Steam has this crazy concept where as a game gets older, you don’t have to pay as much for it as when it was new! Pretty wild, I know.
Sometimes you don’t even have to pay for games. 😇
Lemmy instance checks out
Innuendo aside, Steam has some awesome F2P titles
And discounts, including $0 ones.
Hell yeah it does!
It’s not Valve that makes the decision, check how many times Factorio was on sale.
I respect their integrity.
Yep. In the case of Factorio, for now at least, it’s evergreen. It’s priced cheaper than it probably could be honestly and it’ll only get better. Likely anyone not interested with the current price tag isn’t interested at all. Not going on sale means you never feel the need to wait for a sale. You just buy it when you want to.
Even though I bought the expansion and haven’t even played a single second of it yet (factorio burn out is real). It’s still the cheapest game I’ve ever legally acquired in terms of £/s
I find it absolutely hillarious that you measure it per second lmao
You never played a free game even for a second?
I never agree with the $/time metric being used, but it is the easiest. I prefer (enjoyment/time)/$. If a game drags itself out just to keep me playing, I don’t value that.
With that said, Factorio is great for this too. Even with the current price (which is not the price I paid), it’s an amazing value. Once you consider the mods that are available, it’s easily worth the price.
Same thing with RimWorld. They only go down like 10% because they want players who want the game for what it is, not just a cheap bargain. I respect it. A lot of love put into that game.
I wonder when the next Rimworld expansion is coming, presumably not too far off by now? Curious to see what new warcrimes it adds.
GOG is cheaper. Steam does have more franchise deals though.
GOG is also DRM-free and lets you download the game installer as a backup, even if they’ve been pushing hard for their GOG Galaxy clients as of lately.
Sadly GOG isn’t even close to as good as Steam for Linux support.
True. But for the most part I game on a Windows box. Most games don’t have Linux support and I don’t want to bother trying to run things through Wine. I have 2 seperate comps for Linux and Windows. I pretty much use my Windows computer for for gaming and blender because it has the better graphics card and processor.
Indeed, it’s not their main goal either. Unfortunately tools like Lutris, while doing awesome work, are utterly overwhelmed by both the influx of people as well as the amount of games. And while most GOG games work with the auto-generated installers, many do not and require custom installers that are often unmaintained and quickly become outdated.
Gog stopped their own linux launcher and instead unofficially partnered up with heroic (heroic got their own affiliate link). Until now it works pretty well.
Gog stopped their own linux launcher and instead unofficially partnered
Stop spreading this nonsense.
Heroic added affiliated links to their software that anyone can apply for (without notifying the users at first).
I have been using the Heroic launcher a ton on my Steam Deck, it is great!
I am not sure if you replied to the wrong thread, good for you that it works for your needs, but
My point is that GOG did not drop Linux support and instead partnered with another company. Not about the quality of the software.
- Gog waning Linux support is completely unrelated to Heroic
- Gog did not seek partnership
- Heroic devs just applied to a program that anyone can apply to.
That said, it is shady to inject links and not notify it on the release note or change log. I think there was a message on their mastodon at some point, and the implementation crashed for some people with more restrictive firewall on their network, there were some discussions on the issues page of their code repository.
Escept for red dead redemption. RDR2 is actually cheaper for some reason
My experience is that games on Steam are still far more expensive than their pendants for PS4 or similar on ebay (new).
I think it depends on the developer sometimes, for example when Microsoft announced they were going to delist Forza Horizon 4 (June of last year) they put it on sale multiple times at 80% until it was delisted on December 16
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
10 year old mario kart 8 is like 70 bucks or somethingwith dlc. They have lost their mind and people still pay for it.
Why would people want to buy fun games and support their development? Are they crazy?
Something interesting is that Steam users, (myself included) will ignore a game not on sale, I couldn’t tell you why. The only thing I can think of is that we are so used to things being “on sale” we forget that there was a reason it was priced at that amount in the first place.
