Handheld computers are competition to the PlayStation in the sense that Sony would want everyone who owns one to buy a PS5 instead but not in the sense that those consumers having an option is hurting sales significantly. I could not find actual numbers, but analysts seem to be estimating that Valve has sold about 6 million Steam Decks in total. For comparison, Sony sold 1.5 million PS5s last quarter, which is devastating since they sold 2.8 million the year before.

Also, that sales gap is going to get worse in the short term. Instead of raising Steam Deck prices or reducing profit margins, Valve has decided to stop selling systems until RAM prices come back down.

Ouch. My company was just about to start moving over to GitLab off of Atlassian.

The truth is; a lot of us feel like we need more internet accounts about as much as we need genital warts.

You are confusing decentralized and fragmented (or self hosted). The promise of fragmented software (like Lemmy) is that there are many instances but an agreed upon protocol. You create one account on one site and then use it to pull and push data to any other site that uses the same communication protocol. Like you and I for example. You created an account on lemmy.zip, I created one on lemmy.world, and we are both discussing a post created by a user on lemmy.nocturnal.garden (an instance I have never heard of).

3 is a tab width compromise. It is wider than 2 but not as wide as 4. No one is happy but not as unhappy as they would be at their less preferred extreme.

You missed the joke. Obviously, a man is only going to have 0 or (rarely) 1 woman interested in him, but the woman is assuming that he is talking to many women, which is physically impossible.

With prescriptions, it is not about what the customer wants, it is about what brands the insurance wants to cover (and getting a doctor that does not write a brand specific prescription). If an insurance company only covers a weird brand of a common (but expensive) medicine, the customer either has to hunt for a pharmacy that has it in stock, wait for their local pharmacy to order it (in either case delaying when the insurance company has to pay for it), or buy the in-stock brand without any insurance coverage. The insurance can still claim they cover the drug while paying less for it.

At one point, I was on a medicine that had a very high co-pay for the brand name and would not cover the generic. It was so high that it was cheaper for me to buy the generic uninsured instead of paying the co-pay.

The issue is that you went to a fast food store location in a city. I have never gotten edible food at an urban location of a fast food chain, even in the 90’s.

I feel like many “cost of living” type laws need to be pinned together. For example the 401k yearly contribution limit and tax brackets should be defined as a multiple of minimum wage and not raised automatically each year without it.

I am not a lawyer, but I imagine the people bringing the lawsuit are going to have some problems in court. First of all, they will have to prove how much of the tariff paid directly by Nintendo of America was passed to the consumer. All they know is that at the same time as the tariff was announced, Nintendo launched a new system for a higher than expected price and increased the MSRP on a couple hardware SKUs. They could have raised prices due to non-tariff costs (AI gobbling up hardware, inflation). They could have raised the price due to indirect tariffs that they will not get refunded (increasing cost of parts for delivery trucks). They could have raised prices for no reason at all, knowing that people would just blame the tariff while they pad their profits.

Even if they show that tariff costs were directly passed on to the consumer, why do the consumers have a right to Nintendo’s refund? If Nintendo gets an income tax refund, they don’t send the money to customers. When a game is an unexpected hit, they don’t have to give everyone back money because the fixed development cost was spread across more copies.

And what about items that Nintendo paid tariffs on but did not raise the price? Presumably, the settlement that Nintendo gets from the government is going to be less than what Nintendo could have made if instead of tariffs that money could have gone into developing more games. If they lose the trial, can they turn around and demand consumers pay them 10¢ for every physical game they bought in the last 12 months?

A Short Hike lives up to its name. It is a sandbox platformer about a kid exploring a mountain to try to find the one place with cellphone reception. The story seems a bit shallow at the start, but the ending is quite touching.

I beat it in one morning, while stuck in an endless conference call. I did not 100% all of the mini games or complete all of the side quests, but I did finish the main story and (I think) I explored the whole mountain.

That statistic does not show that AAA games are not dominating. It could just mean that there are more than 20 AAA games selling well. From the article, they note that “the top 79 games to account for 80% of total PC playtime”.

Oh boy does that headline have nothing to do with the article. The article does a good job of explaining all the hard work Magyar did, but it is a bit silly to suggest that it is a temple for what could be done in Russia. For example, it does not lay out how a candidate can avoid all the tripping hazard windowsills that litter the Russian halls of power.

I would, if given the opportunity. I assume that by preordering, the game is automatically added to my account and maybe even installed on my system on release. That way, if I see an interesting game, I can mark to play it when it comes out without worring about release dates or forgetting about the game while waiting for it to release. Unlike a paid game, I am not out any money if the game is not as good as advertised.

There is innovation in every Nintendo system.

The Wii U had dual screen and asymmetric games.

The 3DS had a 3D screen, a couple AR games, and Street Pass.

The Switch is the first console with a docking station and being able to dynamically change the graphics settings without having to restart running software.

The Switch 2 has multiple mouse controls.

All of them are a bit gimmicky, none are totally original, and most of them did not really catch on, but you cannot fault them for trying. What innovations have there been in PC, PlayStation, and XBox? VR headsets and DLSS?

I hate the conspiracy theory that big pharma could cure cancer but they are covering it up because cancer treatment is such a profitable business. This makes no sense if you remember that big phara is a bunch of companies each of which is trying to maximize its own profits. The first company that can cure a cancer will make so much money, the Ozempic racket will look like chump change.

Not every company out there makes cancer treatment, so why don’t the companies outside the cancer racket cure cancer?

Well, only companies that specialize in cancer treatments could find a cure. If that is the case, why would a company want to be a small part of the cancer treatment market when they can have a monopoly on the cancer curing market?

Well, only the company that has the market leading treatment for a cancer can cure it. If that was the case, they would still want to cure it and sell the same amount of money as 10 years of treatment. Insurance would still cover it because it is saving them money in the long term and is, technically, better for the patient. It would immediately make the pharmaceutical company an obscene amount of money. Sure, once they cure all the existing cases, their revenue will fall off, but by that point, upper management will have cashed out.

I am not sure if you can do it on a Switch, but I recall the 3DS having a feature where you could pull patches and DLC from one console to another. Not even close to what you were suggesting, but it is something.

Do any software stores support creating a local package mirror? I suppose you can make one for GoG by periodically checking for new game versions and saving the installer to a backup.

According to the box photo on the GameStop site, it does not say that it is a key card.

Nintendo has said that, for now, all first party games are games on cart, though not for games that Nintendo is only the publisher/distributor for (see Pokopia).

It is a manufacturer suggested retail price. If a store wants to sell it for more or less, it is their right (and I am not aware of Nintendo having a Minimum Advertised Price policy).

The issue is that it is just an upgrade. The biggest difference between the Switch 1 and 2 is just better graphics/frame rate. With only a few exceptions, both systems play the exact same games. Why would a customer pay $450 (minus a small trade in credit) for a Switch 2 when they already own one or more Switch 1s that play the exact same games the exact same way, except a bit uglier? Nintendo customers tend not to obsess over graphics quality (if they were, they would be playing on PC or PlayStation).

There are a handful of games that take advantage of the Switch 2 mouse controls and now there are starting to be more and more exclusives, so there will be a stronger case to upgrade, but for the first year, it was kind of weak.

Remember, only shop on Bandcamp Fridays, when all the money goes to the artists. The corporate owners are not playing nice with the employee union.