I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but I'm in the same boat.

• Most games tutotialize you like you have never played a game before
• "Cinematic storytelling" is everywhere. I turned off the dialogue in Need for Speed Unbound, and the game is wayyyy more enjoyable without it. And its...a racing game.
• There just are more games. Used to be I'd bring a physical copy of a game hope, and that'd be my game for a bit. Now I have thousands of games accessible at any moment. It's hard to wait for a game to "get good" when I know that.

I'd also say that I feel no need to complete games or get further into them at this point. Especially seeing how people said Starfield is best in new game plus or whatever, that game barely has legs to stand on in a first playthrough. It's not worth it for me to play a game for 60 hours for it to maybe get better, and I tend to know when I'm done with a game early now.

It's interesting seeing the variety of experiences in this thread. I definitely had to fight Linux to get it setup and stable on my machine, but ever since then it's been rock solid in a way I've never experienced with a Windows install.

Windows has a mind of its own...and being at the mercy of their update cadence or w/e other nonsense Microsoft is pushing sucks.

Meanwhile on Linux, I've had two CPUs that have C-State/P-State issues (5900x, 1700x), some weirdness with my audio interface, and a GPP0 bug that interferes with sleep. All of them are fixed or managed on Bazzite now, and it took plenty of digging for docs/reddit threads but now it's rock solid.

On Windows, any time I've needed to deal with the Microsoft Store I run into issues that require registry fixes, uninstall/reinstalling various things, etc. Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 5 had issues launching as a result on Windows but not on Linux.

Ultimately, not being under the Microsoft gun is such a relief that the initial battle is completely put out of my mind. I've had some instances where I'll boot into Windows for games, or HDR/Atmos support more reliably for my living room setup, but they have gotten rarer and rarer over the past couple of months.

My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn't relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.

It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.

That's what killed it for me. I really enjoyed the Lawbreakers beta, but paying $30 for a game that would either die at a fixed price or quickly shift to F2P made no sense.

Yeah totally. I've noticed everyone's bandwidth dropping as capitalism worsens. It's even more apparent when every live service game wants you to treat it like a job.

Agreed with your last point. I'm at the point where I can call how much is enough for me for any given title, and it makes me a lot happier than feeling obligated to finish games I don't enjoy.

When I dug into this for myself I landed on Ghost!

https://ghost.org/

I tested it for a bit and am very excited to play the whole thing. My only full playthrough of the game was on a bad laptop on Project64 as a kid, and playing with full M/KB support now feels amazing.

I also got it working with Special K's HDR feature and it looks great too.

I got Archon 2, think I went 5/7 in my placement matches with the last two beings losses. I think I performed well in them still fwiw, had a couple carries in earlier matches.

Pretty happy considering this is more or less my first MOBA I've actually gotten into. Have been thinking my MMR has dragged the party I usually play with in casuals into tougher matches.

Not the best clip summarizing this episode, but South Park has a great take on this.

https://youtu.be/C3WsfViEwxQ?si=D3dVt0vcfiZ3vdWU

I know right! Every time I come back to a game and they've changed every thing about it again I wonder why I bother. I think that's part of the reason Melee has survived for so long, the community establishes the meta more than someone whose incentive is to keep selling you things.

I've been using Nobara after messing with Manjaro, and it's been my go-to distro across multiple computers now.

Handles games incredibly well, built in fixes for Resolve, rock solid otherwise. It's based on Fedora so very well supported on that front as well.

One of the few really meaningful things I learned in film school was about the anti-vertical integration legislation in early Hollywood. Studios couldn't own distributors, theaters, etc. at some point.

Yet here we are...makes it all very transparent lol.

It works! Looks like some people have run into issues with EAC but it worked without finicking around for me.

https://www.protondb.com/app/1172620

Honestly I think this may have happened on the Steam version for me, I ended up reinstalling on Linux same-day and didnt have the same issue.

IIRC it had something to do with the Xbox Game Bar/App registry entries that still applied to the Steam version. I had definitely used the UWP version before though, so it's possible it was that or that had contributed.

But downloading it on Bazzite and just having it work was...a little bizarre to experience.

I think the Xbox App somewhat serves content through the Microsoft Store, I definitely had to troubleshoot between the two for a couple things.

They do sell games as well. I think I got an episode of the Batman Telltale series through it for free, though much like Epic managing an additional library with less features/support is usually not worth it for me.

I had some trouble with the beta but didn't get far testing, have been planning to boot into Windows for it.

Seemed like folks were running into similar issues on ProtonDB fwiw.