$60
$70looks better than $60Factorio is an interesting example, its never on sale. It’s just the price. In fact it keeps going up in price.
I couldn’t tell you why.
Because steam always has a plethora of amazing games on sale. You could never buy a full price game and still never run out of awesome things to play. And even if there is a particular game you want, it’ll almost certainly be on sale within a few months. I’d have to double check, but I don’t think I’ve paid more than 40 bucks for any single game in years.
The Steam Deck can run Biebian and Hannah Montana Linux fairly easily. That’s not really a selling point just another thing Nintendo isn’t bringing to the table.
I impulse bought a deluxe Need for Speed game a few weeks ago for $6.50. I’ve already played it 65 hours. I don’t want to jump into the math of it but I reckon I would need to enjoy Mario Kart for much greater than 650 hours before I would get the same hours per dollar value NfS: Heat has brought me thanks to a Steam sale. And Mario Kart could never catch up in miles per hour.
Just a heads up you’ll get to learn how to navigate Linux if you change your mind on the starter car. The only way I could start a new save file was by manually deleting the old one in the file system. It was a little frustrating but served as a good reminder that it is a handheld computer not just an outlet for gaming.
The steam deck is awesome. I love my little handheld computer.
You could even buy something like an ROG Ally for a similar price and still get a bit more performance
steam voice chat
PC exclusive games
Get every GameCube game for free instantly by pirating them
GameCube, Wii… Even switch if you can find an emulator fork that still works
Switch emulators are still just as easy to find as they always were. Most people include them with the game.
Don’t forget Wii U! Oh, right, they ported everything worthwhile to the Switch.
Yoshi’s Wooly World
So cutee
True, it got a 3DS port, but not Switch!
something sonething those people who want wwhd/tphd
For people who didn’t get it: he’s talking about Zelda Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD.
What Would Hellspawn Do?
Tony Pawk’s Pro Dater?
Tony Pawk’s Pro Dater?
Sounds like a parody porn game
If this is what I think it is (The second touch screen)
There is a youtuber working on that in android.
Two notable exceptions!
Sidebar in my community has links for the surviving Switch emu forks, but I haven’t tried installing them on Linux/Deck yet.
Assume it’s going to be far more manual than a Flatpak or whatever for the time being :S
It literally is just install a flatpak, then configure the control scheme in the emu, maybe tweak some settings, add it to your steam library, map the steam controls to the emu controls in game mode.
EmuDeck/RetroDeck automate most of this or you can just find the individual emus in the Discover software center.
… They might actually perform better if you compiled the entire thing from source on your Deck, which is possible to do, but is significantly more of a hassle, gotta set up a root pw, turn off read only mode, hope you can actually find all the sources for the dependencies, know how to tune/tweak the compile parameters to optimally use the Deck’s hardware…
Ive gotten Ryujinx working via flatpak… but uh… lets just say I’d have to delve into OCing/PowerToolsing my Deck to get it to actually run many Switch/WiiU games at a playable framerate.
It works, its stable software wise… but the Deck isn’t quite powerful enough.
… Also, it could be that most modern emus are designed to map consoles onto traditional PC architecture, and ironically the Deck uses an APU which is closer to many consoles, so it doesn’t actually perform as well as it could with better support.
How does 3DS run? I have a hacked Switch so can just run Switch games on that, but 3DS is beyond the Switch’s capabilities.
So, I have literally never used a 3ds emulator before, ever.
EmuDeck set up Azahar in a few minutes, a few minutes more for me to find an OoT rom, a few minutes more to dl it…
…a few minutes more to figure out that the EmuDeck parser thing either isn’t working at finding 3ds files … or I am a moron and you just install the .cia (what a file extension name) into the Emu, in Desktop mode.
