sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on A playable build of GTA 6 appears to have leaked, as Rockstar and Take-Two scramble to take down videos 23 hours ago:
To the best of my knowledge, the build itself has not been posted anywhere.
However its not like i know or frequent every existing darknet site.
The videos that are being ‘leaked’ appear to only be possible to… produce, if one has an actual build of the game.
So, somebody has it, they have yet to share it.
- Comment on "Without us, Bethesda games aren’t Bethesda games": Rallies against Microsoft layoffs at Elder Scrolls studio continue, with unionised devs' morale "on the upswing" 1 day ago:
Your first part is ‘more’ right by way of detail, but…
A dev that works for Bethesda should be able to figure out what you just said pretty quickly.
A dev that figures that out and then continues to work for Bethesda is a fool. Sure, that’s maybe a bit harsh for younger devs… but that’s how this industry works … unless you band together and make your own indie studio, you’re going to be the first on the firing line for everyone elses mistakes.
You are correct though that the entire writing team, including Emil, need to be fired. Start over, try again. They are still using the same facial animation tech as from roughly 2008-10, which was already outdated and surpassed by say HL2, when they switched over to it… I could go on.
The second half of what you said, I take issue with. In the last 10 to 15 years, the quality of enviornmental storytelling has gone down, the overall feel of the games has also gone down. Easter eggs? Who cares…?
But yes, all senior managment, including Todd, need to be shit canned as well, for making 10 years of terrible decisions.
Sharma taking an axe to Bethesda is really the only thing that makes sense from MSFT’s business POV… she’s gonna trim down the most financially wasteful things under her control first. ES 6 needs to come out and be very good, relatively quickly, or Bethesda as a studio is a dead man walking.
And even Asha isn’t fully in control of or responsible for how much fat she needs to trim, because MSFT has gone so wildly into AI, and Windows has so much technical debt and bloat, again mostly accrued over the last 10 to 15 years, … that bill is now coming due, and she needs to help figure out how to pay as much of that as well.
- Comment on "Without us, Bethesda games aren’t Bethesda games": Rallies against Microsoft layoffs at Elder Scrolls studio continue, with unionised devs' morale "on the upswing" 2 days ago:
Yeah sorry Bethesda hasn’t made a good game in over a decade, found your own studio about it.
Modders have been outdoing you idiots for years, fixing your mistakes.
Devs in general deserve better, not fucking Bethesda devs though, nope.
- Comment on Disney Shows Its Steam Deck Animatronic Controller In New Video 2 weeks ago:
Ah, sorry, I’m just explaining the joke then, woops!
- Comment on Disney Shows Its Steam Deck Animatronic Controller In New Video 2 weeks ago:
One can unintentionally spread misinfo, but sure, I hear you.
‘Dubious claims’ is maybe a less harsh phrasing.
- Comment on Disney Shows Its Steam Deck Animatronic Controller In New Video 2 weeks ago:
Consoles are usually just weird, cheap, locked down, underpowered pcs, that only play certain brands/formats of games, and have unique cases, lol.
It basically means ‘thing that is (usually) for your living room what plays video games and such’.
- Comment on Disney Shows Its Steam Deck Animatronic Controller In New Video 2 weeks ago:
Ah so Rbnsft is spreading misinfo.
I’m not able to find anything that corroborate Canuck’s claim that prompted my question.
At this point I’m assuming they were also talking out their ass.
- Comment on Disney Shows Its Steam Deck Animatronic Controller In New Video 2 weeks ago:
Disney got them at a discounted price?
- Comment on Indies devs band together for 100-game, $10 bundle aiming to help an "unprecedented number" of laid off developers 2 weeks ago:
I fairly frequently try out games made for Windows, released on Itch, me running Linux.
Yeah, some are not well optimized… but these are basically alpha builds of indie games, so, yeah basically, works pretty much as well it can.
Can’t say I’ve ever had a technical issue with anything that his 1.0.
- Comment on KONAMI detail more platform specifications for METAL GEAR SOLID: MASTER COLLECTION Vol.2 4 weeks ago:
Oh boy i cannot wait to play remake of game i have already played
- Comment on Indie open worlder Future? No Thanks! gets last minute delay after Steam content mods allegedly demand a "watch the sex scene" button 4 weeks ago:
The vast majority of the gaming media exist primarily as functionally but not technically subcontracted PR outlets for major companies.
