Steam and PS5 on October 15, Xbox in early 2027.

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Hey, folks. The Jellyfin and Komga media servers running on my NAS are going great locally. I invested in a firewall and some managed switches, and from preliminary VLAN tests, I'm confident that I've got what I need to section off the self hosted services from my primary network. I was hoping to get a recommendation for the next couple of steps.

I've got a mini PC running Bazzite that had been a portable console/fighting game setup that I'm ready to retire from that role so that it can serve as a server and reverse proxy. I'm not sure what OS to put on it. If I have to manage it entirely by command line, it will take 10 times longer for me to do anything I want to do, and I'd really prefer a GUI. That said, I know it also takes resources to power a GUI that I won't be touching most hours of the day. I was curious what distro you folks might recommend for this purpose. In some of my research, I also came across Apache Guacamole, but I'm not sure if that requires a proper desktop environment to already be present in order to get that kind of remote access with a GUI. Am I overthinking this? Is this going to be just fine with a normal desktop distro installed on it? If normal desktop distros work just fine, I need something that can sit there without updating until I tell it to; since introducing snaps, this is something Ubuntu has been a pain about, so I might want something else.

The next thing I was curious about was order of operations for the reverse proxy. There are SSL/TLS certificates that are needed for HTTPS, but I need a domain for that, and a lot of tutorials just skip on past this step in the domain configuration screens where you "enter your DNS servers" as though I know why I'd need other DNS servers, where to get them, how to select them, etc. And ideally, I'd want to test that the reverse proxy is working locally with HTTPS and all before it's exposed to the internet in the first place, so I'm not sure what order to do those steps in: DNS servers, buying a domain, getting certs, configuring reverse proxy.

As with most things, I'm sure this is far less complicated than it looks to me right now, and once it's in the rearview, it will make a lot more sense, but I'd appreciate any advice folks here can offer.

UPDATE, from a separate article by Jason Schreier: Compulsion, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are all in active negotiations with Microsoft. Depending on how that goes, studios may be closed or spun off. I figured rather than also posting the Schreier article, I'll wait until the dust settles on these deals. This is a bloodbath.

In short:

1. Increased graphical fidelity means that you need more people to create the same scene. By way of a source of his, he gives the example of a scene from Final Fantasy IV and how many people with specialized roles it would take to create the same scene in modern graphics compared to back in the 90s.
2. Larger team sizes means communication takes longer. For everything. No longer just one studio but multiple studios in multiple locations and time zones working on the same game.
3. Scopes are bigger. Players are expecting more, whether that's more hours of content for your dollar or more reflective puddles. May become a vicious cycle as this means you now need to make your game appeal to more groups of people in order to justify your larger costs from this and other areas.
4. Technical challenges; changing game engines or platforms over time. If you need to upgrade your engine so that it supports outputting to a console that came out while you were developing the current game, it affects more than just the version that ships on that new platform. Or any other way a game might need to upgrade to support some ambitious new thing the game is trying to do.
5. Covid happened in the not-too-distant past, and everyone had to change how they work on a dime.
6. Mismanagement, though a bit too umbrella of a term. He feels the number 1 reason is managers deciding every game needs to be a live service, not playing to the developers' strengths. He also cites shifting timelines by 6 months at a time instead of actually evaluating how much time the game really needs; upper execs not being decisive about a direction for a studio while the studio is strung along for months before minds are changed; short-sighted layoffs between projects breaking up team chemistry; etc.

A game designer's essay on how the job is "tuning", and one of the goals, but not the most important one, is "balance". Largely from a fighting game perspective, as this is Keits, who is deeply in the fighting game community, but also includes some examples from shooters and others.

I've often thought, on a technical level, how I'd implement a montage like this and wondered why we don't see it more often. This is more or less exactly how I'd do it, and techniques like this could be used effectively even in, or especially in, non-open-world games to preserve that cinematic presentation and do away with load screens and pre-rendered cut-scenes.

Enough live service games have lost enough money, including Sega's Hyenas, that at least one company is now scared enough to stop making them. Video games are healing.

From the exhibition match they had for the game at Evo Japan this weekend, the game is looking like fun offense with not enough in the way of defensive mechanics for my tastes, but it sure is a looker.