Add the Azahar emulator itself into steam library via EmuDeck which launches Steam Rom Manager…
Back out into game mode, launch Azahar, launch OoT, and yep, it works, also wow I forgot the 3ds has two screens, Azahar’s default render screen sectioning for this is weird, but it works!
Turn on performance overlay, looks like I’m getting a solid 60 fps, rendering the main game screen at double the DS’s native resolution.
Start a new save file, go through the intro sequence, run around in my treehouse room a bit…
All works, save for a few instances of the audio playing… a bit too fast, or too slow, for maybe a split second, in a few parts of the Navi flying really fast intro sequence.
… So… seems to work just fine, basically?
Probably I could tinker with Azahar’s settings a bit to see if I can iron out the mild audio quirks, but I’d say thats pretty good for a total elapsed time of about 30 minutes, and me having literally zero experience with 3ds emus, much less on a Deck.
EmuDeck handled making up the control scheme layout in Game Mode, which worked fine in game, automatically, I just had to deal with some mild awkwardness of double clicking on OoT with the trackpad to launch it.
Thanks for trying it out! Sounds like it’ll require tinkering to get games running smoothly. About what I’d expect!
It might be worth noting that I was running Azahar through Vulkan… which … I think is currently listed as an ‘experimental’ level of support by Azahar’s website.
It recommends OpenGL for better support and stability.
I ran around more in Kokiri Village, no more audio spikes. I think its just due to how certain cutscenes quick load scene transitions.
Also, I completely didn’t expect this to just work, but it does:
The secondary screen, that’s touch sensitive on a 3ds?
Well the Deck’s screen is touch sensitive as well.
Worked just fine to navigate through the map and item menus and what not, just poking the Deck’s screen itself.
I’m just referring to possibly outdated package repos which may not have kept up with the forks and all the drama, but I could be easily wrong with outdated info. I haven’t touched my steam deck in a couple months :p
EmuDeck isn’t letting you auto install Yuzu anymore…
But it does install Ryujinx for you.
But it doesn’t provide BIOS or prod/title keys, gotta find those on your own.
There’s also Citron, but EmuDeck just lets you know it exists and won’t auto dl it.
Ryujinx has a flatpak (though its a fork) in the base Discover store on a Deck running SteamOS, so its just on mainline flathub.
Yuzu and Citron appear to no longer be on flathub.
Thank you for your service o7
Well not instantly because you have to wait for your torrent client to download it
The funny part is steam has the most exclusives of em all.
It also has integrated microphone and you can also talk to your friends while playing 🤣
deleted by creator
If you’re not being sarcastic, check out “Desk Job” on Steam. It’s a free small game which shows all SD functionality.
I’ve not tested it myself, but others have said it’s best to wear headphones otherwise there will be some echo for the voice chat.
And steam chat doesn’t require a subscription
Of course, and even if they do you could always switch to any other chat software because you’re literally playing on PC.
Proof (as if it was needed) that just running a reasonable storefront generates more than enough profit.
Not allowing strangers to talk to my kid is absolutely a Switch selling point.
And gamecube games… and wii games and n64 games and ps2 games…
The pricing of this is really going to fuck them.
BotW should be like $10 by now. The fucking DLC for it still costs twice that.
Switch 2 is going to be a repeat of the Wii U disaster.
“No Timmy, I’m not paying 500 dollars for Mario Kart. Don’t you already have that game?”
I wish it wasn’t true, because the wii u had some great games and ideas, and the switch 2 definitely will as well.
But yeah, a HUGE portion of Nintendo’s sales come from being the budget, kid friendly option. When a parent sees a ps5, xbox and switch 2 all lined up for roughly the same price, Nintendo isn’t going to be the default choice it once was.
And it kinda sucks because all people do is hate on the switch for its lower performance. The only way to get better performance is to put more expensive parts in leading to a higher price. They can’t win in some ways.
what are you talking about botw is free now
Where?
🏴☠️
Yeah but then you have to muck around with emulation.
