Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.
It's possible I'm just interpreting the quote wrong. I figured they were making the distinction between "console" and "entry level PC" as a way to say "The price isn't set yet, but don't expect this to be $400-500"
Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.
It’s not particularly great hardware. It’s fine, but not great. The most obvious thing is 8GB VRAM, which is bare minimum for modern gaming really. Add in that they’re buying in bulk, that price seems reasonable.
I know they don’t have the same supply chain at all but Apple sells an entry Mac Mini for $600. That makes me feel like a similarly priced Steam Machine is possible.
Apple mini is a hard comparison to make because the cheapest mini is a loss leader. Add a bit of extra ram or extra storage, which you have to do since the base model is very limited and the only way to get it is through Apple because everything is soldered together, then it is suddenly more than a $1k PC. They make the profits up with those upgrades which are practically mandatory and grossly overpriced.
The base M4 model is 16GB ram and 256 GB of storare and it costs $600, “cheapest minipc ever with such performance”.
The 512GB storage model costs $800.
May I point out that 256GB of ssd storage does not cost $200.
The 24 GB model costs exactly $1000.
No matter how much ram prices are ramping up right now, 8GB of sodimm ram does not cost $200…yet.
Anything else above those specs throws the Mac mini into $1k+ territory. It can go all the way up to $2600.
Now, Apple rarely publishes manufacturing numbers to the public. But historically this has always been their strategy. A base product that seems too good to be true (because it is) that leaves buyers wanting a bit more. For which they get skinned alive, price wise. Of course, I can’t be 100% certain that the base Mac mini is sold at a loss. But evidence suggests the $600 mark is priced exactly to act as a loss leader.
You didn’t present one piece of evidence that $600 is a losing price point for the base model (and you even stated that explicitly). All you’ve done is shown that Apple is known for their outrageous markups; something we all can see with our own eyes.
Given they’re greedy enough to markup storage and ram so much; I’m willing to bet they won’t bother with techniques like “loss leaders”. I bet the margins are just extremely tight but that profit is above zero.
That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.
Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.
I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.
I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.
Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.
Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.
It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.
I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”
You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.
The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.
Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.
High end would be the high end of the market components, right? So RTX 5090 ($2k+) or RX 9070 ($700+). High end CPU would be Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $400. Add a motherboard and copious RAM and you’re looking at $2k+ for all AMD, $3-5k for Nvidia.
Mid tier would be somewhere in the middle, so cut those numbers in half ($1-1.5k). Low end is what you can get away with, so cut the mod tier in half again, though going below $700 would be hard for anything but the most casual of games.
Personally I don’t think I would say that most people would consider a $1,000 PC to be entry level. To me entry level means something that a kid could save up their pocket money for in a reasonable amount of time maybe with a paper route to supplement. I’d say entry level ends at about $700 just to throw a number out there. For $1,000 you could get a PS5 and a PSVR2
But it’s also a handheld console so that doesn’t really track.
An entry level gaming PC doesn’t have to have a battery and it doesn’t have to have a screen which are big expenses. You can’t just take the price of the steam deck and multiply it because so much time has passed between the releases of the two products and they’re not equivalent anyway. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
I like GoG but… GoG very much has a history of “performative” bullshit.
Some of us still remember The French Monk Incident where they pretended the site was shutting down and let everyone hammer the download servers so they would panic and “learn” why “DRM Free” games were better. The backlash was so bad that it actually led to the addition of a new quest (that totally wasn’t ready to go…) in The Witcher 2 that, if you won a game of dice poker (Gwent before we had Gwent) you would get a Witcher 1 code at GoG.
Also… their definition of “DRM Free” is what us olds would have called “that Stardock GOO shit”
They’ve also had a LOT of “we are going to lose the rights to sell this game so buy it now” FOMO sales. I want to say the Atari games have been through at least four?
And so forth throughout the years. It was more or less guaranteed GoG would do a smut games sale once Steam delisted games. The freebies is a surprise but stuff like House Party is a massive DLC sink and the Postals get given away five with every soda.
So e’rybody saying “Now is the time to let GoG know they were being inconsistent and they will fix everything”: Hey, I got a really great deal on this bridge. And I’ll give you a discount if you pay in whatever “untraceable” crypto kids like this week. Err, but through this site that just gives me fiat currency. No reason.
There is only one magazine video game advertisement I really remember from seeing in the wild in an actual magazine, and that was the Quake 3 Arena one of a computer in a crusty-as-fuck basement bathroom in front of a toilet with just a super dirty setup.
Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing. I find it funny that Nintendo fostered their famiy friendly appeal seemingly right after the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Those particular ads are saucy.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
At first I was like “WTF does an indie games site have to do with Funko?” then I Googled it…
Looks like they hosted a BUNCH of infringing games, so Funko, instead of doing the righteous thing and sending them a takedown request, just nuked the whole domain…
I mean, I don’t blame them for protecting their IP, they just picked a super shitty way to do it.
