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Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

Though I've long since given up on my gaming days, I purchased a Steam deck last month, mostly out of impulse. I'm frankly astonished at the amount of playable games, and also the amount of quality indie games out there. I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog. Its been more enjoyable (and surprisingly comfortable) than I expected too. I'm definitely in the very casual crowd at this point, gaming an hour or two a week on the couch, and its hit that sweet spot.

Purchased the base model; overall impressed with the quality of the device too. So much more comfortable than I was expecting, I just rest it on my lap. Its great.

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PSA: Two of my favorite games, Limbo and Inside, are on sale now for a bundle deal of $3. That’s a great value.

Nice to see at least somebody is actually putting their games on sale. The last few Steam sales have been pretty sad. Back in the day you could look at your wishlist and the average game would be 50% off, with lots of 75%s and 90%s. These days they act like giving you 20% off a five year old game is some big sale.

I just opened my wishlist and everything is 50-90% off except for two items one of which is a relatively new DLC expansion (other DLCs for the same game are 50% off).

I really shouldn't buy more games now though, when I have so many that I haven't even played yet or barely played.

I picked up Forza Horizon 5 for 50% off and Doom Eternal for 67% off. Cyberpunk is 50% off, Back 4 Blood is 80% off, Control is 75% off. It’s not everything that’s on huge sales, but there’s plenty of deals on big games.

It's probably a matter of tastes but the games I'm interested in are on deep discounts. I only picked up a few because I already have a big backlog. The sales are there but it depends on the game.

That depends on what on your wishlist though. I just bought Halo collection (90% off, includes 6 games) and Sleeping Dogs (also 90% off) for a grand total of $5 (localized pricing).

Heres the thing though:

I got sleeping dogs for the same price several months ago and could have also done so twice a month ever since... It's effectively just the going price and the discount is pulled just as an incentive to push immediate purchase when people do happen to log in....

I've stopped buying things on sale and am now waiting until I'm ready to play a specific game before buying it... Nearly 100 unplayed games on my gig with most never going to get played (I played Baldur's Gate enough as a kid, I don't need to play EE).

Inside was an amazing game. The feeling of the environments you go through is just indescribable, like a combination of megalophobia/submechanophobia and mystery.

Agreed, these are two brilliant games from Playdead. Apparently they've been hard at work and are hiring for their 3rd title, which I personally can't wait! Definitely worth a buy/play.

amazing value indeed. You'll get a good 5 very high quality hours on each of them.

Every time I compare the values of video games to movies, even the small indie ones come out on top.

Cinema is so expensive nowadays.

That's why actors are celebrities spending millions on drugs while game developers constantly question whether they should get a real job

> game developers constantly question whether they should get a real job

Same model. Most actors stay poor and barely make it. You just only know the most successful ones, which is a tiny minority of the acting pool.

Yeah but B listers can make a very good living, often times with more steady work than A listers since they don’t have to manage their reputation as much. They’re the session musicians, or the AAA dev working on his indie project on the side of film/TV. Still they’re also a minority but if you show up and do your work for enough years it’s an achievable track.

Yet, cultural footprint aside, in economic terms the video game industry is significantly larger than film.

(Sorry, citation needed, but I clearly recall reading this from a reputable source.)

"Gaming is Five Times Bigger Than Movies Now"

https://gameranx.com/updates/id/416500/article/gaming-is-fiv...

Unfortunately a lot of that is ad filled P2W shovelware

Not much different than Hallmark shovelware

Many people only play free phone games. It tracks. I know people on the internet constantly discount it, but mobile is much too big a platform to ignore in discussions like these

I think the market is confusing gambling with gaming. The two markets don't overlap (or not directly, I'm sure there are people who enjoy both). We pretend they do, but the only thing they share is the technical aspects in producing something. Diablo Immortal clearly highlighted this.

It's equivalent to saying that soccer and basketball are the same game because played both with a ball.

"core gamers" (the gamers that play videogames) are actually "videogamers". Mobile gamers are gamblers.

Of course there are also some videogames in the mobile world, so you can find some core gamers playing videogames on mobile

Notch of Minecraft fame is arguably richer than any actor has ever been.

