I(14m) recently got the new xbox and as you've heard it is in high demand and a lot of people wanted one for Christmas.
People: me, my mom, 2 aunts, 2 uncles, 5 cousins.
So this year has been rough on everyone. My mom lost her job for a bit, my aunts and uncles either lost their job and still are looking or lost it for a while and barely got it back. I lived in a small apartment where i shared my room with 3 siblings and my parents had their own room but they arent part of this.
It all started when i buy myself an xbox with my own money. When it gets here i actually was moving since my grandparents let us stay at their house until my mom got a job since she lost it at the time. Since i was moving i didnt use it.
Then a month later my mom actually got us a better apartment that let me share a room with only one of my siblings. Once we move in i finally use my xbox for the first time a couple days ago because i forgot i had it but found space for it. My sister doesnt play video games because she got her own switch last year so she barely used the tv in our room which i owned.
Fast forward to Christmas where i have a cousins coming over with my aunts. Once they come inside they go everywhere even in my room and once they saw my xbox they were like "can we play the xbox, i havent used one" i said fine but only minecraft because again i just started using it. They used it for 3 hours but had to go eat and once they ate they asked my mom what they got for Christmas. She gave each of my cousins $20 because she didnt know what they wanted or didnt have the money.
2 of them got me some clothes which i liked very much since i didnt get any new ones this year. The other ones gave me $25 which i was really expecting nothing because i knew they've had a very rough year.
Then once everyone gets their presents we just play card games and board games. i decided i was going to get some sleep they said ok and i said my goodbyes. Later i get woken up by my cousins saying that i have their Christmas present.
By this time my aunts offer and say"uh no i need it more than you" i was just like shocked because i was still tired and they were very demanding especially when my cousins started asking "can we go home now i want to play the new xbox" i said no its not for sale and to get out of my room. Then they started calling me ungreatful for not letting them have it because they've had a rough year and my cousins just want it.
When my mom came my aunts explained first then i told her my side and my uncles tell the truth and say that its mine and i should keep it since they kniw i bought it with my own money. My mom tells them to leave and they were just whining. I woke up and my mom apologized and my phone was blown up by my cousins and aunts saying im an AH.
AITA?
Edit:im going to go offline for a bit while i slowly go through this because i am a bit traumatized from all the drama especially since it was all from family which just makes me scared since they have keys but my mom is working on everything
Edit 2: im going low contact with my family that was involved, my mom has also been helping me go through this, i have decided to hide my xbox, and for those wondering why my uncles and aunts have keys its because they would babysit my siblings incase if me or my mom werent here, but she changed the locks and is seeing if she can get a house with mortage to set up cameras. I am feeling a bit better but still very traumatized from the incident. Thank you for all your supporting comments

Hello everyone,
I hope you are all doing well during this Covid-19 crisis and take care of all of your family and friends!
I have been a gamer since my young childhood, and I love them since it is a good way to relax when I am stressed. I will always defend video games for the positive effects they can have on our minds.

Why I am writing this?

I have noticed something really severe: most people now care only about graphics. They want to know which is the most powerful between PS5 and XBOX Series X. And they will buy only games with beautiful graphics. I am playing newer and older games, and I feel like why people care about graphics. I have been playing Super Mario World and Super Metroid on the Switch's SNES Online, and it was more rewarding and satisfying than most nowadays games I have been playing. By seeing how the gaming community behaves, I believe it tends to focus only on graphics and nothing else. When I want to buy a game, I don't even care about the graphics, and I have the feeling I am the only one who focuses on gameplay, music, art style, etc. Am I the only one?

The Delusion about FPS/Graphics

At least 20 or 30 FPS is good. I understand if someone wants to play at 60 FPS, but this should not be mandatory in my opinion. And then who cares about 120 fps or 240 fps? Your eyes don't even see the difference. I know sometimes games need some precise input so my best compromise would be 30 FPS for offline and relax games, and 60 FPS for online games with tournaments for example. I don't understand when people tend to buy the best resources for their PC. Games don't need 8K and 240 fps to be enjoyable. But yeah, this is your money and you do whatever you want with it, I am not your mother ;).

The most powerful is NOT the winner

If you look at each "war" generation console, the most powerful console always failed. But remember that there were never console war. Only one during Nintendo and SEGA during the beginning of the 1990s. Sony VS Microsoft is nothing compared to what happened then.

• NES and Master System were a bit equal and during this period we didn't care about the power of a console.
• SNES won against Megadrive (Genesis). Sonic The Hedgehog for example was more beautiful and smooth than Super Mario World. You can even add the Neo-Geo which was really really expensive but wasn't successful. And even the PC-Engine (TurboGrafx-16) if you want to be exhaustive.
• Playstation won against N64 and Atari Jaguar. Playstation is 32-bit and less powerful than N64 and Atari Jaguar that were 64-bit. It won most notably because of the usage of the CD that could store 1 GB instead of a cartridge that can't store more than 100 MB. N64 games are more beautiful than Playstation games but it lost. I don't even count Saturn, because it was a mess during the commercialization of this console. I think it was as powerful as the Playstation but correct me if I'm wrong.
• PS2 won against XBOX, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. Dreamcast won at the beginning because it was the only 128-bit console, but when PS2 came, it led this whole generation, at the expense of the Dreamcast. Gamecube and XBOX were more powerful than the PS2, they "survived" because of their exclusivities.
• Wii won against PS3 and XBOX 360. I think this one is the most relevant. If you were living during this period, you can totally relate to what I am saying. This was Gameplay (Wiimote) versus Graphics (transition to HD), and Gameplay largely won. The Wii was largely criticized for being just a copy of a Gamecube.
• PS4 won against Wii U and XBOX One. PS4 was less powerful than XBOX One, and yeah I know the Wii U was less powerful than PS4. The failure of the Wii U was because of its marketing and how Nintendo sold it. They didn't make the same mistakes for the Switch. For the Switch, I don't know where I can put it since it was released in the middle of a generation. But anyway, XBOX One was the most powerful and didn't win.
• For the handheld consoles, this will be really quick... Game&Watch won but no rivals. Then someone who will tell me the GameBoy didn't win against Game Gear and Atari Lynx... GameBoy was monochrome and ugly compared to them, but it won easily. GameBoy Advance didn't have any concurrent (there was Wonderswan or the N-Gage but do you know them?). DS easily won against the PSP, and again the DS was less powerful than the PSP. Same for the 3DS and PS Vita, don't tell me PS Vita won against 3DS.

Graphics is different than Art Style

Don't confuse graphics and art style. the Pokémon series, or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has awful graphics but an awesome art style. The games have bad graphics, but the character design, the level design, the way everything is drawn is beautiful. However, we are not talking about art style here.

People who tell me Graphics are important

If you are going to tell me graphics are essential because when you play, you need to look at a fantastic landscape. A video game is something you play through. If you just sit and look at the landscape, I'm sorry but this is not a video game since you are not playing, this is just panorama. This is not playing, you just watch beautiful pictures. Photography is different than video games, even both are considered art. I would ask you what is a video game for you? For me, a video game is the gaming interaction between the human and the video of a machine. No questions about graphics. This is called a video game, and not video watching or anything like that. If you need to look at beautiful backgrounds, you can go on Google Images, and look for high-resolution pictures (Settings > Advanced Research).

Games with bad Graphics are Bad?

My favorite question to beat the people who only care about graphics is: Why retrogaming exists if graphics are so important? This is not nostalgia or anything like that, I am born during the Gamecube/PS2 era and I didn't even know how the 1980s or the 1990s were in terms of video games. (I wish I could have been here when Final Fantasy VII and Pokémon Red/Blue were released). And can you tell why Minecraft is the best selling game of all time?

Conclusion

To conclude, of course, I agree this is cool if you have good graphics, but people need to stop worship graphics and giving all of their attention to this instead of focusing on gameplay, music, etc. This should not be a criterion to define the quality of a game in my opinion. Can someone tell me this is just me who is a toxic hater, or if someone feels like me? Maybe I am just stupid so I would like that someone can correct the wrong things that I believe in.
Thanks a lot for reading my very long message and have fun playing the wonderful video games we can have in 2021! Remember video games are the most prolific media, far ahead of the cinema or the books.
TL;DR: Am I the only one who is noticing people only care about graphics? I want to know if I am just a toxic hater who doesn't understand what the gaming industry needs right now, or if I am on the contrary smart enough to understand video games are not based only on graphics.

I’m playing the newest beta version of minecraft on my Xbox one and I’ve been trying to play splitscreen with my gf the past couple days, but every time she joins the game she can’t place or break blocks. I’ve tried remapping the build/place controls, giving operatomember privileges, using a different Xbox live account to join the splitscreen game, going into offline mode, switching controllers, etc. and nothing works. PLEASE tell me somebody has encountered this before and knows a way to fix it???
EDIT: Tried it just now and she can place blocks but is unable to break them. It’s like when she breaks a block it disappears on her screen but nothing happens on my screen, and she can somehow walk into the space where the block she broke just was, but on my screen it’s like she’s just phasing through blocks?

Let me explain. This change seems to effectively destroy Minecraft's decentralization. Anyone can host a server and play with anyone else on their own terms. They can be as offensive or as peaceful as they want, they could have offensive skins, builds, chat all they want, so long as they keep it in the communities where this is deemed as acceptable. This is how the game has always been so far. You break the rules of a community and you get banned from said community. These changes have severe implications in how Microsoft/Xbox accounts are handled. While the old ban/kick system will not disappear, your new Microsoft account will have it's own report and ban system. This means that you can be banned from your entire minecraft account, singleplayer and multiplayer for reports against it. Take a look back in to what I mentioned for being offensive in communities where that is acceptable (like 2b2t). Someone can take a screenshot of your builds or chat logs and submit them as a report reason towards your Microsoft/Xbox account directly. And while you're within server rules, you're not within Microsoft/Xbox account rules, and risk getting the entire account sanctioned.
This could also spell death for further decentralizations such as custom skin servers and launchers. While minecraft's Yggdrasil authentication system is not open-sourced, its also not obfuscated. It has allowed for people to create reimplementations of the authentication system and host their own "online-mode" servers with custom skins and capes and whatnot. This form of decentralization allows you to play minecraft as it was intended even if Mojang shuts down. The Microsoft/Xbox authentication system is entirely proprietary on the other hand. It's unknown at this time how it will interact with Yggdrasil or if it will replace it entirely, but this might spell the death for complete decentralization and make us all completely dependent on Microsoft/Mojang.
There are many account migration concerns. The old account migration half a decade ago was horrendous. Hundreds of thousands of people had no access to their own account e-mails and credentials and could not do the migration process and were eventually blocked from playing the game. Many accounts got lost during migration, or usernames got lost. I for one got my email address blocked for some reason and was forced to create a new e-mail just for minecraft. Contacting support on the issue over the years has been futile, and I still cant use my original registration e-mail with my account. What does this migration entail? Will it be like the last? Will accounts, usernames and emails be lost. Will people without access to their registration emails be able to play or migrate? Will support own up and answer the support tickets before they time out and close without an answer automatically? It's unacceptable that The best selling videogame of all time has support like this.
Microsoft and the EULA are also under heavy concern. When purchasing the game none of us agreed to these terms. With this migration we'll be forced to agree to the Microsoft/Xbox terms as well to continue playing. Something I do not agree with personally. But that's not the major concern. EULAs change, just play an old version... Well, all old versions of the game are locked behind your account, which in term is now bound by an EULA. So to play the version of the game I bought a decade ago, I have to agree to terms and conditions I did not sign up for when I bought the game. This is ludicrous. It would be fine if this new account change was required to play future versions of the game, but backwards imposing it on to old version, and even worse locking you out of those old versions with a new requirement sounds like a very legal gray area to me. Using offline-mode is an opportunity still, but that removes functionality that you paid for when you bought the game, additionally refer to the Yggdrasil authentication system point above, we might become unable to restore these features with mods due to them possibly being proprietary.
This has scary implications of Microsoft creeping further into Java edition. Microsoft have been mostly passive over the years on Java edition, instead focusing on Bedrock edition as the Microsoft influenced version, and leaving Mojang to do their own thing. This potentially undermines Mojang's independence and giving Microsoft more control over Java. Back when the buyover happened people were concerned about exactly this. Everyone kept reassuring us that Microsoft wont have power over Mojang and it will remain independent. Now, you cant play the game without registering to a Microsoft service anymore. So what are we getting reassured wont happen in the future now? Java wont get slowly merged into bedrock? Texturepacks wont get phased out for the marketplace? All in the name of making it multi-platform and unified. Global chat filters? Global "illegal shapes"? You know, to keep the kids safe. Right now it's masked as "security". Because they couldn't add 2 factor authentication to Mojang accounts already? I'm a developer, the OTP implementations with an authenticator app like Steam, or Discord or Google are free, with a permissive license and easy to integrate. This is not about security at all...
Also as a final footnote, capes. Capes have always been something exclusive for major events, achievements or staff. Mojang has had a firm stance on capes for years. They kept them exclusive because that's what they are. And at this point it's perfectly understandable. Someone with a minecon cape might not feel like he has something actually special when everyone can just make their own cape. Right now they're giving away free capes to seemingly everyone. This will cause a huge influx of capes and make the actually exclusive ones not stand out at all, from something that was a fun feature you saw once in a blue moon, to every player having one. Most will see it as an annoyance and disable capes completely.
This all seems very hurtful for the community, for cape owners and for privacy concerned people who do not wish to have an association with a multibillion dollar corporation known for collecting user data for advertisements. I do not wish to stop playing one of my favorite games.

I’m playing the newest beta version of minecraft on my Xbox one and I’ve been trying to play splitscreen with my gf the past couple days, but every time she joins the game she can’t place or break blocks. I’ve tried remapping the build/place controls, giving operatomember privileges, using a different Xbox live account to join the splitscreen game, going into offline mode, switching controllers, etc. and nothing works. PLEASE tell me somebody has encountered this before and knows a way to fix it???
EDIT: Tried it just now and she can place blocks but is unable to break them. It’s like when she breaks a block it disappears on her screen but nothing happens on my screen, and she can somehow walk into the space where the block she broke just was, but on my screen it’s like she’s just phasing through blocks?

