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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There are flaws and benefits to every platform, that’s why they exist otherwise only one would stand the test of time. There’s a reason why PC gaming continues to march on. It has its flaws, sure, I wouldn’t necessarily say glaring though.

    The argument here isn’t that PC gaming is flawless or you can run on literally any hardware or os, that’s silly. Just that it’s more flexible and open to choice. I run my Steam library on my Windows PC, Linux PC and steam deck. Games I bought a decade ago can run perfectly fine on all these configurations. That’s the argument I was making and why your claim of PC being more exclusive seemed so disconnected from the reality of my experiences at least.

    Still, it’s not an argument to say you should use one platform or the other. Just that they are different and have their pros/cons, flexibility being a huge pro of the PC platform that’s important to some people and less so for others.


  • Ok I’m with you on the whole store exclusivity thing but come on. More exclusive? Having to buy from a certain store and being able to run anywhere on hardware of your choice is hardly more exclusive than being forced to buy from one vendor and only run on one system.

    That said, I do think this whole argument is somewhat moot because the steam deck and switch serve very different but overlapping audiences. I own an original switch and a steam deck, I don’t think one can replace the other but I’ve opted not to buy the switch 2 because Nintendo’s anti consumer practices really turn me off if they want to tell me what I can do with the games and hardware I bought from them.








  • This is my headcanon when I see a simple but long lasting bug like this at a large company.

    To you or I, it seems simple. Clearly things are not working as intended and the fix is trivial. Raise a bug in the tracking system if you really have to, then just fix it, right?

    Here’s the thing. That code was written completely according to the specification. The path there was clearly there in the requirements. So what? So…that means it’s not a bug, it’s a feature change. And if it’s not a bug, that means we can’t officially use our allocated (but always shrinking) bugfix time to work on it.

    If we want to fix it, we need to put in a feature change request. That means we have to articulate the value to the business in changing this feature and explain why we think the original specification is wrong. We can’t get confirmation from the spec author because they are no longer with the company. That means we have to prove that it was written incorrectly.

    If…and that’s a big if, we can articulate that there’s business value in doing this and that the original specification was likely incorrect, then we get to the really fun part. Prioritisation.

    You see, the team that built that feature doesn’t exist anymore. Once the bulk of the features were done, they got disbanded and the engineers moved to other teams. Technically there should be a single team responsible for every feature so it gets maintained, but in practice it doesn’t really work that way. The people on the official team that’s responsible haven’t touched any of that code. They’re not too keen on starting either because they have their own priorities.

    So after all that, the task sits in the backlog of that team, neglected. Eventually in some distanct sprint planning session it will be flagged as an old ticket. You, who raised it, would have left the company and nobody in the meeting has context about why the task was created. Isn’t that miscategorised, shouldn’t it be a bug? Why is it with our team, is it even worth doing? Then it will be pruned from the backlog. The sad task that was fought for so valiantly, only to die sadly in the cutting room floor of a backlog grooming session.

    Then one day, the bug will annoy a newcomer so much, they’ll just sneak the change in under another ticket and the bug will finally be fixed. Months before the product gets scrapped for a worse replacement. What are the specifications of the replacement software based on? That’s right, the original specs of the old system to ensure backwards compatibility.