I’d love to find a $40 PVP FPS. That has split-screen and lets me host my own server. Tuned to work with small groups and large groups. This one is just tied to a server that I don’t control and will inevitably die a painful death.

You can still own your games without a physical copy if you buy them DRM-free.

They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I don’t think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that they’d have been better off without Game Pass.

Consumers have always owned their media.

That’s not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that’s disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS “best of” tapes and whatnot, but you’d never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we’re at a spot where you can buy a “digital copy” of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your “copy” of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you’ll get through in a month. That’s just simple economics. It’s usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she’s a member of the other party and likely doesn’t care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it’s better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It’s funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there’s no competition I can go to instead.

I don’t see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they’re not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo’s online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

I’m no fan of kernel level anti cheat either, but that “capable” anti cheat still sucks. At this point, I’m convinced that good anti cheat is actually impossible, so you may as well just not put it in the kernel. There are so many ways to cheat that an anti cheat will never detect.

The cloud save support is a beta feature. When I tried it with Alone in the Dark earlier this year, it didn’t work.

I can give it a try. LTS is from the Linux Foundation then, rather than Canonical?

24.04 is an LTS distro release. Is my kernel not the LTS kernel? It’s 6.8.0-39-generic, according to neofetch.

I understand the nature of troubleshooting, but I don’t think testing a 45 GB game is feasible off of a live distro, and any way to test it on my hardware outside of logs is a whole lot of work to get one game working; I don’t have a spare drive around either. I just figured these errors would mean something to someone who could take action on it to make a better Proton for everyone. I haven’t checked the kernel yet, but my version of mesa matches the latest stable version in your link.

EDIT: I did find this link that sounds like it’s a mesa bug. I’m on the same major version but a different minor version.

I’m not in a position to test on more than just these two machines/distros. Once upon a time, I tried switching to Fedora, but some of the behaviors were not to my liking, so I went back to Kubuntu.

Thanks. I’ll give it a go. I don’t think I’m convinced it’s a hardware issue, since that error says something about permissions and faulty IDs, but what do I know? Couldn’t hurt to check.

I could give it a shot. Will it test VRAM too? Last I ran memtest was years ago. It needs a boot device like a USB, right?

To be fair, I can’t find evidence of anyone on the internet experiencing this same freeze, so it’s probably more specific to me than AMD in general. When I saw freezes like this in Monster Hunter, years ago, I was on Nvidia.

Alright, from journalctl, I can for sure identify exactly where my computer hung. That last line that repeats itself? It repeats itself thousands of times until I shut the machine down. Does that mean anything to you?

Aug 03 12:58:26 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: 08/03 12:58:26 minidumps folder is set to /tmp/dumps
Aug 03 12:58:26 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: 08/03 12:58:26 Init: Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(gameoverlayui)/version(20240716232148)/tid(1798223)
Aug 03 12:58:26 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: 08/03 12:58:26 Init: Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(gameoverlayui)/version(1.0)/tid(1798223)
Aug 03 12:58:36 Compy-5600X kernel: input: Microsoft X-Box 360 pad 0 as /devices/virtual/input/input105
Aug 03 13:00:04 Compy-5600X systemd[1]: Starting sysstat-collect.service - system activity accounting tool...
Aug 03 13:00:04 Compy-5600X systemd[1]: sysstat-collect.service: Deactivated successfully.
Aug 03 13:00:04 Compy-5600X systemd[1]: Finished sysstat-collect.service - system activity accounting tool.
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: [gfxhub] page fault (src_id:0 ring:24 vmid:4 pasid:32798, for process WolfNewOrder_x6 pid 1798131 thread WolfNewOrd:cs0 pid 1798172)
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:   in page starting at address 0x0000e8674353a000 from client 0x1b (UTCL2)
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: GCVM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS:0x00401430
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          Faulty UTCL2 client ID: SQC (data) (0xa)
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          MORE_FAULTS: 0x0
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          WALKER_ERROR: 0x0
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          PERMISSION_FAULTS: 0x3
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          MAPPING_ERROR: 0x0
Aug 03 13:00:33 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu:          RW: 0x0
Aug 03 13:00:43 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=815617255, emitted seq=815617257
Aug 03 13:00:43 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* Process information: process WolfNewOrder_x6 pid 1798131 thread WolfNewOrd:cs0 pid 1798172
Aug 03 13:00:43 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: GPU reset begin!
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: MODE1 reset
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: GPU mode1 reset
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: GPU smu mode1 reset
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: GPU reset succeeded, trying to resume
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm] PCIE GART of 512M enabled (table at 0x0000008000F00000).
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm] VRAM is lost due to GPU reset!
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm] PSP is resuming...
Aug 03 13:00:44 Compy-5600X kernel: [drm] reserve 0xa00000 from 0x83fd000000 for PSP TMR
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X plasmashell[1970]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.
Aug 03 13:00:45 Compy-5600X steam[4057]: amdgpu: amdgpu_cs_query_fence_status failed.

I can also get the Proton logs if you still need them, but that will have to come later, since it’s an ordeal to plan for a scenario where my desktop will crash.

Absolutely not correct.

Feel free to price out the build that beats these things by a wide margin.

All of which you can run on an ATX…?

Try carrying around a dozen ATX machines while I carry around a dozen of these. You’ll see why TOs prefer the smaller, lighter machine.

This is not complicated.

It sure isn’t.

responding to edits:

What’s cool about spending ridiculous amounts of money on needlessly small products?

$550 is ridiculous? You’re not getting much more power in an ATX build if you’re only filling a 1080p display anyway.

Like Minesweeper tournaments?

Skullgirls, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, basically anything retro and emulated, Puyo Puyo. Take your pick. This thing can run Street Fighter 6, and let me tell you how many problems there are with running it on a PS5, even if it outputs a better image…Sony really made things harder for everyone.

Because it’s doing a tenth as much work.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it!

And also, most game-playing time worldwide is spent on games that are over ten years old and don’t need a lot of power. If you want the form factor more than power that you don’t need, you may as well lower your energy bill and the amount of space this thing takes up in your home.

The form factor is why this thing is cool though. I know a handful of tournament organizers who love how much better these things have gotten. (Also, this is using about a tenth of the energy that your ATX build will likely use.)

Seriously, this thing looks awesome.

EDIT: I waited a few weeks to make sure I still wanted one, so that this couldn’t be considered an impulse purchase. It is, in fact, awesome. More powerful than a PS4 Pro in such a small, light, quiet package. I’m definitely using this as my fighting game machine when I travel and need to set up a casuals station. Not only is it significantly more performant than a Steam Deck, it ought to be less cumbersome to set up than a Steam Deck and dock.

Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.

What’s the hook to each one? I hear people mention Caves of Qud a lot, but the low-fi graphics aren’t grabbing my attention on their own.