I recently bought Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch and have been enjoying the game. When my friends learned I got it, many of them asked to play. One of them was on a different console, namely the Xbox One, so for Crossplay I had to create a Microsoft Account and send him a friend request. We’ve played a ton and it’s been super fun, but I’m a person who likes to play alone in my own world most of the time and practically every time I get into Minecraft he sends me a message asking to play. I love the guy, but I’m getting a little tired of always needing to talk and socialize with somebody every time I play, especially in a game like Minecraft that can be really good to chill out with.
I usually accept his request and end up playing with him, but he’s also the kind of guy who wants to play video games for 7 hours straight late at night, and I’m most certainly not. I’ll tell him I’m getting off and going to sleep, but in reality I just want to play by myself. The problem is that he can still see I’m online playing Minecraft, so I feel like I can’t play the game when I want to.
One option is to just not sign in to my Microsoft account, but that limits what you can do. I’ve already missed some achievements I was supposed to get because I wasn’t signed in, and I also can’t access any of my downloaded skins or worlds. I’ve been coming up with some excuses for why I can’t play, but they’re running out of believability. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, cause he is cool and I’m glad he wants to hang out with me, but I’m just not the kind of person who wants to be online with somebody 24/7.
My problem is that because I don’t own an Xbox, I don’t know how to set my profile to appear offline. I looked at a few sites and they all seemed to require the console. Does anybody know a way to set your Microsoft account to appear offline without owning an Xbox?

All I want is to be able to reliably play Minecraft with my son.
I have Minecraft on my Xbox One X. My son has Minecraft on his Nintendo Switch.
This all began with me thinking it would be easy to setup a custom Minecraft server in my homelab so that my son and I could play every night before bed. Installing Minecraft on my server was easy but I soon realized that Minecraft doesn't like to make things easy. I went to the in-game settings to join my custom server on our LAN and guess what? I couldn't join my Minecraft server. I found some guides that recommend custom DNS settings to get a menu that will allow us to input a custom Minecraft server IP address, but none of that worked. I got to the custom server form but the connection kept failing. Fine, a custom Minecraft server won't work, what now?
Morale now low, after hours of troubleshooting the custom server connection and hitting a dead end, I decided to try something easier; adding him on Minecraft and joining his world. At this point, he had a world with some nice work done, but there was one problem.. We were using the same Minecraft account. I couldn't join his world because we were both the same user in Minecraft's eyes, despite being on separately purchased games on separate consoles. I'm sure that Minecraft has their reasons to restrict usage so that an account can only be online from one console. So I created a new Microsoft account for my son, starting fresh, with all of his previous work saved on an account that we could not play together on. He was a little bummed out after realizing that we couldn't play on his world and that we'd need to start a new world to be able to play together. He was happy to hear that I'd be able to play with him though. And we did play.. For a couple of days before Minecraft struck again...
Connecting to eachother's game was unsuccessful 80% of the time. I would turn on my Xbox and see his account as offline while he was playing. So we tried restarting the Switch and restarting the game, and this worked for a couple of days. We were having fun, building houses and pools and airplanes, when Minecraft threw us another curveball. His Switch couldn't connect to the game anymore. He always showed as offline despite restarting the Switch numerous times. I couldn't join his game because he was offline, and he couldn't join my game because he'd get an error, "This gamertag doesn't exists" yes, it does exists, Minecraft.
Alright, I get it. Minecraft must want me to pay more. Almost ready to give up, I pay for the Realms subscription and create a new Realm. I could use his first world, since that was created on my account, but the recent world that we were playing on was now inaccessible. Everything built over the past couple of days was now gone forever. My son was just happy to be able to play with me, though. He watched as I setup the Realm with his older world, and tried to connect on his Switch.. "Cannot connect to Realms. Try again later."
And that is where we're currently at. Two worlds saved on his Switch that I can't join from my Xbox. Hours wasted troubleshooting issues caused by a broken game. I'm about to give up. I'm open to hear suggestions for other similar games (Fortnite works beautifully for crossplay with his Switch and my Xbox so why wouldn't another game work as well?). I'd appreciate somebody with experience with custom Minecraft servers helping me identify what might be causing the issue preventing the connection from my Xbox or Switch. I'd appreciate somebody helping me see my son's account online. I'd appreciate somebody helping me play this game reliably. But yea, I'm so frustrated with this game.

