Listening to Jeff talk about his past experiences with in-game VOIP it's a good idea not to lose sight of the impact that the game and platform have on the age and maturity of people who play it. I have no data to confirm this, but I'm going to guess that console skews younger than PC, and games like CoD are going to skew younger than Counter-Strike (for example). That's not to suggest that all PC players are all well-behaved adults, but even a few years difference in the mean age can make a huge difference in the overall community temperament if you're comparing mid-teen to college aged.
Having never played any form of console multiplayer, I hadn't really thought about the PC vs. console demographic divide until the advent of cross-play started between PC VR and PSVR (which straight up ruined social games like RecRoom.)
I know nothing at all about the LoL and Dota2 communities, but I'd be curious to know if the age demographic is different between them.
iirc, the director of the Rocketeer film (Joe Johnston) is the credited designer of Boba Fett back when he worked for Lucasfilm/ILM, although I believe that's purely coincidental.
I don't think there's any connection between the two characters beyond the fact that Boba Fett's popularity and Lucasfilm's pulp throwbacks (Star Wars, Indiana Jones) established a market for throwbacks that led to the introduction of Rocketeer in comic books in 1982.
The term "deck" sure did fall out of popular usage quickly. I don't ever remember thinking twice about the "NES Control Deck", probably because of terms like "tape deck" were common parlance back then. I think I still referred to the SNES, PSX, and N64 units as "decks" when they came out.
I believe Valve only have a trademark on "Steam Deck", so I wonder if they would offer resistance to "deck" being used by other manufacturers as a descriptor for this formfactor of PC. Asus Deck, Xbox Deck (xDeck?), Razer Deck, etc. I think I'd be into that.
Regardless of whether I like the show or not, I feel like this type of content is better suited to an ad driven model on youtube where you get to leverage the search/discoverability algorithm and viral nature of art/media criticism. Once this series is behind the premium paywall you're only producing this for some subset of existing GB subscribers, and it doesn't serve as a good sales pitch for new GB premium subs either given that it has little in common with anything else on the site.
I can pretty vividly remember having apple juice be my go-to beverage when I was ~3-7 years old, but hated any soda. One day a switch flipped and I didn't like it anymore and switched to ginger ale, but still didn't like cola. A few years later pepsi was the go-to. I didn't become a coffee drinker until I was well into my 30s.
After doing some quick google research just now, it appears that our taste buds actually change in quantity/strength as we age (they decrease). In particular our taste for bitterness. Probably a significant evolutionary selection pressure there because toddlers would be at high risk of ingesting poisonous things, and more vulnerable due to low body mass. Might also be the reason why we become less fussy about certain vegetables as we age into adulthood. Likewise would explain our gradual shift to stronger alcoholic beverages which tend to be more bitter.
Leaves me thinking about Jeff's "mouth feel" experiment with the Switch cartridge and what that would taste like for a baby that's more than twice as sensitive to it.
I wonder how well a Steam library folder on a SteamDeck would work if the path were pointing to a mapped network share and you launched the games over wifi. Even if the theoretical bandwidth were sufficient (assuming excellent wifi and ssd storage) maybe the I/O latency would make things too janky.
edit: I guess at that point you'd be better off using the remote play streaming function and save yourself tons of battery and play with higher quality settings.
Regarding the Steam Deck analog sticks with capacitive touch: At the very least I could see that being useful for disabling the trackpad input to avoid inadvertent inputs. Beyond that it's probably not useful for game inputs as they wouldn't map directly to any Xinput button mapping, or even the original Steam controller.
The USB-C port seems pretty crucial. Short on storage? Strap an external usb3 drive to the back. Short on battery? Strap a portable battery to the back. The device is already too big to be pocketable anyways, so filling that concave area between the grips with junk doesn't really change how usable it is.
Regarding the conversation at ~1:31:00 about the continued lack of info about PS5 SSD expansion:
I have to wonder if it's in Sony's best interest to delay any sort of firmware update and compatibility list for as long as possible. No matter what Sony does here it's hard to see how that news is going to reflect on the PS5 in a positive way. The list of drives that will be supported will likely be small, which means you're going to see a run on whatever stock that's available as soon as the announcement is made, and scalpers/speculators will cause prices to skyrocket. Sony will have no control over MSRP, so the media narrative will be carried by whatever the prices are on Ebay, and that'll be contrasted with XBox's SSD expansion MSRP and availability that has presumably had the chance to stabilize since launch.
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