> Cinema is so expensive nowadays.

and that's not even taking in account the overpriced pop-corn

I actually don't mind the popcorn price, as that goes directly to the theater. If you choose your theater wisely, you're helping a local business.

Nor the fact they still show ads before the movie you paid for.

I kind of wouldn't mind too much, but they start the movie around 30 minutes late just to show ads and trailers.

Then also arrive at the cinema late so you can skip the ads. I always arrive about 10 min late to skip the ads.

Yeah, but I'd have to learn the timing like it's a train that's regularly late roughly the same amount. It's easier to learn to watch movies home.

Doesn't work at the drive-in, though thankfully ours only shows one preview before the feature.

But the drive-in is an edge case.

> the drive-in

Tell me you live in the US :D

Sadly there aren't many left. The one we go to in Australia is shutting down this week: https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/melbourne-lunar-drive-in-ci...

Only went as a novelty maybe a few times before having kids. This drive-in was a godsend since having kids ~5 years ago, and have been going regularly since. Extremely handy during COVID too.

Yup. Here's a site to find your nearest drive-in, anywhere in the world

https://www.driveinmovie.com/mainmenu.htm

Even in the US drive-ins are a relic of another time and most of them have closed. They were most popular from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Everyone should make the effort to support the ones that are left. Going to them is an event, and affordable.

"Going to them is an event, and affordable."

Hmmm.... So is bull fighting but most of us refuse for various ethical and moral reasons...

Maybe we should treat a giant parking lot that goes unused for 99% of the time, and requires people to use polluting transportation when they could use public transit to go to a theatre, as the giant unethical mess it is, eh?

To be fair, most movie theaters in the US have a giant, 99% unused parking lot attached to them anyways. Plus anywhere with a drive-in probably doesn’t have transit.

Most theatres are part of malls now aren't they, with the parking shared and therefore not unutilized most of the time?

Or is that just everywhere I've been?

I’ve bought it, even if i have them on Epic Store… and I don’t even have a steamdeck yet.

About a year or 2 ago I started to mainly buy games on Steam (and even wait if they start out exclusive to something like Epic) just so I can get the "free" Steam Proton compatibility for my Linux machines (NixOS), my Mac, and my Steam Deck

How they can offer games for so low?

The cost per unit is 0. Once they’ve sold a game at full price to anyone that will pay, they can lower the price to near 0 to capture any remaining demand along the curve.

Yup! The term is marginal cost: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost

You are discovering indie games?

You are in for a treat!

I essentially play only indie games, with rare exceptions once or twice per year.

Take a look at Buried Treasure:

https://buried-treasure.org/

I have found some great recommendations there I would have never found otherwise.

How do you discover good indie games to play?

Looking through Steam sales for sub-$10 titles with "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews is a good filter.

Some of my favorites over the years include Slay the Spire, Celeste, Vampire Survivors, and FTL.

Edit: How can I forget the "holy trinity" of mystery indie games? Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, and Her Story. These are brilliant games that really make you feel like a detective.

If you haven't tried it, play The Case of the Golden Idol. I liked it as much as Return of the Obra Dinn and it was one of my GOTY last year.

This. And if you like detective games try Shadows of Doubt too. A persistent city with ongoing crimes and full relationships among all citizens.

I adore Return of the Obra Dinn, but didn't quite enjoy the madlibs aspect of The Case or the Golden Idol. However, it isn't necessarily a bad game and it did scratch the Obra Dinn itch a bit.

The makers of FTL have another game, Into The Breach, and it is available on iOS for free with Netflix.

So many hours spent playing FTL. I was against getting Netflix subscription (we already had 3 streaming apps) until one day I noticed Into the Breach is available on mobile if you have a Netflix subscription. Can't believe I'm subscribing to a streaming service to play an indie game (wife turns out enjoy Netflix though).

I thoroughly enjoyed FTL and Into the Breach.

Another I thoroughly enjoyed was Jupiter Hell, which seems to be a fast paced game, but is actually a very thought provoking, turn based game.

It's also only $7.50 on Steam right now

Can vouch for this game, it’s super fun.