I mean you could always pirate on device, though easier said than done on Switch (but the Wii U is rather easy to mod, would 100% recommend)
Modding an unpatched V1 Switch is pretty easy, the most difficult part is there’s like 2 main guides and if you try to get support from one group and they get clue that you’ve looked at/used the other guide they’ll say your config is trash and a ban risk lol
Ah yes, the Deck vs. Switch debate. One offers performance and affordability, the other offers nostalgia at premium prices. Choose your fighter: the powerhouse or the Pokémon tax.
Considering the Steam Deck can run just about every console game ever made up to PS2 gen (and a good amount made after), I’d say they have the Switch 2 beat on nostalgia.
I play Steel Panthers on my steam deck, a DOS game from the 90s
Yeah but not the memberberries kind!
Nintendo’s been hitting the memberberries for so long that 20 year old games have memberberry moments in them.
2005 GC games: Mario kart, smash, Mario party, animal crossing, Luigi’s mansion, Metroid, zelda
2025 SW games: Mario kart, smash, Mario party, animal crossing, Luigi’s mansion, Metroid, Zelda
deleted by creator
Palworld for the win.
Haha right? Palworld really said ‘what if Pokémon had guns and capitalism’ and somehow made it work
Pokémon with black Jack and hookers.
And slavery.
And
colonialismbase building
You can emulate almost any Nintendo game from before 2016 on a steamdeck. Just got to wait a few more years for the switch emulators to get efficient enough to run well on the steam deck!
I know I’m not the standard pokemon fan, but showdown still exists if you just like to battle. The in-game gameplay of pokemon has always been a little lackluster to me and I don’t like VGC/doubles.
ROM hacks can be fun, and I have done some self imposed challenge runs. I can’t see myself finishing any of the Prof oak challenges I did without emu speedup.
I still have my GBC with pokemon yellow and a flash cart with (almost, missing the new ones) every GB and GBC rom in existence on it that supports save states, and can emulate many switch games on the deck iirc if I were somehow nostalgic for those, and in fact can emulate basically any nintendo game from history I may be nostalgic for better than the switch, among other games nintendo didn’t make.
Which one is the real nostalgia machine? (Hint: It’s the Gameboy Color lol)
“Powerhouse”
Not a Nintendo fanboy. But their own IP games are truly fun. That alone is enough incentive to buy the switch
To emulate* on my desktop 😌
This.
Yeah, this is the only reason I have a Switch. I’m a sucker for their first party games, and I will probably buy a Switch 2 for Mario Odyssey 2 alone.
ultimate
A hacked Switch is a pretty good Nintendo piracy device, too.
If you can find one without the updated firmware
I got mine at launch. It’ll be the gift that keeps on giving since Switch games are going to continue to be released at least until 2026.
Switch 2 proceeds to outsell the deck by a factor of 50
Steam is clearly playing the long game with Steam Deck and Steam OS, they’re basically trying to slowly normalize portable gaming pcs. If they achieve this Nintendo will not be just facing competition from Steam Deck but from multiple devices from the likes of Asus, Lenovo, Dell (Alienware).
Absolutely. Nintendo has huge fanbase with most of them not caring about Nintendo ripping them off and Nintendo has some of the most highly regarded and iconic gaming IPs in the world and Nintendo has insane marketing budget behind the Switch 2 and the switch doubles as a home console.
I love the Deck but it’s not going to outsell the Switch and I think Valve isn’t interested in pulling people away from the Switch. Valve made the Deck primarily for Steam users and that’s who they’re targeting.
Mario Kart on Steam? It’s more likely than you think.
“Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library…”
On the Steam Deck? Possible. On Steam? I guess technically possible if you add a third party game. But actually on Steam? Nintendo can’t even give a tech demo out for free, I can’t imagine what would have to happen for Nintendo to put their games on Steam.
