Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

The name of the poster here got cut off, but appears to be "Ringo - AxlTheHunter08", so credit where it's due.

@anthracite Anyway, of all places to find futurism discourse this week, for me it's been the work Kat Kingsley put into the Warframe 1999 storyline.

She took the huge mess of dystopian space crap that that universe is and made it relatable by saying: yeah, no matter how far flung and crazy things get, people are still people.

That's been sitting with me the past several weeks. It's the message I needed, really.

@anthracite That all said: futurism is incremental. There's no magic space armada in the next few years, unless it's some fascist vanity project that looks like they spaced a Cybertruck.

But things like smartphones, internet buildout globally, and all of the cool projects I see people putting in VRC give me much more hope for our society. In that: there's an appetite for not-terrible change, when you ignore futurism grifter guys.

It's slower and more boring, but hey, that's fine.

@anthracite Someone was saying over on either Bsky or... Charlie's Apologia blog post? I forget which, that one of the things Elon specifically has done is capitalize on this.

By always claiming the future is just a few short years away, then moving the goal posts when people forget and he fails to deliver, he's used his position as dumb futurism guy to extract wealth from people that fail to hold him accountable.

So this isn't just a trend, it's an institutional source of grift.

@Ravtrag Yeah. It's funny to me because, the Switch line is based on the Nvidia shield hardware. Which, technically, precedes the Steam Deck by some years.

It's neat that handhelds-with-line-out have taken this segment and made games more portable and accessible, and I'm all for it honestly.

Anyway, I hope it works out for them. I can't complain too much about more Kirby, more Mario Kart, and the impending flood of Zonai art on FA again.

And my feel is that honestly, I and a lot of folks may just... not. And just pick at the few first party things instead.

It'll be interesting to see how successful third party does into that. I'd expect it'll fall off to other offerings, unless the system is a breakaway success for other reasons (see: one of those concepts they're trying taking off surprisingly well). Guess we'll see.

But that all said: I'm not excited to now need to go upgrade my system, buy upgrade passes for games I already own, and make awkward tradeoff decisions on upgrading now or later because of how they've chosen to monetize.

I get so much better value from playing indie publisher games on the Deck, and goddamn, that's gonna be a high cost to upgrade all of the games I do enjoy playing, as opposed to just leaving them be for now.

The Wii and 3DS eras were kind of breakaway success stories for them as a toy (more than game) company, and it's kind of hard for them to replicate that now without Iwata at the helm.

But their solution being throwing a bunch of earlier concepts out there that they want to explore more, and build on the ones that work, seems pretty reasonable to me tbh.

That said, it's fun to see the first party offerings exploring stuff we only really saw in the early or experimental release cycle of previous console generations.

Controller is a mouse? Mario paint.
Open world racing game? Man, Diddy Kong Racing was great.
Voice chat while you play with friends? The Wii had that (it worked with MH Tri!), and it wasn't bad?

Kinda hope it pans out for them tbh, because doing those well is understatedly good.

I mean, it's not for me, and that's okay. I might pick at some of the collection on offer, the first party titles are tempting eventually.

But what this says to me is I'm really glad that the Steam Deck exists. To see Nintendo basically veer in that direction demonstrates just how ahead Valve was in making that system possible, and how successful it's been.

I think the best lens for the Switch 2 direct today is this wasn't really for consumers. This is clearly part of a long, drawn-out process to make the Switch a competitor to other consoles and PC for third party publishers, and the licenses they showed today demonstrate that.

Corporate as hell, but I at least understand how they got to doing this, and it bodes well for the system. It also explains why so many of the presenters they rolled out today just looked... exhausted tbh.

Huh, they're retrying several of the ideas that went into the Wii lineup of games like game-integrated chat, and camera features brought over from their arcade lineup.

Cannot wait to figure out how to set up a Vtuber for these tbh.