I thought many companies had weekly "chit-chat" meetings over video chat for just hanging around and doing nothing ? My place doesn't have it and we are not a place that welcomes or listens to any kind of ideas so they never cared about that.
Often these are poorly attended, for better or worse the office forces people together for a set period of time. Even out of boredom some folks will come up with ideas, when at home you can just cruise HN or do something else entirely.
"I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche."
Same here, I gave up on some AAA games because of this reason. I frequently return to old games. Some of them are from 1997,some of them are 2000,some of them are 2010's. Most of them have patches but if stadia and likes become mainstream, I don't know how its going to end up in 20 years.
a "nice" feature of consoles like the Nintendo Switch is that they can always be played offline, even the ones that are "always online" on other consoles and computers.
There's a lot of issues with the switch - and Steam Deck is expensive, but maybe if it sells really well, other companies will make similar offerings and we might get some actual competition in "consoles" or handhelds that can play games up to about 6 years prior to the release of the console, perfectly.
I imagine with the shrinking of transistors and whatnot, someone could theoretically release an extremely low power version of, say, a 9800GT, or even a 1050ti in a couple of years - Rather than needing all this active cooling and heatpipes and a huge PCB to spread out the RAM and everything, just put the same IP onto a 5nm process or something and get the same performance in 1/10th of the wattage.