Source | Previous table

Questions	Answers
What would you say is the biggest "bottleneck" for the site right now? Thanks for all that you do.	Like code-wise? It's kinda spread out right now balanced across things. Every time traffic doubles, something architecturally breaks. I think next to break would be our cache infrastructure, then the number of db queries we make. But we survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so architecturally we're probably fine until next year.
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out of curiousity how hard is it to redesign these things when they break?	Depends on what it is. First version of the site ran everything on a $20/mo single 256MB RAM instance. Then we had a traffic spike the same time processing a large Newegg catalog and it ran out of RAM. Just paid more money for a 768MB RAM instance which bought me another year. Then that migrated to a separate db from frontend. Then separate offline task/feed processing. Usually you see the issues cropping up months before they break, so you have time to prepare. Our current pricing architecture was years worth of work and iteration though.
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How much of this did you learn on the job? Or were you already proficient in designing scalable systems before starting PCPP?	There are a lot of articles that talk through different sites and their architectures. Those often provide some good info on why they chose what they did, what broke, how they fixed it, etc. For smaller stuff like ours there are pretty standard patterns. Eventually you'll hit a point where some aspect of that starts to fall behind. That's when you can adjust your setup to your particular performance needs. So I guess what I'd say is it has been a mix of reading how larger players do it, and then using that to guide our architecture.
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What arch are you using? AWS? Azure? Other?	AWS
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I'm assuming you're the AWS Arch, SysOp, Dev?	Yep.
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Very nice. How long have you been doing AWS?	About five years I think? It's not the cheapest but it's been great for us.
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The resource costs more, but you save in not having to have more people on staff to support it. Did you switch from On site? Datacenter?	We were at a different (smaller) cloud provider. Before when that provider would go down, people would harass on twitter telling us to fix our stuff. Now when AWS goes down, half the internet goes down with it so people blame AWS and not us. That's been kinda nice lol.
How formal is the required attire at The Eggies?	Hahahahaha. I'll never forget what you told me - that everyone probably thought I worked for intel because I wore a suit. The card said evening/cocktail attire! That event was an interesting experience.
What has been the weirdest PC you have seen in your life?	There was a guy who brought a grill PC to QuakeCon several years ago. As in, grill on wheels. Flip open the grill and the monitor was on the top half, and the components were in the bottom half. That thing was so awesome.
I think it might be this	Yes! That's it!
Can you guys add the NZXT H1 to your cases?	We hope to soon. We need to incorporate some modeling for cases so that we can list them with integrated cooling first.
What are your thoughts on things like Stadia and online/cloud work environments where having high-end computer parts don't matter as much as a solid internet connection? Do you see the relevance of PCPartPicker waning in the near future or do you think building PCs will still be a thing a generation or two down the line?	I'm not too worried about it to be honest. If it becomes prevalent, that's ok. I think there will always be a DIY side of things even if latencies reduce enough to make cloud setups viable.
Hi Phillip, about 8ish years ago I was learning how to code web applications and was a total noob. I sent you an email with beginner questions and you answered. Just want to call out how much of an impact that made as now I’m a Staff Software Engineer at a tech company.	That's awesome! Congrats!
What's your favorite cheese?	Eh, maybe Parmigiano Reggiano?
Do you sometimes get items to review/test or to thank you for your website?	When we were filming content for youtube we'd get stuff to review/test. But we never really pushed hard for it. Some manufacturers would let you keep the stuff, others would ask you to send it back. I think if we had started doing product reviews we could have opened up the review sample floodgates but we never went there.
Do you use PCPartPicker yourself to pcpick parts?	Yes.
?	Correct - all the components are entered manually. There's a team of people who do that, and I do very few these days (mostly the CPUs). We don't scrape for that data but we have some tools/dashboards to make it a bit easier.
Umm hi Pc Part Picker, I'm a huge fan! When I watched some yt vids on pc building back in the day, I was lead to your site where I discovered a platform to share lots of cool builds and ask questions to others when I was making mine. While this has been said before I'll say it again, your site has been massively helpful and had been a cornerstone in the pc gaming community because of how good of a resource it is, so thank you so much. So anyway... 1. Who chooses which builds get featured? I love hopping on and seeing what creative things people do with their builds. Is there an upvote criteria for it/do some just get recommended? 2. What got you into custom PCs and gaming? It'd be super cool to hear your story and what got you to make this site in the first place. ty!	Alex already mentioned #1 - Ryan picks. (I'll also second the good photos. For me great photos of a good build will win out over bad photos of an epic build.)
	2) - Growing up the last family computer we had was a commodore 64. The IBM PCs and clones were too expensive. Later after my brothers went to college I'd borrow my dad's work laptop to play warcraft 2 over a serial cable with friends. My first PC was scraped together as cheap as I absolutely could because I didn't have a lot of money. I think my first build was ~$350 minus OS but including monitor (bought for $100 at an auction) and a bunch of secondhand parts. I upgraded that PC to a Celeron 300A running 450MHz my junior year in college and it was so stupid fast for me. But that too was a budget upgrade at the time. I ran that build for another 4 years I think? By that time I was out of college with a full-time job, so I had a bit more discretionary income to spend on PC stuff. So long story short, custom PCs for me started out of budget necessity. Later when I had more money it shifted to being able to get exactly what I wanted.
What's your stance on RGB?	My kids love it. I like it if it's subtle and not distracting.
What’s one feature most people don’t know about/use? I’ve only ever used pcpp a couple times, but I’d love to get more familiar with it!	Probably parametric selections.
ok, so first of all, thank you so much for this service. Without it, I would have been lost on my first PC. Secondly, the question. What were the specs of your first build?	AMD K5-133. 80MB hard drive. I think it had 2MB RAM, but I can't remember.
Idk if this has already been asked and answered, but did your ever expect it to become so widespread and popular?	Not even close. I thought if I was lucky it'd make enough for my wife and I to go get coffee. I had planned to work on it for about a year, learn Python and Django, and then move on to something else.
No questions at this time - I just wanted to use this as an opportunity to thank you for contributing to KBMOD's Extra-Life campaign over the years. Literally, tens of thousands of dollars, all of which you didn't have to donate. What Extra-Life does for kids is great, and you are a big part of that. Thank you. :)	KBMOD was one of the first groups that started using the site. They had me on their podcast waaaay back. I had a newborn who barely slept so I did that interview in my car parked in my garage. They're great guys, and I'm more than happy to contribute to what they've done for Extra Life.
Have you ever thought about stopping work and stepping down from owner of PCPP? If so why?	Like if I could retire? Selfishly and honestly, yeah, all the time. I don't because I feel like PCPP is only about 10% of what I want it to be (feature/functionality-wise). Too much unfinished stuff.
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You have done me and my friends countless benefits with this tool. We definitely take it for granted and I give you my gratitude. Your compatibility notes have saved me more times than I’d like to admit! Anyways, here are my questions. 1. If you could travel back in time to 2010, and give yourself advice for the future, what would it be?	1) - great question. Had to think about it for a bit. Mostly I wouldn't say anything at all, because my naivety early on kinda helped? There were some problems we'd have to solve later that I didn't really know how hard they were when I first started. Had I known (like how terrible most retailer price data quality is) I may not have ever tried to do it?
	One of the things that was really hard for me the first several years was the emotional roller coaster. When I left my job to work on it full time, it was a heavy weight of responsibility. What happens if it fails? What happens if I screw up royally? The highs were higher and the lows were lower. And I could go from the highest high one day (just got mentioned on website X or Y) to the lowest low the next day (retailer Z cut commissions by a factor of 4, or a new competitor popped up cloning all our features and data but with better UI). The emotional swings were really hard to deal with. Over time I've learned to temper that, so the bad days aren't as bad and the great days are good. I'd tell myself that when it gets a little crazy to just take a breath, slow down, and take it all one bit at a time.
2. Have you ever thought of expanding beyond computer hardware and doing something else? For example, another program. Have a great day!	2). We've looked at other niches. We launched a cycling site similar to PCPP. We learned a lot along the way but unfortunately it just didn't work out. The concept might be viable in other niches, but it's not something we're going to consider pursuing for at least another year.
Are there brands who tried to pay you guys for higher rankings?	Yes. But we don't do that. I guess it's pretty common other places because we get asked for that a lot. Essentially paid placements or people wanting to pay to win the buy box price - which we don't do.
Thanks for all the hard work! Could you expand on the issues you faced when trying to make MTB part picker work? Remember the project being unfeasible and closed but would really love to hear you talk more about it. Is MTB another one of your personal hobbies?	Our cycling site was pretty hard to shut down. That one hurt. We ran into a couple things: people build new PCs ground up every few years. Bikes on the other hand are usually bought pre-built and are rarely ground-up builds. PCs are economically viable to build ground up, where bikes aren't unless you're $5K+. And at that price point, you're probably buying from a local bike shop you've got a relationship at rather than our site. So most of our traffic/sales were cockpit or weatear oriented. Lots of tires. Data entry for compatibility for full bike builds was really expensive because it needed really intense domain specific knowledge. So the site basically wasn't profitable where it was actually referring sales.
	I'm not a MTB guy, but I do enjoy bikes. I don't ride that much though. I converted an old hybrid to a 1x drop bar setup for commuting to the office, so I'm super excited to be able to ride that once COVID goes away.
What was the hardest part?	Work-life balance.
First off, thank you so much for creating what has become an integral part of PC building for not just myself but for all my friends as well. I always tell anyone who is new to the PC scene to build their rig or check for compatibility using PCPartPicker! My questions is, I feel it's become second nature to me and so many others to check the price history as well as set alerts for any potential components that do go on sale in the future. PCPartPicker is an awesome site to do this on but I feel like there could be more to it. For one a PcPartPicker mobile app would be awesome along with notifications of sales on components one wishes to be alerted on. Are there any plans to do bring an app to the market or maybe even go further with price alerts for components that users want to be instantly notified on?	We hope to launch a PWA version later this month that will support push notification price alerts (on platforms that support it).
Hello pcpartpicker love your website, you are a god among men. Question: How fast does your crawler work? In an era like now where RTX 3000 series and Ryzen 5000, Radeon 6000 disappear in an instant, do you think your crawler could be fast enough to "catch" and display stock before they get sold out?	We can run very fast - < 10min latency on full product catalog updates, or < 1min latency on select product sets.... if we had that kind of availability from retailers. Only one offers that though. The rest have data feeds with latencies too high to use for catching GPU stock right now. (If you watch closely enough, you'll find that even retailers have caching latencies between product pages and product category pages. The category page pricing can be out of sync with the product page pricing. If they can't get it the same on their own site there isn't a chance we'll get better latency from their feed.)
What is the future of PcPatpicker? I know you added Cycling Builder but that seems to be discontinued. Are you planning on expanding into any more fields similar to Cycling or was that a one-off thing?	For now we're going to focus solely on PC. We learned a lot trying to launch Cycling Builder. I don't plan on going after other niche markets for a while, if at all.
Hey Philip and team! Two questions: 1. How do you handle low quality data/data integrity issues from your partners? For example duplicate listings made by marketplace sellers on Amazon 2. Would it be possible to add RGB compatibility to cases and related components, or would that be hell? I think it might be helpful for me builders to know that their Asus Mobo isn't going to support their MSI RGB controller, for example. :) Thank you!!	We generally only list the buy box winner. In the past we've had to do some validation on marketplace sellers that would show low base price but exorbitant shipping. But Amazon seems to have filtered that out a lot more than what we were seeing 5-6 years ago.
Do you have the hammock up at the new office? Serious aside, big congrats on yout progress over the past decade. Its been great to see first hand how this community has evolved since you made pcpp your fulltime gig!	Thanks Jappetto. :) I had the hammock is up in the back of the office but Jack took it down to make room for the reno... :(. One day, one day.
I know this is such a small feature to ask for: but would you be willing to make the line on the price history graph “hold” and slidable for mobile users? For example, on my iPhone in safari, I can tap different points on the graph and prices pop up. But I can’t tap and hold the line on the graph and slide it left or right (with the idea being the prices would change dynamically with the hold and slide method). Regardless, I really enjoy your website and all the work your team has put into making it such a great tool for the pc building community. It’s the first place I send friends who are new to building and want to get an idea of what’s required.	Can look into this for sure. Probably a touch/drag event I'm not handling.
What was the most difficult technical challenge you faced?	We've since removed the feature, but doing lowest-price calculation on a part list with parametric part selections and combo deals was probably the hardest problem so far. The general algorithm itself isn't bad, but rather it's doing it hundreds of times a second across hundreds of thousands of prices, and getting an answer back in < 100ms for each. That was hard, but fun.
Have you considered cooperating with userbenchmark website? I liked to check my pc parts there before i purchased and they have sophisticated database, maybe some kind of collaboration could boost both websites, what do you think?	We're working toward sourcing our benchmark data internally where we can control every aspect of the process.
Hey, I have a question: Your price history software is probably the best implementation I've found so far, with specific retailers and the like (in comparison to say CamelCamelCamel which just shows Amazon and 3rd party), is there any possibility to expand this to maybe more tech related products? Maybe even a whole new site, because it's *really really good*	We could. We have the price tracking across retailers already. But it'd be a bit different of a site - just price comparison. It requires a bit different workload to populate that stuff. On the PC side, the data entry is pretty expensive because we model all the bits for compatibility. For general purpose price comparison though, it's more just aggregating pictures and random specs that don't have specific meaning. There are data sources for that available, but from what we've found the quality is really low. I'm not sure if that's something we'd want to do (listing stuff with spec data we don't source ourselves, and with filtering that wouldn't be as detailed).
Thanks you guys rock. Would love if there was a way to do rebates through pc partpicker, and letting you guys get a cut. Any chance you can add in bundle sales? Sound like that could be complicated but super useful.	We ran bundle sales listings for a few retailers for several years. We ended up removing them because they were often unreliable. One retailer even had bundle deals listed that were more expensive than the sum of the parts. It was a huge hassle both on the implementation and data quality side, so we ended up removing it.
PCPP, Jesus Christ, thank you so much. You helped me make my first build, and now my second one. You have helped so many people, and I hope you understand how much everyone cares about the resource. For my question, what was your first experience with technology?	Computer-wise my grandparents gave us a TRS-80 color computer growing up. Had minesweeper some submarine game can't remember the name on the cassette tape drive. Later we got a commodore 64. But I was more into audio than computers until I got to college.
Not sure if the AMA is over now or if this has already been asked. If so, no worries. Thanks for making pcpartpicker. Its been imparitive to pc gaming and pcs. But what are your hobbies and passion outside of computers and gaming? Do you have any other pet projects like pc part picker? And do you have any pets?	I love building stuff. Anything really, but electronics and lately 3d printing. Used to do a lot of woodworking but that stopped when I had kids (no time these days). Love swimming, and picked up running again when COVID hit.
