The Hotdog Laserhouse

Everything we know sounds like Nintendo was very close to announcing a Switch Pro to supplement the Switch Lite. From what I remember (and maybe I’m getting some of this wrong, it’s just from memory):

• In the big Nvidia leak, a second driver branch was discovered for the Switch’s specific brand of Tegra chip that included a new version of DLSS, the tech that upscales low resolution displays up to 4K. It was assumed this was for the Switch Pro.
• It’s not just that the Nvidia leak was for the Switch’s Tegra chip, I believe it was for, like, a “version 2” (or even version 3) of that same chip.
• Bloomberg ran a report that a dozen or so developers had Switch Pro development kits and were targeting their games for it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume something like Mortal Kombat One and the Batman Collection were probably including the Switch Pro in their targets, and the performance problems people reported in Link’s Awakening HD were probably meant to be cleaned up by the Pro. Digital Foundry also has noted that Nintendo’s own trailer footage of Tears of the Kingdom appeared to be running on hardware much better than a stock Switch.

Some reports of the Switch 2 are “more evolution than revolution” and it feels to me like Nintendo is just taking the Switch Pro and maybe just bumping it up a little more. After all, they have all this work done on development for the Pro, so why not just extend the capabilities a little more?

The current target is said to be “in the same range as the PS4”, right? For a portable, I think that’s about right. The ignorant will moan at how behind the curve Nintendo is on hardware, but one, that’s how Nintendo actually remains profitable, and two, that’s kind of the limit of what a portable system is capable of.

Because we have the Steam Deck now, right. And the Steam Deck has created a market of Steam Deck competitors – stuff like the ROG Ally and the Ayaneo. And for the current price point ($400-$700), we generally seem to have hit a limit of what’s possible in portable hardware, and it’s right around that “about as powerful as a PS4” spec.

The ROG Ally and Ayaneo can push things beyond that a little bit, but the added power consumption basically makes the battery on these things worthless. Which is to say nothing about system heat; the ROG Ally was famous for having an emergency ejector function that would suddenly launch the SD card from the slot like a missile under the danger that it was getting so hot it might melt.

We’re simply at the boundary of what’s possible in that form factor, doubly confirmed by Valve stating last year that we wouldn’t see a Steam Deck 2 “for at least a couple years.” For something this light, this thin, this is as stable and as usable as it gets.

I imagine the Switch 2 will be somewhat competitive in this arena, but not quite as powerful or versatile as a Steam Deck. But it won’t exactly be a slouch, either. I imagine it’ll be the sort of thing where a $300 Switch 2 will be “good enough” but a $400 Steam Deck will still edge it out in performance.

Will Nintendo announce the Switch 2 this year? Maybe, I guess. I always got the impression that they didn’t announce the Switch Pro because sales on the vanilla Switch were way too strong and they didn’t want to water down the market with too many alternate SKUs. But now vanilla Switch sales seem to be falling pretty fast and they’re in a position to get this thing to market quickly, so I think they will.

Hmm.

It would help to play Doom first, I think, yes. You don’t have to finish Doom, like it does not rely on the “story” of Doom (which almost doesn’t exist), but it does require you to be a little familiar with the mechanics.

I would say, bare minimum, play three levels of Doom. That should get you in the headspace of how the flow works. For me, Myhouse.wad was borderline a walking simulator because I apparently stumbled my way around almost every single monster encounter in the back half of the game. But maybe you’ll be more attentive than I was.

For example, Myhouse.wad has multiple different endings! That’s also something I didn’t pick up on until watching a breakdown of how everything worked (huge spoilers), but seems super obvious in retrospect and I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on it.

But yeah. I’d suggest just getting your feet a little wet first. You don’t gotta be an expert, given it’s mostly just regular First Person Shooter stuff, but it might help your appreciation of it to have a feel for Doom first.

It depends on what economic values you subscribe to. A lot of guys like EA want to take the shortcut to easy money. EA even tried to compete with Steam, remember. They had their “Origin” client. They gave away free games for over a year and still nobody would use it. The hope was to give them something comparable to Valve’s firehose of money. An easy profit stream where they could get a cut of every game sold on PC just by the simple fact they existed.

Rather than just do good work, they hoped to pry people off of Steam with the promise of regular freebies… except it was a client nobody wanted to use and in a lot of cases actively hated. It lacked most of the features of Steam, was a little bloated, and came at a time where EA was starting to push increasingly aggressive DRM that limited how many “activations” you were allowed per-game. So, it struggled.

The same thing happened with Uplay. Ubisoft thought they could make their own Steam, but the greed was too evident and annoying. It was a hassle to work with, added nothing of real value, and nobody wanted to use it. So most people didn’t, unless they were forced to use it.

That’s the thing with these corporations, right? Nothing is ever enough. They can’t just sell well on Steam, they have to make their own platform so they can have all the money. And the profit lines must not only always go up, it has to go up faster. More and faster and more and faster and more and faster until the wheels come off and everything breaks.

Then these board of director weirdos, now among the richest 5% of people on earth, pull the ripcord and parachute over to the next corporation and start over. All the money, more and faster and more and faster…

What separates Valve is that Valve never seems to have treated it like much of a race. Like, sure, they do things to boost sales (even recently had a really ugly “capitalism celebration” sale event) but they seem pretty comfortable being themselves and not cranking all the dials until they break off.

Some of that is arguably down to the fact that Valve never became a publicly traded company. Once you get listed on the stock market, investors enter the picture, and the whole dynamic of how a company exists changes. Publicly traded companies rely on investors for some amount of operating costs, and the highest ranking investors can even legally control some part of your company as if they were employed there.

