Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.
They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.
its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.
and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.
Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.
"I'm extra sorry that our lawyer got back to me and said the previous wording we did around the 'all future DLC inclusion' was legally binding and we'd get the pants sued off of us unless we changed course."
The wild monetary successes of Call of Duty and Fortnite send a clear message: treat unsupervised children as prey and you will earn billions of dollars
Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.
What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.
Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.
MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.
As far as I’m concerned the series is definitively over. 5 was the final. You don’t really need Kojima for remakes, just a team of good devs who love the series. But I also don’t trust Konami to pull that simple thing off. What is with the really bad “remake” ports from all the game companies in the last few years? Is it that hard to remake a game?
As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.
As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.
And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.
*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of
I played the main series and never played the side, PSP games like peace walker, so I was completely lost when playing 5. I was wondering what this setting and people were for a while, until I realized I had to go back and read up on peace walker.
Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.
All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):
This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.
A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.
I hate it when developers make what they say are side games in a series essential to canon, especially when they don’t tell you they’re doing it or when they go into the side game not planning to make it canon and then decide it’s canon during or after development.
Or I should say, I hate it when developers make the next main series game assuming you’ve played the essential “side” game and leave out or half-ass their catch-up for people who haven’t played it. I call it “Chain of Memories syndrome” after when Kingdom Hearts made Chain of Memories essential to fully understanding KH2.
What they need to do is take whoever the next director of the game is going to be, strap them to a chair Clockwork Orange style and mix the entire Criterion Collection and Evangelion for about a year or two.
Then just for good measure have them write a page of names and slap them anytime a name nears anything of normal.
Then, and only then, should they be allowed to start working.
try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
Based on their last attempt they couldn’t even manage that. Have we already forgotten that as soon as Kojima left the company, Metal Gear Survive came out?
PS, Kojima has a really cool Instagram where he posts his thoughts and stuff he likes, if anyone is a big fan and wants to sub to him. Dude has some radical tastes lol
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.
“Hey gonks! Remember that game we released and was dirty as hell but you all gave up the eddies because we told you it was preem. We finally have the game we should have released just 3 years later. Go ahead and flatline your 200hr characters and reboot.”
Same. But I have wanted to explore other characters. My current one I made a baseball bat wielding, hard punching, aggressive nomad punk with a heart of gold, with some sniper secondary skills. Basically what I imagined a nomad would be like, with the skills I thought they’d have.
I kind of want to see what it’s like as full stealth or a corpo hacker or a street samurai katana wielder or knife thrower.
If you got 200hours out of release then clear you got your moneys worth out of the game and enjoyed it, promises not kept or not.
Personally the game could’ve been better but I certainly enjoyed the one 120ish hour playthrough I did and had no major issues other than some texture bugs or weird physics, I had a capable PC though not a last gen console trying to play at being modern.
And don't circlejerk over the dead horse that this game is unsalvageable because it had a shitty release. People forgave No Man's Sky, but the internet won't let this one go.
Shitty games with shitty releases go into oblivion, the game is obviously good.
I’m not criticizing the game, I’m criticizing the company and the billionaries that preside it and decided people swallow it all up if they launched a game in the state they did.
I agree but I think it took about this long from Cyberpunk released till there was a better outlook on No Man’s Sky and I bought both at release, I enjoyed both, but I’d say at release Cyberpunk was a better game at launch (I didn’t have any bugs I got lucky). NMS did much more work on content in the following years to where it’s barely the same experience. Has been awhile since I restarted Cyberpunk will do for 2.0 though. Maybe I haven’t caught much newer content and they added it but it seemed updates were tweaks / fixes than content.
if there was a movie that was 200 hours long and you chose to stay for the entire duration and not walk out, then you either enjoyed the movie or you need to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy
I did a heavily modded 90hr playthrough and loved it. Dealt with a ton of crashes though 😅 I’m planning on playing this vanilla finally, or very lightly modded for UI and stuff.
Yea I played vanilla release over 100 hours, then some ui/qol mods. Looking forward to a vanilla 2.0 and dlc run then maybe see what some of these overhaul mods are doing a few months after that once they’ve been patched up
PC launch play was mostly fine. Only Console launch, mostly caused by massive delusion about min. spec.s, was f'd up completely. The PC issues were also the easiest to fix and even when they could fix the Console issues, they had to convince the Console store's Owners that the relaunch wouldn't be a shit show. But then I play on PC and so expect similar to last time, once I buy it after it launches.
I’m actually a fan of the game. I’m excited to play it. I just find it funny they are saying they have made it so much better that they recommend starting over. My point is that they are saying they finally got a lot of things “right” in 2.0 that we were playing an inferior game with quite a few quaility issues. Probably due to deadlines, etc. I’m happy devs continue to improve based on sales and feedback to make it better.
No it’s a good game. I like it even with the qc issues because it’s ambitious. But the devs are basically admitting that they worked on it for 3 years to fullfill the original vision and it’s so much better that it’s worth starting over.
Yeah, I’m not buying that either. I’m on a 2014 i7 and a 3060 playing on ultra. My sole issue was not running on an SSD which I resolved yesterday. That kid is clearly playing on a potato and lying.
They’ve pretty much been standard for gaming and containing the os on PC for 5 if not more. HDDs are still good for storage, but only luddites and people trying to save money in the stupidest way would have their games on them.
Playing on ultra on a 3060 ? So you’re getting 20-30 fps? Because that’s what it gets on mine with a much newer CPU. I had to turn it down to med-high to average 45 fps
Gotta love the Bethesda fanboys upvoting this one cherry picked comment. They’re are like 70 comments in there with all different combos of system specs complaining about performance.
Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.
Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.
They can’t lay people off, so they just put them in a room with no work to do until they get so bored that they quit. It’s the same thing but different.
