UltraMega

Tried out update 5 yesterday. Definitely a big performance improvement. Also the world map in the menu is way more detailed so it's easier to find cool places to fly. Before I was playing at max with 80% res scaling. Now I'm at 100% and getting about the same performance as before, maybe a little better.

Valves cut isn't even a flat 30% anymore, after a million sales or so it drops to like 20% IIRC. It's not the percentage that bothers me, it's that in order to sell on steam you have to follow their rules about pricing your product outside of steam. I remember that ign article about the steam cut, I posted it as news. That was back in the beginning of the epic store vs steam debate and before any of the anti trust lawsuits going on now had started.

Valve is a private company so they don't disclose any sales info. That said they basically get 30% of the vast majority of PC game sales so it's gotta be a huge amount.

Even if there is wiggle room for sales and such, it seems pretty messed up that Valve should have any say over how a game sells in other places. I think a strong argument can be made that they have monopolistic control over the PC game market to an extent since Steam is the only store with any traction that sells third party games, and if they weren't so dominant their pricing rule wouldn't make sense anyway. I mean if the Epic store had rules about how games are priced on other platforms... I doubt many devs would bother with it at all.

Valve Facing New Lawsuit Over Steam Digital Dominance [Update: Valve Responds] - IGN WWW.IGN.COM Update: Valve has a recent antitrust lawsuit regarding Steam to be dismissed, saying that even an... I do hope Valve loses this one. Their pricing rules are rediculous and I'm surprised it's legal for Valve to dictate how devs price their product in other stores if you argue they don't have monopoly control, never mind that they do have monopoly control. Seems like the type of rule that only a monopoly could implement. If Steam wasn't the only store PC gamers wanted to use, devs would just avoid steam and their rule would backfire, and since Steam is a monopoly no other store game can gain traction so long no other store can compete with Steam on prices. I wonder if this rule is one of the reasons games are exclusive on epic store when they release for a while, so they can sell their game without bending to Steams rules initially and offer a deal they wouldn't want to offer on Steam with the larger cut.

The Coalition's Xbox Series X|S's Unreal Engine 5 Demo Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg - IGN WWW.IGN.COM Gears 5 developer The Coalition explains a bit more about how Xbox-specific advantages will benefit... Definitely looks impressive. Hearing a lot of talk about this, I get the impression devs are waiting to see if UE5 will get optimized to the point where 60fps is more viable before they really start using it.

I saw other site that posted this article and made the headline "I live in a state where it's legal to buy weed but not high end PC gaming parts"... The news these days is ridiculous.

I'm quoting this from a comment I found somewhere else about this issue. "it seems that it is not based on power when in use, the regulation limits the power the system draws when not being used in idle/ sleep states. Basically to meet regulations it looks like a system shouldn’t be drawing much power when not in use"

That's my take as well, if only because it seems like Dell is the only company reacting to this regulation as an issue.

Not ideal but it doesn't bother me too much. The cut off is basically ddr3 and PCs that don't have 4k copywriting hardware. Doesn't sound like 11 really does anything new except run on arm so I don't see it as an issue for people with legacy hardware.

Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations • The Register WWW.THEREGISTER.COM Energy efficiency rules appears to be limiting the availability of gaming rigs I'm not really sure if this is news or not because the information and regulations mentioned is not new, but Dell's reaction might be. IMO it seems like Dell has a misunderstanding of the regulation and they could ship these PCs if they wanted to. Perhaps they're trying to make a political statement. In any case, it's an interesting topic. The idea that by 2040 computers will use more energy than the human race generates if nothing changes is definitely discussion worthy.

https://www.techspot.com/news/90561-intel-make-chips-qualcomm-looks-challenge-tsmc-samsung.html

I actually really disliked that game because of the way the leveling up works. Everytime I'd get a better weapon, the AI would just have more HP to counter so it felt like there was no progress.

Yea, all true but still I think they still sell a lot of office licenses, probably mostly in bulk to businesses. And yea their games are on Steam, and they still make money when they sell on there but I think game pass is also a pretty big deal, even if it hasn't blown up a lot yet which I don't really have any idea if it has or hasn't, but I think eventually there will be enough really good first party games on there that it will just make sense for most PC gamers to sign up. Microsoft is like a dealer who used to just sell weed, but now sells all kinds of stuff, and often sells to other dealers now too. They still sell a lot of weed but it's not they're main focus anymore.

10 introduced the store (or did 8 do that?) so getting people on win10 at least gives them the potential to spend money with Microsoft on something other than Windows. I don't think Microsoft could keep charging people the same way for windows because over time there are better and better alternatives. Microsoft made the first consumer OS so they definitely had a monopoly on the market if only just from being first for a long time. If they charged the same for it now, people would be more likely to try some kind of alternative even if that means they end up playing different games. Annual Office subscriptions and Game Pass, soon they will also have the option to just pay a sub fee for a virtual PC via streaming. They've pivoted pretty well I think in terms of making money from people using windows without relying as much on the up front cost of windows itself. Microsoft is also just a way bigger company today and has been growing steadily. Windows is a smaller chunk of their revenue even adding in things like Office subscriptions in no small part because they're making a lot of money from other sources as well these days. Ever since Balmer left, their stock pretty much only moves in one direction because they just keep growing.

And that's probably why it wont come to steamOS.

That, and EA's monthly subscription service is on steam as well.

Valve Might Be Trying To Get Xbox Game Pass On Steam WWW.THEGAMER.COM Valve is trying to get Xbox Game Pass on Steam according to industry insider Tyler McVicker. I heard this mentioned in a Digital Foundry podcast so I looked it up and there does seem to be some evidence to support this, though I haven't found anything beyond this one quote so far. It does stand to reason that Microsoft would want game pass to be more ubiquitous but I doubt they would want to support steamOS with it so who knows. I wonder if this does end up happening if it will only be for the windows version of steam.

In BF3 me and a buddy would sometimes play 1v1 ctf where one person would be on a motorcycle and trying to get the flag while the other was Ina heli trying to stop them. On the right maps it was a lot of fun. Could do something like that with BF portal it seems.

Battlefield 2042’s Portal Lets You Remix Classic Battlefield in Insane Ways - IGN WWW.IGN.COM This is insane. I'm starting to think EA might not mess this up. I've played every BF PC game since 1942 and I'm super excited about the BF1942 maps. El Alamein!

Netflix’s gaming expansion starts with mobile WWW.THEVERGE.COM You’ll get games for free as part of your Netflix sub. I wonder what their logic in starting with mobile is.

Until windows phones come back haha. I think Microsoft is playing a long term game here. Eventually either windows will run well enough on arm and arm will be powerful enough that we can just use full windows on our phones and have them work as full fledged PCs or something like an Intel CPU will become power efficient enough to put in a phone. Either way, eventually windows in a phone sized form factor will be an option and there will be lots of competing devices for it. My step sister used to work at Microsoft as a high up product design person and I asked her once if the plan with windows phone was to eventually have it run a full x86 version of windows and she got kinda awkward and said she can't talk about that.

Oh yes irritating for sure. I just wonder if their justice system there might not have much ability to deal with this is any other way. Takes man hours to sort and redistribute that tech.

Trying to set an example perhaps, or maybe the miner was warned to shut down and didn't.