Hey, thank you so much for what you do! Its really cool! If i had one thing to suggest, it would be to improve the estimated power consumptions as i've had some issues with that before But i'd love to ask -- what was the biggest hurdle you had to jump to set up your system?	The biggest hurdle was probably convincing retailers we were worth working with early on. When we were small no one knew who we were, and so when we'd ask if we could list them they only saw us as another price comparison site.
Might you have any plans to open source/license your part search engine for other hobby projects? I can think of several "assembled from standard components" type things that I really wished I could use PCPartPicker on.	We tried it out for cycling, but it didn't click like PC did. We've had suggestions for a number of other niches. The challenges are partially product modeling, and partially getting part numbers for everything. The latter is surprisingly hard.
Considering that the idea literally spawned from relevant work at the time, was there ever any intellectual rights issues? Was that ever a worry in your mind? Appreciate the work and due diligence with the AMA.	I talked with the company about it to confirm that there wouldn't be any overlap or competing interests. I had an appendix/page/whatever-the-name-is added to my employment agreement saying it was ok to work on it.
Replying again in this thread because the OP deserves it...my experience 7 years ago with him... https://www.reddit.com/buildapc/comments/17c031/big_thanks_to_this_sub_and_especially_to/ ...and now my son is studying computer science in college. I kinda like to think this helped...thanks Phillip, you are the MAN!	Awesome! I'm happy that we got to be a small part of that.
What are your thoughts on the shortage of hardware, bots, scalpers, ebay listings, and so forth?	It stinks. Everyone has different opinions on who should get their cards first. Or whether different approaches (scalping, scraping, etc) are ok or not. So personally I'm just sitting back while supply catches up and then I'll try and get a card once it all settles down.
What are your other hobbies aside from PC stuff?	I got my first filament 3d printer last year and absolutely love it. I love electronics in general so anything involving that. (For instance here's the beginning stages of a motorized minecraft chicken alarm clock for my son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C15NKLbUFdo. I absolutely love tinkering on stuff like that.)
Regarding cases, I know we can sort by full/mid/itx etc., however I wanted to ask if there were plans to add dimension sorting, like by width. Is that just a lot harder to pull off?	We're really constrained width-wise on that category view and how many columns we can show. We could put it in there, but we'd have to drop other columns to make it work.
What is your favourite Christmas movie, and Christmas time food?	Elf. We watch it every year. My wife made me watch it every year after we got married, now we both make my kids watch it every year.
	Not really Christmas food specifically but around Christmas time my wife makes a certain Chex mix that I love. That or the scones she makes.
Thanks for building a truly useful site with no extra crap. My question...What are some of your favorite retailers, and why?	I wish I could answer this. I've had some really great retail experiences - both with pre-sales help and super easy returns / RMA service. If I retire from this one day I'll be happy to say who those were from.
What’s your favorite console?	My kids really aren't that into consoles, so we don't have a PS4/5/Xbox here. Tried to get them into the Switch but they don't play that either. The last console I spent significant time on was a Panasonic 3DO that I won in a competition and had Street Fighter for.
Thank you for everything with that website. It's been a godsend as I build PCs for friends and friends of friends. I only have one question. Why doesn't Amazon appear in the price history graphs?	We only show price history for the retailers when we have permission to.
Thanks for helping me build my first PC this spring. If I have to ask a question... what's your favourite pizza?	Pepperoni from Via313 (Detroit style). manirelli is from Chicago so I'm sure he's a bit opinionated on this question.
Pcpartpicker but for bikes? I heard this almost happened. Im in the market for a new bike and a site like that sounds so awesome!	We launched a cycling site, ran it for roughly a year, and then decided to shut it down. It just didn't work out unfortunately.
How many times have you built your own PC?	For myself personally? Lots of little odd systems here and there for linux servers, experiments and whatnot, so probably a couple dozen. For work related stuff, both at my old job and via PCPP, several dozen more.
What do you think was the break trough point in your sites history. When did you really get things going?	I'd say the inflection point happened probably April 2011. That's the point where I realized that this might not be a side project after all.
Avid PCPartPicker user here. What are your plans for the future of PCPartPicker?	PWA version later this month, benchmarks and youtube content again next year. Those are the main things. Otherwise lots of small things here and there.
Thanks for the help for years! How do you guys feel about newegg attempting to implement pcpartpicker like software internally on their own website?	I figured it was inevitable, and I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
1. Is it still coded using Django? 2. Any thoughts on making parts (heh) of it open source?	It's written mostly in Python and uses a lot of Django, yeah. No plans to open source it right now.
Would you consider becoming a stockist for pc parts in the future?	No plans on selling stuff ourselves. We have no real expertise in that and the margins are super tight.
u/pcpartpicker just wanted to ask, how are you?	Doing ok. Feeling like I'm finally starting to come out of a year's worth of development burnout.
Any more info on development for the app?	Hoping to release the PWA version this month.
What’s your favourite food Mr. Partpicker?	Sushi, but rarely get to eat it.
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I’m assuming that’s because of your location relative to the closest ocean	Oh I'm no connoisseur. I like just the simple stuff and it doesn't have to be on the coast or at a fancy place. The issue is that it's expensive, my kids won't eat it, and I don't want to eat at a restaurant because of COVID (and I've never been big on sushi takeout).
PWA PWA PWA!	Hopefully by the end of the month.
[deleted]	https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/june-15-1992-dan-quayle-misspells-potato-48017343
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Oh no. I'd never seen that. It hurt my soul.	And they all applaud at the end too, like a real life emperor has no clothes moment.
What kind of revenue do you make?	Slightly more than expenses.
First, Thank you for this wonderful tool. For suggestions, PCPP works pretty good in America and Europe, but when it comes to Asian countries, most of the times it's not very helpful as it shows very high prices. So, kindly see to this!	manirelli: If you have suggestions for retailers you can always send a message on our contact page: https://pcpartpicker.com/contact/
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For example - pcpp shows me a price, but if I directly go to the official site, it's very less. Like in amazon, most of the time, it's due to difference in sellers. So, is there an option to automatically select the cheapest option?	We have some special rules in place to prevent unreliable listings from showing but the default is to show the lowest price based on the information provided from the retailer. If you have a specific example I can take a look.
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Specialist-Hippo9328: Ok, thx. I got that. I don't have a specific example right now FUS_ROALD_DAHL: Maybe see if you can find one. It's not every day you have a developer offering to look at your specific issue.	ThoughtA: You're not wrong, but we see every single piece of feedback like this and devote time to them. For example, if you send us a ticket about it via our Contact page, you will get a human response 100% of the time.
oh, man. how blessed are you? that websites doing great. lol. is awesome.	manirelli: Very blessed and thankful every day.
I was hoping you'd shed some light on what you consider to be current gen PC specs for an AMD build. Think in the $1000 price range. Maybe something like the 3600 CPU and the rx 5700 GPU ect? Thanks!	manirelli: We've got a number of guides at and around that pricepoint: https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/
I really like your site, im sure it has helped countless people, including me, and saved us countless hours of researching. Theres not enough good things i can say to express our appreciation, so im gonna be real and talk about areas that need improvement. For me, that is price availability updata, at least for canada. i find it not as useful as its intended to be, half the time it doesnt show the store and their price. And its not even a small store, its big ones like amazon, canada computer, bestbuy! I mean i dont expect real time updates for every store, but i remember x570 tomahawk being available in many stores, different prices, but on pcpp, it showed no price no stores for months! And there were quite a few items that i found in regular big retailers that just simply didnt show on pcpp. So ultimately, i could only use pcpp for 3 things, keeping lists of diff builds, compatibility check, and if i dont know where to start looking for a component, i could use filters to narrow it down to get a few models, and google to compare and look deeper. I cannot rely on it for price alert anymore, i had to manually set up wish list with every retailer, and check them individually, which i believe is one of the problems pcpp was designed to resolve. I really wish i can start trusting pcpp on prices again.	ThoughtA: If you have any examples, now or in the future, we would very much appreciate you reporting them. Usually it's because there's an issue with the merchant's data (even the big ones), but that doesn't mean we necessarily wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
	You can send me a message on here, post in our Request Additions / Corrections Here forum section, or send us a contact request.
First of all, thank you so much for PCPartpicker. And for a question, what is your favorite feature in the works and/or one that is already in PCP? (Sorry if that made no sense.)	manirelli: Oh that has to be [redacted]
Probably got to this late, but I'll give it a shot maybe somebody gets to it. What parts should a long-term, sort of "layaway" build focus on first in regards to price changes? Meaning, what products fluctuate in price the fastest and/or most substantially? Also what parts should an amateur builder obtain first without worrying too much about compatibility/obsolescence if the rest of the build takes a bit more time to piece together? Might be a little vague I know, but basically I got a new job in tech where I will sometimes need to work remote and the work I do isn't going to be possible on the budget laptop I'm rockin' these days. My goal is to put together a PC powerful enough to remote my new job and hopefully a strong enough GPU to handle my gaming hobbies as well. Dual purpose, but I won't be able to buy it outright, was a tough year. It will be a build I slowly pay for and piece together over the next year hopefully. This might not be the type of question you guys are fielding but thought I'd give it a shot. Love to hear what the pros think. I've used PCPartPicker in the past to help friends put together their monster gaming stations when they first got started, I have a lot of faith and respect in this tool.	ThoughtA: If you don't have a use for the component before the build, I'd largely hold off on buying piecemeal over a long time. There's some wiggle room when it comes to parts that don't directly impact performance such as the case or PSU, but even there there will be advances made, aesthetics changed, and preferences evolved. Better to have a beefier emergency fund than a video card collecting dust on the floor when that video card could be cheaper later (current stock issues notwithstanding). That being said, if you're fight stock issues, see something in a particularly deep sale (if it impacts performance), or see something on a decent sale (and doesn't impace performance), then it's not so bad to have at it. Additionally, if you do have use for the component, such as throwing the GPU into your build that you plan to replace later, then any part is fair game.
Why don't you make the various flags and data points required for items as they're entered? Fans, for instance, not every one lists a decibel rating.	ThoughtA: We do have a number of data fields that are required for entry. However, requiring certain data fields would create more problems than they'd solve it. This is often the case for specs that are not always listed. If case fans required decibel rating to be added, there would be fans that are just never added to the site because that spec data is missing for them.
	If the data is there, we will always add it regardless of whether it's a required field. The data field required status mostly just helps with human error, which we try really hard to cut down as close to zero as possible.
Much doubt you will see this but ill drop it anyway. Pcpartpicker has helped me an insane amount. I have friends, friends of friends and other people who want to build PC's and I always use Pcpartpicker to ensure im not buying the wrong parts. This site has been one of the most useful sites and has helped me make some cash on the side (from building PC's), and I will be forever thankful for this (not to mention that the user compatibility is one of the best i have ever seen and so simple). I did want to ask a question however, all the prices accessible are always in american dollars (which I take is where most your customers are from) but has it ever been thought to move it to a more world wide option and show prices in the selected countries. In each country in the world there are places where people buy from. I feel this would add on to make things quicker and simpler. For example: South Africa has a site called evetech.co.za Switzerland has a site called digitec (Of course there are many more, but these are the primary ones)	manirelli: We currently support 37 different countries. The country dropdown is in the top right corner of the site. If you have additional retailer recommendations please send them via our contact page: https://pcpartpicker.com/contact/
Bruh this is cool. 1. Will you ever add micro center as a price option? 2. Do you think you will ever make a dark mode for the website?	We’d love to work with them. We had some discussions with them but then they stopped responding.
	On desktop the switch is on the top right corner of the site. On mobile, tap the profile icon and then the switch.
Philip, Brent, Jenny, everyone...thank you so much. I'm a longtime lurker here, but my brother and dad are the engineers in the family; I'd never built a PC. When my old prebuilt started to slow down last year, I decided to give it a shot. I built the whole thing through your website; it's an AMD build with an RX 5700. In total it cost me just under $900, way less than I expected to spend (though I later sprung for a fancy 1440p monitor, also found through your site). Four different retailers delivered my stuff over the next week, I inexpertly threw it together, and it runs like a dream. I can't imagine trying to do it without PCPartPicker. Now I'm playing Cyberpunk smoothly on Ultra settings while the internet implodes about it not working on their machines. All thanks to you guys. So I guess my question is...do you feel the love and appreciation for what you do every day? Because we're sending it your way.	Thanks for the kind words. :). Definitely feel appreciated. Definitely.
Yo! I used your site to build my first rig a few months back. What do you think the new Intel series of CPUs will look like?	manirelli: Visually? The same as the others :) I try not to crystal ball too hard on future components. Build with what is available unless there are solid releases dates (and reasonable supply).
Hi Philip! I LOVE what you built. about five years ago, my son was getting interested in pc's and wanted to build one. I was clueless and found you site. I was able to learn how to ask my son the right questions by reading the forum, and then got suggestions and critiques on my virtual build. I ordered the parts directly from your handy dandy list of pricing and availability, they came in and we built his first pc. He was off and running and has been using your site to help classmates build their own machines. I don't have a question, just want to thank you for developing a useful and easy-to-use tool for people who are not computer inclined. I hope that this venture has served you well and you continue for as long as I might ever need your help. Best wishes, Mike	That's awesome!
I think all one needs to know the least number lives you've made better is to look at the number of subscribers just on this sub. Thank you! Question: 1. One of the things I noticed is that whenever there is a new price for a product that is listed on the retailers the website tracks, there is a delay before the information is updated. Sometimes that delay is significant such that the listed price won't last before your websites starts to reflect it. Do you have an strategies to minimize that to the point that all we need to do is just visit your website for all of our purchase needs? 2. Will you allow users to submit links or embed video links to products review so that people can just watch it on your site as they browse?	On 1), most of the time there is a lag is from how long it takes for the retailer to send us the price data. We push for updates as frequently as we can get, but some retailers only update their price data (for us) once a day. On fast moving products that can mean that we show stale prices. 2). We can certainly look into that. I've seen a few other people mention linking to other product reviews, so that's something I can chat with our team about.
Why do my fans never turn off? Running an old ASRock motherboard with an AMD Phenom II processor. BIOS is updated, latest update of Windows 10, all updated drivers, etc. 2 fans plugged into a splitter to the fan header on my motherboard + 2 more plugged straight into my power supply + the cpu cooler fan all stay running when my computer goes to sleep (on it’s own, or when forced to sleep). Monitor still goes to standby after 10 mins. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I already tried a clean install of Windows with no background apps running and fans still stayed running.	manirelli: The fans plugged into your PSU molex will run at 100% - that is a limitation of molex. Modern boards can control fan speeds on some 3pin headers but one that age may not be able to. It will depend on the specific hardware (mobo/fans) involved. Feel free to stop by our discord and ask in the troubleshooting section. Pictures will be helpful. http://discord.gg/pcpartpicker

