Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

• They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
• Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
• Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.

Unless Valve can either find or pay a company that does a custom packaging of a Nvidia GPU with x86 (like the Intel Kaby Lake-G SoC with an in-package Radeon), very unlikely. The handheld size makes an “out of package” discrete GPU very difficult.

And making Nvidia themselves warm up to x86 is just unrealistic at this point. Even if e.g. Nintendo demanded, the entire gaming market — see AMD’s anemic recent 2024Q1 result from gaming vs. data center and AI — is unlikely to be compelling enough for Nvidia to be interested in x86 development, vs. continuing with their ARM-based Grace “superchip.”

Probably from the FAQ pane on the Kickstarter page:

What about Steamdeck support?
Will be 100% supported
Last updated: Tue, April 23 2024 10:55 AM PDT

There has been:

• Watch Dogs
• Watch Dogs 2
• Watch Dogs: Legion

GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284

Or compare with:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI

GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.

Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).

From my own statistics how many I feel worthy posting/linking on Lemmy, the most direct alternative to Kotaku is Eurogamer. PCGamer, PCGamesN and Rock Paper Shotgun are occasionally OK, but you have to cut through a lot of spam and clickbait (i.e. exactly this “50 guides per week” type of corporate guidance). Not sure if this is also the state that Kotaku will end up in. The Verge sometimes also have good articles, but the flood of gadget consumerism articles there is obnoxious.

The PS Vita side of Sony customer has gotten a deep taste of Sony’s issues of catering everything to a singular console. And same with PSVR2: Of course it must be PS5 exclusive, because everything are adornments towards their shiny console — and went on to not sell a lot of PS5.

See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/u-mad, in particular the “Due to the agitating nature of the phrase, it is often considered a form of trolling.”

The “you mad bro” is found among internal Valve communication (Valve COO Scott Lynch to Erik Johnson and Newell, i.e. in the sense Johnson/Newell being “mad”, not Sweeney). It was particularly not sent out as a response to Sweeney. Another outlet already got tripped over this and had to make a correction: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/valve-coo-on-epics-tim-sweeney-you-mad-bro-when-launching-the-epic-store/

This is not quite as sensational as some people are framing it.

There is pre-existing context and criticism. And it is not about, or just being the perception of “this journalist”:

https://www.theverge.com/23992402/geoff-keighley-the-game-awards-layoffs

https://www.levelup.com/en/news/777306/He-doesnt-represent-us-devs-and-players-deliver-harsh-criticism-of-Geoff-Keighley-on-social-networks

https://videogames.si.com/features/games-industry-deserves-better-than-geoff-keighley

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/the-game-awards-2023-needs-to-acknowledge-industrys-lay-offs-problem

https://dotesports.com/the-game-awards/news/the-game-awards-layoffs-developers-no-respect

The problems also goes beyond just the layoffs, but his overt coziness and preferential treatment of large studios, over even the ones that actually won the award he is presiding over, and are supposed to be celebrated:

https://insider-gaming.com/geoff-keighley-shows-cowardice-at-the-game-awards/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-biggest-problem-at-this-years-game-awards-was-disrespecting-the-winners/

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-game-awards-speeches-were-too-short-geoff-keighley-admits

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-game-awards-criticized-for-giving-winners-little-time-to-speak-amid-silence-on-industry-layoffs

https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/dec/04/sub-ire-as-hacks-slash-word-length-getting-the-skinny-on-thinnernyms

There are now summaries from non pay-walled (and English) press: https://www.eurogamer.net/new-the-day-before-report-alleges-employees-fined-for-making-mistakes

The was a GNOME FAQ that describes “guh-NOME” or IPA /ɡˈnəʊm/ as the official pronunciation, due to the emphasis of G as GNU. It does acknowledge that many pronounce it “NOME” or /nəʊm/: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/aui/html/pronunciation.html

From https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/10/tony-hawks-pro-skater-1-2-adds-offline-support-for-steam-deck/ :

You may be able to get it to work on desktop Linux too in offline mode by using SteamDeck=1 %command% as a Steam launch option for the game, which likely won’t work for Windows since the Steam Deck is just a Linux machine.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 runs decently on the Steam Deck, and has semi-(?)/de-facto-(?) official support (the developer purposefully switched to a Linux/Wine-compatible EAC earlier this year, and referenced the Steam Deck support in the corresponding patch note).

This summary (and sadly, also the GoL title) has somewhat buried the lede here: The firmware update that comes with 3.5.1 Preview adds undervolting controls — with the obvious implications of improving the battery life.

This is absolutely not true, certainly not at the time of Bungie and how Microsoft made Halo Xbox-exclusive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/

As a user of an ecosystem that I care about, I totally do not. Why should the health of an ecosystem be dictated by my usage patterns or that of people that I know? Bit self-centered, also?

Also, today’s Apple fans and their “Apple-no-gaming” fiction are too quick to “forget” Bungie and how upset Steve Jobs was when Halo became Microsoft-exclusive. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/