The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays.

And yet monthly active Steam users are about the size of all Switches sold over its lifetime, including those who bought multiple Switches as new SKUs came out. I think what the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs capture are people who want to play PC games and play them handheld. Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld? I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.

A season pass is a bundle of several DLCs intended to release over a period of time, usually a year, and they usually come with a small discount for buying in bulk or maybe a few extras for buying them all together instead of separately. A battle pass will often have a “free tier” and a “paid tier”, and it’s basically a experience points progression meter that encourages you to keep playing the game longer (and they have an incentive to put the best rewards behind the paid tier to get you to pay for them). Typically battle passes are only available for a limited time, and if you don’t get them while they’re available, you missed out, which creates a greater sense of urgency to play longer during that period of time.

Is making the game live service a quality of life improvement? There’s still a market out there for Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Borderlands, after all; a large one.

I like matchmaking. I never once found a “community” on a server browser and instead was just frustrated by teams changing rosters mid-match and such. Years later, I’d find that kind of community building in Discord servers and not the likes of de_dust 24/7. But regardless of personal preferences, it’s just about mathematically impossible that matchmaking will sustain a player base forever, so the player-hosted servers need to be there.

One might argue (I might argue) that live service is just a worse version of some other form that game could take, like the old model of expansion packs, self-hosting servers, and such. They’re going to inevitably turn up the dial on monetization, just like Apex Legends did, once one line crosses another line and their current trajectory is no longer sustainable. Live service games have ongoing costs in a way that non-live service games do not, so they need more incoming revenue to justify it. When that revenue doesn’t make up for their spend, they shut the servers off, and the game is gone forever.

Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.

Digital Extremes and Bungie were the first formerly singleplayer-focused studios to find major success making MMOs with more action-heavy gameplay

Both companies were known for making multiplayer games before making live service games. BioWare made plenty of multiplayer games before Mass Effect 3.

If you want a term for something that means “not a live service”, “single player” is a bad way to do it.

I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.

It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.

Anecdotally, more of my techy friends are at least entertaining the thought of switching to Linux when they never did before. Great job, Microsoft!