X-Box One update failure raises awkward questions about the future prospects of console hardware
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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That is always going to happen at some point, no matter what. There's a reason why so many are against DRM, single-player games requiring online, inability to host private servers, etc. Every game that fights that will be dead. It's why I buy everything on GOG I can and archive it, and why I'm totally loving my short lived Linux gaming experience so far, because it's just so good at making shit work.
Have you tried it recently? I was extremely surprised. I basically have a Steam Deck now.
I simply typed in "usb wifi linux" on Amazon and bought the first result for like $20 and it worked immediately with no installation as soon as I plugged it in. Don't see why you'd have to pretend something basic like wifi is still as difficult as it might have been a decade ago.
It’s improved a lot since hardware standards have gotten to be a lot better. Wi-Fi kept me away my first go around with Linux nearly a decade ago, but with hardware all from the last five years, it’s a non factor.
I’m not lying to sell Linux as much, as I would like to. I totally expected my Linux gaming experiment to be a disaster. With rare exceptions I mentioned in another post, it’s just fucking worked.
Mine is a decade old PC that I repurposed into a medis system after an upgrade that didn't have any built in wifi, I just plugged the D-Link wifi thing into a USB port and it worked. Can't stand guys who made Linux Hater part of their personality and fixated on "my sound card drivers don't work" from 15-20 years ago.
Mine is only a couple years old, but it’s far from high end outside of the huge SSD I just put in it.
If it weren’t for all the kernel anti cheat requirements of normie games, I’d feel comfortable enough handing my PC to a normie gamer and saying here you go, it’s a Steam console, use it. The Steam stuff has been that trouble-free. It’s barely more complicated than using a PS4.
For me, so far the benefits have far outweighed the tiny bit of fiddleyness. Everything in one place, no half dozen launchers all using RAM and stalking me. I haven’t installed anything this week, I turn it on and play it like a console. I’ve got some mods to try soon, but doesn’t look that bad with how each game has its own little virtual C drive. Then I will give MVP Baseball 05 a go. That game is totally unusable on Windows 10/11 and doesn’t seem to have Lutris support.
What distro are you running?
I'm on Mint and for 90% of games Proton just works, for 8% there's maybe 15-20 minutes of figuring out which version it works for and two clicks to change it and maybe 2% just don't work, but those games are usually stuck on Game Pass which is locked down like an entire nunnery.
Nice, nice.
I've had a few suggestions on here about Linux distros to install, so I'm contemplating what to go with.
Mint has a windows skin over everything including a start menu and software manager, like half of the windows specific keyboard shortcuts work, but there's a few quirks.
Bazzite. It's really just Fedora with default Steam Game Mode built in. It gets Fedora updates and all. It wasn't my intention to go that way, but I started looking in how to put SteamOS on any old PC and it kept coming up.
So essentially, it boots up just like a Steam Deck into a console-like space. All the Steam stuff works fine in there and if you're all Steam you could fairly easily just use it as a Steam console at that point.
I have much more from GOG, so I go into desktop mode, basically just a Linux desktop and into Lutris, where I can install GOG games. I've done quite a few with a lot of success so far. I even installed an Epic Store freebie game, and while a bit more cumbersome it actually works, and they way it works, EGS runs inside it's own walled garden and only when the game is running. Lutris will link the games to your Steam, so in general all of my gameplay is via the Steam console-like interface. This works with emulators too, but I haven't really tweaked those yet.
I left a Windows 11 dual boot for games that have issues. That was really 75% of the work getting it set up was getting the dual boot right. The only things I've needed that for so far are games that require Xbox app (e.g. the Forza games) and one EA game that I think could be made to work with more effort, I spent a full 10mins on it tops. I've heard the usual suspects for kernel anticheat, like Valorant, won't work in Linux--because Linux doesn't allow kernel access.
Awesome. Are you using an AMD or Nvidia card?
I haven't decided about whether I want to fresh install on my current rig or just by a new gaming rig altogether and make it a dedicated Linux build.
AMD. I’ve heard Nvidia doesn’t work as well particularly with a lot of the features develop for Steam Deck. I think still okay with games though.
Yes that was literally my main reason for not putting SteamOS on a gaming rig because Nvidia isn't supported, and I've heard similar things about other Linux distros. I guess I'll just keep waiting until there is better Nvidia support. But it looks like that day is getting closer.
I'm glad this is at the top. I am a big proponent of having offline backups of all software. Making sure games that are purchased should be playable offline. The one thing I hate the most, and is notorious with Nintendo Switch games, is a download being required for a physical game. 2K and WB does this with just about all of their Switch games. 6GB is on the cartridge the other 34GB is on a server. The whole thing should be on a cartridge. If you lose online access then say goodbye to playing that single player game.