I don’t even think they would have needed an official cease and desist… just a friendly note of “Hey, none of this Funko material is licensed, please remove it.”
Well, if you care about an indie gaming site being shut down for copyright violations, yeah, you might want to actually care about copyright infringement.
What they were doing here though was supporting developers profiting off someone elses IP. It would be like, I dunno, I started an independent Superman movie and was fundraising off that. It’s a little different from piracy.
In the case of the Five Nights at Freddies game, the developer is infringing on not one but TWO properties.
“In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
So, me, making a fan page for FunkoPop versions of the Five Nights at Freddies characters and using their images? THAT’S fair use.
Me charging money for a fan game based on the same Funko versions of those characters is NOT fair use.
“Section 107 of the Copyright Act gives examples of purposes that are favored by fair use: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, [and] research.””
I blame them for protecting their IP like a old white person protects their property value by shooting at any black person that moves into the neighborhood.
Valve is not a normal company. As far as I know they still have their fluid work structure in place where projects are dictated by what the devs themselves feel like doing and are inspired by.
Icefrog (who was the lead developer of Dota 2 - and Dota 1 for many years before that) is lead developing Deadlock as I understand it. It has his fingerprints all over it, at least. It seems enough other people at Valve liked his idea of a twist on the MOBA concept to turn it into a full project.
I feel your frustration but there isn’t really any opportunity cost lost here. It’s not that they decided to make “a game” and chose this one out of all available options. If they felt like they had enough ideas to make Half-Life 3 (or any other single player game) then they would have. It’s just that this is the game they want to make right now.
This is going very well it seems! I see the next few countries close to passing the threshold are:
Denmark (88%)
Netherlands (87%)
Germany (75%)
Assuming we get those, we would need one more country. The highest remaining country is Ireland (55%). Getting all those still wouldn’t reach 1M signatures, but the rest could keep being distributed across the EU (even including countries which have already passed the threshold, I’m assuming).
This is all very exciting and gives me a lot of hope! Keep signing folks!
At this point I’d that say getting enough individual countries is almost inevitable in the process of getting 1M signatures. If the distribution between countries remains as it is, every country with more than 25% right now would reach the threshold by the end.
Seems to me like the individual country threshold is only added to prevent initiatives getting single-handedly pushed by a single big country and never be the blocker for regular initiatives.
So yeah, the best strategy would most likely be to keep pushing the big countries: Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Speaking of Italy, what’s up with them? Only 18%? Those are rookie numbers.
That’s one thing I checked first, but compared to Germany for example, the average age and percentage of people playing video-games is apparently just a few percentage points of difference. Though “people playing video-games” could of course mean anything and I’d wager that the average person playing casual games on their phone might not care as much.
Discreetly insulting both Australia and Pluto in one sentence! Absolutely love this; will share it with all my Australia and Plutonian friends! If Earth gets attacked, it’s not my fault, but yours :'P
It can be played pretty casually. A run usually takes around an hour but you don’t have to play it in one go. And on the base difficulty it’s pretty approachable. You definitely don’t have to play 500 hours to enjoy it. But you can if you want to :)
Slay The Spire is an excellent recommendation. Although a lot of people find roguelites stressful because they get stressed about losing progress. You just have to play with the right mindset:
Outer Wilds. For a few friends who don’t have it yet. I’ve already bought it a couple times.
I already own it… but it’s just that good. So good I vicariously try to relive the game by watching livestreams and Eelis’ recaps of other live-streamers.
It really is something you have to experience blind. Since the entire game progression is knowledge based and pulling threads on the mysteries until the mosaic of the story and experience unfolds is truly something you can experience once.
I thought you meant The Outer Wilds, and spent a solid two minutes on a routine sanity check. Hadn’t heard of this game though, so we’ll call it even 😸
It was a bit of a slow burner on release so I’m not surprised you didn’t hear about it. People had access to the beta years before the official release, so when it came out essentially nothing really changed and there wasn’t this big announcement.
How is the dlc? I had a tough time with outer wilds. At the time I played it, I found it to be very frustrating. I needed a spoiler to get past two or three major points. But in hindsight I think it’s really an impressive game. I’m thinking about picking up the dlc, but I’m not sure about it and I don’t want to search about it to avoid spoiler.
It started off a little slow, but imo it was better than the main game. It’s both a little more streamlined and better story-wise. You probably should play the main game first
Not really. It will feel like programming if you already know how to program, but I don’t think it will teach you programming anymore than any other problem solving activity.
I’m putting up a minecraft server for my kid and her friends, but I don’t really play myself other than than. Few creative builds so I’m curious if you could please expand for me what exactly you mean when you say to mod the shit out of it. Is it enough to create rules or am I going to have to actively moderate their play?
bin.pol.social
Ważne