MudMan

Wait, who wins between scissors and wax tablet? Does that count as stone?

Cool. But that’s not the conversation we’re having an five-ish million people clearly don’t share that concern.

I don’t think I can agree. I mean, I’m sure being in Latin America and being at the tail end of support for less global products skews this a bit, but ultimately these are two big global publishers selling globally.

For what it’s worth, Steam is willing to sell me any currently available Steam Deck in my region with 3-5 day delivery. There currently isn’t any Switch 2 stock on Amazon or the local top specialty game retailer. Checking a couple other major retailers it sure seems to be sold out everywhere for now. You’d probably have a better shot at a physical retailer.

So I’m saying that Valve has stock of the Deck and has for ages, at least in the territories it supports through direct sales. Which is expected, the thing is not new anymore, but it suggests that if it needed to ramp up production it could, it just doesn’t have to.

You could argue that this is not apples to apples, and it may not be, but the difference is so large it may not matter. The Switch 1 by itself was about as large as all of Steam combined, let alone the Deck by itself. The Switch 2 did in weeks what took the Deck years to do, crucially at the same price point (the Switch 2 is cheaper than the OLED but more expensive than the LCD). Considering how much of the marketing and the community focused on the Deck being a Switch killer based on the performance advantage it had, I’m going to say they are close enough competitors and the gulf between them is large enough that whatever differences you want to account for are accounted for.

Which, again, doesn’t speak to the quality of either piece of hardware, but it does to the notion that the Deck has been a runaway success or that it has overwhelmed Valve’s expectations.

I forget what wave I was on. I know I wasn’t there day one, but it also wasn’t that long of a wait.

My best guess is Valve was making very few of these. It’s pretty impressive that Nintendo has been able to move this many consoles while keeping stock up, but Valve was clearly not operating at that volume for both cost reasons and to create some hype.

For the record, I do own both a Switch 2 and a Deck. It wasn’t that hard to get either, but the Switch 2 was available on day one in a way the Deck was not.

I am very glad it exists. I may have a problem with owning handhelds. I am the perfect mark for this stuff. I have multiple upcoming boutique handheld PCs I’m actively trying not to overspend on.

But they are competitors. If anything, they are about as similar as they’ve ever been, honestly.

I’m only reacting to they weird Valve mythmaking that presents them as being extremely successful in the meme up top. Yes, the Deck is a very popular PC handheld, it is supposed to account for half-ish of the entire segment and it’s been very well priced for what it is, but it isn’t a runaway hit in the large scheme of the game industry and game hardware manufacturing.

Weirdly so is Nintendo these days.

In any case I’m not sure what “percentage of units sold/manufactured” implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn’t much of a metric unless you’re doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they’d manufacture them faster.

I mean…

Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what? Three weeks? I’m not even saying it’s better, but I think people should get a sense of the scope of PC handhelds in general compared to consoles and the Switch specifically. And I say that as the owner of multiple handhelds, the Deck included.

What, you think any of the stuff he said is expected by his base?

It was never about the stuff he said, it was about how you didn’t have an answer to it he couldn’t counter, so you lose and they win.

What you lose and they win about was never the issue, and there is no consequence to it beyond perhaps the opportunity of another argument they may have a harder time winning, but they know how to win arguments against you, so they’re not particularly worried.

I guess it depends on where your line for “gross” happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.

I’m also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?

So I’m not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won’t stop playing, and that’s a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I’m not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don’t make the experience worse. They do, in my book.

But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.

I’m more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.

That being said… man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It’s all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren’t currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one’s wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It’d be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.

Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It’s pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).

So if you’re playing “Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3” there’s a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.

If you have a F2P game and you’re charging for things you can also grind I frankly don’t see a much better place to start.

Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it’s servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that’s just seeking “fun”… well, I don’t know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.

I think there’s a conversation to be had about whether “good”, “fun” and “makes people want to engage more” should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It’s tricky and nuanced and I don’t know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that’s alright.

I mean, fair enough, on a technicality at least.

Sure. There can be more than one terrible driver endangering everybody on the road at the same time.

I’m constantly, endlessly disappointed at how hard it is for human brains to accept that two people disagreeing with each other can both be wrong.

I mean, the text say the guy honked for going “70 in a 50”.

If you take it at face value, the person posting is the asshole and a terrible driver endangering everybody on the road.

I have to say, I normally find the “ha-ha, this word sounds like something else in English” stuff to be a bit… provincial, but I’ll admit some are a bit .

Well, yeah, but so are plenty of other gross things and you don’t see me out there raiding coastal villages just because we’ve spent longer taking things from each other by force than enforcing some peaceful, democratic social contract.

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing, we have tribalism baked into us. It just happens to suck and we should strive to break past our built-in biases.

OK, so the difference is a nationalist is a supremacist and a patriot is not.