You can also play Minecraft on the Steam Deck and technically you can also play Apex Legends on the Deck (if you install Windows and play through that), but all of it depends on the user being a tinkerer. But the casual gamer is not a tinkerer which means those possibilities have next to no impact on the wider market.
I have a feeling there will be an increase in tinkerers as the cost of staying casual continues to increase to unreasonable levels.
Even PS Portal sales is not that far from Deck. You know, the handheld that people said won’t sell
Haha. Not in the US, thank you Mr. Trump very much.
I don’t know what Nintendo was thinking by doing the Nintendo tax bullshit harder than ever during a time when Americans are facing such heavy financial burdens
These tariffs suck for sure, but America is not the center of the world : the pricing of these games is insane and looks like a poor marketing decision globally
I’m aware, but it’s worth noting since America is usually a big consumer country, and right now, we can’t onsume.
Most likely they came up with the plan while people thought Trump was not going to do the crazy stuff he kept talking about…
To still go through with it and have Doug Bowser give this “Do you guys not have phones?” level bullshit defense?
It seems these idiots do not have the emotional intelligence we try to enforce in toddlers to recognize when a mistake was done, make apologies and rectify… instead they quadruple down and keep pushing as if their idea is now even more genius than before.
This is how we end up with Trump literally destroying the US economy while people wonder “is it outrageous stupidity or intergalactic 17 dimensional chess?”
We have never (to my knowledge) lived in a real life, non analogy, of the Emperor has no clothes
The Switch has the Switch tax. The Switch 2 will have the Switch 2 TARIFF.
You can also install a Switch emulator and just keep it even if Nintendo cease&decists again.
We already know that the steamdeck plays switch games better than the switch. It would be hilarious if it also plays switch2 games better than the switch2.
It hasn’t been my experience that Deck emulates Switch games better than the Switch, unless you mean 3rd party titles running on Proton instead of being emulated, in which case, I’d agree. For example, haven’t been able to get a solid 60fps on MK8 in split screen mode.
Maybe not all games, but the two Zelda games run better on emulator than they do on Switch.
Metroid dread runs pretty great on Deck, too! But last I checked Mario odyssey is something like 10fps, same with the mario galaxy switch port 😢
I’ve been trying to play totk on my steam deck cuz im not shelling out 70 bucks for a game and it runs at like 20 fps. How are you getting it running playably
I’ll look into it when I get a chance, I don’t remember the details, but it went pretty smoothly for me.
I haven’t tested them, but my understanding is that on a faster gaming PC, it’s a better experience than the Switch. My understanding is also that the frame rate on the Steam Deck isn’t great for them, especially TotK, and that BotW is more playable on Steam Deck with Cemu. Here’s a thread on Reddit talking about how to get beyond 20fps for TotK with mods and other techniques:
https://www.reddit.com/r/yuzu/comments/176700x/zelda_totk_playable_on_steam_deck/
I made my statement based on popular opinion. I don’t have personal experience with it.
It definitely won’t play Switch 2 games better. The hardware is roughly in the same ballpark performance wise, but the steam deck needs to emulate Switch 2 games.
Please, you can argue all you want against Nintendo, but just straight up lying really doesn’t help.
Steam link to a desktop running an emulator though?
Is there even much competition between them though, I would have thought people considering one wouldn’t even think of the other.
If the switch 2s hardware isn’t better than the Deck, then of course it will.
Do we know what the switch2’s hardware is yet?
If the leaks are correct its:
Full specs:
CPU: Arm Cortex-A78C 8 cores Unknown L1/L2/L3 cache sizes GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere 1 Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) 1534 CUDA cores 6 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) 48 Gen 3 Tensor cores 2 RTX ray-tracing cores RAM: 12 GB LPDDR5Handheld Mode:
CPU: 998.4 MHz GPU: 561 MHz (~1.72 TFLOPS) Memory Frequency: 4266 MHz Memory Bandwidth: 68.256 GB/sDocked Mode:
CPU: 1100.8 MHz GPU: 1007.25 MHz (~3.09 TFLOPS) Memory Frequency: 6400 MHz Memory Bandwidth: 102.4 GB/sI personally don’t know how that compares to other hardware though.