I wish I could play Outer Wilds again. That's up there as one of my all time favorites. Obra Dinn was phenomenal as well. I haven't heard of Her Story, but if you're putting it in the same league as those 2, then I'll have to try it out! It's also only $0.99 on Steam right now.

> I wish I could play Outer Wilds again

There's a rather extensive DLC to play through as well in case you haven't seen it. A bit different, but really well made too.

Yes, that was also incredible. I appreciated that it was very different from the main game.

I loved playing Outer Wilds but boy did it make me car sick, had to give it up because I could only play 20 minutes then feel sick.

Thankfully, it's a game that lends itself well to 22 minute play sessions

Great recommendations. I would also add Strange Horticulture and Cultist Simulator to the list.

Honestly, steam. I look at steam queue occasionally, I also look at "similar to this" section on a game I played (store page). I search for tags of things I like, I also use the steam experiments (although most of them are integrated) and I make a point of looking at all games on discounts when there are "festivals" in the dedicated festival page. Then world of mouth.

I also make a point of grabbing stuff only when positive rating is 90% or more (recent) and of things that have at least ~5000 reviews or more. There are exceptions obviously, but this helps a lot to trim down the things I don't love, my backlog is already infinite.

I can give you a list of my favorites if you want and you can trim down. As I said, world of mouth!

Sibling answers are good but if you want to go deep, twitter/game dev mastodon is a great place. I try to follow anything that looks or sounds interesting, though it often takes years before actual release.

I've found many good ones just from looking at games with high review score on MetaCritic. This is how I found Hollow Knight and Chained Echoes, for example.

On a side note, it's quite astounding what just a handful of people, sometimes a single individual, can accomplish. It becomes quite clear that the main limiting factor when trying to create a good game is simply your own imagination and creativity. A large team with a huge budget seems to be just as much of a curse as it is a blessing.

Steam 250 [0] lists the top-rated games. You can filter by tags, price, date; but the most interesting category for me is the "hidden gems".

[0] https://steam250.com/

Cannot recommend Adam Millard's youtube channel enough. Every year he reviews his top games, many of them make it to my wishlist. ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Eo7fwGBJ4 You can have a look at other years as well.

My personal method is to find a Youtuber who you enjoy watching that has similar taste to you and plays a variety of games. Also gives you a preview to decide whether you like a particular game or not.

Here and there usually, browsing steam by rating works decently.

I'll throw out a recommendation for Dave The Diver, fun little oddball game.

>I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog.

I've actually kept track how much money I've splurged on PC games this year. I've spent 420.10€ directly on Steam and I have 56 direct Steam Store game acquisitions in my license history. Outside of Steam, I've spent 111.30€ and I have 151 "Retail" acquisitions (which aren't all games since "Forza Horizon 5 Oreo Zonda" is in there). So a total of 531.40€ spent and 207 product activations.

Feels pretty cheap considering previously I used to buy actual physical box copies of PlayStation games, and those were generally not cheap. Average game price for those is like close to $40.

Is the base model EMMC able to be removed to install NVMe? I was mulling over picking up either a Steam Deck or a Realforce R3 on Friday and still haven't decided.

Edit: Looked it up. Yes, its storage is 100% upgradable.

Edit edit: Ordered a base model + dock :)

Yep, that’s the route I took. Bought cheapest steamdeck model on sale, took the chance on a 2TB stick from aliexpress and have been very satisfied so far. Link to the 2TB I bought, which is now roughly 15% off: WD SN740 2TB https://a.aliexpress.com/_ms4e8NQ Only concern I had was that this retailer did not ship it in antistatic wrap. Another one my brother got did ship in antistatic wrap though. It’s aliexpress, what can you do.

Good microsd cards are cheap as dirt and easy to use with a Steam Deck. I do not regret getting the lowest storage model and just using a card.

Thanks, just bought a base model + dock. I've got a bunch of 128GB SDs, and my only current plans are to use it for PC-98 emulation, so load times shouldn't be a problem.

Just so you're forewarned - some things always get installed on internal storage and people regularly have problems with it filling up.

IMO getting at least 256GB internal (or upgrading later) is a smarter decision.

