I didn’t see it here, but I do believe that’s it!

Unfortunately the goal here wasn't to get the bounty, it was to keep it out of the hands of Sony who'll patch it.

The issue, as I understood it in this case was that he wanted it kept quiet until GTA6 launches, because announcing it to the public also announces it to Sony, and they'll patch it; normally that's fine, everyone just doesn't update, but given GTA6 is apparently quite popular, my understanding is that he wanted to let everyone get that one last update that allows GTA6 to run before they're stuck on that version.

I think the hoarder just wanted to have rooted PS5

Plot twist: They're actually TLA staffers who don't want their backdoors burned.

This is a different exploit. This one is a kernel exploit, the one that caused the drama is a hypervisor exploit. A kernel exploit lets you pirate games but running Linux requires a hypervisor exploit.

Note that Sony significantly improved the PS5's security on firmware 14.0 and above, likely to prevent GTA 6 from getting pirated. Ripping a PS5 game apparently requires a hypervisor exploit, and the last known one was sold to Sony. This means that nobody will be able to rip GTA 6. Even if it was ripped, they would then need to "backport" it to run on hacked PS5s running earlier firmware versions, which would take some time and expertise.

An interesting thought would be what would happen if they manage to exploit past GTA6 release, and actually manage to ship a PC-compatible GTA6 version based on that exploit. Surely Rockstar got a lot of cash to be console-only on launch - but the hype around the game would destroy PC game revenue. I hope this happens and they just let me buy the game through steam for honest money as a response of the pirated version.

Whoops, guess I flipped it around!

Truly we live in a golden period where any of the major console vendor's controllers can be reasonably well-supported on Steam and Linux. My own Gaming PC's main companion is a spare Switch Pro Controller that I took out of rotation due to a stick-drift issue but then repaired.

Video games are still video games. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are still the main platforms.

Microsoft is trying to reason about how gaming fits into their computer-centric empire. They've been using the Xbox brand for a new gamepad shell in Windows, for their cloud gaming subscription service, and for the gaming section of the Windows Store.

Steam has built the most popular computer game download service. They're renowned for having sales - you can get the Arkham Trilogy for $5 with some regularity when it would cost you $30 on Nintendo's eShop. It's a meme that most Steam users end up impulse-buying hundreds of cheap games and only playing dozens of them.

Microsoft and Sony have both bought a lot of previously-independent game studios. They've often let them continue publishing on other platforms. For instance, Sony's Spider-Man games are also available on Steam.

There are rumors that amid Microsoft's clusterfuck of an Xbox strategy, the next Xbox is going to share a lot of infrastructure with Windows, including the ability to play Windows games. This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games.

As someone with a Steam Machine, somewhat low potential. It has a console like experience but not everything in the store supports it. It's open then other things but there are plenty of multiplayer games that refuse to support it due to Anti Cheat.

It feels like R&D project that Steam is doing so in case Microsoft gets really aggressive and locks down Windows 11 to point that Steam no longer works, they have fallback option.

Not an person you're address your question for, but I would say that Steam Machine is a thing Valve released as an addition to their library. Average Steam user has a library for a few hundred of dollars, he can buy a console that guaranteed to has games on it. Its potential depends on PC gaming overall which is bright as people still buying PCs and love to play games on it.

Steam Machine owner here! As of like three weeks ago.

The Steam Machine's biggest problem in general: it's launching into a headwind, because of hardware shortages. It should have been like $650-$700 for the base model, instead it's $1100ish.

The Steam Machine's biggest strength, overall: the Steam library. Absolutely massive.

The Steam Machine's nerd-gamer appeal: you can also run emulators, use it as a desktop, and play games from other stores (Epic, GOG, et c.). Nb this all comes with a big asterisk, as you're very much into non-console-like operation with any of this—I had to intervene with Heroic's installation of The Outer Worlds (from Epic) once to get it running with functioning cutscenes, which took me probably 30 minutes including a lot of trawling Reddit and forums to figure out the most-recent version of Proton that would work [I doubt I found the most-recent one, but I did find one more-recent than the first suggestion I saw], and then again on about my fourth play session when an update caused it to misplace its own saves (my only indication was all the saves had disappeared—they hadn't moved, it just wasn't finding them there anymore) for some reason, which I doubt would have happened on for-real Windows, and also any time it has an update available it silently fails to launch until it's updated, but I'm not notified of this until I re-start Heroic itself. This is some real computer-gaming and Linuxy bullshit (which is to say, it sucks and wastes your time) not a console experience. Still a benefit that it's there, but comes with a caveat that someone who just wants it as a console won't/can't/shouldn't engage with any of this.

