Daily Briefing: Tuesday 1st March

Steam Deck owners are reporting stick drift

In a video shared to Reddit, one user showed the test controller input screen to prove that their right stick was already drifting - they clearly let go and reset the stick to neutral, but the screen is showing input values, the same issue that has been affecting most modern controllers and most notably on the Switch’s joycons. This is despite Valve’s claims last year that they did everything in their power to avoid stick drift issues.

• There’s clearly a fundamental issue with the core of stick design in the shared manufactured parts, because this problem is exceedingly prevalent. Hopefully, this is an isolated issue to a few users, and Valve will replace the sticks for those affected.

Amazon’s Luna Has Launched In The US! Did You Also Forget About It?

Today marks the launch of Amazon’s Luna, their Stadia-but-with-channels cloud gaming service. It comes with free games for Prime members and some Twitch integration for streamers. Hopefully, this one fares better than Stadia, but a Prime-like channel-based subscription service feels more complex than an early product in the market should be. User acquisition is done better via simplicity, like Xbox Cloud Gaming.

• Are we ready for Stadia 2: Electric Boogaloo? Not to rag on cloud gaming services too hard, but Google and Amazon’s efforts seem to be ill-considered for how young streaming is in the market.

Nvidia’s DLSS Source Code Has Been Stolen & Leaked

Nvidia’s cybersecurity breach last week was allegedly carried out by the LAPSUS$ group, who have sent TechPowerUp images of the DLSS source code files. They threaten to leak the 1TB of sensitive data they acquired, and have already released a taster - 75GB of files, comprised of mostly source code. This leak could mean hash rate limiters designed to slow crypto miners could be bypassed, although it’s possible some good could arise from GPU drivers being open and in the wild.

• Cybersecurity is a major problem in general, but when hardware and firmware secrets are available to nefarious actors, it starts to feel a little bit dangerous.