So I got minecraft for windows 10 on pc with the intent of playing online with my son’s on Nintendo switch. Now we have experienced a tonne of issues which some I have successfully gotten past, like permissions through Xbox for kids. Now the main issue is Microsoft login being consistent on the pc, which I am using for the server. Another issue is that when I was able to get logged in on Microsoft I was unable to see any of my kids online, then eventually I couldn’t see them in my friends list at all. If I re-add them it shows they are my friend already and sometimes show online and sometimes show offline regardless of them being online. Now after I have rebooted my laptop it no longer will sign in to Microsoft. It comes up with a connection error. I have done an uninstall and reinstall and it worked for one play, then the same series of issues until I reboot and can’t sign in anymore. It got to the point today where minecraft would just hang while loading. Like what the hell is doing on with this? I have searched these issues and don’t find there being much info I can find, yet my brother is having issues with setting thing up with his kids, minus the Nintendo part. Any help will be appreciated. I’m almost at the point of trying to get a refund for the game, it’s a pretty bad experience.
Thanks for your time.

Minecraft over LAN? normally my girlfriend plays on the switch with us (me on PC and my girls on Xbox) connected to Wi-Fi playing locally. we have done this a hundred times. we haven't done this however, in the last few months as we were moving and such. we tried to do it again and we cant get the switch to recognize there is a game. usually when you hit play, you go over to friends, and its there to show that we are in a game and we can all join, PC and Xbox are no issue but the switch wont see it. we have tried resetting, verifying Wi-Fi connection, etc. but no luck. I don't know if this is related or not but her account name changed. we read that there was a merging of accounts of some kind, but she never had more then 1 account. it now shows some new name. while she don't know how to get it to her old name/account. we did friend the new one but the game still doesn't show. i don't know if this is related or separate issues but we have tried for a week and cant figure it out. it randomly worked once were it showed locally, but no idea why it worked or how to get it to do it again. and because of it being a different account for some reason, she didn't have any of her in game items that she normally had (we play in the same world every time). addition info: the new account must not really be completely new, because at one point on my own account it showed her old account was online when she was on the new account, and it would show offline as soon as she got off. so they are somehow connected.

Creeping Winter is upon us and spreading across all Minecraft Dungeons platforms! There are plenty of things to do on your quest to take down the Wretched Wraith, in addition to a new free update with Daily Trials and new camp merchants. As always, the team has been hard at work on gameplay balancing and a wealth of bug fixes.
This update has a few different version numbers depending on the platform you're playing on. But don’t fret! They’re the same versions with the same features, changes, and fixes outlined below as long as you're running version 1.4.X.X.
More details on Creeping Winter can be found at: aka.ms/CreepingWinterFAQ
If you have found any bugs, please report to the bug tracker: bugs.mojang.com
Creeping Winter DLC:

• A creeping winter is slowly taking over everything it touches, and the source of its chilling power is a powerful creature known as the Wretched Wraith
• Take on three new missions and face new enemies such as the Illusioner and Iceologer
• As you hunt down the source of corruption, you’ll discover new armor, weapons, and artifacts below the snow and sleet
• Two new player skins and the Arctic Fox pet

New Features – Free For All Players:

• Daily Trials – New challenges every day that make wild changes to the game mechanics which provide difficult, experimental, or fun challenges for you to overcome and earn powerful rewards. There are four new pieces of gear to earn, exclusive to Daily Trials! Learn more at the Daily Trials FAQ.
• New camp merchants to rescue during missions, such as the Blacksmith to upgrade gear and the Gift Wrapper to gift items to other players
• New weapons and armor exclusive to Daily Trials, as well as two new artifacts and six new enchantments spread across the game. Buzz into combat using new tools such as the Beenest, the Beenest Armor, and the Tumblebee enchantment!

Changes:

• Added a Map Legend, showing new rewards, secret locations, and captured merchants
• New achievements and trophies to unlock for Jungle Awakens and Creeping Winter
• After losing a life, players are now given a bundle of arrows if their they had less than one full bundle
• The host of an online game can now toggle Private Game so friends can’t join unless they’re invited
• Balance Changes
  • Shortbow / Longbow / Bow: Increased ammo 50%
  • Cutlass: Changed attack combo from 4 to 2 attacks
  • Pickaxe: Changed attack combo to 1 attack
  • Daggers: Increased dagger attack range by 25%
• Battlestaff now drops in Lower Temple
• Light Feather now triggers all rolling enchantments

All Platform Fixes:

• Crashes / Performance
  • Fixed several crashes that occurred during gameplay across all platforms
  • Fixed the game freezing after activating Flaming Quiver, Fireworks Arrow, and Torment Quiver at the same time on Nintendo Switch
• General
  • Made dozens of improvements and fixes to Text-to-Speech throughout the game
  • Fixed players getting disconnected from a session if the host experienced low FPS during the loading screen
• Gameplay
  • The Corrupted Cauldron can no longer be insta-killed
  • Fixed players having no arrows and health potion not working if getting disconnected from a game during load screen, then reconnecting
  • Using soul related items while wearing soul related gear no longer results in the player getting propelled into the air (MCD-1810)
  • Fixes to inventory salvage issues
  • Fall damage has changed to percentage of health, regardless of armor worn
• Graphical
  • Fixed the gates flickering when down on Overgrown Temple
  • Fixed the ending cinematic becoming choppy during online multiplayer
• Audio
  • Updated lobby chest close sound to better fit close action
  • Fixed missing sound when pressing the last button in the puzzle on Dingy Jungle
  • Fixed background music randomly stopping on Lower Temple
  • Redstone Golem mines no longer produce sound when Master Volume is set to 0%
  • Fixed cinematic voiceover language not changing after the system's preferred language is changed
  • Fixed menu sound effects not playing when selecting Threat Level VII
• User Interface
  • Fixed the controller disconnect prompt not disappearing after reconnecting a controller (MCD-1584)
  • Fixed the door at the end of Dingy Jungle prompting "Travel" instead of "Exit"
  • Fixed a rare issue that showed an incorrect 'P0' indicator on the Mission Select screen in local multiplayer, causing input issues
  • Fixed the white background appearing briefly during rewards screen after opening the chest
  • Panda Plateau now shows the proper loading screen for hidden missions
  • Added a spinning icon animation to the Microsoft account sign in screen
  • Altered the teleport menu so it will close if a button is pressed that isn’t bound to a specific target player

Xbox One Fixes:

• Improved title stability after being disconnected from Xbox Live
• Fixed a crash that occurred when the active profile signed out during the mission victory countdown screen
• Fixed a crash that occurred when signing out of the active profile whilst viewing the Mission Select screen at the camp
• After resuming from a suspended state on the Start Screen, the title no longer erroneously displays a 'User signed out' message
• Fixed players being unable to accept friends’ invitations after resuming the game from suspension while it was launched and suspended in offline mode
• Fixed the game crashing when leaving a game session using a secondary profile after first disconnecting and reconnecting the controller

Nintendo Switch Fixes:

• Fixed a crash when pressing the Available now button for Jungle Awakens with guest controller
• Fixed news not appearing if not logged into a Microsoft account

PlayStation 4 Fixes:

• Fixed players invited to an online session by someone other than the host not receiving the invite

Jungle Awakens
It's finally here the first DLC, Jungle Awakens has been officially released in patch 1.3.2.0. There has been alot of additions and bug fixes along with it.
It is available for purchase digitally on Windows, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation™ 4.
This DLC is also available for players who have already purchased Minecraft Dungeons: Hero Edition or the Hero Pass Upgrade. More details on Jungle Awakens can be found at: aka.ms/JungleAwakensFAQ
If you are looking to discuss anything regarding Jungle Awakens join the live discussion: redd.it/hjbwih
If you have found any bugs report to the bug tracker: bugs.mojang.com
New Features:

• Lower Temple
  
  • All players will be able to unlock this new secret mission and discover new loot!
• News
  
  • The latest news for Minecraft Dungeons is now shown in the main menu

Changes:

• Obsidian Pinnacle
  • Reduced minimum threat level from V to IV to make the boss less difficult to beat (letting more players unlock Adventure mode)
• Soul Siphon
  • Made each soul collected respect your soul gather bonus
  • Reduced amount of souls per pop a little
  • Reduced chance a little
• Exploding
  • Increased explosion radius by 50%
• Fire Aspect
  • +100% damage
• Poison Cloud
  • +50% damage
• Thundering
  • +25% damage
• Pets
  • Half HP
  • 50% damage reduction
  • Increased attack damage 10%
• Llama
  • Increased attack speed 15%
• Iron Golem
  • 25% more health
• Wolf
  • Increased movement speed 15%
• Life Steal Aura
  • Increased life steal 3% -> 6%
  • Capped the damage on which life-steal is based to the actual health of the target
• Radiance
  • Reduced radiance melee range to 750 (same as ranged)
  • Fixed issue causing radiance heal amount to scale twice as much as it should (effective reduction at Apocalypse -50%)
  • Increased radiance ranged trigger chance to 20% -> 50%
• Leeching
  • Increased healing 4/6/8% -> 5/7/9%
• Shockwave
  • Increased damage 20 -> 35
  • Increased projectile base speed by 13%
  • Fixed missing notify
• Snowing
  • Reduced stun duration of snowball 3s -> 2s
• Health/Speed Synergy
  • Synergy now triggers on Lightning Rod and Corrupted Beacon when it is activated
• Soul Speed
  • Max stack reduced from 100 to 5
  • Increased speed bonus from 1% to 5%
  • Increased duration from 2,3,4, to 3,5,7 seconds
  • Removed soul-amount multiplier for the speed bonus on collected soul (each visual soul == one stack)
• Anima Conduit
  • Removed soul amount multiplier on soul collection
  • Increased effect from 1/2/3% to 2/4/6% per visual soul collected
  • Now triggers on any kill source
• Soul Gathering
  • Reduced Soul Gathering on all gear 2->1
  • Soul Gathering is now collected from all gear no matter what kind of kill it is
  • All soul themed enchantments now give +1 Soul Gathering (added bullet point to UI)
  • All soul themed permanent enchantments now increase the item's natural soul gathering
  • Increased soul bar max souls 50 -> 300
  • Added error feedback to soul bar when you have too little souls
• Soul Knife
  • Increased damage 40%
• Soul Scythe
  • Increased range by about 20%
  • Increased damage by 35%
  • Increased splash multiplier 0.4 -> 0.75
• Soul Bow
  • Increased ammo stack from 40 -> 50
• Harvester
  • Increased cost 25 -> 40
  • increased cooldown 1s -> 4s
  • Max damage also effectively increased by 60% due to damage being DAMAGE PER SOUL
  • Removed variable soul cost
• Corrupted Beacon
  • Increased Cost 1 -> 2
  • Added cooldown 2.5s
  • Increased beam radius 150 -> 200 unreal units
  • Increased damage by 100%
  • Fixed bug causing the armor property bonus damage to be applied twice. (E.g. reduced damage bonus from Soul Robe compared to before)
  • Fixed bug in soul cost which was making it not drain correctly
• Lightning Rod
  • Increased cost 10 -> 15
  • Added cooldown 2s
  • Increased radius 300 -> 350
  • Increased damage 30 damage per soul -> 60 damage per soul
  • Max damage also effectively increased by 50% due to damage being DAMAGE PER SOUL
  • Removed variable soul cost
• Soul Healer
  • Increased cost 20 -> 50
  • Increased cooldown 1s -> 5s
  • Increased healing allies spark start speed 100% and acceleration 150%
  • Healing per soul 10 -> 4
  • Removed variable soul cost
• Torment Quiver
  • Increased cooldown 1s -> 6s
  • Increased soul cost 10 -> 30
• General Soul Gathering Changes
  • Your non-soul item kills still give souls
  • All your pet kills give souls
  • All ally player kills where either the player or the kill is within 1200 range, you get souls too
  • Number now shown in the HUD next to soul bar for changes to souls
  • Soul Gathering bonus from armors reduced 100% -> 50%