It ‘works’ because there are a bunch of them, and well, they couldn’t all be like that, right?
They all know they are almost entirely replaceable by AI… when was the last time you read any of these kinds of articles, and were truly impressed by the actual writing?
When was the last time any of them did anything approaching investigative journalism? Almost never, instead they just sqwuak and have opinions about when somebody else does that.
… they’re beholden to their ultimate paymasters, and their paymasters are downsizing.
Thus, they all shape up, real fast, to pushing narratives that will aggrandize them to whom they depend on.
It’s basically ‘Yellow Journalism 2.0’… everything is for sale, integrity doesn’t exist, being professionally exasperated and feigning ignorance is a reputational defense mechanism.
(Also, for the etymylogically challenged, no, ‘Yellow Journalism’ is not primarily a racist term, it derives from a time where the concepts of duplicity and cowardice were strongly associated with the color yellow
- Comment on Laid off Bethesda Montreal staff allegedly told they'd get "smallest severance legally possible" the same day as those Fallout announcements 4 weeks ago:
At some point, you would that just generally, game developers would realize that working for AAA is just uh… dumb? Stupid?
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 1 month ago:
Well… no.
Thats… Sony and MSFT raised prices on all of their hardware too, same with Nintendo.
We’re at the point where being a huge player… can only get you priority in the queue for chips and parts.
It can no longer secure bulk pricing discounts.
That’s how bad this is.
- Comment on "I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you": Doom's John Romero responds to id Software reportedly losing half their team 1 month ago:
In all fairness to Romero, and many other heroes/legends of the ‘birth of fps’ era…
These dudes are getting old.
Getting old sucks.
Everything hurts, you’re always more tired than you used to be, you can’t pull 7 all nighters in a row anymore, it might actually kill you.
While the present circumstances are not … exactly awesome, dignified, ideal in any way…
… there would always one day need to be a changing of the guard.
All our favorite studios from the 90s/00s… they’re all mostly gone, they just have the same name sometimes, like the ship of Theseus. People leave, teams get shuffled… and the captains that are still there, are growing gray.
Don’t mourn this.
Be inspired by it.
Do what they did, but with that thing that you always thought they should have done, but never actually did.
It doesn’t have to be any graphically fancier than what they did decades ago… graphics age, gameplay is timeless.
- Comment on 'Being Proud of the Thing We Made Did Not Give Us the Right to Make It' — Dbrand Cancels Its Steam Machine Companion Cube 1 month ago:
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
- Comment on 'Being Proud of the Thing We Made Did Not Give Us the Right to Make It' — Dbrand Cancels Its Steam Machine Companion Cube 1 month ago:
99% certain this is what will end up happening.
Its not even a 180.
Its… you used our IP without asking, please go to the back of the line, fill out the form where you properly ask to use, and wait in the queue again.
All they had to do was ask permission first.
- Comment on "We were only three votes away": Stop Killing Games-backed California bill to keep online games playable fails to win over senate committee 1 month ago:
Yes, yes you can. Initiatives are neat, that way… the sword cuts both ways.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 1 month ago:
Huh, you’re right, I didn’t know that.
But yeah, looks like the jailbreak process only works up to firmware v6ish… which means you’d have to have a PS5 that hasn’t been connected to the internet since basically December 2022.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 1 month ago:
Got nothing to add other than you know this shit better than I do, appreciate the specificity!
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 1 month ago:
Yes but… they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components…
This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.
Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.
- Comment on Battlefield Studios begin sponsoring Godot Engine development 1 month ago:
Its because they basically use a fork of Godot as a mod tool / map editor suite for BF… 6?
Are we on six now?.. I literally don’t even remember.
So they’re probably just essentially paying for a bit of extra help with custom tooling.
Hopefully they’re at least paying for a bit more than the actual services they’re getting, but idfk.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 1 month ago:
Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers… because the normal drivers are propietary.
Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs… 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.
- Comment on Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered out with a demo and it's open source 1 month ago:
I am actually amazed that they open sourced it.
ARMA, old ARMA, is jank as a fuck as an engine, when not running on a supercomputer, but also… it does some pretty insane shit in terms of detail and scale and number of AI/NPC agents active at the same time.
… there could be some interesting patterns in here, maybe not to emulate or use exactly as is, but try to learn from, if one is insterested in having a game that is basically also a big simulation.
