It’s a lot better than it used to be, from a Linux perspective. I switched to Mint a few months ago and it can be a bit fiddly, but I haven’t had any real issues with any of the games I’ve tried. Admittedly, that’s all through Steam, but still.

The laptop’s definitely more versatile, but there’s something to be said for the handheld form factor. If you’re on transit or something, you’re not going to want to whip out a laptop. If you’re just using it at home, though, laptop all the way.

The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.

People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.

I think it’s reasonable in that the same kids who get into the difficult, complex parts of Minecraft are likely the same sort who would enjoy something like Myst. You’re right that it’s far from a perfect comparison (two very different genres, after all), but there’s something in it as well.

I’d suggest you look into some of what’s possible in Minecraft before dismissing it. The basics are simplistic, but the moment you start dipping into redstone builds you’re opening up an entirely different, entirely more complicated can of worms. Some of the mods available also expand that complexity greatly - Create, for example. It’s a different genre of difficulty than what’s offered by puzzle-based games, but I don’t think it’s possible to argue that there isn’t depth to it. Factorio’s another one which I’d name as offering significant complexity in the same vein.

I’d also note that Myst is almost generation defining in terms of its complexity. I’d be hard pressed to point towards many other games that were on par with it from its time (and I’m intentionally excluding some of the classic text adventures here, which were difficult in ways unfair to the player).

Other way around - base launches at $20, dlc comes out at $5, game and dlc get bundled down the line in a $25 pack, discontinuing the separate purchases.

Would you feel differently if no updates were released for the original game, and all development post release was bundled into a paid expansion? What if, after that, the game was only made available with expansion?

IMO, that’s all this is, with the nice bonus that people who bought in early get the expansion for free.

If this marks the return of people actually picking up a newspaper (or the digital equivalent), that’d be fantastic. Not holding my breath, but one can hope.

Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I sank way too many hours into this (started off as a TA clone but branched off into other game modes too) a decade or two ago, and it looks like it’s still going.

https://springrts.com/