In fairness, they did just increase the price of all of their consoles due to tariff effects on hardware production. Same with playstation. It's pretty much the first generation in history consoles have gotten more expensive after release.
I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.
They bet on GP and acquisitions would increase their hw units sold and it did not happen. They can't really afford to subsidize day and date games from all their studios at the previous price anymore. And this is why they are now also releasing the games on the other consoles too. They just became the biggest 3rd party publisher, Xbox is not the focus going forward imo.
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone,
Strongly disagree here. It worked out well for the businesses that can standardize on these engines and not spend resources making custom bespoke engines for sure, but as a gamer I remember the days when each game or company had their own engine which brought their own feel to the game. They could specialize it for exactly the type of game they were making.
In addition, Unreal Engine 5 in particular runs like absolute trash on many PCs (including my very high end machines). Its reliance on frame generation (fake frames) and super resolution (fake pixels) has predictably led to developers ignoring optimization even further - "just turn on DLSS 4x Frame Gen and DLSS Ultra Performance!" - see Randy Pitchford's recent rants on Twitter.
I work with the engineer behind this (different team, but we interact semi-often and work on overlapping projects), but had no idea it was him until I looked at the little copyright notice in the footer. He is a fascinating guy and a fantastic engineer (one of those 10x engineers you hear about) while being humble and always willing to help out.
Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a number of times.
If he doesn't read the thread here, please tell him that a random internet user would like to thank him very much for providing this awesome service, fully understands his choice, and congratulates him for having the willpower to make the choice that is right for him rather than lighting himself on fire to keep others warm.
As I understand it, GeForce Now actually does require changes to the game to run in the standard and until recently only option of "Ready To Play". This is the supposed reason that new updates to games sometimes take time to get released on the service, since either the developers themselves or Nvidia needs to modify it to work correctly on the service. I have no idea if this is true, but it makes sense to me.
They recently added "Install to Play" where you can install games from Steam that aren't modified for the service. They charge for storage for this though.
Sadly, there's still tons of games unavaiable because publishers need to opt in and many don't.
I wonder if they'll drop support for ChromeOS Flex, their install-it-on-whatever version. Would be kind of interesting to have a semi-official Android for various x86 machines I have lying around.
AFAIK a majority of Chromebooks are x86 (which has always been funny to me because surely that's the best case for ARM but w/e). Therefore, I think it's reasonable to assume that any new ChromeOS-on-Android OS will probably run on x86. Now I grant that x86 Chromebooks are already not using normal UEFI so there is a small gap there... but if you're already building the same OS for the same CPU on basically the same hardware, surely it's worth the... what, couple days of work?... to add an UEFI bootloader to vastly increase your hardware coverage. For bonus points, this should make it (even) easier to run in VMs for dev reasons.
All of which to say: Yeah, I'm actually somewhat optimistic that we get official Android x86 out of this.
This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command.
Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
Took the plunge 2.5 years ago. I'm more likely to give up gaming than move back to windows at this point. It's so pleasant to be able to use the same reasonable tools I use for development to customize my environment for gaming. For example I use a custom Babashka script to switch off various things like mouse acceleration and night shift when a game starts. I have a repo of Ansible tasks to take a stock Ubuntu install and customize it exactly how I like it. I can take a ZFS snapshot of my entire library and revert instantly if a mod installation goes wrong.