- Comment on Steam machine prices are live 1 month ago:
Let’s pick Oct 2025 as our ‘pre RAMpocalypse’ time frame.
Data source: pangoly.com
(I removed BestBuy because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)
16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$275
2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD
Oct 2025: ~$140
Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)
512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$200
$275 - $50 = $225
$300 - $140 = $160
$225 + $160 = $385
Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.
2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%
Do the same with the 512GB variant:
$275 - $50 = $225
$200 - $50 = $150
$225 + $150 = $375
$375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.
MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%
Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I’d argue its quite reasonable ‘napkin math’… you could maybe make an index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, on average, about 40% to 45% more expensive than it otherwise would have been.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
Are you saying… $10b annually in harware sales?
Using the $1128 price for the 512GB SM + Controller, that’d be uh… ~8.8m units sold annually.
That’s totally absurd, imo.
That’s roughly a quarter of 2025’s PS5 (any variant) console sales numbers.
Valve would have to pivot into basically only/primarily being a hw manufacturer, they’d have to … somewhere between 10x and 100x the amount of money/capital they’re currently using to source components, do assembly and then ship things physically.
They do not have that much money.
Valve has like a total of less than 500 employees, their entire business culture is built around having a very small number of incredibly competent and often multi-domain skilled employees.
They’d have to radically shift the entire fundamental structure of what the company is, to do something like that.
… but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
Its actually not that expensive, for what it can do, and that’s from the Steve directly, in that video.
He does a price comparison to nearest equivalent parts you can actually currently buy for a DIY PC.
He ends up with $979 for the DIY vs $1050 for the 512gb Steam Machine, a 7% difference.
… and also, this video here, from ETA Prime,.that I linked, that is this post, that apparently no one is actually watching, is also full of game test benchmarks, though not as much crazy specific shit as Steve gets into.
It outperforms a PS5 Pro on say, RDR2.
1440p, high/ultra settings, no fsr upscaling, gets ~75 fps in complex/open areas, significantly better inside of rooms/houses buildings.
And, as stated in the main post body… the Steam Machine is going to support FSR4 upscaling either on launch or very soon afterward, so you could use that, not lose much graphical fidelity, and get more frames.
A PS5 Pro cannot run RDR2 at a stable 60 fps, at 1440p.
It has to be locked to 30 fps to run 4K, which it does via upscaling, and a checkerboard rendering technique.
To get 60fps, it has to be locked at basically 1080p, though I think technically it is doing dynamic resolution scaling, so maybe effectively a slightly higher average resolution than that, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 way to 1440p.
A PS5 Pro costs $900.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
Yeah, I’m guessing they’re also uh, in addition to the lottery, going to be attempting some backend strategy to attempt to weed out likely ‘this is a fake account for resellers’.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
… watch the video.
The majority of it literally is performance testing of various games.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
I am totally open to other people having different stances, but at least for myself, worth it.
I already have an OLED Deck with a 1 TB drive.
So, I can get the 512 GB + controller bundle, and just swap the drives.
$1128 for a ‘pc’ that can run RDR2 and Cyberpunk 77 at pretty darn good graphical settings, at 1440p? And fancy pantsy controller?
Good enough, my eyes are starting to go a bit anyways lol, 4K is very likely wasted on me, and I’d love to have a Steam Deck that’s basically easier to hold and lighter, as a control option.
That’d be a steal, imo, looking at it in PC pricing terms… which is the way I’m looking at it, because that’s the way I’ll mostly be using it.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 1 month ago:
Yep.
I was initially hopeful that this thing might be surprisingly affordable, due to… basicslly the theory is that the ‘semi custom’ apu was initially intended to be used in a planned but cancel Windows tablet/Surface kind of thing…
But yeah, then, tariffs, rampocalypse, strait’s closed due to raids = shipping costs go up bigly.
I’m pretty sure the way Valve does their internal finances is that that 30% cut of all games?
Sure some of it goes toward Steam server costs, but I think most of it just goes into a giant war chest fund, from which they ‘experiment’, with things like this.
Makes sense to me that they at least want to break even… business wise, that works if it makes more people use Steam and/or increases their reputation as actually innovating in some way.
But being a loss leader would simply be too dangerous, too risky. They are small fries compared to the major console/pc hw manufacturers, and I am very sure the last thing they would ever want to do is owe some outside actor a lot of money.
