Quoting: slaapliedjeTime to fire up those Amigas, Atari STs or DOS systems and play the loads of games that released for them that you never had time to get to! Or even the loads of new games that have been coming out for them!

With how the industry is going to have to lie in the unsustainable bed that it's made for itself, I'm currently preparing for an emulation-heavy approach to gaming in the future until things right themselves again, so I'll certainly be checking out the new stuff alongside revisiting old favourites and digging into stuff that passed me by!

Quoting: PhlebiacI don't know if there are newer stats available, but anecdotally I think tablet use peaked around then, and has declined a lot since.

Edit: here's some recent browser stats, which have it at around 2%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet

I didn't look exhaustively, but I think it peaked at less than 7%
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2014

And was already on the decline when mobile overtook desktop
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2016

I struggled to find more recent ones because I didn't know where to look - many thanks for digging those up.

It's still just as sad of a picture, though, since for all intents and purposes "Mobile" and "Tablet" are the same thing here, with people opting to use phones and tablets (all running the same mobile OSes) interchangeably for internet tasks, instead of PCs - when you put the two together, you get 60% of the market in favour of the mobile/tablet side (with an unknown amount of the PCs also being portables themselves, I'm sure).

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Quoting: GuestThe original Switch was announced back in 2015??! O_O

Time flies.

No, it wasn't - that's a bit of gaslighting on Nintendo's part, there. It was announced at the end of 2016. They merely confirmed that a successor to the Wii U was close to completion in 2015.

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QuoteTo me, handheld gaming like this is the future. You may think I am heavily biased, and in many ways I am (obviously, I run this website) but I'm a tech-fan. I have a PlayStation, a Switch, an Xbox and more. But it feels increasingly weird to have a dedicated solid box permanently attached to a single TV. I actually don't like that at all now. Being able to take a much smaller device with you to play anywhere, and additionally have the ability to hook it up to a TV whenever you want just feels so much better. Nintendo definitely had the right idea, as did Valve.

They made the right moves, and the reason this happened is because the gaming market was quite strongly portables-leaning for some years before that.

People forget this or try to pretend that handheld consoles "aren't consoles", which is thoroughly illogical, but for the longest time, the front-runner in the previous console-generation was not the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 (which eventually took the lead), but the Nintendo 3DS. And its forerunner, the Nintendo DS, is a very close second for the best-selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2, and some figures I remember seeing some years ago (so I'm afraid I don't have them to hand anymore!) suggested that the DS had in fact overtaken the PS2 around 2012 or 2013, if I recall correctly (I remain unsure if they were slightly off-base, or have been buried by folks who don't want to accept that handhelds are consoles and one of them outsold the PS2, hahaha ).

Meanwhile, PC sales have been declining since 2012, with these figures from 2016 painting a rather sad picture, along with a note that by 2014, tablets accounted for 40% of the home-computing market.

Quoting: grigiThe 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.

Quoting: Liam DaweIt's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.

But even so, the Switch is very close to becoming the best-selling console of all time globally (it's currently third, with the top three being very close together), with it having been such in some countries for several months now, so it hasn't hurt it that much! (It's also been more profitable than all of Nintendo's other consoles combined .)

Quoting: ToddLMy take on this is that I won't buy the Switch 2 because the Steam Deck still satisfies my gaming without whatever restrictions that Nintendo likes to do with their console. Also, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm not giving anymore money to them for all the crap they've been pulling for decades on and even their games do nothing for me nowadays.

They lost me and I will NEVER go back. And that's really saying something, as I used to play some of their games competitively and was extremely invested in their ecosystem - not the sort of customer that you want to drive out, but by God, Nintendo found a way of course, and I'm all the better off for it. Good riddance.

Going by all of the rumours about the Switch 2's specs and Nintendo's own official statement that the Switch's successor is less like a new console and more like a souped-up "next model" of the same product (noteworthily using the very same language that they used to describe the ill-fated Wii U), I don't imagine that we'll need a revised Steam Deck for a long time yet.

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Quoting: EikeIs that referring to Steam Deck?

Oops! Yes, it is! Sorry for not being clear enough there - I wrote that comment quickly whilst between rounds in Stumble Guys. Have edited my post to clarify!

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Just a small thing that I encountered that might be worth pointing out: Post-update, I played Stardew Valley and noticed that the scrolling was really jerky even though the game was otherwise running fine. It seems that something got messed up regarding per-game power-saving settings, because even though I already had that game set to 60fps, I had to change that to something else and then change it back to fix the problem; Turning per-game settings off and on again didn't help, I specifically had to change the refresh-rate and change it back again. I presume that it would've affected anything, but that just happened to be what I played first.

Just making a note of the fix in case anyone else runs into it.

EDIT: Just to clarify, this was on my Steam Deck. Thanks for reminding me, Eike!

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QuoteFixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.

Thank goodness. That's been driving me mad!

QuoteMade taking screenshots more responsive.

And so has this!

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Quoting: pb24.99 for 4h of playtime, mind you.

I don't mind paying that for a short game that I'll revisit a lot (I've gotten more than my money's worth out of many infinitely-revisitable titles over the years), but this is not that game, for me.

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Consolidation + Unsustainable business-practises = This.

Terrible for everyone who's affected - I hope that they'll all land on their feet with companies that'll appreciate their talents!

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QuoteOne that will support the Epic Games Store, GOG, Steam and more out of the box.

Weren't these the guys who said it'd support all anti-cheat-enabled stuff, whilst also including an AI-driven cheat-engine helper to stop people from giving up on games by taking over and beating them for the player?

QuoteDoes Playtron run Linux games?

Currently, PlaytronOS only runs Windows games using Wine. Native Linux games will be supported in the future.

That's a really weird way of setting up a Linux distro...

QuoteWhat integration does Playtron have with Sui?

You'll be able to make purchases with your SUI wallet. Web2 and Web3 games will be available to download and play.

For those who don't speak Marketroid or Buzzwordese, these are the sorts of games that "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" are all about.

QuoteHow will Playtron deal with anti-cheat on Linux?

Playtron is working with interested partners to enable anti-cheat services.

That's a change of tune!

QuoteWhat about auto-mounting and formatting drives?

We've created a drive formatting tool in Playtron and will auto-mount devices for you. No need for desktop mode.

Aw, but Desktop Mode is a really nice feature to have on a device like this.

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I'm glad to hear that this worked out for the best because customers spoke up. Hell, the statement "We're still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable." even sounds almost-sincere, too.

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