Both are great. Here are some great indies:

• Factorio
• Hollow Knight
• Subnautica
• Celeste
• Hades
• Tunic

That covers a wide range of genres, none are particularly derivative, and those are just off the top of my head.

I play great classics all the time, but I also play great new indies.

Yup, AA and indie make up >90% of my gaming dollars and hours.

Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.

AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.

Why? What relevance is Ubisofts poor record keeping to non-shareholders?

I don’t think that’s all that impressive though. The GPU looks to be a little weaker than the Xbox Series X, one gen newer and just over half the CUs, and the CPU is a gen newer with fewer cores. I’d wager The comparison I’ve seen is the Steam Machine is about the same size as the Series X, but a bit shorter. The Steam Machine doesn’t have a disc drive, so that makes sense.

It looks like the Steam Machine’s cooling is just a big heatsink and a 120mm fan. That’s really not that crazy. It’s basically a mini PC with a custom SOC and a bigger heatsink and fan.

DS4 is pretty close.

That depends on how strong each economy is. If both sides have sufficient ability to replace the bots, it could go on for some time.

It’ll be like the Cold War, essentially an economic war.

Yeah, it’s not released or supported outside of the Steam Deck or handheld partners. So you’re probably not going to get Nvidia drivers or anything else that’s not built in to the kernel.

You don’t need it though, you can just run Steam in big picture mode on whatever distro you want.

Yup, looks just like a DualSense controller from the PS5 without the trackpads.

Yup, I love my Steam Deck and usually prefer asymmetric joysticks, so as long as it feels like the SD, it’ll be fine.

I’m not sure what the standard for large vs small hands is, but I haven’t had issues with pretty much any controller except the OG Xbox controller:

My kids have no issues with either the Xbox 360 controller or DS4 controller that I have.

Steam Box

Ahem, it’s a GabeCube.

Yeah, I’m debating getting this one as my first headset. It looks dope.

And even then, most games are available on multiple platforms, for similar prices. So you can get the same game from Steam, GOG, or EGS in many cases, plus all of the stores that sell Steam keys (and Steam probably doesn’t get a cut of those sales).

Eh, for the number of CUs, it looks fine. It looks like a slightly smaller RX 7600.

I think that’s mostly for the camera. He seems like a really down to earth guy.

Yeah, Steve is about as non-smug and non-jerk as I’ve seen in this space.

Idk, I wouldn’t really call Steam OS an Arch distro. It’s not quite as extreme as the relationship between PlayStation and FreeBSD, but it’s in that realm.

The user has very little control over the base system, which is distributed by Valve. Most of the user’s interaction is on the surface, such as through Flatpaks and whatnot, not w/ the package manager. It’s like other distros like Aeon (openSUSE) and Silverblue (Fedora) where the user doesn’t really interact w/ the distro itself.

it takes minutes on the forums to convince me what a horrible idea that would be.

The reason the forum is like that is because Arch is designed to be a system where you have the tools to solve problems yourself and not need to ask for help. That’s why the install process is so manual, the intention is that if you can make it through that, you probably won’t need much help from anyone else. The install process has gotten easier, but it’s still to a point where it generally discourages “casuals”, for lack of a better term.

I used Arch for about 5 years and I think I interacted w/ the forums like twice. If interacting w/ the forums is something that’s important to you, then Arch probably isn’t for you. Something like Debian or Fedora will probably be a better fit.

I really don’t get people’s fascination w/ Arch. It’s basically a LEGO-style Linux distro, and that’s not really what most seem to want. I switch from Arch to openSUSE because openSUSE had everything I liked from Arch (rolling release, mostly-vanilla packages, etc) and most of the reliability of a release-based distro. I still don’t recommend it for new users because the community is pretty small so getting help is a bit harder, but people are generally nicer than Arch users.

The DS4 has a gyro though, so I can do gyro aiming w/ it if I want. Steam Input makes configuring it quite easy.

I thought I was the target for the Steam Controller because configurability sounded fun, so I picked it up w/ the Steam Link in a bundle w/ Rocket League and I ended up not using either (and I bailed on Rocket League after EGS bought them). I think it was a cool idea, but I ended up not liking it as much in practice. I keep trying to give it a second chance, but each time it just feels weird.

That said, I love the Steam Deck, which is a natural evolution of the Steam Controller. It has capacitive joysticks to make the gyro better, the track pads don’t get in the way, and the triggers and shoulder buttons feel better. The main thing I miss from the Steam Controller is the button in the triggers. Everything else on the Steam Deck is a straight upgrade, and the extra back buttons are enough to make me not miss the button in the triggers.

I might end up getting the new Steam Controller, but I wish they would’ve put the left thumbstick a bit higher and the D-pad a little lower. But since I already use a DS4 and have been considering a DS5, this is a natural upgrade for me.