I’m confused, is that supposed to be good or bad? A lot or a little? That article seems to be making a heck of a lof of excuses. The hard pivot from “the Deck is an unmitigated success!” to immediately, quietly admitting it hasn’t outsold any actual handheld console is… kinda weird.
I like the Deck, and its influence in the market is clearly outsized… but it’s still a fairly niche product, and for the price I’m actually a bit surprised at how not-mainstream it remains.
It integrates better than Bazzite on it.
Which weirdly makes me annoyed at Valve’s lack of interest in expanding SteamOS beyond first party hardware.
It does mostly work, though.
It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.
I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).
Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.
I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.
Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.
After that the biggest fixes I’d recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that’ll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.
W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.
There’s only one mention of the word “slop” attributed to Nadella in the entire piece. It’s this:
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,” Nadella laments, emphasizing hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as “cognitive amplifier tools.” “…and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.”
Now, that’s entirely meaningless corpospeak, but it’s also very clearly not “Nadella wants you to stop saying slop”.
But the article needed bait and nobody reads past the clickbait headline anymore. The intellectual laziness fuelling the slop isn’t exclusive of AI usage.
We suck at this.
I propose an oath, ok? You commit to not using GenAI in 2026… and also to not EVER comment on an article or social media post you haven’t read in full.
Deal?
They didn’t, they used a sprite with a single pixel to hack together a visual tweak (that just happens to be part of Guile’s leg).
But watch the video anyway. Despite the clickbaity thumbnail (blame Google) it’s a passable account of an example of having to fix a visual bug in code after an asset lock because of how the production process of old games was structured.
Oh, so there literally is no practical reason? Just pure aesthetics, OCD-ish stuff?
So does that extend to the lid and people just say “toilet seat” as a catch-all or is there a specifically cultural predilection for the seat down/lid up configuration? Because that one looks messy to me. If the goal is for the toilet/bathroom to look tidy surely the lid down is a must, right?
You guys keep coming back with glib answers meant to comment on the question, and you’re missing the point.
I genuinely don’t know what the complaint is. I need someone to tell me that it’s about people finding it gross to be within 30 cm of something previously exposed to a naked butt cheek for cultural reasons or something. I genuinely don’t get it. Like, in practical terms. It’s not a rhetorical question.
MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.
Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.
For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.
The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.
Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.
Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.
By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998. BG1 you can make the case (but given that it was an Interplay-published, licensed game meant for relatively performant hardware, it was absolutely in line with AAA PC releases of the day). BG2? Absolutely not. Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all. And of course neither were independent games by definition.
For sure BG3 is absurdly large and the historical comparisons break down a bit in the sheer scale of what that thing is. But nobody in the late 90s was buying a top down D&D CRPG with the production values of BG (or an action RPG in the vein of Diablo the previous year) and thinking they were slumming it in the dregs of small budget gaming.
Well, yes it is.
That is exactly how being things and not being things are.
If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.
I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.
If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.
Nobody ever cheered for Windows. I was there at the Windows 95 launch and everybody hated it and its problems were “impossible to ignore” and it was an embarrassing failure in tech circles and the BSOD was a meme.
Remind me again how that went.
“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?
What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.
This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?
I hate this century. This century sucks.
Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.
As opposed to what?
Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.
“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.
I am screaming internally.
We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.
Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.
At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.
Literally everything “remains to be seen”. I’m confused about the source of distrust there.
I mean, the guy is taking this fully private. Technically GOG currently answers to even fewer people than Steam and has no financial commitments with anybody.
What “remains to be seen” in that scenario?
Yeah, with a semi-large household there’s a fairly even chance of anybody needing or wanting any sort of configuration on the toilet. But mostly you just… you know, put the whole lid down. For one so you don’t spray your poop all over when you flush, for another because it… you know, looks nice.
I get wiping the edge if you’re a peer-stander-upper. I get making sure there’s paper left. I get cleaning the bowl (which Americans don’t get because they poo in swimming pools, as it turns out). I don’t get the argument about the toilet seat position specfiically.
Incidentally, I used to think the argument was about dudes not putting the seat up to pee and spraying their stuff all over the seat, plus the mist then leaking under and drying at the bottom, so if you don’t wipe after yourself it ends up getting all crusty under there. For the longest time I assumed the argument was that people were mad at dudes peeing witht he seat down, and only later realized that’s apparently not what people are mad about?
See, that’s the type of justification that doesn’t sit well with me and that the article is doing all over the place.
Is the Steam Deck a very successful handheld PC? Sure. Compared to the boutique stuff sold on Indiegogo by Chinese manufacturers it’s probably an order of magnitude larger.
Except it’s also not priced like one of those (or wasn’t at launch, anyway), it’s priced like a console, with the LCD model (while it lasted) priced right alongside the Switch OLED and a bit cheaper than the Switch 2.
And by that metric it’s done poorly, with best estimates placing it right alongside the PSVita at the absolute best, lifetime. The bar for success on that scale isn’t “selling millions”, it’s selling tens of millions, which the Deck has struggled to do.
So, all fanboyism aside: The Deck did well for a handheld PC, but kinda failed in the attempt to bridge the gap between those and handheld consoles. That, if you’re keeping track, is “reporting, not an opinion piece”.
This?
This is an opinion piece.