Nils

This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.

Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.

I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.

No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.

I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.

Linux gave extra life to so many computers. I still have a core 2 duo running Void.

Sadly, I can only open two tabs on Firefox. But it is great. For some games thought, I can only run stuff on hardware that came after 2012.

Wow almost 20 years! Kudos.

future proofing

I understand the sentiment, but this wording was always a marketing ploy for people to spend more than they need and it was never useful.

When I was young, we were having so many innovations that there was no need to overpay, in two years you could get something twice as powerful for half the price. Even less if you could get used.

Then it took a halt, by the time I needed more memory. It was cheap to get a DDR3 + mobo + CPU than filling the empty slots on my DDR2 motherboard.

I failed for “future proofing” a few times. Extra memory slots, multicores and 64bits that windows and programs struggled to see, PSU with 4x that power I needed, when I needed it most of the plugs already changed.

I lived through a bunch of hardware shenanigans, some were shrugged, some were caught and received a slap on the wrist.

Now, more than ever, people should buy what they can afford and properly dimension their hardware for their current needs, not some future fantasy. There are communities over here that can help them with that.

There are no big innovations either, mostly exaggerated hardware usage for no apparent reason to force buy new hardware that does not do much either.

My rule of thumb for games early last year was if you cannot build something better than Steam Deck for cheaper, get the Deck, but now it is all crazy.