You can just search terms right within Element to find public “rooms” (like a Discord Server). There’s rooms for all kinds of things. There are private rooms, too, but someone in the room would have to send you a link to it.

I love the Element client for Matrix. I use it with my friends and I have joined a lot of communities on there. It’s Discord-like, but I personally find it much easier to navigate than Discord. It’s free, open source, decentralized, you can self-host if that’s your jam, it’s got some solid security and usability features, call quality is great, and I’ve found it to be very stable and reliable. I’m a little biased because I personally don’t like Discord, I find the UI clunky and unpleasant to use, but I love using Element. If you love Discord, you will find Element familiar, but you may or may not appreciate the differences.

Satisfactory, Valheim, The Riftbreaker, and Necesse are favorites of mine that I come back to a lot

Agreed. The game looks pretty sick, but I hope you can get some like cool armor for the main character or something.

Dantotsu, hands down, imo. Great UI, lots of extensions and configurability but simple to use.

Holy crap, that thing had a backlit LCD and could play 16-bit home console games on the go. What a beast. How did I not even know this thing existed? 0.o

I think this is the answer. It seems like Microsoft is laying the foundation to go all-in on cloud gaming and/or gamepass. I think their ultimate goal is to dip out of the console wars altogether and be at the forefront of what they think could be the next frontier in gaming.

Honestly, it’s kinda smart. Idk if cloud gaming could really be the future (at least in the US) until we have better infrastructure and access to fast/reliable internet without data caps is more ubiquitous, but carving out a niche for themselves instead of locking horns with the competition is pretty clever. It’s worked for Nintendo. Most PC and console gamers I know also own a Switch, in part because of the quality of the exclusives and in part because of the relatively accessible pricing of the console, but also because the Switch hardware offers a unique experience (well, it was a lot more unique pre-Steam Deck).

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Triangles is so dope

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There are some really awesome mods for it, too. It def sets a high bar for FOSS game quality.

These are all great games. I’m surprised not to see some of the heaviest hitters, like 0 A.D., Beyond All Reason, Xonotic, or Veloren.

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I suspect this is exactly why Battlebit Remastered blew up the way that it did this year even though it looks like a Roblox game. lol

I think people are starved for a good, clean FPS that isn’t mostly battling menus, cluttered UI, MTX, endless DLC, P2W, battle passes, lootboxes, daily login bonuses, timed events, grindfests, invasive anti-cheat (or an overwhelm of cheaters), constant updates that break the game, etc. I think there’s a lot of us that just want to shoot stuff and have fun with our friends, like the glory days of online FPS. I’d happily fork over $60 today for that kind of experience, but I don’t trust hardly any AAA publishers to keep their promises if they even did offer something like that.

You are right, I’m a pretty big fan of Bloons TD 6 myself. I’ve also played a lot of Osu!Lazer and some of the Netflix indies. It just kind of feels like the overwhelming majority of mobile games are predatory and obnoxious, but there are definitely some really well-done games between the premium options, console ports, and a handful of open source games.