PC Gaming general discussion (Gaming PCs, game sales, news, etc...)

The Game Room
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Epic Game Store released its Year in Review a few weeks ago and it’s noteworthy in that sales of third party titles went down 18% over 2023. And 2023 sales were down 13% over 2022. In total, sales of third party games on EGS dropped from $355m in 2022 to $255m in 2024. That’s despite having more accounts than ever and the free games, etc. My guess is that they got more purchases when they would give out $10 vouchers during the sales and had deeper discounts then customers lost interest as those incentives tapered off. They earned a good bit of ill will with their exclusives poaching but you barely hear about Epic Exclusives any longer. Alan Wake 2 was, but Epic was also directly involved in the development so that was a somewhat different situation (and last I heard still hadn’t made back its costs). The other last exclusive I remember hearing about was Saints Row reboot and… the less said about that the better.

Steam launched their Year in Review yesterday and it… doesn’t give any numbers for year over year total sales. They used to give better information and all the other signs from the year pointed to a laudable year for them financially (breaking records for concurrent players, sales of new titles, 10% increase in Seasonal Sale revenue, 15% increase in new game sales revenue, etc) but I guess they’re keeping their cards close to the chest this year. Too bad.

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I’ve been watching a YouTuber play a game called “We Happy Few”. His first couple run-throughs were when it was still in early release, but now he’s playing the full release. It looked interesting enough to me that I went looking for it on Steam but it was $60. It didn’t look that interesting so I put it on my wish list hoping it might go on sale sometime. Steam has it for $20 in their Spring Sale so I think I’m going to grab it. Anybody played it? What did you think?

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Never played it, but steamdb says it regularly goes down to 15 bucks. If you’re on the fence, wait a bit and get it cheaper.

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Picked up the bundle of Mafia: Definitive Edition trilogy games for $15.99. It also comes with the original Mafia II for some reason.

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There’s a number of people who prefer the original Mafia II and the differences between them are cosmetic. The remaster has more detailed textures but at the cost of the original’s PhysX mechanics and eye movement.

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I’ve played it. Haven’t finished it. The game itself is clever in both the overall premise and the writing, but combat is just awful. (Not necessarily difficult, but boring and awkward.

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Bought Battlefield 1 for $1.99. Didn’t really even want it that much but… 2 bucks. :man_shrugging:

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Hm. Maybe that’s why I lost interest in playing.

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Nexus Mods changes hands!

The message keeps many of the behind-the-scenes details under wraps but says two new individuals — one named Victor (a.k.a. Foledinho) and another named Marinus (a.k.a. Rapsak) — have adopted the leadership role, with both of their profiles now bearing the “Site Owner” title. The leadership change signals the beginning of a new era for Nexus Mods, and for Scott, a much-needed break.

“The strain of being responsible for the behemoth I created has taken its toll,” Scott explained. “The stress of the job has been a regular source of anxiety and stress-related health issues. I realised that I have been burning out and this started to have an impact on my staff and Nexus Mods as a whole. So, I firmly believe that the best thing for the future of Nexus Mods is for me to step aside and bring in new leadership to steer the business forward with renewed energy to make Nexus Mods the modding community we all truly deserve.”

The small project born in Scott’s bedroom for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind eventually ballooned into a massive entity in the gaming space. The Nexus Mods About Us page notes that this beating heart of the PC gaming community is made up of 63.4 million users and 16.8 billion file downloads, positioning it as one of the most highly trafficked UK-based websites on the planet.

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Speaking of Battlefield…

There used to be a number of people here that played BF4 for quite a bit…any interest in a revival of a squad once the new Battlefield is released late this year or early next year?

Rumors that the open beta will be held soon is encouraging, and I like what ive seen from the BattleLab releases.

I really liked BF1 & V, but they didn’t ever instill the need to play with a squad like BF4 did. Hopefully, they get it right again.

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I lost track of the all the different Battlefield #s and re-runs, but I loved the first few games in the series (2? 3? can’t remember).

Is the new one going to be set in the modern era again? Will it be like the old Battlefields (capture and hold flags), or just another battle royale extraction shooter?

If it’s like the old games, I’d love to play in a squad!

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We did indeed used to have a big SDMB group that would play battlefield 3 together long ago. Mostly that group has drifted apart and with the SDMB population being as low as it is I’m not sure there are many new people to recruit. I’m not sure if I’m going to get the game, but if I do, I’m open to meeting new people to play it with.

There’s an open beta going on right now. You need an “early access” key to play today, but it will be available to anyone tomorrow. And you can get one of those keys just by watching a twitch streamer playing the game for a half hour.

It is indeed a modern day shooter and seems to be going back to the BF3/4 style old school battlefield. I think it has multiple modes including the traditional conquest mode and some version of rush as well as others.

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Steam changed the date of their autumn sale and it actually started today. Makes sense – it was a little weird having a black friday sale just a month before the big winter sale. Starting at the end of September spaces it out pretty well between the summer and winter sales.