(Edit: Thanks for the replies!)Here’s the OLED Deck specs for comparison:
APU
6 nm AMD APU
APU power: 4-15W
(which contains:)
CPU:
Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz
(up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU:
8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.6GHz
(1.6 TFlops FP32)
…
RAM:
16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM
(6400 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
Storage:
Steam Deck 512GB NVMe SSD
Steam Deck 1TB NVMe SSD
Both include high-speed microSD card slot
EDIT: More details
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Steam-Deck-OLED-APU-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.799065.0.html
So basically, the Deck and Switch 2 are roughly inverted in compartitive hardware power… the Deck has a more powerful CPU, the Switch 2 has a more powerful GPU.
EDIT 2:
also the Deck has 33% more RAM.
Consoles can also do more with less since the games are (unless they’re shitty ports) designed for that specific hardware.
Yep, this is always a factor, even with PC games.
For example: the Switch 2 uses an ARM CPU.
That is different in significant ways than an x86/64 CPU.
How the system allocates memory is also… a confounding factor.
Sometimes you have just one kind of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Sometimes there are different kinds of RAM for the CPU and GPU.
It looks like the Switch 2 is sharing LPPDR5 RAM between the CPU and GPU, as the Deck does… on the Deck, you can use CryoUtils to manually adjust how much is allocated to which.
The Switch 2 will… maybe have a standardized allocation for all games, or allow certain games to adjust the allocation.
And then if course there is port quality, and proton…
It gets pretty complicated to estimate just purely from specs alone.
Hence why the PC centric crowd is so much into empirical testing via benchmarks.
That low ram is going to hurt the new switch pretty quickly, I think. I wouldn’t get a newish pc/laptop if it didn’t have at least 16g ram these days. They’re going to struggle again with ports.
core count x clock speed hasn’t been a good metric for about 15-20 years, but if we go by that anyway then it looks like the switch2 will be slightly worse than a steam deck.
Might be somewhat comparable to a laptop RTX 3050: https://tech4gamers.com/nintendo-switch-2-equipped-with-5nm-nvidia-tegra/
I love my Steam Deck but it doesn’t have Mario Kart or even anything like it
Bro doesn’t know about dolphin
It does if you run Dolphin.
What if I want to play Mariokart World online with my friends?
Then you and your friends are accepting of the problem.
That’s still just Nintendo with extra steps.
Yeah but if the steps are piracy, then fine.
Sure. But this is an argument for piracy far more than quality.
If you’ve got the money to burn and consider emulation a hassle, you’re still buying a new Switch (tariffs pending)
I have nothing against piracy. I’m just lazy.
Isnt there an open source linux cart racer?
The nickolodeon cart racer is fun and I have heard one of the sonic cart racing game is real good.
lol there are so many racing as well as cart games, and the fact you can run literally any Nintendo game on PC
None of them really compare, and I’m not really interested in setting up emulation.
you’ll pay the price, one way or the other
C’est la vie.
SuperTuxKart exists for a native Linux kart racer, and it’s FOSS on top of that. Oh, and since STK is FOSS, I can imagine there are some tracks as intricate as anything in modern MarioKart if not moreso, that the community around it made for it.
SuperTuxKart is a neat indie game, but I really would not compare it to Mario Kart or try to recommend it as a substitute.
Sadly the trend of $80 for a digital copy of games will be copied by every major AAA studio in the following years if Nintendo succeed. The switch 1 games are not pricer than others at launch, they just never for whatever fucking reason become cheaper.
And then AAA studios will see their games stay on digital shelves indefinitely and pirating skyrocket and they’ll learn that they’re not nintendo and trying to be will bankrupt them.