So I’m back to my original statement, then. Patriotism sucks. Call it what you want, but allegiance to specifically a nation, nation-state or whatever construct you’re assigning special status is bad and I actively oppose it.

I’m not arguing in bad faith, I’m disagreeing. But you made it seem like we don’t actually disagree and like you had a distinction that made patriotism not match the thing I’m saying is bad, so I want to understand if that’s the case. It doesn’t seem to be the case. You think patriotism is not a problem and think my negative characterization is of nationalism instead.

Let me be clear, it is not.

The patriotism you’re talking about? The lovey-dovey “improve your country and learn from others” patriotism? It sucks. That’s what I’m saying here.

I’m also saying it’s just whitewashed nationalism and that your distinction between supremacist nationalism and patriotic nationalism is superficial at best an non-existent at worst. Sure, not all nationalists or patriots are equally toxic, but that doesn’t mean the concept of patriotism is salvageable into something positive.

You owe no allegiance to your nation, beyond what ties you culturally to the groups of people that live within it. Just like you don’t owe allegiance to your hometown beyond the same concerns. Or, you know, to the planet.

You wanting to improve any one of those scales of human organization isn’t any better or worse than the other, and the mere fact of implying any special relevance to one of them is a brand of nationalism I just don’t find justified. It’s a bit like religion. It can be well-intentioned and genuine, but in the long view of history it is undeniably an irrational, toxic force at the core of many atrocities. I will respect it and your right to participate in it, because the alternative is worse, but I won’t take part in it and I don’t think it’s a good thing.

Things, yeah. National symbology, not as much.

I’ll say that I agree with you, though. Americans do way creepier stuff. The first time I attended a US sporting event it felt exactly like being trapped in some ritual for a religion I don’t understand. They may as well have been ripping off some poor guy’s still beating heart before lowering him into lava and watching it spontaneously burst into flame, for all I cared. I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself for the entire duration of the thing.

I’ve never been to school there, either. I imagine watching a bunch of children recite their daily indoctrinations must be creepy AF. I’m not sure if it actually happens, though. It’s never in American movies.

OK, so it’s just nationalism, then.

I have a real problem trying to wrap my head around where you’re drawing that line. Is the problem that “patriots” honestly believe they’re making things better? Because it seems to me that the difference that leaves between a nationalist and a patriot is whether you agree with them.

From the side of the victors it’s easy to see slightly morally flawed patriots where, had things gone the other way, people would see nationalist zealots.

I’m also surprised at you bringing up left and right divides. There are plenty of violent nationalists across the spectrum. I mean, it’s definitely true that traditional leftists were internationalists (hell, left-wing movements organized in “internationals” and that’s also the name of their anthem). So historically yeah, right wingers are more patriotic/nationalistic, but there’s no shortage of left wing nationalists, either.

I don’t know, man, I struggle to share your very US-centric view, but also to see how anywhere in there is a distinction between those two terms. If patriots are just nationalists you like then you start to sound a lot like one.

The etymology of the term is certainly much older than the nation-state, but also entirely disconnected from modern meanings (or ironic/facetious, which I do appreciate). There is just no original, clean, virtuous instance of “patriot” dislodged from the nationalist undertones. It simply has never existed.

The mistake you’re making is assuming that US revolutionaries weren’t nationalists or were praiseworthy or fundamentally different than British colonists. We’re going to disagree on that one. I mean, never mind that they didn’t invent the term or that their whitewashing of it was self-serving. Even if your timeline of events was true, I despise their patriotism as much as anybody else’s. US revolutionaries weren’t some ideal version of a patriot, they were nationalist independentists who happened to borrow some French revolutionary ideas about the liberal democratic state-nation organization slightly earlier than their previous administration did (and perhaps due to the first draft nature of the thing, slightly worse, too).

I won’t judge them by modern standards, but I also absolutely, entirely refuse to sacralize them or idealize them. They were what they were, and they are absolutely not the thing that’s going to give patriotism a good name.

Well, then what fatherland is the patriot beholden to?

Cause that’s what the word means.

I get it, particularly in countries where the nation state has overlapped more or less perfectly for a long time it’s hard to shed the emotional attachment, but there’s no need for it.

See, the reason I go from small to international is precisely that the nation state takes care of itself. The world has agreed that it’s the natural resting place of sovereignty and every other scale of governance or administration os derived from it. I don’t like that much. I don’t resent it, but I also don’t give it immediate precedence over any other scale of government.

A patriot may care for whatever arbitrary definition the XVIIIth century put on their identity and be well meaning enough about it. I’m not a patriot. The historical borders of what some consider a nation today have no particular relevance, beyond the fact that they happen to drive some level of administration. If anything, it’s the level where the most people decide to infringe on each other’s business just because they feel they have a right to ownership over that national identity. I have no particular interest in whitewashing any of that into some supposedly healthy version of patriotism that has very rarely existed in any way.