• 3 months

    Half-Life 3 being ruines by tech bros wasn’t in my bingo card but I’m not surprised at this point.

  • 3 months

    if valve is waiting for ram price to come down then steam machine won’t be released until 2028…

        • 3 months

          The US government has a financial vested interest in the AI bubble. They will artificially keep the bubble going. The AI bubble collapses when American society and government collapses.

        • 3 months

          If it bursts the ram will be on graphic card in a warehouse somewhere. We still will need to ramp back up consumer production I assume.

        • Are they using the same ICs in the AI modules as they are in DIMMs?

          If yes, then we can still hope for some level of a 2nd hand market, which may at least manage to be lower than the max at that point.

          • 3 months

            Not the same chips, but ddr5, gddr7, and hbm2 are made off the same wafers in the same plants. The issue is allocation in wafer and production time skewing towards the higher-margin items. DDR5 additionally is being made more into the server ecc variant, which companies are buying in droves for cost-efficient MOE inference.

            • Well, the server ECC variant is still pretty useful for desktop workloads. Just make sure AMD always supports it in the next generations. If it’s still a DIMM, then it can be sold right away.

              GDDR7, again, if the chip has the required pins as in GPUs, then GPU manufacturers can simply buy them, test them for a few hours maybe, and pop them in their lineups with a bit of re-calculation of traces (in case the exact pinout differs). Of course you get some re-soldering damage, but there’s not much you can do about it. On the other hand, if the GDDR7 is in GPUs already, most the companies would require is to alter the firmwares a bit and sell refurbished units.

              HBM2. Seems like it is possible to get slottable modules with HBM2. Pretty sure some industrious people in China will find a good use for them. Perhaps with RISC V processors?
              And the AI specialised units shouldn’t be fully useless either. Remember the cancer studies case?
              It is still useful computing ability that can be used well by those who know how.

        • 3 months

          if the AI bubble bursts prices will go down

          Considering how everything tied and glued together in IT, when AI bubble will blow up, not only it will collapse US economy, it will also increase all prices in IT, as I see it. ARM? Belongs to Nvidia. x86? Basically a duopoly of AMD and Intel. Anything IT and corp related? Most probably located or entirely American. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. you name it.

          Whole IT right now is like that dude from “it goes down” meme

          • ARM doesn’t belong to Nvidia. They tried to buy it a few years ago and failed. Its majority owned by a Japanese conglomerate.

          • Nah, it’d bring prices crashing down as the market gets flooded with all the used hardware from the AI data centers being cleared out and auctioned off in bulk lots by bankruptcy courts and debt collectors, leading people to buy them by the truck loads and put on ebay for pennies on the original retail dollar.

  • Never thought I would be expressing accelerationist views but rn I just want the crash to happen. AI is bullshit and the sooner everyone realizes that the better.

    • Programmer buddy of mine was telling me their theory that AI is the last hurrah of Big Tech and Venture Capital, shifting a patient that has been in place since most of us were children.

      Even after the Dot Bomb area is the 2000’s, FinTech taking it in the chin in the 2008 global financial crisis, three meaningful Crypto rises and falls, and now AI, there’s always been some new for train to institute and sell to the retail investor and the general public.

      The beleaguered finances of middle classes pretty much everywhere, hand in hand with the deleted brain trusts from AI making us really dumb and unconfident (or falsely confident), convinced with the lack of new productivity borne from these last few market cycles (AI and Crypto not actually doing much for the majority of humans commensurate with the hype) results in a possible chance for actual market accountability and seeing only genuine market growth.

      I think that megacrash and the world waking up to the marketing machine is considerably less likely, but agree with them (given their best experience in FinTech) that it might meaningfully end our collective beliefs that Silicon Valley can steer everyone towards brighter shores.

      • I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

        • They think there’s nothing else left so yes its the death throes of capitalism.

          How about actually building good devices again? Devices we actually own that arent filled with spyware, and that are repairable and moddable by us. Or good software/os’s. This is the problem with capitalism. It does not breed innovation.

          But no. You’ll own nothing and be happy. The ruling class cannot let us own anything ever again.

      • 3 months

        Even after the Dot Bomb area is the 2000’s

        Pardon?

    • what in the fuck does ai have to do with this post

      edit: oh its the hardware prices. yea

  • 3 months

    yes of course. HL3 is being delayed because something in the future is exploding backwards through time and fucking everything up. This is the only explanation I choose to accept.

    • The GMan has broken containment and is now wandering through our timeline, inserting people into the right points to change the future. I guess this explains the whacky wild ride we’re currently on.

  • 3 months

    Oh yeah, hardware prices are what’s preventing HL3 from coming out. Sure.

    • 3 months

      I’m guessing they want to bundle it with the machine and have it as a sort of “demo” game.

          • the orange box wasnt released along side any steam hardware? that i can recall at least.

            • 3 months

              No, Steam didn’t have their own hardware back then afaik, but it introduced Portal alongside new installments of two extremely popular existing franchises. That’s why I said it was similar instead of the same thing.

              • 3 months

                Team Fortress was not an “extremely popular existing franchise” even among dedicated PC gamers. What the Orange Box did was let Valve experiment with marketing materials like the teaser videos for Portal and “Meet the Heavy.”

                • man… I really wish valve would go back and make new Meet The videos… or just TF2 videos in general. The first ones, like Heavy, got so ripped off compared to later ones like the Pyros

                • 3 months

                  TFC was one of the most-played mods for HL1, there was plenty of anticipation around it

  • 3 months

    Pretty bad luck on the timing for Steam Machine. Hope Valve can still pull it off, but not sure they’re going to be able to hit a price point where it’s worth buying.

    • 3 months

      Linux as a gaming machine dream gets destroyed by ram prices…

  • 3 months

    This is just straight cope. HL3 isn’t coming out anytime soon.

    • 3 months

      I’m confused, was there any expectation it would that I missed? As far as I know half life is dead. They never even finished episode 3 of half life 2 from like two decades ago.

      • Half-Life Alyx proves it’s not totally dead. It even retconned an important plot point, which would make sense to do if they’re planning to continue the story in some way.

        There are persistent rumors that Valve is planning to release it alongside the Steam Machine.

      • 3 months

        There has been a lot of data mining in the past few months that indicates they are working on something that has yet to be released, which is very likely a Half Life game. I’ve been watching the HLX Files series by Tyler McVicker for a while as he sticks to just facts without much hype.

        https://www.youtube.com/@TylerMcVicker1/videos

      • 3 months

        Would be pretty cool to have the Orange Box have a copy of the Orange Box preinstalled

    • 3 months

      Yeah and it’d be cool if they threw in a couple other games to show its versatility. HL3 of course, but a multiplayer game and maybe a unique puzzle game would be a good mix of game types.