Instead of doing their due diligence, they just bought up as many studios as they could and are now considering selling, shrinking or closing them (I assume while keeping the IP for themselves if there is any as well as any valuable assets).
This reads like a „we need to homogenize the game industry so lobbying for anti competitive measures becomes easier.“
I still don’t understand why shit like this is even legal.
At the same time, the industry is looking towards massive monopolization. I think Embracer move was also motivated by seeing how ABK was able to make a sale to Microsoft and cash out. Now everyone is trying to sell themselves, including EA. The buyers are usually trillion dollar tech, or Saudis (who currently own a very big part of the industry), and Chinese megagiants (who own the other big part of the industry). As days go by, we are looking at a landscape which could be similar to early era console wars where players were forced to tie their wagon to one horse and hope that it keeps releasing titles. This might sound a bit doomer speak, but if a studio the size of gearbox can shut down, then absolutely anyone can.
Thanks for elaborating. In other words, we need to make it illegal to buy other companies if you‘re larger than sum x and make it illegal to sell a company (because all industries have that problem) to someone like that. Got it. :)
Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
Nevermind the fact that everyone is doing cross-platform multi-player games. One of the main advantages of console gaming is everyone is running the same hardware. If that’s the future, then I’ll just play on PC.
That may be, I have a model newer than the was written and I can tell you the menu and apps are laggy in comparison to my 1st gen 4K AppleTV. Does PC GamePass work on TVs? I can try it.
Don’t worry y’all. By cloud it’s just gonna be dynamic ads.
But for real, background animations and details could be streamed through another device having to render that something. Anything that doesn’t revolve around the gameplay itself.
It’s going to be more convenient and economical just streaming games and renting them forever and then upping the subscription rates and making them exclusive to game stream platforms.
In cost of the game itself for sure, but then you’d have costlier price in the disc too.
With the discs the scratches and storage were a bitch of a problem and later games even needed internet connection to activate games running on disc. It had pros but wasn’t all rosy either.
Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.
Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.
So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?
Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?
They claimed the Xbox One (the original last gen model) would be decades ahead of any other competitors because games would be, wait for it, cloud hybrid. Some things would render locally, but Microsoft servers would calculate complex collisions, volumetrics, crowd AI, and so on.
Because people complained about the connectivity requirements. Unfortunately I don’t think we are there still, infrastructure for a lot of areas will not support this.
For all its many many many flaws (like having your flagship game start in a snow storm…), Google Stadia very much demonstrated the viability of full game streaming. Even people with shit broadband could still play a “last gen” quality game. Sure people in the outright sticks won’t be able to but… they likely aren’t doing a lot of gaming as getting a 10 GB patch out to them is hard enough.
And if you are only doing game logic and some simulations, rather than full rendering? The bandwidth needs drop even more.
Sure, people with crappy broadband could play… At something like N64-level settings and slideshow frames per second, even with “last-gen” games. Granted, streaming an entire game is more of a load on bandwidth than cloud hybrid or patches, but if it was really feasible for the masses even a year ago, Stadia might still be up today, but it’s already gone. I would still rather be able to play a game I own on console without needing a persistent connection to play, as a cloud hybrid game may require. If there is still the option to play the game offline at lower settings, that wouldn’t be so bad, but then you just know that M$ will be looking to monetize the cloud hybrid option: “play at full settings online for only $— per month!”
Weird. Very curious what issues you ran into. I didn’t even have anything that bad on hotel wifi.
Mostly because: The video is pretty “easy” and mostly suffers from compression artifacts. If you can watch youtube, you can stream a game at generally one quality setting lower. Because latency is what matters. The actual game inputs are nothing on top of that.
Mostly it was just annoying that google did EVERYTHING they could to market it poorly and “Gamers” lost their god damned minds because they felt threatened. Which… is pretty reminiscent of MS cocking up the announcement of the One.
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