-up device are pretty worthless IMO. There is zero reason to expect that Valve would be treating this the same as a normal console.

I like to do this but it’s much cheaper to buy bags in the giant packs. Those don’t fit in my drawer because they aren’t the normal size/shape. Or sometimes if I mix/match brands the boxes don’t fit together in the drawer. Uncommon, but happens.

Not saying this is 100% needed, but it’s not without use.

That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.

Nonetheless, it didn’t really feel finished, y’know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.

The performance issues seem to be what every article and blog post focuses on because it’s the easy thing to talk about, but I think this right here is what the actual biggest issue was and the real reason people shat on the game.

I didn’t hate it by any means. And I, like you, ran it without issue. I just sort of lost interest because it was janky and super unpolished. Like I was playing an early access game. It wasn’t big bugs as in the game breaking and not running. It was just lots of little annoyance that felt unfinished or half conceived, or like they didn’t undergo full play testing.

The massive performance issues experienced by some just compounded those issues that existed even when it did run perfectly well.

The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.

• It was straight up broken for many console players.
• Some PC players had performance issues.
• For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
• Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.

So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.

With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.

Pretty simple root cause analysis to conclude that the game’s brokenness was the ultimate reason though. Like, why was the game being massively refunded?

I agree

We can only hope that there are people waiting in the wings at Valve who are ready to take over the reins whenever Gaben is done and carry the torch forward in the same direction.

Valve is a private company. Microsoft can’t just buy Valve, Valve would have to agree to that. Considering Valve has (for a company their size) effectively unlimited resources already, and considering that Valve’s founder and leader is a known detractor of Microsoft, this is a nothing story. Microsoft will not buy Valve. This is baseless musing, like how I sometimes daydream with my wife about what we’d do if we won the lottery (which we don’t play).

Of course Microsoft would love to buy Valve. Just like they would love to buy Nintendo. I’d like to buy a Lamborghini. All these things are about equivalently likely, zero likely.

I went from buying and never playing PC games to playing them pretty often.

My gaming PC is in the basement. I rarely find the time to hole up down there with kids and family life. But I can hang in the living room on my couch and play now. Game changer.

One thing I don’t like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn’t subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

If I’m going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That’s hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

I’m late to the party, but just wanted to say that your list of purchases and recommended to purchase are just monumental lists of games. So many amazing choices.

I want to add two more if you have room.

Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. They won’t get you as much in the way of epic set pieces, but they are dripping with charm and very well crafted games with some of the most interesting levels I’ve seen.

The Witcher 3.

I think it’d make sense to offer a refreshed device that is either smaller, has better cooling, or both. And maybe an upper tier device with a better screen.