This page has a list of “special deals” many of which are actually quite good and feel like the old steam sales from 10+ years ago. I don’t know if that’s static for the whole sale or if it will be rotated with new games.

On that list, if you like stealth / sort of puzzle games Desperados 3 is really good, Monster train is one of the best deckbuilder and/or roguelike games ever, and I’ve heard great things about control although it’s been free on epic 3 or 4 times. But every game on that list looks pretty great from a price to rating perspective. I have more than half but I think I’ll grab transport fever 2, far cry primal, and the south park game.

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A heads-up; the game Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is being permanently delisted from all stores by November 15th. If you want it or its DLCs, get it now or never. GOG has it on a 70% sale until the delisting, so it’s likely the best option.

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An interesting new game from some of the folks behind Tales of the Borderlands, I guess Dispatch can be called “the Mystery Men meet 911 / 112 Operator.”

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New Steam Machines are coming out early next year, this time with Proton support: Steam Machine

I’m quite excited about this. The Steam Deck was a huge success, and this is coming at a good time… Proton is a thing now, Microsoft is focusing on AI and seemingly abandoning Xbox, and Nvidia cards are ridiculously expensive.

A simple, capable enough gaming PC-as-a-console could make the hobby way more accessible. And maybe finally start peeling away at the shitty Windows ecosystem and the Microsoft tax.

Valve is a way better steward of PC gaming than Microsoft has ever been, and I hope this becomes the start of a new era…

They’re also releasing a new VR headset that can be used standalone or with PC games, along with a new controller with gyro aiming.

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I think the new round of Steam Machines is going to flop as hard as the last round. I don’t think there is a market for an ultra-low-end gaming PC. What market may exist for such products is already filled by budget gaming laptops.

I think they needed to make it a premium version of the SteamLink. It’s too weak to compete with a PS5 for the same money.

Maybe I underestimate how many people are looking to crossover into PC gaming but want the comfort of a console-like experience as their entry point.

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Yeah, that’s a possibility for sure. Personally, I’m hoping that Proton will make a big enough difference this time. The first Steam Machines could barely play anything, since there were only like maybe half a dozen native Linux games. But now with Proton, the overwhelming majority of Steam Windows games can be played on SteamOS now.

It’s not exactly a super-low-end PC; “6x more powerful than the Steam Deck” is what’s been quoted, so maybe a midrange PC? Certainly not 5090 level performance, but probably able to play all but the most graphics-intensive games.

I’ve been a PC gamer since the DOS days, but I haven’t had a gaming PC for a few years now. It’s gotten so expensive, and Windows is such a terrible, enshittified experience these days that it’s hard to convince myself to give it another go. I keep hemming and hawing. The hardware is better than ever, but the software and pricing, not so much…

SteamOS is really nice in comparison, and if the Machine is reasonably priced (hopefully sub-$1k?), it’d be an instant buy for me. Between GeForce Now for the AAA games and Proton for everything else, it would make an expensive graphics card unnecessary and altogether cast out Windows (yay!). The user experience is such a refreshingly dramatic difference… wake from sleep in a second or two and then you’re instantly ready to play, with a nice, TV-friendly library interface. No dealing with the latest Windows Updates, forced service pack upgrades, endless Copilot spam and Office 365 ads, driver failures, UAC, etc.

Anyway, I dunno if there are many gamers like me who just want a reasonable PC for a reasonable price, with the simplicity of a console but access to PC-only genres and mouse-only games. I can only hope.

Valve is one of the only companies I’d trust to get a good balance of hardware, software, and user experience right. If this does well (and that’s a big if, as you pointed out), it might actually start to challenge Windows dominance in PC gaming. Proton was a decade-long effort for them, and it’s finally starting to pay off.

By contrast, companies like Asus make good hardware but terrible software, and their devices are still Windows-dependent for the most part. Microsoft’s latest experiment with them, the Rog Ally Xbox X (what a laughable name) is an underpowered, overpriced handheld Windows PC with a special SteamOS-like interface hacked on to make it pretend to be an Xbox. But it cannot run Xbox games. I guess even Microsoft senses the desire for a console-like PC experience, though their vision and branding around that concept is an absolutely clusterfuck — gaming is just an afterthought for them, now more than ever. But it’s Valve’s entire company.

Anyway… enough of a ramble. I can only pray this turns out well :folded_hands: I would love to see Linux become the default OS of PC gaming someday.

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Yeah, Proton (and FSR) will be a huge help. There is an order of magnitude or two more titles available for Linux compared to a decade ago. I think the only real obstacle left is anti-cheat software.

This thing must be under $1000. I was thinking $499 + $99 for a controller. Valve might try to buy market share at $399. They have the money.

I wonder how they’d do if they had waited an extra year or two and positioned it as the first 10th generation console. I bet they’d at least capture a bunch of would-be Xbox buyers that way. The Steam Machine, like everything else to ever exist, is an Xbox after all.

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I switched to Linux in October; I have so far had no problems playing any of the games I play. Proton is awesome.