Where the Steam Machine struggles as a console: Yes, it has tons of games available from many, many consoles of multiple generations, running natively (not emulated console games—though, mostly through proton, but Wine Is Not [an] Emulator), including very recent games, giving it a library that dwarfs that of any (... non-"hacked") console. HOWEVER:

1) Couch multiplayer sucks. Very few PC-first games include it, and a lot of console ports will have had it removed (since, who local-multiplayers on a PC now that the Internet is widespread? That hasn't been a normal feature for PC games since, like, the DOS era). If you want lots of couch multiplayer options you're gonna need to deal with console emulation (and I can tell you, bluetooth pairing is better on here than most Linux systems I've thrown together, but it's still bluetooth pairing under linux... hope you like either cords, or headaches) most likely, not just playing Steam games, at which point you're outside the space of treating the Steam Machine like a normal console and into wrestling with a computer.

2) Parental controls basically don't exist. You can have restricted-library child accounts after you jump through some very annoying hoops ("sorry, this just-created kid's account seems to be in another country from the family you're adding it to, based on its purchase activity... which doesn't exist, there has been no purchase activity")... but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it. It's a total joke compared to a Switch or PS5, neither of which are, themselves, exactly amazing at this. In short, its account management is tacked-on crap, they do not adequately-well support having multiple people using one of these, even if you don't factor in the various ways a person could get around it on account of the thing actually being a fairly ordinary Linux OS.

Where the Steam Machine struggles as a gaming PC: Hope you don't love playing the very-latest online multiplayer games. Odds are pretty good you'll be excluded by anti-cheat.

This leaves it a damn nice device for, almost exclusively: 1) people like me, a (to put it mildly) power-user who can benefit from its more computer-like aspects while also appreciating just putting it in its default Steam-only environment and relaxing, and who doesn't give a damn about online multiplayer, AND who can afford it; and 2) people who want to treat it as a console and play almost exclusively local single-player games (and have some money burning a hole in their pocket)... and this'll probably only be a great use-case if they already have a largish steam library, since otherwise their needs are likely covered by a Playstation or X-Box and starting from scratch on a steam machine with no owned games won't be very appealing. Which means it's kinda only a great deal for people in this category who were also already PC gamers.

That's a pretty small market of ideal customers, IMO. I'm rooting for the thing overall but I'd hesitate to recommend it to most gamers.

The new Steam Machine is a horse of a different color. Unlike AppleTV, the hardware supports the same Proton compatibility layer that people know and love on Steam Deck. The majority of Windows-only titles on Steam run without issue, making the Linux experience quite tolerable.

Apple's policy on macOS, iOS and tvOS is to prioritize native ports at all cost. The difference in compatibility is thousandfold; even games that have native ARM/Mac builds like Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky only work on macOS and not iOS/tvOS.

The Steam Machine will probably still flop, but Apple's failure vis-a-vis making gaming work is self-inflicted.

> Someone at Nintendo had the genius idea of charging you a subscription fee for internet access.

Microsoft had that 'genius' idea with the original Xbox. The others saw that people will indeed pay for such a thing and copied the idea with the PS4 and Switch.

They all do this. Sony charges for PlayStation online too.

It's not good, but it's not just Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo is the most reasonably priced.

Err, Pokemon Champions does not require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to play online.

I have no clue where you're getting $35 from. It's $20/year.

It's really not much different than PSN or Xbox Live, so I don't think it's fair to say that Nintendo "had" the idea.

Apple is still against games. Next year they'll remove Rosetta 2, and all the games that require it will stop working. There's no upcoming Vulkan drivers, or upstream support for Proton. CrossOver is expensive and incomplete.

The best gaming hardware will always be the hardware you keep on you; be it a phone, GameBoy, or a Mac. macOS is basically last-place in supporting PC gaming though, and Apple has no qualms letting it die again.

The main problem is that PS5(and Xbox) has unified memory, that's the whole advantage of these systems. You can put your texture in one place in memory, have the CPU write to it and the GPU can immediately read it from the same address once you are finished. It's an absolutely huge performance advantage, that the typical PC architecture doesn't support and doing such a thing will always incur the penalty of having to transfer the data from system ram to GPU vram - with enough bandwidth and fast memory the issue can be somewhat mitigated, but it doesn't change the fact that on PS5 your GPU can start reading the data the CPU just wrote nanoseconds after it's done, on a PC you need to wait for the transfer first.

The recompilation scene has exploded recently. Seems like it could be the future of retrogaming where you get an actual native build of every game. Also opens the door to full mod support of old games as well as being able to run more demanding games on hand held devices that previously didn't have the power to run certain emulators.