Proton has done wonders. It’s legitimately incredible, the explosive growth of Linux gaming through Valve’s work.
Not disputing that, but there's no way I'm getting FFXIV to run on a Thinkpad T60 running Slackware. But it's still enough computer for Firefox and GNU Emacs.
Yeah I have a T480S and it barely runs WoW Classic. I'll sometimes do light games the iGPU is capable of. Most of the time I use my desktop to run games, and if I want to play it on this machine, I'll use Moonlight and Sunshine to stream over to it from the desktop. That machine is a 3090 paired with a 12700KF though. It runs whatever I want it to.
I don't have off-LAN game streaming working entirely just yet, but with ZeroTier you can theoretically run everything remotely - my upload speed is probably the limiting factor there, but the internet works well enough otherwise for Plex streaming off-LAN.
A Deck would probably run FFXIV pretty well, and with the form factor of a controller that you're used to playing with.
I like this idea. I know some games let you play for 60 minutes. All games should have a timer. Once it is up, game ends. If you like it, buy it and continue on.
That's fair, but maybe make it a 60-120 minutes depending on the game. I'd be seriously annoyed if I wasn't already familiar with Hideo Kojima's bullshit, grabbed a 60-minute trial of whatever he ends up doing after Death Stranding, and the entire trial is spent sitting through cutscenes.
As it was, I spent at least a third of the 60-minute trial for Soul Hackers sitting through cutscenes and reading exposition.
Ideally, they would just release a demo mode that cuts to the action so you get a feel for the mechanics, or just have a prologue for each game where you taste the action in the first 20-30 min before all of the exposition.