Nintendo is beyond the event horizon at this point.
And that’s alright. Like, if you can afford a Switch and you get it so your family can play Pokopia and Animal Crossing, all their nonsense doesn’t really matter to your lifestyle.
…But if it does matter, “Nintendo Fans” are in waaay too deep to plausibly defend them anyway.
How much would 2-3 dual-later BDs cost?
The issue isn’t the technical possibility, but whether people are willing to pay the premium for installation media.
You know. Store agnostic game key cards would be so cool.
I’m fine with archiving downloads I’d want + keeping keycards.
From OP in the Reddit thread:
Got five minutes of No Man’s Sky in, then I installed the update the machine had available and it bricked itself. If you’re still in the queue, look on the bright side: they’re presumably going to iron this crap out. Edit: To be more accurate, it’s giving the error light code for GPU failure.
Anticlimactic and somewhat embarrassing update: as some people suggested, I left it unplugged for about half an hour last night and then tried plugging it back in… and it didn’t work. So I left it unplugged for a couple of hours and then tried it again before bed… and it didn’t work. Same error light despite multiple power-cycling attempts. So I left it unplugged overnight and plugged it back in today to try some of the BIOS stuff that other people suggested… and it booted up immediately without issue.
I feel stupid about even posting this now, especially since it blew up a bit, but I was tired and irritable after a long day of work, and an ominous GPU error code wasn’t exactly the seamless plug-and-play experience I had hoped for. But I guess if anyone encounters the same error, don’t panic like I did, just let it sit for a few hours and it will somehow sort itself out.
It sounds like a firmware issue that broke display out. Perhaps Valve pushed a fix while it was “on” overnight, or OP reset something in the BIOS.
What I’m getting at is the specter this raises: The Steam machine seemingly relies on Valve for firmware support here, I think. Not AMD directly, like with the normal Linux firmware shipping.
That’s an interesting can of worms.
It’s not bad or anything, I’d trust Valve more than HP, Sony, or past OEMs who were notorious for wonky “custom” hardware support. And I suppose their track record with the Deck speaks for itself. But still, that’s something I’d keep in mind before buying one of these things.
This is a moot question, because the only thing that matters is engagement.
Internet forums:
Are (mostly) specialized.
Don’t have S&P 500-level advertising.
Don’t constantly ping your phone by default.
Don’t incorporate “dark patterns” in the UI.
Don’t have AI-based algorithmic feeds.
Have rules for posting, which slows down posting.
People didn’t give up on them; their attention got sucked away to other things. And nothing could have changed that, no matter how much they improved.
Not that I have any high horse to stand on.
For a few years, I’ve been telling myself I will become active in a few still-extant forums again (like DPReview and SpaceBattles). I never did.
Yeah, it’s mostly newer indie or “AA” games I’ve been into.
On the pricing: https://blog.subimpact.net/2026/06/valve-allegedly-threatened-to-delist.html?m=1
But in a nutshell, the allegations is that Steam threatens to delist games if they’re priced lower than Steam on other storefronts, similar to what Walmart or Amazon are accused of doing.
That makes sense. The image host I used is pretty unreliable.
Which is the second issue. No image hosts even support JXL or AVIF, except catbox.moe, which is down now! It’s infuriating.
What platform is that, out of curiosity? Im pretty sure everything should load an AVIF.
Om Android, or iOS?
Also, I have a pet peeve:
I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.
Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.
For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS or something, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.
Nah. The hardware for making discs is aging, and not developed anymore. USB/SD cards are too expensive.
And digital key reselling? That’s a whole can of worms for grifters to squeeze.
Not that it doesn’t suck. I want to (legally) archive and resell my games.
…But I don’t know a good alternative.
That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
Well even 64GB microSD cards are $35 now.
There’s a price floor to this kind of thing, and no cheaper read only tech has come to replace BDs.
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Small USB drives are very slow, unfortunately.
Fast ones are pretty expensive.
JXL is working alright for me.
As an example with a lot of dynamic range, here’s a JXL:
AVIF:
Both render in my desktop and iPhone browsers, just fine. I bet at least one renders for you. And I made them from RAWs from a really old camera!
The problem is, as you say… arbitrary lack of support. As an example, I can’t upload either file to Lemmy. Brand new social media software, and it doesnt’ recognize JXL or AVIF as valid image types, even though they should render just fine? Most image hosts wont take JXL either, hence I had to upload them to litterbox since catbox is down!
An HEIF, on the other hand, has basically 0 support outside of Apple:
All three of these render correctly on my phone, but only the top two do on other devices.
iam8bit, a company known for its physical gaming collectibles, which said it is “profoundly disappointed” by the news.
GameFly
Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi
…Well, to be fair, these companies would obviously complain. Game discs are literally their job.
I’d “buy” this headline more if bigger studios spoke up.
To me, its the price fixing allegations (e.g. dictating the prices of other stores).
All the HEIC files from my camera are still busted.
To be fair, its a tricky issue. Its camera makers’ fault for using a format no one else wants to touch, and rendering them as HDR files instead of SDR with gain maps, as is standard practice for smartphones.
…But still, its annoying. They render fine on my iPhone, on Windows, or KDE Linux, out of the box. But they’re completely garbled in Immich :(
Let’s say most devs abandon native Linux and basically everything moves to Proton. Game devs start testing on it, then targeting it. Windows as a gaming platform withers away.
A Windows API, on Linux, is now the stable gaming API. It sets the standard.
…I’m content with that future.
I mean, the irony would be delicious. What better way to dance on MS’s grave than rob their API?