You can work around this somewhat by moving things to external storage and they symlinking it back to the original spot (or so I've heard, I have the top end model and haven't filled it up yet).

only issue with microsd is very slow writing speed. For games that are in the dozens of gigabytes you will wait a LOOOOONG time for the process to finish,

> Is the base model EMMC able to be removed to install NVMe

Yes, guide here: https://boilingsteam.com/how-to-upgrade-your-64gb-steam-deck...

The only caution I would advise is that the fan loves to jam on mine post installation of the WD. The Steam Deck will run but throttle viciously. The problem disappears with reinsertion of the stock eMMC or a little 256GB module.

The only solution I found was to simply not screw in the rear outer enclosure screws fully tight, or to replace the cover with the JSAUX unit that includes an additional heat spreader.

I mostly play managemen/city builder style games like Cities Skylines or Factorio. Have you tried any of those types of games and if so what's been your experience?

I play a ton of these on Deck. Very satisfied with it. I am also a pause - command - unpause kind of player though. But the trackpads work better than you'd expect, and often have community layouts for the controller than add things that make it even nicer than playing with mouse and keyboard (the rotary menus for city overlays are awesome)

“Better than you expect” but still not ideal. It’s doable, but I just don’t get the same enjoyment out of mouse heavy games. But with cloud save it can be great to dip in when not at the computer

The dock is not too bad an experience either. I have played RTS/strategy games on the deck using the dock/mouse/keyboard/monitor. It's a bit fiddly getting the resolution to work well on the monitor, the deck has everything optimized for its own screen size, and anything bigger than 720 makes it sweat. But it does work, and especially for older titles, it's great.

It does enough of what I wanted from my gaming PC, that I just gave my older PC to a relative.

I haven't played Cities Skylines on the Deck, but other mouse + some keyboard management games (Victoria, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron 4 (to a lesser extent), Football Manager) are perfectly fine. It takes some adjustment to get the proper layout that makes sense with any shortcuts you might want (e.g. pause, adjust speed, open this or that menu) but they work perfectly fine.

the trackpads work well with these kind of games. As long as you don't expect to act in urgency - typically building / management games work very well with this device.

Ymmv. Personally, I find the trackpad too cumbersome and only ever play games that are suited to the gamepad.

I have played Stellaris and Oxygen Not Included and they work surprisingly well.

As noted elsethread, lot of pause-action-unpause though.

i doubt the steam deck has enough ram to handle cities skylines, i pretty frequently hit 20 gb on larger populations

That's with mods, right?

If you play vanilla, the Deck's 16GByte should be plenty. Most cities will hit the asset limit long before needing this much RAM.

That's fair, but i'd argue that mods are a pretty essential part of the game for most people

That sounds like a bold statement. I would imagine the large majority of players of any mass-market title don’t know about or use any non-built-in mods.

It's going to depend on the game. Games like Skyrim are essentially just modding sandboxes, and you can measure this at least reasonably objectively. SkyUI is a single extremely popular mod for Skyrim. It's been downloaded by 6.5 million unique users from a single site hosting it [1], another 1.5 million on the Steam workshop, and who knows how many others from everywhere else.

That is almost certainly a vast majority of PC users using that single mod! This is also probably why Bethesda tried to make 'paid mods' a thing, and bring them over to consoles. Not only does PC seem to be their best selling platform, but people are largely buying Skyrim to mod it, and Bethesda wanted to try to start taking a cut of it.

On the other hand I'd completely agree with you for games where modding isn't so well supported. That results in more technical issues, and less impressive mods. I mean in games like Skyrims you have literally entirely new and complete games built as 'mods.' Some even get their own independent releases, like Enderal [2], which many would claim is [vastly] better than Skyrim itself.

[1] - https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863

[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_...

~8 million downloads (and thats assuming duplicates don't get recounted?), vs 60 million copies sold [1] is still barely ~15%. This might mean that for PC, its more like 8 million out of 16 million and 50% of PC players are modding.

So in a best case, it's 50% of PC players (which may apply to steam deck), or worst case, less than 15% of all players (which may also apply to steam deck).

[1] - https://www.gamesradar.com/skyrim-has-sold-60-million-copies...