​
Bug Fixes:

• Crashes / Performance
  • Fixed several crashes that could occur during gameplay and improved stability across all platforms
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when joining an online game
  • Controls are no longer unresponsive while interacting with a merchant or Camp chest and getting kicked or disconnected from an online session
  • Fixed a crash that occurred while host was fighting the Heart of Ender and other players were below the arena, waiting by the jump pads
  • Potential fix for crash that occurs when there's no proper audio device connected
  • Fixed a crash that occurred when docking and undocking during a loading screen on Nintendo Switch
  • Fixed a crash that could occur on PC when pressing Enter on the Add Friend screen
  • Fixed an infinite loading screen that could occur after joining another player's session after reconnecting to Xbox Live while in a suspended state during single player gameplay
  • Fixed an infinite loading screen that could occur when attempting to proceed past the title screen after being forcibly signed out during a loading screen
• General
  • Fixed some issues with Windows Store players receiving the "Unable to verify game ownership" error (MCD-1230)
  • Added a notification when a player leaves the game during online multiplayer
  • Fixed the game getting stuck in offline game when removing a second player from the main menu
  • Starting an offline game after the host of an online game forcibly disconnects no longer launches into a mission-camp hybrid (MCD-165)
  • Kicked players can no longer rejoin the session without an invitation if they were kicked during the reward screen
  • Players are no longer able to send invitations or join themselves through the Xbox app
• Gameplay
  • Fixed camera issues that could occur when players simultaneously jumped off a cliff
  • Fixed Evokers spawning too many Vex
  • Fixed dying on some ledges in Obsidian Pinnacle without falling off
  • Fixed some sections of Camp that caused players to get out of bounds (MCD-457)
  • Fixed players getting stuck in a pit on Squid Coast
  • Players can no longer fall off the edge at the start of the secret Rune Room
  • Players can no longer roll onto platforms in Cacti Canyon before they’re raised
  • Arrows no longer auto-target dead mobs until their bodies disintegrate
  • Fixed Redstone Golems not attacking players if attacked from a far distance
  • Fixed an item duplication glitch
  • Fixed the Cores not animating during the Redstone Monstrosity fight during online multiplayer
  • Shooting a Key Golem with Trickbow or Heavy Crossbow no longer causes arrows to loop back and forth around them
• Audio
  • Fixed Witch potion bottle breaking sounds
  • Fixed Redstone Monstrosity and Arch-Illager sound effects not affected by master volume setting
  • Fixed sound effects for some artifacts not playing when encountering large groups of mobs
• User Interface
  • The "Start Game" button on the main menu now defaults to the last selected mode
  • Fixed missing characters in Korean localization the enchantment and brightness screens (MCD-1394)
  • 'Lobby Chest' is now just called 'Chest'
  • Burning enchantment now has the proper description, stating that it "damages nearby enemies"
  • Artifacts can no longer hover over weapon and armor slots on the Inventory screen
  • Flaming QuiveTorment QuiveFireworks no longer overlap with arrows on the HUD
  • Fixed overlapping buttons on the main menu in non-widescreen resolutions
  • Fixed corrupted Fireworks Arrow animation
  • Power and level of consumable items no longer on the HUD in online multiplayer
  • Fixed mob health bars get wider as the game progresses
  • The friend list now updates properly after kicking a player
  • Fixed the friend list automatically scrolling when clicking buttons or hovering the "Join" button
  • The host of an online multiplayer game now always appears at the top of the player list

DISCLAIMER — This is a big long boring post of me just whining about something pretty trivial for any normal person. I’m a piece of shit and a crybaby. I honestly don’t recommend reading it because it’s absolutely useless but hey, if you need to get your mind off something, feel free to listen to me whine
It’s 11:05 pm, I’m getting ready for bed. Just staring at my Xbox’s home screen, then I scroll through my friend’s list. (I appear offline all the time, my internet won’t let me talk to anyone so I don’t want them to invite me to something and have to say no) I see my old best friend, call him Dill, is on. I was excommunicated from him by his parents. They said I was a bad influence, and I guess that was just because me and Dill were both deconverting from Christianity together and bouncing ideas off each other and finding solidarity with each other. We were like the only ones we knew who were atheists. But yeah, his parents were dipshits and thought hurting me for sure (and maybe hurting him, I can’t know for sure) would stop him from thinking. Anyways, Dill was online, and in a party. My controller occasionally double clicks A so it’s risky to check who’s in the party cuz I might accidentally join it, but I always do it anyways. I just want so badly to be in that party, talking to Dill like we used to. He has a new friend now that he’s always playing with. I guess he replaced me, but I never could replace him. I don’t know how to feel. Good for Dill, angry at him, hurt, sad for me... idk. In any case, I’m glad he isn’t quite as alone as I am. Maybe he’s happier... Well, anyway, another old friend was in the party, and he was playing something Dill wasn’t, Minecraft. On our old realm, back when I had a friend group... And even though I was appearing offline, he invited me! Tbh I never liked this old mutual friend of mine and Dill’s that much and we weren’t close, but he’s a good guy and pretty fun. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, it’s almost easier sometimes to stay alone when you’re this lonely. But I pushed myself and accepted. Like I mentioned, my internet is shit and won’t let me play online, but I foolishly let my hopes get up and started planning how I’d say hi, if I’d talk or use text chat, anticipated what he might say. Then the infinite loading screen I’m so used to happened, and it never connected, leaving me with a pit in my stomach and the lonely music of Minecraft menus playing in my ears. I’ve never felt so strongly what that music was supposed to evoke, just pure and utter solitude, without hope of ever being near another human. It was transcendental and beautiful, in a way, even though it hurt me so badly.
I wanted, I had hoped, that our old mutual friend would tell Dill I joined and he would drop his multiplayer game and come see me and we’d talk and catch up and things would be good again. I was a fool, and I shouldn’t have hoped. Hope just makes coping that much harder.
I wanted to let Dill know I got him a present too. We’re fileshared, and I knew I couldn’t actually buy him anything because of his batshit parents, but if I bought a game on XBL he would get it too. It would even start downloading when I downloaded it, unless he turned off that setting. So I got Doom 2016 and Doom: Eternal cuz I love the series and he did too, and were cheap enough on Black Friday, plus I figured his parents would never let a game with satanic imagery in there house willingly, so maybe this would work. Idk if he even knows he has it. I wanted to tell him, but I know I can’t. I miss him so much... God, I just wish I could talk to him
Idk, I guess writing that helped. Moral of the story is Minecraft music is seriously bad for your health if you’re lonely, do not listen to it alone, it hurts!
(Also I’m still lonely af rn, but also tired af. I’m just gonna go to bed. But if anyone wants a Minecraft buddy who’s ok-ish at the game but has shit internet, hmu in dm’s. Realistically, as long as your NAT is Open and we play around 8-12 pm central time, it should be decent and playable. Idfk, just thought I’d offer that if anyone needs someone to talk to. Can’t guarantee I won’t ghost you, as that is my typical thing these days for some reason. I’m just a dick, I guess)

