ampersandrew

I had a GPD Win 2 and had the same experience, but the truth is that you’re going to spend more time in game than dealing with Windows, so if you need that compatibility, you’ll put up with it.

I just think you would have made your point better if you had said maybe one decade, because two decades catches some certified bangers in the public consciousness.

So…that’s your personal taste. Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn’t have been successful if no one liked it, and we can quantify some form of quality via review scores. Some of Bethesda’s games have reviewed phenomenally well, especially in as large of a bucket as the past 20 years of their history. If I was the sole dictator of what was good, no one would be playing the latest Assassin’s Creed game or Hades, but plenty of people love those games; the majority would say they’re great, and we can measure that to some degree.

But there are also tons of people who’ve been plenty pleased with those games, as you can see on the long tails of their sales and how many concurrent players they retain to this day. You’re the odd one out on those heavy hitters. Not so much on 76, and to a lesser extent, 4.

No, you can measure it in things like sales and review scores. Sure, they also put out games like Fallout 76 and Wolfenstein: Young Blood, but two decades is enough to capture Skyrim and Fallout 3.

In the past two decades they delivered some of the most successful, beloved games of all time.

So if those people aren’t seeing the information they need, they should not pre-order. I’m confident that if you know these other avenues to find out this information, it’s easy to avoid getting burned.

Even if that tech worked, you wouldn’t want the games you buy to rely on it.

Isn’t this usually just LOD stuff where the high-quality stuff is when you’re up close and the low quality stuff is for when you’re far away? So you’re just about always seeing the high-quality stuff, and it’s the stuff that’s actually processed in real time like shadows and stuff, that take up practically no space, that are getting toggled when you turn down settings. That’s how I understand it anyway.

But that’s why I said one person saying it’s still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn’t. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let’s Plays…and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn’t have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn’t pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that’s just a difference in taste between you and I.

There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it’s still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn’t. I’ve got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all’s well, I’ll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I’ll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.

No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it’s in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.

Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.

No idea; I’ve got a Steam Deck. But those slight improvements at the expense of battery life are speaking to a large enough subset of people.

It’s not laziness. Why sell you the games when they can exclusively rent them to you instead?

There will be different amounts of friction depending on the customer and what they expect. If all they need is Chrome and like one or two other Electron apps, as long as they’re walked through the software center on first boot, quickly. But there will be friction when one odd customer here or there expects program X and it’s not available, even if there’s a very viable alternative. They’d have to educate their customers through marketing like Apple does to ease that transition, and Apple still only has a single digit percentage of the PC market.

I don’t need Slack to do voice calls. I could use something else for it. It’s just that the things that Slack is good at, Teams is horrible at, and Teams sucks for calls too. If someone calls me, the pop up that allows me to accept or decline the call should actually be responsive and not crash. When I’m browsing old messages, it should be able to render a simple text history without thinking about it for 30 seconds. When I get a message, the notification should occur every time instead of just when it feels like it. When I lose and regain my VPN connection, it should be able to dynamically reconnect without crashing or hanging on a disconnect message. If you’re going to put document integration into Teams, why is there not a tab system for open documents I need to keep open rather than forcing me to use the history on the back button or otherwise reload the document by clicking through to teams->team name->files?

Adobe would be huge, but what would be even bigger is if it came pre-installed on a computer you buy at Walmart or Best Buy. Otherwise, no one’s going to want to switch from what they’re using unless the thing they’re using bothers them. As annoying as I find Windows Updates to be, most people don’t seem to notice.

Is the ROG Ally dead in the water? It seems to be gaining some traction. I don’t think it’s going to overtake the Steam Deck or anything, but it satisfies that customer who wants a little extra power, resolution, and compatibility.

They’ve totally ruined any brand power that Skype once had by now, so in this case, I get it.