But there’s never any guarantee that an investor knows what is good for your company. They just gave you a lot of money and expect you to pay it back at some point (by increasing shareholder value). And its created this culture of people who race to maximize everything at the expense of the structural integrity of the company and its employees. It’s like (spoilers for one of the most famous movie trilogies of all time) the end of Back to the Future 3, right, where they need to get this old 1800’s locomotive up to 88mph.

Feeding it that much fuel, getting the heat up that high, it builds up extreme pressure in the boiler and the train will eventually explode. Except for a lot of these business types, exploding the boiler is the point. Exploding the boiler is a successful operation. Like I said: more and faster and more and faster, right?

Some companies need investor money to survive. But… not all do. Many of them still go public anyway, because the race to explode the boiler matters more than just being comfortable. We’re still in the era of people starting companies just to sell them.

Valve got lucky. They established an emerging market, gave people exactly what they wanted, and became the defacto home for PC gaming. Steam was such a comfortable, welcoming platform that nobody even thought about competing with them until they had already gained too much momentum to ever be slowed down.

And the only reasons most people can come up with to compete with Valve is “We want more money.” Valve wants 30% of my earnings? A whole 30%??? Unreasonable! I’ll start my own storefront! With blackjack! And etc.!

As someone who works with Youtube and gets a 55/45 split, I guess I don’t have perspective on how 30% is some kind of horrible offense. Only in my wildest dreams would Youtube give me 70/30.

But really, that’s all this is. Valve did good work and got themselves into a position where they now can’t really be out-spent into obsolescence. I mean, Epic Games is currently trying to do that, and they’re burning something in the realm of $275,000,000 a year (according to this website I am unfamiliar with and have never read before today). By Epic’s own statistics, most people registered to the EGS client spend less than a dollar on the platform (723m users apparently spent $820m).

Valve has so much momentum with Steam that they can (and often do) just coast, granting them a reputation for taking a very long time fine-tuning most of their products until they are perfect. Gabe Newell is so rich he owns and operates multiple fully-staffed private yachts. Not by more and faster, but by getting to the race track before anyone even knew it was open and just doing the job so consistently they are now ten laps ahead.

To compare with what happened with Netflix, which also established an emerging market: Netflix also didn’t want to just coast. Movie disc rentals by mail became streaming movies. That turned into streaming TV. That turned into Netflix wanting to make their own original content so they wouldn’t have to pay to license anyone else’s movies. That turned into Netflix wanting to offer games. And lest we forget, the founder of Netflix specifically has a vendetta against theatrical movies and continues to deliberately erode that market.

There is no “coasting” for Netflix. There is only more and faster. Netflix put out 17 original films in 2016. Last year, 2023, Netflix put out 153 original films, 49 original documentaries, 11 TV specials, 11 short films, 28 stand-up comedy shows, and at least 26 new original TV shows. The aim is not to maintain a good platform, the aim is to dominate and make all the money there is to make in multiple industries. The line must always goes up until the boiler explodes.

Anyone could just do what Valve did, but nobody wants to because it’s too slow and takes too much actual work (and luck) making genuinely good products. It also theoretically leads to a “dead end” where growth slows or even stops. That means the line doesn’t go up anymore, it just levels out and stays there. Outrageous! You mean the man who owns a fleet of yachts doesn’t want make infinitely more money forever? The nerve of some people.

It’s easier to crack the whip on someone else and crank up the heat until the boiler explodes. Especially when that’s what all the competition is doing, too.

Never understood his appeal and why he was present in so many memes. But then I guess I’ve also never really seen too many of his videos. I’ve maybe watched one, ever, total? And it was many, many years ago.

He was so memed that for literal years nobody ever actually said what his name was, he was just this guy that obnoxious 4chan people would stick into their funny images. Like a human Pepe the Frog. A tiny little whistle people would blow that makes me put up my guard a bit.

So at this point it’s one of those “I don’t know and I’m too afraid to ask” sorts of things. I have no intelligent thoughts about it.

I suppose if I had to say one thing, it’s impressive how he still looks like a middle school kid dressed in his dad’s suit.

I absolutely do not agree with that.

I’ve said it over and over, but Sonic Mania is pretty one-of-a-kind. You can’t just do “More Sonic Mania.” Because I am of the opinion they already gave us slightly too much Sonic Mania as it is.

You need to ask yourself why you liked Sonic Mania and why Sonic Superstars doesn’t scratch that same itch for you. It’s because of the team who made Sonic Mania, right? Sega tried to come to terms with them for a Mania 2 and it did not work out, because I assume that team probably wanted to do something with Sonic that was beyond the scope of what Sega wanted from them.

Given what Sonic Superstars turned out to be, it would make sense to assume Sega were the ones who wanted more Sonic Mania and the team at Evening Star wanted to do something more different, right? So we got the closest thing we could get to Sonic Mania 2 that Sega was able to muster.

And it did not live up to Sonic Mania. But could any new 2D Sonic? Probably not.

I would be thankful you got a Sonic Mania at all. Don’t be upset there weren’t two impossible miracles.

Nope! He just does!

And even then, he didn’t in most games! I feel like it only really became a “thing” in Team Sonic Racing, where suddenly Sonic and Shadow were hyper competitive rivals trying to prove which of the two of them was better at everything.

Which then became their sole dynamic for the next five years. Shadow generally ended up being the smoldering cynic of the pair. Telling it “like it is”, refusing Sonic’s advice out of pride, etc.