Jensen Huang: (01:13) (silence) Welcome to my kitchen. I hope all of you are staying safe. We’re going to talk about an amazing GPU today. Modern GPUs are technology marvels. It is the engine of large industries from design, cloud AI, to scientific computing, but it is the gamers and their insatiable demand that is the driving force of the GPU, pooling their GPUs to create the largest distributed computer ever. A million gamers united to counterstrike the COVID-19 Coronavirus. The result was 2.8 exoflops, five times the processing power of the world’s largest supercomputer, to simulate the virus. Folding At Home was able to simulate a hundred milliseconds, a 10th of a second in the life of the coronavirus and captured the moment it opens his mouth to infect the human cell. Scientists believe this is also its moment of weakness. Jensen Huang: (02:05) Thank you all for joining this historic fight. We’re going to talk about computer graphics and the work we’re doing to push the boundaries. We love computer graphics and have advanced it incredibly in the time of Nvidia. As the technology advanced, the expressiveness of the medium has made graphics an invaluable tool to help us understand our world, create and explore new worlds. Tell stories that inspire us. From science to industry to the arts, computer graphics has made a profound impact on the world. And for that, we are privileged to have contributed. Jensen Huang: (02:38) We’re going to talk about gaming and the infinite ways that gaming is expanding. G-Force PC gaming is large and thriving. It’s open and rapidly advancing technology, combined with the amazing creativity of the community makes magic. Anyone could be a broadcaster. Add a G-Force and you have a personal broadcast station, pros stream their practices, experts stream tips and tricks, friends stream to friends just to hang out. There are over 20 million streamers. Games have become a new art medium. In Minecraft gamers can build their work of art. Machinima artists create cinematics made from game assets. Tens of millions are using games to express their creativity. Inside a computer simulation, any sport can become e-sport. Virtual NASCAR and F1 are already attracting top racers. Like sports, e-sports captures the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat and the human drama of athletic competition. E-sports is on its way to be the biggest sport. Jensen Huang: (03:38) I have something special for all the G-Force gamers around the world, four gifts. I hope you like them, and you’ll find new ways to game. First, big news. Fortnite is turning RTX on. Now Minecraft and Fortnite, the number one and number two most played games in the world have RTX on. Fortnight will get Ray trace, shadows, reflections, ambient inclusion, and DLSS too. These effects look fantastic with the art style of Fortnight. I can’t wait to see a Fortnight concert with RTX on. The last one with Travis Scott was watched by 28 million people. Epic made a trailer for you. Let’s play it now. 75% of G-Force gamers play e-sports. e-sports is a game of milliseconds, reaction times a combination of the gamer and the machine. Let me explain. This is Valerie. In this example, the opponent is traveling at 1500 pixels per second, and it’s visible in this opening for only 180 milliseconds. A typical gamer has a reaction time of 150 milliseconds, from photon to action. You can only hit this opponent if your PC adds less than 30 milliseconds. Most gamers have latencies far greater than 30 milliseconds. Many up to 100 milliseconds. Jensen Huang: (05:12) Today we’re announcing a new e-sports technology called Nvidia reflex. Nvideo reflex optimizes the rendering pipeline across CPU and GPU to reduce latency by up to 50%. in September, we’re releasing reflex with our game ready driver. Over 100 million G-Force gamers will instantly become more competitive. Valarent, Fortnight, Apex Legends, Call Of Duty War Zone, and Destiny Two will be the first to integrate reflex technology. Jensen Huang: (05:40) E-sports pros and enthusiasts strive for zero latency. For you, we’re announcing an insanely fast and beautiful display. A 360 Hertz Gsync display designed for e-sports. This display has a builtin precision latency analyzer. Just connect your mouse. The Nvidia 360 Hertz Gsync e-sports displays are arriving this fall from Acer, Alienware, Asus and MSI. We’ve made a video comparing gaming on a 60 Hertz, 144 Hertz and 360 Hertz display. You can see immediately how 360 Hertz display will help you target and track an opponent. Jensen Huang: (06:21) For the 20 million live streamers, we have something really cool for you. Nvideo broadcast turns any room into a broadcast studio. Nvideo broadcast runs AI algorithms trained by deep learning on NVIDIA’s DGX supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the world. Effects like audio noise removal, virtual background effects, whether graphics or video and web cam auto framing is a virtual camera person tracking you. Jensen Huang: (06:44) These AI effects are amazing. Available for download in September and runs on any RTX GPU. Brandon and G-Force marketing will now show you in a video broadcast. Brandon: (06:55) Hey everybody. I’m Brandon and I’m very excited today to talk to you about our Nvidia broadcast app. Like many of you I’ve been home a lot more lately. I’ve been video conferencing all day and then gaming and streaming all night. And I have a very basic webcam microphone set up. Nvidia broadcast makes these things supercharged with a lot of new awesome features that really bring it out, using the power of AI and our RX GPUs. The first one ,I want to talk about is noise removal. So I’ve asked my girlfriend to join me with a blow dryer here and that distracting sound makes it very hard to understand what I’m saying, but when I turn on noise removal in Nvidia broadcast, you find that it’s completely gone. And that blow dryer is still going. Brandon: (07:32) But Nvidia broadcast isn’t just awesome audio features. There’s some really exciting video features as well. Let’s take a look. First up, we have the ability to blur your background, which you may notice that I need because I have a very cluttered and messy room. But when I turn this background blur feature on, all of a sudden I get this really classy effect and I can adjust the strength of that from low to high and everything in between. Or if I want, I could actually replace the background altogether. Now I’m in a space station with the magic of AI. It’s that easy. Or if I want to jump into some gameplay, I can remove the background altogether and jump into some Valoran. And now I’m playing with a green screen effect without actually having to have one at home. I don’t have to play good, but at least I can look good. Sometimes when I’m video conferencing or doing a just chatting stream, I want to zoom in to get a more personal connection with the audience. But the problem is, I bounce around so much, it’s easy for my head to get out of frame. With the auto frame feature, it’s like having your own personal cameraman that follows you wherever you go. So if, for example, I want it to reach over and grab my cool Valoren hat, and show it to everybody, it follows me every step of the way. I just find Nvidia broadcast to be really exciting, as both a streamer and as someone who works from home. The ability to remove distracting noise, improve your background and keep yourself in the center of the frame are all awesome features in one app. And I just can’t wait for you guys to try it. Jensen Huang: (09:05) A new form of art has emerged from gaming called Machinima. Artists are using game assets to create cinematics. There’s been tens of billions of views on YouTube. Most are shorts. Some are even recreating entire classic movies. It’s becoming a whole new art genre. Today, I’m going to show you an app that will make these cinematics amazing. It’s called Nvidia Omniverse Machinima. It’s an app build on our omniverse 3d workflow collaboration platform. Omniverse is a universal design tool asset exchange with a viewer, based on photorealistic path tracing. The engine is designed to be physically accurate, simulating light, physics, material and artificial intelligence. We have connectors for most third party design tools, like 3DS Max, Maya, Photoshop, Epic Unreal, Rhino, and many more. The Machinima app brings in elements and assets from games and third party collections like turbo squid, and lets you mix and compose them into a cinemtic. Jensen Huang: (10:03) … [inaudible 00:10:00] like TurboSquid and lets you mix and compose them into a cinematic. Creators can use their webcam to drive our AI-based post-estimator to animate characters, drive face animation AI with your voice, add high fidelity physics like particles and fluids, make materials physically accurate, and then when done with your composition and mixing, render film quality cinematics with your RTX GPU. NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima, beta in October. Sign up at nvidia.com/ machinima. Jensen Huang: (10:31) Let me show you a demo. We created it in a few days. We started with assets from Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. You’re going to love this. Speaker 1: (11:15) Whoa, that was close. You guys are getting better. Jensen Huang: (11:28) For 40 years since NVIDIA researcher Turner Whitted first published his paper on ray tracing, computer science researchers have chased this dream to create super-realistic virtual worlds with real-time ray tracing. NVIDIA seeing the ultimate limits of rasterisation approaching focused intense efforts over the past 10 years to realize real-time ray tracing on a large scale. Jensen Huang: (11:49) At SIGGRAPH two years ago, we announced the NVIDIA RTX. Now two years later, it is clear we have reinvented computer graphics. NVIDIA RTX is a full- stack invention. RTX starts with a brand new GPU architecture, but it is so much more. It includes new engine tech and a bunch of new rendering algorithms. RTX is a home run. All major 3D APIs have been extended for RTX. RTX is supported by all major 3D tools. RTX tech is incorporated into all major game engines. There are hundreds of games in development and thousands of research papers of new rendering and AI algorithms enabled by RTX. The RTX GPU has three fundamental processors: The programmable shader that we first introduced over 15 years ago, RT core to accelerate the rate triangle and ray-bounding box intersections and AI processing pipeline called tensor core. Tensor core accelerates linear algebra that is used for deep neural network processing, the foundation of modern AI. Jensen Huang: (12:52) AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. Computers that learn from data and write software that no humans can. The advances are nothing short of breathtaking. NVIDIA is doing groundbreaking work in this area. You might have seen our work in self-driving cars and robotics. Computer graphics and gaming will also be revolutionized by deep learning. Let me show you some recent works and the art of the possible. Jensen Huang: (13:15) The first video is a generative adversarial network that has learned to synthesize virtual characters of any artistic genre, including photorealistic. Second is a neuro network that animates a 3D face directly from voice. Speaker 2: (13:29) You require more Vespene gas. It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this. Jensen Huang: (13:35) The AI character can speak in any language, be any gender and even rap and sing. Jensen Huang: (13:41) Third is a character locomotion of infinite number of positions. Imagine negotiating arbitrary paths and obstacles. The fourth is reconstructing 3D from video. Imagine the possibilities, record video, interact in 3D. Jensen Huang: (13:59) This one is a deep learning model that learned the physics behavior of cloth animation. Finally, this deep learning model of ray tracing can predict colors of missing pixels so that fewer rays need to be cast and fewer pixels need to be fully rendered. We can achieve orders of magnitude speedups. AI is starting to play a giant role in the future of computer graphics and gaming. The powerful tensor cores in RTS GPUs will let us do AI in real time. Jensen Huang: (14:27) One of the first major AI computer graphics breakthroughs is DLSS. Here’s the challenge, real-time ray tracing is far more beautiful, but requires a lot more computation per pixel than rasterisation. The solution is to ray trace fewer pixels and use AI on tensor course to up res to super res, to a higher resolution and boost frame rate. Jensen Huang: (14:50) DLSS took nearly two years of intensive research. We built a supercomputer to train a network. The DLSS model is trained on extremely high-quality 16K offline rendered images of many kinds of content. Once trained, the model is downloaded into your driver. At runtime, DLSS 2.0 takes in low resolution aliased image and motion vector of the current frame and the high resolution previous frame to generate a high resolution current frame. Jensen Huang: (15:18) I think DLSS is one of our biggest breakthroughs in the last 10 years. Take a look at these images of Death Stranding, the latest game by Kojima Son. DLSS is sharper than native 4k and create a detail from AI that native rendering didn’t even show and the frame rate is higher. Jensen Huang: (15:36) Reviewers have loved DLSS 2.0. They say its quality beats out native rendering and runs even faster. You can play a 4k without a performance hit. Tensor core effectively gives RTX a two X performance boost. Let’s look at one frame trace of a game to see the processes of RTX in action. Jensen Huang: (15:55) Adding ray tracing to games dramatically increases the computation workload. Using shaders to do rate traversal and object intersection reduces the frame rate. We added the RT core, which reduces shared workload by 60%. RT core offloads the shaders by doing that ray triangle and ray-bounding box intersection calculations. Using the same methodology as Microsoft Xbox, the RT core is effectively a 34 teraflop shader and Turing has an equivalent of 45 teraflops while ray tracing. Jensen Huang: (16:27) Even with RT core the amount of time consumed is significant, so RT core and shaders have to run concurrently. Even then, 20 milliseconds is only 50 frames per second and still a step back and performance relative to previous generations. This is where the tensor core and DLSS come in, rendering to a lower resolution then using AI and super-fast tensor core to effectively double frame rate. Now you can get ray tracing, get high results and high frame rate at the same time. That’s the magic of the three processors of RTX. Jensen Huang: (17:03) Turing was our first-generation RTX GPU, combining ray tracing, programmable shading and AI. The flagship Turing had a ton of processing power: 11 shader teraflops, 34 RTT teraflops and 89 tensor teraflops. Jensen Huang: (17:20) Let me show you our new RTX GPU. Ampere is a giant leap in performance. Ampere does two shader calculations per clock versus one on Turing. 30 shader teraflops compared to 11. Ampere doubles ray triangle intersection throughput. Ampere’s RT core delivers 58 RT teraflops compared to Turing’s 34, and Ampere’s new tensor core automatically identifies and removes less important DNN weights. The new tensor core hardware processed the sparse network at twice the rate of Turing, 238 tensor flops compared to 89. Jensen Huang: (17:59) Ladies and gentlemen, NVIDIA’s Ampere GPU. Our second-generation RTX, 28 billion transistors built on Samsung [inaudible 00:18:09] NVIDIA custom process. All three processors double rates over Turing, a triple double. It connects to Micron’s new G6X, the fastest memories ever made. Jensen Huang: (18:20) The days of just relying on transistor performance scaling is over. Yet Amperes an incredible two times the performance and energy efficiency of Turing. At Nvidia, we use every engineering lever to squeeze every drop of performance out of the system, from architecture custom process design, circuit design, logic design, packaging, custom series IO, memory, power, and thermal design, PCB design software and algorithms. Thousands of engineers per generation, billions of dollars. Full-stack engineering and extreme craftsmanship is the hallmark of our GPS. Our performance, energy efficiency and low power are all world-class, and real application performance highlights Ampere’s new RT core. The more ray tracing is done, the greater the Ampere speed up. Ampere RT core doubles ray intersection processing. It’s ray tracing is process concurrently with shading and Ampere can render cinematic images with motion blur eight times faster than Turing. Let’s take a look at Ampere in action. Jensen Huang: (19:25) At our kitchen GTC a few months ago, we showed Marbles, the world’s first fully path-traced, photorealistic, real-time graphics. It was running on our highest end Turing Quadro RTX 8000. Turing was doing 720p, 25 frames per second. Today, we’re going to run an enhanced version of Marbles with even more special effects, and it is running at 1440p, 30 frames per second, over four times the performance. Jensen Huang: (19:56) Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy Marbles At Night. Jensen Huang: (21:17) Marbles is entirely path traced, no rasterization, all real time. There are hundreds of area lights, including spherical area lights. There’s no pre baking. Everything is dynamic. The depth of field is film quality and beautiful. Everything is dynamic. Diffuse GI, all dynamic. Jensen Huang: (21:46) There are hundreds of [bridge a bonds 00:21:49], 80 million triangles, materials are physically accurate, physics simulation and volume metric rendering in real time. DLSS 2.0 is doing the super resolution and AIG noising. Let’s compare Marbles Turing and Marbles Ampere. You could see dramatic visual quality jump of Ampere. Marbles on Turing runs at 720p, 25 frames per second. Marbles on Ampere runs a 1440p, 30 frames per second, more than four times the performance, and Ampere even did area lights and depth of field. A giant performance leap. Jensen Huang: (22:50) Today’s games are giant worlds, indoor and out, with photogrammetry, dense geometry and lots of characters. Games are over 200 gigabytes getting bigger. This is like 50,000 songs or 400 hours of streaming video. Games have pushed PCIO and file system sort of breaking point. Jensen Huang: (23:08) CPS copy files from disk can decompress the game image. This is fine when the story system was slow, 50 to 100 megabytes per second. Now with gen four PCI express and solid state drives PCs can transfer data at seven gigabytes per second, a hundred times faster. CPU copying data to memory and decompressing game images is now the bottleneck. Decompressing data from 100 megabytes per second hard drives takes only a few CPU cores. However, decompressing from seven gigabytes per second SSDs on PCIE gen four takes over 20 CPU cores. Today we’re announcing Nvidia RTX IO with three new advances: new IO APIs for fast loading and streaming directly from SSD to GPU memory, GPU losses decompression, and collaboration with Microsoft on direct storage for windows that streamlines the transfer of data from storage to GPU memory. Jensen Huang: (24:02) With Nvidia RTX IO, vast worlds will load instantly. Picking up where you left off will be instant. This is a very big deal for next generation gaming. Let me show you Ampere in action in one of the most anticipated games of 2020 CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk. This trailer is called scenes of cyberpunk RTX. It shows ray trace reflections, diffuse elimination, shadows, and ambient occlusion, and DLSS 2.0, enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, our new flagship GPU, the Nvidia G-Force RTX 3080 powered by Ampere, second generation RTX architecture. The Nvidia RTX 3080. I have one right here. Let me show it to you. It is beautiful. Look at this, the RTX 3080. It is wonderfully crafted. It’s going to look beautiful in your PC, and it lights up. Jensen Huang: (27:53) Now, let me tell you about some of the other exciting technologies inside. Turing uses G6, the fastest memories at that time. The industry thought that was the limit. For Ampere, we had to push through that limit, working with Micron, we designed the world’s first memories with PAM4 signaling, pulse amplitude modulation with four voltage levels that encode two bits of data each, 00011011. Jensen Huang: (28:18) Each voltage step is only 250 millivolts, so in the same period of time G6X can transmit twice as much data as G6. PAM4 is extreme singling technology, and it’s just becoming used in high speed networking. The Ampere thermal architecture is the first ever flow through design, working harmoniously with PC chassis cooling system, pulling in cool air from the outside, flowing through the GPU, and pushing hot air straight out the chassis. To allow room for a fan to flow air directly through the module, our engineers architect a super dense PCB design that is 50% smaller than previous, while adding the bigger Ampere GPUs, HDMI 2.1, PCI express 4.0 and G6X. Jensen Huang: (29:05) There are two independently controlled fans, the bracket front fan pulls cool air from the bottom and pushes the heated air out through the graphics card brackets. A backside pull-through fan passes cool air over the fence of the heat pipe and directs the hot air to the top and back of the chassis to be exhausted by the system fan. The 3080 flow-through system is three times quieter and keeps the GPU 20 degrees cooler than the Turing design. It can cool 90 Watts more than Turing. Jensen Huang: (29:35) The generational leap is ultimately the most important factor of new GPUs. A significant technology advance is needed to inspire content developers to create the next level of content and for the install-base to upgrade. Let’s see how the 3080 stacks up the previous generation architectures on the latest graphics intensive games. 3080 is faster than 20 ADTI. 3080 is twice the performance of 2080 at the same price, Ampere is the … Jensen Huang: (30:03) It’s a 2080 at the same price. Ampere is the biggest generational leap we’ve ever had. Ladies and gentlemen, Nvidia G-Force RTX 3080, our new flagship GPU. Powered by Ampere, our second generation RTX GPU architecture. Incredible amounts of processing in the shader, RT ray tracing core and tensor core for processing AI, 10 gigabytes of G6X, twice the processing power of 2080, and at the same price, starting at $699. Available September 17. One of our most popular GPUs is the 70 series, 970, 1070, 2070 were all hugely popular. You’re going to love the new RTX 3070, faster than the 2080 TI, the Turing enthusiast GPU priced at $1,200. Ladies and gentlemen, the new G-Force RTX 3070. Let me show it to you. Jensen Huang: (31:05) It’s a work of art. 20 shader teraflops, 40 RT teraflops, and 163 teraflops tensor core for AI processing. With eight gigabytes of G6, RTX 3070 is faster than the $1,200 RTX 2080 TI, starting at $499. Available in October. Every generation we pack in our best ideas to increase performance while introducing new features that enhance image quality. Every couple of generations, the stars aligned as it did with Pascal, and we get a giant generational leap. Pascal was known as the perfect 10. Pascal was a huge success and set a very high bar. It took the super family of Turing to meaningfully exceed Pascal on game performances without ray tracing. With ray tracing turned on, Pascal, using programmable shaders to compute ray triangle intersections, fell far behind Turing’s RT core, and Turing with ray tracing on reached the same performance as Pascal with ray tracing off. Jensen Huang: (32:11) On a technical basis, this was a huge achievement. The images are far more beautiful and reflection and shadow artifacts are gone, but gamers wanted more. They want every generation to be more realistic and higher frame rate at the same time. So we doubled down on everything, twice the shader, twice the ray tracing, and twice the tensor core, the triple double. Ampere knocks the daylights out of Pascal on ray tracing, and even with ray tracing on, crushes Pascal in frame rate. To all my Pascal gamer friends, it is safe to upgrade now. Amazing ray tracing games are coming. Activision and developer Treyarch are launching a new Call of Duty on November 13th. It’s a masterpiece and it looks incredible. They’re dynamic lights, ray tracing, shadows and ambient occlusion, DLSS 2.0, and Nvidia reflex super low latency technology. The last call of duty sold an amazing 30 million copies. Activision put together this trailer of never before seen footage. Enjoy. Let me talk to you about one more thing. Several years ago, we started building the Titan, pushing the GPU to the absolute limit to create the best graphics card of that generation. It was built in limited quantities, only through Nvidia. The distribution was limited. The demand surprised us. Creatives were making 4k movies, rendering cinematics, researchers built workstations for data science and AI, bloggers built broadcast workstations, flight and racing simulation fans built sim rigs. There is clearly a need for a giant GPU that is available all over the world. So we made a giant Ampere. Ladies and gentlemen, the RTX 3090. Come here, come here, papa. All right. 3090 is a beast, a ferocious GPU, a BFGPU, 36 shader teraflops, 69 RT teraflops, 285 tensor teraflops, and it comes with a massive 24 gigabytes of G6X. It comes with a silencer, a three slot dual axle flow through design, 10 times quieter, and keeps the GPU 30 degrees cooler than the Titan RTX design, but there’s more. The 3090 is so big that for the very first time we can play games at 60 frames per second in 8K. This is insane. Because it’s impossible for us to show you what it looks like on the stream, we invited some friends to check it out. Roll the clip. Speaker 3: (36:05) I’ve never been more excited to do anything. Speaker 4: (36:07) Oh. Speaker 3: (36:07) Are you kidding me? Speaker 4: (36:11) Oh my gosh. Speaker 5: (36:12) Oh my God. Speaker 6: (36:14) No way. Speaker 3: (36:15) This is f***ing incredible, dude. Speaker 5: (36:17) This is amazing. [inaudible 00:36:20] This is silly. Speaker 6: (36:24) My god, you can see Raymond’s [inaudible 00:36:27]. Speaker 3: (36:26) Look at this. Why is it so detailed? Speaker 6: (36:30) All right, all right, all right, move fast and shoot things. Speaker 4: (36:33) This is 8K, sir. I can see everything. Oh, I need a shoot you, though. Speaker 3: (36:36) Not a whole lot of people have seen something like this. Speaker 4: (36:38) This is so realistic. I feel like I’m really in battle. Speaker 5: (36:42) This is insane. Speaker 6: (36:44) Die, I want to look at the pretty things. There we go,. Speaker 5: (36:47) Dude, the ray tracing is insane on this. Speaker 3: (36:49) These are the sizzle reels that you see. Speaker 4: (36:51) This is basically hacks. Speaker 3: (36:53) And then it’s like, “It’ll never look like that,” but it does. Speaker 5: (36:57) I’m looking across the vistas, the grand vistas that are happening right now. Speaker 3: (37:01) Holy shit, look at this. Speaker 5: (37:02) This feels like a Disneyland experience. Oh, it is so smooth. It’s butter. Speaker 3: (37:07) Oh, it’s smooth as shit, dude. Speaker 5: (37:09) I can’t believe it’s not butter. Speaker 3: (37:10) I mean, this is game changing. There’s no other way to put it. My mind is blown dude. Wow. Jensen Huang: (37:20) It’s been 20 years since the Nvidia GPU introduced programmable shading. The GPU revolutionized modern computer graphics. Developers jumped on and invented clever algorithms, like shaders that simulate realistic materials, or post-processing effects for soft shadows, ambient inclusion, and reflections. Developers pushed the limits of rasterization beyond anyone’s expectations. Meanwhile, Nvidia GPU processing increased a stunning 100,000 fold. Gaming became a powerful technology driver. Gamers grew to billions, and gaming pushed into all aspects of entertainment and culture. If the last 20 years was amazing, the next 20 will seem nothing short of science fiction. Today’s Ampere launch is a giant step into the future. This is our greatest generational leap ever. The second generation Nvidia RTX, fusing programmable shading, ray tracing, and artificial intelligence gives us photorealistic graphics and the highest frame rates at the same time. Jensen Huang: (38:25) Once the holy grail of computer graphics, ray tracing is now the standard, and Ampere is going to bring you joy beyond gaming, and video reflex to improve your response time, and video broadcast turns any room into a studio. An omniverse machinima turns you into an animated filmmaker. We are super pleased with 3070, 3080, and 3090, the first three members of the Ampere generation. You’re going to feel a boost like never before. I can’t wait to go forward 20 years to see what RTX started. Homes will have holodecks. We will beam ourselves through time and space, traveling at the speed of light, sending photons, not atoms. In this future, G-Force is your holodeck, your lightspeed starship, your time machine. In this future, we will look back and realize that it started here. Thank you for joining us today and to all of our fans for celebrating the arrival of Ampere.