Most gamers don't see this or care because their consoles are constantly connected to the internet and they've always had the luxury of not losing their internet connection. I've been there before. I've been in places for days or months where my only internet was what's on my phone. This is why I now have a 100TB media server. All of my software, both PC and consoles, is backed up to it. I take no chances.
Exactly, for some reason the article is written as if the consoles have suffered a hardware failure or something.
"the situation raises awkward questions about the future prospects of console hardware reliant on an internet connection to fully function" - it actually doesn't though? Things that require online services do in fact require those online services. Wow, shocker. Ultimately, what the console can do while offline is all the console itself is really able to do.
Speaking of Linux, this is also why I'm leery of package managers and looking into ways to archive installed packages before I'd even consider switching.
I don't really bother with archiving just day-to-day software so I don't care too much about keeping packages. I think you could, if anything from the days of offline Linux. It would be a total pain in the ass though.
Most of the games I've gotten going were my GOG games I installed right off my external HDD or disc(s) where I had stored them. Lutris let me point to the exe file of the installer and did the rest. How well it's all worked has far exceeded my expectations, and I'm only a couple weeks in.
Fucking LOL. That's almost as rich as "20[xx] will be the year of desktop Linux!!!"
this isn't a console failure, it's a Microsoft failure. I wonder how many more catastrophic failures Microsoft is going to have before everyone abandons ship.
Jesus, Microsoft software quality has been a joke since, basically forever. They've had huge fuckups with their core OS properties. Windows ME. Windows 8. Windows 10. Windows 11 (which is STILL a hodgepodge of Windows 3.1 / Windows 95 / Windows 10 style administration programs).
If anyone expects excellence out of Microsoft products, they haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years.
Microsoft is good enough, relatively cheap, runs on anything, and has a lot of old business programs that will still run. That's it.
Today Microsoft is effectively the cloud business. Everything else is an afterthought.
XP and 7 usually worked well enough, and 8 and Vista didn't get very far because they were genuinely dogshit. Yet 10 only became halfway decent years after it was first released, is still incredibly finicky about what hardware it'll run on, is notorious for updates that fuck everything up, etc, and 11 is the same bullshit repeating itself.
Microsoft has always had its problems, but it does seem to be getting much worse.
Windows 11 is such garbage. I have a PC from right before it was released that windows 10 keeps freaking out that I'm not eligible for an upgrade... just because I have an option checked "wrong" in windows 10.
I'm not updating until I'm forced.
It's such an irritating mess. Some things are in settings, some are in control panel, some you have to know a run command for. At least in my network support days the XPs and 98s I had mostly everything was in one place.
My favorite Windows is actually NT 4.0 that I ran in the late 90s. It just worked and was so solid. Except for DOS games. I was a younger teen then, but I was making money doing web development so gaming was on the backburner or a console. When I did game, modern Direct3D stuff worked great, and I had ZDoom. So I was happy.
I'm not sure this one wasn't by design.
Once my manky old PS4 dies I'm out of the console sphere for good.
If Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo want to sell me an "exclusive" they need to make it legal for me to purchase and use via an emulator.
I'm right there with you with my Xbox One X. Except maybe whatever Nintendo is doing. I was die hard console-first for a decade, and they managed to run me off.
Same. I bought Xbox live for the first time when I was 16, and had an unbroken subscription from then until last year. Nearly 20 years. And I havent missed it for a second since I canceled it.
For about a year before that my Xbox was glorified Netflix box. And now it doesn't even get used for that anymore.
Wild how much goodwill and loyalty corporations have burned through recently
Yeah, June was my last month (it was prepaid for a couple years up until then). They had me since at least a year beginning in 200, uninterrupted. I don't miss it at all. I spent maybe a grand total of $30 buying up games I wanted to keep from game pass on sale. It was old stuff I'd just taken for granted as having.
I haven't missed a thing. It's even gotten me exploring leaving Windows entirely if you see all my talk further up. They had me locked-in, and just didn't offer me anything I wanted. I'd have easily continued their game pass, bought a Series X and all, and all I ever saw was microtransactions and diversity.
With the state of current Microsoft software, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is working on the old Windows XP to upgrade that to work off than deal with 11 right now.
Western companies have more to fear for Microsoft's internal incompetence than any cyberattack
I'm running 7 and the only reason I have an install disc for Windows 10 is because at some point I'm going to need a machine that runs DirectX 12. I see zero reason whatsoever to upgrade to 11.
Updates failing to install is a recurring issue on windows as well. MS has no idea what they're doing.
Whelp. Looks like it's time to jailbreak it and go sailing on the high seas.
Planned obsolescence. They don't want you playing these systems in the future. They want you buying every new remaster for every new system that comes along.
Clownstrike