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Games: Steam Machines, Nostalgia, and More
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Boiling Steam ☛ Steam Machine: Between 12k and 15k Sold per week
Valve is a fairly secretive company when it comes to how they perform: they have never published quarterly hardware sales figures for its consumer devices. They don’t track them in press releases, they don’t have earnings calls since they remain a private company, and they don’t treat unit volume as a front and center KPI on the store. There is maybe one exception: a few years back, they did announce that they had sold 500k Steam controllers. That was actually just 10 years ago! At the same time, they do like to share a lot of data. They have hardware surveys, weekly best sellers, and also real-time revenue data: the Global Top Sellers chart. Because that chart ranks products by gross financial throughput rather than unit count, it creates a bias we can exploit to do some napkin math estimations. High-priced hardware requires significantly fewer transactions to occupy a higher chart position, compared to low-priced software or microtransaction-driven titles.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Korean outfit hosting 1.44MB game development contest to honor the floppy disk — entrants must confine entire fileset, including resources, engine, and library, to miniscule storage format
There’s a new 'open to everyone' floppy disk-size game development competition with cash prizes for the best three submissions.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Valve confirms Steam Machine red light overheating warning is showing earlier than it should; BIOS fix on the way — will raise temperature warning threshold to 100 Degrees Celsius
Valve has confirmed that the Steam Machine's red light bar warning is being triggered prematurely.
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ScummVM ☛ The Count Rises Again
The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce that Dracula: Resurrection and Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary are ready for public testing!
Follow Jonathan Harker through Transylvania and London as he searches for Mina and attempts to put an end to Count Dracula once and for all. Explore panoramic locations, solve puzzles, gather useful objects, and try to survive the Count’s return.
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Hackaday ☛ Simple Games From A Simpler Time
Modern video games are nothing short of amazing. My son and I were playing through the one of the latest Zeldas, which involve a mix of combat and puzzle-solving that’s pretty much the hallmark of the franchise. But the most recent open-world Zelda is simply massive. Made by around 1,000 people at a development expense of $150,000,000, it takes probably 60-80 hours to play through if you’re not rushing, and more if you’re taking it easy. It has layers of game mechanics, and worlds in the sky, on land, and underground. It’s big in every way.
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Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ The road to epsilon-zero: ordinals as nim-heaps
Nim is a very simple game for two players. There are some piles of beans, which are called nim-heaps. When it's your turn, you are allowed to remove as many beans as you like, as long as they are all in the same pile. Whoever takes the last bean wins.
Nim with only one pile of beans is trivial, because whoever goes first can simply take all the beans from the one pile and win. And with two piles it's very simple. But with three or more piles it starts to be a little interesting. Consider the case where there are three nim-heaps, with 1, 2, and 3 beans respectively. The first player can't prevent the second player from taking the last bean.
For a slightly less simple example, consider a game that starts with nim-heaps of size 1, 3, 4, and 8 beans. Here the first player can win, if they might the right opening move. But there's only one winning move! If the first player does anything else, the second player can win.