Hey fellow reditors,
This is an updated and rewritten post of one I posted a few month ago. There are new redditors and the list contains a lot more games now, so take a look if you like.
We are a group of old friends and we meet up twice a year for a long weekend of couch (offline) coop gaming and play a handful of times a month coop games online.
We already did this on other platforms but are really going strong on the switch. I think you can consider us Coop-Experts. We often notice that some of the games we play are not played by anyone else (no other parties in the online lobbies, very rare occasions of randoms joining us) so I guess I would like to use this post to
a) recommend some games we really liked
and
b) offer our expertise when some of you guys plan to play Coop (on- or offline) and have troubles/questions.
We have played almost all real coop games or have analyzed them to decide if we want to play them or not. So we pretty much have an opinion on most if not all coop games on the switch.
We are also playing some multiplayer games (YES! There absolutely IS a distinction between coop and Multiplayer games although this is way too often ignored when people speak about these kind of games on the internet. :) )
If you plan a weekend for couch COOP and want to know if a game can be recommended or need an answer on how a certain coop feature is implemented please just ask. Often times databases ( we obviously know about the great website www.co-optimus.com, but also they are not complete), official websites or even the digital storefront listings of games are quite vague on what modes can be played in which way, so we also had to resort to asking others (sometimes the devs themselves) for necessary details.
Not that many games offer their coop modes also for online play (we heard from devs, that the switch architecture is sometimes to blame) so these online coop games are rare.
I hope the following list of Coop Games can help some people to decide what to play when they have friends over. Maybe it will encourage a group to pick out one game as a coop project.
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Hopefully you guys can recommend some other coop titles that slipped through our net or get a discussion started on what are the best coop titles out there and what makes them great!
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I updated the following recommendations and put them in alphabetical order because they became so many (apparently we played a lot of games!) I gave them an out of the hip star rating (out of 5) which does was not discussed or deliberated on in group.
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Real Coop Games
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Aegis defenders (3 Stars) (couch only)
2 Player Tower Defense Plattformer. Game was short and neat. There was some iffy checkpointing and some framerate issues.
Blazerush (4 Stars) (couch tested, seems to have some online play as well)
Hidden Gem Alert! We downloaded this as a micro machines stlye racer because we played too much of Mario Kart. The custom game modes are really neat. There is football, races, death races, king of the hill and they are sometimes 2 on 2 coop sometimes simply multiplayer. But then we found a feature that I think I have never before seen in a racing game: the career mode can be played fully with 4 player local coop. Everyone working together against the CPU. This was a lot of fun. We played through it on 2 days. This game deserves a lot more attention. It looks and plays great. The vehicle variety is great and sometimes key to mastering a level. If you like racers you have to get this. We were utterly surprised by the quality of this title and it turned unexpectedly to a show stealer of a whole weekend. It also features online multiplayer but we have not found out if also the career can be played online coop.
Broforce (2 stars) (couch and online)
This is way more multiplayer than coop. fun romp but more action and less cooperation. We encountered some bugs (PS4 Version)
Catastronauts (4 Stars) (couch only)
A mix out of Overcooked and Lovers in dangerous spacetime, But brings a different vibe. IT can get very chaotic but this is a little less process focused so far (we are not completely done yet) so there is more room for error than in the overcooked games. This game seems a little like a cheap overcooked clone but it is better than that and is quite fun. Very nice: the voicework is over the top and spoofes “Nintendo speech” in games. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Crawl (4 Stars) (couch only)
Really unique and clever concept! It is coopetetive and changes you around in a 3 vs 1 setup. Great style. Give it a try. Takes a lot of getting used to but deserves more attention. We have only played it a few times because we are scared if we play it more we won’t play that much else. Experienced players will find a lot to like here since it is a great sort of working together against each other and it gets really tense towards the end.
Death Squared (5 Stars) (couch only)
Great Coop puzzler. (too few of those!) This is more brain and less controller input focused. So you try a few things but mainly you discuss what there is to do and what might work. Somebody gives a hypothesis and the other poke holes in it. Very fun. Leads to some levels where a player might have to too do only a small part of actual gameplay but still every character is vital to the solution of the puzzle. Quite laid back and not action heavy, but you have to concentrate and think a lot. Up to 4 player campaign coop offline.
Deru: The Art of Cooperation (4 Stars) (couch only)
Hidden Gem Alert. This is a really good puzzle, coop game that makes full use of cooperative gaming. It is great fun, cleverly designed and something I really recommend. The setup is simple: two players, one black, one white, have to traverse to their respective target locations. There are however laser mazes and other obstacles that are also black and white. You cannot hit the opposite colour or you are dead and that means the team failed. You can however block or destroy your own colour to open routes for the other player. It is used in very unique and clever ways and playing it is a delight. You feel really dumb until you feel really smart. When somebody remembers Shizoid on Xbox360 (the most coop game ever! Brain synchronisation!): this reminded me a bit of it. Utterly recommended. It is rather short though.
Disc Jam (5 stars) (couch and online)
Hidden gem alert. This is multiplayer or at least 2 on 2 but oh boy: This game is great. It looks hideous. Seriously the artstyle is haunting and normally it would be okay to pass on this at the first sight of a screenshot. But this is the best Mario Tennis/virtua tennis – Court like games on this generation. You have Longer rallies than other games in that manner which means that the point counter and the reward for a winning shot is constantly going up. Not that many interrupting animations. Very fast paced. Seriously try this out. This is the most competitive we get amongst each other (right next to Mario Kart) Up to 4 Players on- and offline however the switch version has no 2 online Players as a double online. You need to be 4 online players or 1 player to play online against other humans.
Escapists 2 (5 Stars) (couch and online)
We started this and were utterly confused. After 40 Minutes we were thinking that the game was nice but probably something we won’t stick with, since it asked a lot of tiresome prison day-to-day stuff and it felt like we were playing alongside each other and not really cooperating. That something changed and the game clicked. WE LOVED THIS! We played every level. Every DLC. Every coop escape (there are a few single player only escapes which would have loved to do coop as well!) This is really a unique game that makes you plan something and then realize said plans. Seriously after all this preparation your pulse is up to unhealthy levels! It is great jump of the couch moment fun when you flee from a tightly guarded prison. It has a strange saving system which is perfectly fine once understood.
Flat heroes (4 Stars) (couch only)
It was a really nice, small game with creative levels for four squares to play through. I think this was one of those games that we started and played to completion in one sitting. We were totally captivated by it. Easy to pick up and play.
Full Metal Furies (4 Stars) (couch and online)
We have recently started this and are around 30% through and really dig it so far. Great and very stable 4 Player online on switch (which is not always the case). All 4 player classes are completely different and the game asks specific players to kill specific colour-coded enemies which makes for great coop gameplay. It is a little hectic and there is a lot happening on screen which can be confusing at times. Also not too easy, not too hard. Looking forward to play more of it.
Hammerwatch (3 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a nice pixel-art diablolike dungeon crawler for four people. It has different classes and from our experience you absolutely need one player to be the healer mage. It is quite the difficult game with a shared life-pool. You can save but loading means joining in again and that is where the trouble starts: the game has to be joined by a 4 digit code of letters and numbers and it does not run that smoothly, loading means rejoining which means that you communicate and type in the code a lot. That was a little annoying. However when the game works it is quite fun and we have only completed the first of two campaigns and plan to continue.
Hell Warders (2 Stars) (online only)
This is a very very ugly Dungeon Defenders Clone. It runs horribly. I have to admit it was fun for a few evenings but this may have been so because we loved Dungeon Defenders 1 on 360. You should not play this game since a new Dungeon Defenders Game is announced. We did not finish it because the frame rate dropped to almost unplayable levels. It is a mess. A mess you can find fun in. You shouldn’t.
Human fall flat (4 Stars) (couch and online)
2 Player offline Octodad-style fun. Some really great ideas (the climbing controls are very interesting) and top visual humour. It is a puzzleplattformer I guess. This has an 8 Player online mode I have not tried. If anyone can chime in on that this would be highly appreciated. We really laughed a lot. Not unsimilar to Octodad.
Joggernauts (3 Stars) (couch only)
A simple concept: you run in a row and the player of the right colour has to be in front. Everybody can switch position with the player besides him. When the right person is not in front at the right time you will lose health. Simple but devilishly difficult to coordinate. We were really really bad at this. But if you have time and determination this can be a sort of hive-mind-ballet of the best kind. We were somewhat thrown off by the fact that in the options you have a slider of the speed which makes thinks easier. It is probably meant to be used to find a speed that suits your team but it felt to us as cheating? I dunno. Maybe we played it in way to hard, but we probably needed a little more direction and handholding here. Maybe we will pick it back up. It really seems to be a creative and good game that can be worth your time.
Just Shapes N Beats (5 Stars) (couch only)
This Game is a little marvel. It is an audio-visual experience and very close to what I Imagine to be similar to group-drug-euphoria. This is not a rhythm game – though it helps if you feel the music. This needs to be played with sound on full volume and the biggest and best picture. Gameplay: you play along creatively designed winamp visualisations of BitPop Music in a bullet hell fashion(but very clearly communicated) . This is almost a multiplayer game but the cleverly implemented revive mechanic elevates this to a great coop game. Best part is that the audiovisuals are so great that the group is almost dancing while playing and having a sort of synaesthesia experience where the feel for the song translates to great gameplay performance.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (5 Stars) (table only)
This is THE Team-COOP game. We are playing this for years now on these weekends. We play the pc version but the switch version is the same. This is a test of your own abilities to understand and perform under pressure, as well as a test of the team on how to juggle information and workload. Very clever game design, great concept and good onboarding. Gets very hard but that is okay. One of the best group game experiences ever, marries something like a board game with a videogame. Should be played in group of more than 2 but less than 8. You can play it over skype but it is more fun with everyone on one table.
Killer Queen Black ( 4 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a very unique game that gives you a lot of tactical coop gameplay on one screen. You team has to be well tuned. It has a very creative rules that mix together a lot of rules similar to the Splatoon 2 ranked modes. This game is easy to learn but incredibly hard to master. I am hoping for a good community that will make this possible to play in ranked mode for a while and find people on your level. You can get easily devastated by a good team which might lead to some frustration. I really like this because of all the creativity but the task to get deep into it is daunting. Sky high skill ceiling.
Kirby’s Star Allies (1 Star) (couch only)
I am really sorry to say: this was not challenging enough. We are all Nintendo fans and payed full price and tried to like it but is was just too easy. This is okay but we were not the target demographic. Play this only if you are very young and inexperienced J Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Lode Runner : Legacy (4 Stars) (couch only)
Lode Runner on the Xbox 360 is one of my all-time favourite Coop games and a great version. It has a great two player adventure mode and an utterly brilliant 2 player puzzle mode (the 2 plyer puzzle mode is in fact so great that you can play the 1 player puzzle also in coop). This version is not that good. However: There is a nice adventure mode and there is a puzzle mode which can be tackled in a team. So this is still a super fun game and especially great for people who like 2D Plattformers and Puzzle games and Coop. This would probably be a 5 Star Game as well because the mixture of coop and puzzle is unique and brilliant, it is however not that good than the preivious entry in the seires. But the best (and so far only) Lode Runner on Switch so stop reading now and buy it J
Lovers in a dangerous space time (4 Stars) (couch only)
Also a big focus on Collaboration. The sense of “get us safely through here” is very great and fuses you together is a team. Very “we all lost or we all won”. Great team experience and also quite non-gamer friendly. It is also fun with two players, but gets harder at the end. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Mechstermination Force (4 Stars) (couch only)
Hidden Gem Alert! This is a short and very good 2 Player Plattformer Boss-Rush with very creative enemy design and deserves way more praise and attention. It has some puzzle elements since you have to crack the pattern to kill the bosses and find your way to the weak points. It is an all-around ideal package for 2 players on a couch. Utterly recommended! To be 5 Stars it needed one finesse extra, but I am super interested in what this dev team does next.
Mercenary Kings (4 Stars) (couch and online)
This marries Contra-Gameplay with Monster Hunter Looting. The structure takes a little getting used too and the (rather small) grind may be offputting for some but the graphics and the presentation are super nice. It was a very fun and engaging romp. It seems that we liked that way more than the general consensus. I urge more people to give it a try.
Monaco: What's yours is mine (5 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a great game with a fantastic artsytyle and sound design. We played this way back on Xbox 360 and are now starting it again on switch beacause of the added content. We remember this as being one of the best coop titles we ever played so we all double dipped. This is utterly recommended and deserves to be a success on the switch as well. It has you and your friends breaking in and heisting into high security buildings playing on what looks like build plans. you have several characters and it will not always go to plan. Great mixture of stealth and action. Hilarity will ensue!
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate (5 Stars) (online only)
A star of coop games. Very Japanese, Very much to learn. Quite difficult to get into it but when you are in. boy. You. Are. In. The complexitiy and the thrill of a good prepared hunt is matched by nothing. Game design at its finest hidden behind many hurdles. This is also a great version with many monsters and a few Quality of life improvements not that many as in MH World though but alos this game has a bit more charme than world (looking especially at the design choices for weapons and armor). This is one that your group has to decide beforehand that they really want an epic and complex adventure with a bit of forcing yourself through the early learning stages. The reward is immense. Getting into the MH Games is like learning an additional foreign language. Embrace everything that is weird and befuddling. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop online. After being done with it I would count this as one of the best games ever.
Ms Splosion Man (2 Stars) (couch and online)
We played the sh*t out of Splosion man on 360 and loved it. Very nice timing based coop jumping. When you are in sync it works like ballet. This is the sequel with better reviews. We played a whole bunch but never got to finishing it. It is more or less the same but maybe we burned out on the first one so we did not get that into this. We plan to give it another go. (so take the rating of 2 stars with a grain of salt, not very firm rating)
Mugsters (3 Stars) (couch only)
A somewhat strange game for 2 players in a nice polygon-popart artstyle that asks you to complete certain objectives on small diorama-like levels. It is a good time waster to talk over with a good friend and also brings some hilarious situations with it and also some puzzles. We are not done and we plan to continue. It is not that engaging that you have to keep on your toes all the time, so rather a laid back experience. Probably also neat in a bigger group and passing around the controllers. It is a little out of the ordinary which we always welcome.
Nine Parchments (3 Stars) (couch and online)
This was a fun “one of those” games. Top down twin stick. This time again a somewhat diablo setup. However the coop spellcasting was fun. It feels a little bit more like a multiplayer game but the revival and healing is important so you need to work together. The coop is a bit drowned in the action. This sounds rather harsh. It really is a fun game but most of it has been seen in a similar fashion somewhere else. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline and I think also online.
No Heroes Here (5 Star) (couch and online)
Hidden gem alert. This is a 2D Pixelart / tower defense take on the Overcooked Collaboration mechanics. This is a game that way too few people played. The generic name does not do it any justice. It really is a lot of fun. Great High Performance coop. Great screaming at each other. Very neat: This works online. we encountered some small bugs but the devs promised to fix them. There is follow up to this game which looks very similar called “Monica E A Guarda Dos Coelhos” which we were very much looking forward to but the devs left out the online coop mode (why oh why?!?!) so we did not yet get around to playing it. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop on- and offline.
NoReload Heroes (2 Stars) (couch and online)
A very simple twin-stick shooter which does not really do anything new. Also it seems to be roguelike, because we did not find a way to save. We played this for a few hours and then died and it was over. It was not bad, it is just nothing special. It is a bland “one of those”.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch (as a game 3 stars, as an experience 5 stars) (couch only)
Play this unsober with a complete group of 4. It is a party game. The controls are the best (worst) thing and humour is old-school top notch. Every player takes control of 1 of 4 limbs and your task is to do everyday tasks and hilarity ensues. The whole presentation and heart-warming story does the rest to make this game really good. This is more of an event as a real game. It is also the right amount of short. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Overcooked 1 (5 Stars) (couch only)
Hectic & fun team experience. Very gaming-newcomer friendly. Big focus on Collaboration. Easy to learn, hard to master (gets very process-focused to increase performance for better results). You will scream at each other (always a big plus in our group!) Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Overcooked 2 (5 Stars) (couch and online)
Pretty much the same as the first one. Some neat changes, but not better or worse than part one. Biggest chance for us: this is online playable (which too few games are), so we keep our couch time for offline-exclusive titles. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop on- and offline. A sh*tload of DLC.
PixelJunk Monsters2 (3 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a nice and very tower-defensy tower defence game that you can play coop and also online. It is quite challenging in the harder levels but it does not seem to leave that much room for error so games can be over quite quickly which means a quite long repeat of the whole level. It scratches the tower defence itch and leaves good room for tactical deliberations among the group but it misses a good action component during the waves like In Dungeon Defenders.
Rayman Legends (4 Stars) (couch only)
Very fun and challenging 2D fast paced platforming. Maybe 2 or 3 players is the best way to play this. Up to 4 Player campaign-coop offline.
Rico (3 Stars) (couch and online)
A fun, tactical ego shooter roguelike. It has a great sense of place and cool slow-mo action that depends on good cooperation. It is mostly stylish gunplay that feels good. However, the fun is a little dampened by the fact that the game is a roguelike and you start from scratch once you failed. This is especially punitive since there are missions where you have to quickly find two bombs and finding them in time seems to us like pure luck. 2 Player fun but not that long lasting.
Shift happens (3 Stars) (couch and online)
2 Player Puzzle Platformer. Not that polished but some very good ideas. 2 Player on- or offline campaign coop.
Super Chariot (5 Stars) (couch only)
2 Player Puzzle Platformer. We played the PS4 version but switch should be identical. High Performance 2 Player Cooperation. This is really great. The game has a unique flow. The physics based puzzles are not easy and for some of the coop challenges you have to perform very good as a team. There is a very hard challenge in the end game after the campaign for dedicated players to sink their coop perfection teeth into. 2 Player offline campaign coop
Super Kriby Clash (1 Star) (couch and online)
A 2D-Brawler with a simple “my first Monster Hunter”-Progression and structure. It is well presented and free to start but the multiplayer integration is horrendous. You have to play a lot on your own to unlock coop stages. This boils down to a gameplay loop of playing together for 10 minutes and then each player alone for 10 minutes and it never comes together as a real coop experience. It had potential but the structure killed it for us completely. Fun for one evening but not really worth anyone coop-group’s time!
Snipperclips: Cut it out! Together! (3 Stars) (couch only)
Played the 2 player “campaign” and it is really nice. Very creative because every level is a little different. Some levels are more fun than others. It is a great showcase of the switch’s portability. I coop played this on the subway (mounted on a suitcase in the isle) and on a train. This is also something you can coop with non gamers. It is not that deep though.
Splatoon 2 (5 stars) (online only)
4 player online in ranked mode. Ranked mode is superbe and the most coop splatoon gets. Why so many people stick to turf war or salmon run is beyond me. These modes are so creative, strategic and demand a high amount of team work and collaboration. If you want to test your coop team against others this is the game to play. You have to be a group of 2 or a group of 4. Sadly 3 squads are screwed.
Terraria (4 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a really good game. It offers you a lot to do and caters to many playstyles. You CAN play this as a building game like Minecraft but you absolutely do not HAVE to do so. There are “quests” and Bosses and a progression and you can totally team up as a group to play through it which we did and we really enjoyed. You can upgrade your gear and get fun mobility gadgets. You have to dig and fight and gather to reach some weird (a wiki or an experienced player helps) conditions to unlock a boss. Everyone should have built at least one “Hellevator” in his coop-gaming live. We played this on PS4 and switch has to seemingly wait for local Coop.
Tied Together (3 Stars) (couch only)
A very fun concept and a nice game. It is very indie and veeeeery short. I think we played it in one sitting with 4 players. This also means that it did not get a true difficulty curve going. This was a nice effort by an indie studio and is worth your time but this could have been so much more with more content and some more ideas to build on the concept.
Towerfall (4 Stars) (couch only)
We played only the coop campaign+dlc, not the multiplayer. And sadly we did it with 2 people and you can and probably should do it with 4, because the game is really good. It has a very nice pixel art style and a very intuitive gameplay loop. Though it controls very easy the game itself is rather difficult at times, so probably more for the gamepad experienced player. We played it on ps4. but it is a good fit for switch (what isn't?) 4 Player offline campaign coop.
Unravel 2 (3 Stars) (couch only)
It is a nice puzzle platformer for 2 players with some neat mechanics. We have not completed it yet but I think it deserves its mention here. It is not really innovative but very competent. We failed to find the feature that really sets it apart, except its graphical polish, but we played the PS4 Version.
Warframe (5 Stars) (online only)
This also has to be highly recommend. Very hard to get into. Not all of us made it. But some of us are now real fans with quite the hour count. and free. It brings with it one of the most creative player design there is and harbours some crazy surprises down the road for people who stick with it. It somehow really scratched my borderlands itch and I like it more than Borderlands 3. I wrote a love letter to this game here: https://www.reddit.com/NintendoSwitch/comments/c658ej/warframe_how_this_brilliant_game_surprised_me/
Wolfenstein : Youngblood (2 Stars) (online only)
Playing through the campaign with a friend. It is a modern shooter and has not that many unique things. It is a nice coop mode since you can revive and buff each other but the game isn’t really that great or memorable. The switch version is also not very well optimized and not pretty. Serviceable game, serviceable port. Good game to play while you are talking about stuff.
20xx (4 Stars) (couch and online)
A fun roguelite megaman-ish platformer for 2 people. This is roguelite done well (and similar to how dead cells handled things) You always get some little upgrades you can keep and your progressions moves along in a good pace. The game overs a lot of characters and quite some depth that we did not check out but we played it through and really liked it. The coop aspect is mostly that pickups have to be distributed well and that your positioning can give tactical advantages. Especially with the great boss design.
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Multiplayer
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Astro Bears (4 Stars) (couch only)
This is always cheap in the store and really really good. It is a sort of a palate cleanser game you can play for a few rounds between other games or really get your teeth into. It is easy to pick up and can get really tense when the round continues on and the space to manoeuver gets smaller and smaller. It is just competitive and nor really that varied but simple fun. This really should be on every switch out there. It can be played in almost every group, for almost every amount of time. Ideal party game.
Bomberman R (2 Stars or 5 Stars) (couch and online)
It is Bomberman! Hoooray! One of the absolute best and most fun competitive games out there. BUT it is simply not that great a version FOR US. We prefer Bomberman 95 on PC. We played this for hundreds of hours in the last 24 years, so we feel every change and Bomberman R feels wrong. Wrong speed, Wrong physics, wrong pixelhitboxes. If you have not played and loved another Bomberman version and would start with this I implore you: do it! You will most likely love it and it will stick with you your whole live. It could be legitimately 5 Stars FOR YOU. Everybody should have their own got Bomberman and play a lot of Bomberman. It is just how things are meant to be.
Diablo 3 (2 Stars) (couch and online)
I think I will get yelled at for this, but please hear me out: I played this on PS4 and it was one of my biggest gaming disappointments ever. I liked the first 2 Diablo games a lot and was looking forward to the PS4 port of Diablo 3. Played it in coop and we noticed it was too easy on normal. We increased the difficulty several times to the absolute max (of what was unlocked at first playthrough) and the game was still too easy. It was so easy in fact that it was challenge free and close to broken: bosses would die in a few hits and never were able to complete their voicelines. It was a boring slog and also we were just playing alongside each other. As far as I remember it felt more like multiplayer than real cooperation or coordination. I was super bummed and did not enjoy my time with the game at all. For a long time I thought this might have been a bug but people online told me that ‘yes it is too easy’ and ‘the campaign is just the tutorial’ and ‘the game really gets good with the endgame’. I believe that. BUT a game that takes 35hrs to get good is a really badly designed game and not for me. This is my honest opinion and I am sorry.
Flip Wars (1 Star) (couch and online)
This was cheap and looked a little like Bomberman. Simple geometric action against other players. The game idea is not bad. Nothing else positive to say. Not that fun, not that well made, horrible online mode. Stay away.
Guns Gore and Canoli (1 Star) (couch only)
I think this is just multiplayer. There were no coop elements if I remember correctly so we all were not that hot n this one. It is rather stupid action and you do not need to work as a team.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe ( 5 stars) (couch and online)
We play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Of course we do. Everyone should. We desperately need new tracks.
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (3 Stars) (couch only)
We played the Wii U undeluxe variant. I hesitated to put it under Multiplayer but compared to other games on this list the coop component is not that huge. It is however super fun and I think also better than its reputation. The game design is top notch and the game gets harder as you go along and it does was a 2D Mario game has to do. I also really liked finding the shortcuts on the overworld. This is probably best played with 2 or 3 players since 4 is very chaotic.
Runbow (3 Stars) (couch and online)
This is a fun diversion. A clever concept where consistently changing colours of the background change the level layout and you have to pass thorugh it as fast as possible while bothering other players. It is quite hard in the beginning and feels random. But you learn to have an eye out for the next colour changes and what they mean for your best way to traverse the level. This has very short rounds and you can die in a second. It is also a palate cleanser and party game but I think it is not deep enough for us to play it a lot.
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Honourable mentions
Skyforce Reloaded
We tried this but stopped and never gotten back around to playing it. We palyed the first one on PS4 and really liked it. Seems to be more of the same which would make this a very good 2 player coop shoot em up that took a lot of things from ealier games in this genre and mixed and matched the best.
Sine Mora EX
Played this on PS4. It was short and quite good. I don’t remember it well enough so to score it fairly.
Unruly Heroes
We are in the middle of this and I remember it being quite nice but somehow the details escape me. Will probably be able to say more soon.
Yoshi’s Crafted World
Will be played this weekend. Will put this in later.
Degrees of Separation
Will be played this weekend. Will put this in later.
Please comment, ask and criticise. I will edit if I missed stuff or have to correct errors. We are also always looking for coop recommendations so please post these. Thanks in advance!