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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • I ran an AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition for ~5 years, then gave it to a friend who ran it for another 5 years. We overclocked the hell out of it up to 4ghz, and there is no way you were getting gaming performance that good from Intel dollar-for-dollar, so no AMD did not suck from Core 2 on. You need to shift that timeframe up to Bulldozer, and even then Bulldozer and the other FX CPUs ended up aging better than their Intel counterparts, and at their adjusted prices were at least reasonable products.

    Doesn’t change the fact AMD lied about Bulldozer, nor does it change Intel using its market leader position to release single-digit performance increases for a decade and strip everything i5 and lower down to artificially make i7 more valuable. Funny how easy it is to forget how shit it was to be a PC gamer then after two crypto booms.






  • Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they’re going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)

    Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That’s ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That’s the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.

    At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.

    That’s how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you’re going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.

    Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It’s almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.

    Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.