It’s probably easier to think that when you’re NOT in the country throwing away ludicrous amounts of money and resources on data centers. And in a country that’ll probably punish you if you do something stupid like writing government papers with it, or I dunno, ask what you should be doing as the leader of the country.
They speculated it could connect anyway via some router brands, that allow specific devices to connect automatically. Since cases like that happened.
So if it’s range of neighbours’ routers, you might be fucked anyway. They didn’t confirm it though, to be clear.
Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can’t afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.
Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.
Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn’t become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)
Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one. (Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)
I’m converting to physicals now that I realised, I’m probably never going to replay 90% of my games.
I’m planning to sell most of my 3DS games because I didn’t like them enough to replay besides two, yet enjoyed them enough/know what the deal is when people discuss them that buying was worth it. Now I can hopefully get half of my cash back (and I already bought them used!) once I find the time and energy to look for buyers. Don’t know how much pawn shops take.
You might even try to buy new games and just sell them after finishing (unless you love them), but I have enough of a backlog already…
In this anti-subscription context, it’s nice, but for me the main point of physicals is reselling. GOG just like Steam and others benefits from the fact you can’t get your money back, and you have to buy from them.
Toby Fox was a wise man for getting rid of that shit, and OMORI taught me that they can hamper the experience, because now I know I missed out on feeding a cat fish on day 1. Even on Steam, I don’t like the game’s profile taunting me every time I look at it - can you turn that off?
Never had that problem playing Nintendo games besides the occassional in-game achievement lists, which are easier to ignore. Just give me a piss-colored title screen as a completion reward. Wouldn’t even know about it without the Internet.
This is great, but a new dilemma for me. I’ve been waiting for Steam Machine because I really want the small size and easy moving between TV and desk, compared to normal PCs. (Performance could go either way, I’m plenty satisfied with HD but also do have a 4k TV to use)
But I’m not actually sure precisely HOW small I want my gaming box to be. It seems like this’d be just a bit too clunky for me compared to the cube, but if Valve time pushes SM into 2027 I might just cave in, it still seems more convenient than most desktops I saw.
Well damn, nevermind. Gonna be honest, didn’t look up the numbers.
At the very least, my point was that they are using USA AI instead of DeepSeek or other models, and that seems to hold true, at least for the recent influx of science publications. If AI is not profitable, like it seems so far, you want to be using the other guy’s offer instead of expending. (And if you DO want to use it on your own in the future, you can distill their model after they did the training work too)