It didn't sell anywhere remotely near 60 million. That was an offhand comment from Todd Howard who was being a bit misleading. He was mixing all the different versions of Skyrim (Skyrim, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Special Edition) and calling them simply Skyrim as a whole. It's like saying "Mario" has sold a billion copies. If you're not familiar with the series, those aren't like 'game of the year' type collections, but distinct incompatible binaries. Each has their own incompatible mods.

I'm only talking about "Skyrim", the original game. It sold in the ballpark of ~25 million, with a probable plurality on PC - so somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million there. And no, like I mentioned, the download numbers are unique users - not total downloads. The total modding userbase is also going to be well upwards of 8 million. There are lots of reasonably sized non-English Skyrim modding sites also hosting SkyUI, and there's probably at least a small number of modders that have never installed that specific mod.

Most of the sales of the "original" Skyrim were on Xbox 360 if sources are to be believed, Wikipedia has the 360 version as selling 13.7 million put of 23. And the PS3 version may have even outsold PC. Obviously anecdotal but that's where most of my friend base played it too.

I think it's fairly safe to say that those numbers are unlikely. One of the only real specific, and accurate, figures we can rely on is Bethesda in late 2011 saying they'd shipped (not sold) 10 million copies to retail (which excludes PC). In 2013 they stated that 20 million copies had been sold (which would include PC). The two notes I'd add here is that they never gave anymore shipped numbers, which means they probably never broke another meaningful benchmark on it, and that console titles (with very few exceptions) are overwhelmingly front loaded in sales.

I'm quite confident on the PC sales, because there's an oddly consistent little metric. For games that sell beyond a minimum amount, about 1 in 60 players tends to leave a written review. So total sales tends to be in the ballpark of written_reviews * 60. For Skyrim, that's 180,000 reviews or 10.8 million sales [1]. Linked because the game's been unlisted since the Special Edition came out. That metric also matches the mod count near perfectly, as well as Bethesda's sales announcements, and also their behaviors like trying to do things like create 'paid mods' (and the predictable backlash it entailed). So I'd estimate reasonable figures would be around 10 million on the PC, and a 2:1 360:PS3 ratio for the remainder. So you end up with somewhere around 10 million, 7 million, 4 million, with a variance probably in the range of something like 30%.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/The_Elder_Scrolls_V...

It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders, it's what kept the game alive. For example, you can only unlock 11% of a map without a mod and even "mod free" playthroughs you'll find on YouTube still have to use a couple of them that don't affect the gameplay.

Sure, there are console players that have no means of installing a mod, but I'd be shocked if even 10% of PC players didn't use at least a couple.

> It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders

After being just about finished with the game, I decided to try some mods. Things that should address pain points, like indeed not actually being able to use most of the map, and traffic management.

The traffic turned into so much micromanagement to get cars to pick the right lane, and every time you made a change anywhere it required updating half a dozen other intersections as well, it just wasn't fun to grow the city bigger than possible in vanilla.

I remember one of the last games being an attempt at public transport only, where housing and shopping and such were accessible only by taking the subway. That worked super well in some aspects, and it's fun to design the mass transportation systems to underpin that city, but Skylines is so much geared towards vehicles that I didn't feel this was a proper city either. (From what I remember of a single game I played five years ago.)

Anyway, what I'm trying to say: based on my own and my girlfriend's experience, not everyone plays with memory-hungry mods, or any mods at all

yeah same experience for me, my wife bought me one kinda randomly as a gift and while I'm not a huge gamer I've kinda fallen in love with the Steam Deck. It works well with my lifestyle since I can just kinda pick it up wherever play for a bit and then do something else, also it runs emulators very well so I've had a chance to catch up on some classics as well.

I had the same experience with the Nintendo Switch. I'm not a gamer at all and don't really care for graphics.

As the Switch runs on pretty standard but outdated hardware, every game studio will basically port yesteryears games to it to squeeze some final bucks out of them. Meaning I can enjoy those games on the cheap ($10-30 mostly).

This, trying to rediscover my love for gaming again...

I feel like there are not enough games somewhere between casual and core without the need of spending 50 hours on it. 10-20 hours is the sweet spot.

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