Exactly, I would start taking naps and watch movies. You can’t bore or shame me into quitting, the second I know it’s a game, I will be breaking a b**** lol
forreal I write as a hobby and I spend as much free time at work sticking it to the boss by writing lol. if they literally handed me a room with little stimuli and let me bring my notebook in I’d be living
You wouldn’t have a notebook. Any and all stimuli would be banned as the purpose is making your experience horrible.
Also, you get incredibly mundane tasks as well. Maybe you’ll get a couple sheets of random symbols and are tasked to count a certain letter. And if you don’t do this task you can be laid off for underperforming.
In Japan, the barrier to firing workers is much higher than in many other places. Even layoffs for financial reasons are tough and can be challenged. This is one reason companies sit on hordes of cash here is to weather financial issues, but it also has negative economic impacts as well. That said, Nintendo are a bunch of greedy cunts IMO, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don't get a cut).
In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
Linus really doesn’t respond well to criticism. He’s trying to act like a sale and an auction are 2 different things? If some hardware vendor tried to feed him that excuse he’d devote a whole video to it! Hell, if someone had sold one of his screwdriver prototypes he’d probably have thrown a fit and sued (as is his right)!
He’s picking quantity of videos over quality, so stuff like this is only going to accelerate.
Ignoring everything else, because other accusations seem to have more credibility, although a charity auction is certainly a type of sale, sale has completely different connotations than charity auction when devoid of context. It's a fair issue for them to have and raise.
No it’s not. It’s not how the item got out of LTT’s hands that the issue here. It’s that LTT didn’t return a fucking prototype! Sold, lost, melted down, really doesn’t matter. If I’m making products and want to send one to LMG for a review, I’m insisting on him paying a hefty deposit first, because he clearly can’t be trusted.
I see this as a “you’re technically right, there is a legal difference; BUT the issue here is not how it was passed to someone else and not returned to the owners, but that it happened at all” type deal.
The wording doesn’t matter. Call it an auction, sale, donation, grand theft, whatever you want. But that the end of the day, a small company now no longer has access to their expensive prototype. That’s very damaging to them as a business, let alone the damage that LTT caused to Billet’s image by their haphazard review process. Billet has every right to sue for damages over this, and I personally think they should.
I think it’s that the world has changed into having fractured multiple cultures.
In the 80s/90s being gay was considered by general society to be an insult. If you’re under 25, the concept of something being negative being called “gay” as the standard insult just sounds made up.
But people who are 40 years old may remember being in school, and you got a D on a quiz. Your buddy might say “You got a D? That’s gay.”
Had nothing to do with actual homosexuality. It’s just that’s what society was. Being gay wasn’t accepted, and it was cool and trendy to hate on gays to the point that it wasn’t questioned if you called anything bad “gay”.
It’s impossible to place an exact date on when the culture changed, because it likely changed at different times for different regions. I assume California was the first to change.
I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.
The reactions I saw on MTV were people saying they were brave for being openly gay. Whereas if it would have happened in the 80s, I’m sure they’d have gotten death threats.
And I STILL see people who don’t accept gay people.
So society is now fractured on what popular belief is. Now it’s more like several circles, who all have different views. As opposed to one giant unified viewpoint, with those not conforming left on the outside in the underground.
Because that’s just one topic. There’s other people who are ok with gay people, but not ok with trans. So thats another circle. Now imagine every single viewpoint which has a counter viewpoint.
Whereas in the 80s, something like 92% of the vote went towards reagan, and everybody conformed to the preapproved normal viewpoints. We don’t do that anymore. We each find our own meaning of normal.
Now me personally, I don’t find giving a nazi salute to be normal. But you’ll still find herds of people defending musk. You’ll also find people like me who say fuck musk, and fuck any self identifying nazi. So, another example of how different people are now in different circles.
Of course there’s always being Nazi apologists and equally there’s always been people who are just incapable of moving with the times. That’s not a new thing that’s always been the case.
The meaning of the word Gay has shifted a lot in different directions over the decades. Way, way back “gay” had the meaning of joyful and fun, without any form of connotation to sexuality. Just as a addition to your text, please don’t read it in any kind of negative meaning.
Nope, that designation goes to Massachusetts. First gay marriages occurred in 2004 and never had a prop 8 pass as late as 2008. California was a red state, redder than Florida is now, until very recently. California is a relatively recent leftward shift.
I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.
Unrelated rant following:
Back in around 2002-2003 as I started becoming cognitive enough to appreciate different artists and styles, I didn’t have Internet at home (Eastern Europe yay), but we had a couple of non-local TV channels somehow. One being VIVA (the German channel, not the UK one), which at some time of day just played the week’s top 100 hits for Germany, many of which were one hit wonders. Tatu was one of them, though they were more of a 1.5 hit wonder (they’re not gonna get us was half a hit compared to the big one).
This was wonderful, because it got me hearing all kinds of music as a 7 year old that I normally wouldn’t have. Where the hell else was I going to hear The Rasmus - In The Shadows, a bunch of songs by Eminem, and then suddenly Las Ketchup Song? Or for something way less commonly known: Travel Time by Starsplash
Yeah, 43 here, went to school with a kid who’s parents must have been from the 19th century, and named him Gaylord. Holy shit, I left that school after middle school, but I would honestly not be surprised if he killed himself.
…part of me wants to know the middle name. Part of me wonders if that might be doxxing him at that point.
Because middle names are weird, but with a name like Gaylord, he doesn’t have much to risk.
He might be like “Call me Olive!”
And it’s somehow better than being Gaylord in the 80s/90s.
I think I’d just create a persona. Thats what a kid at my school did. His name was Adam, but he was like “Call me, The Jew!”
Not “Jew”, not “The Jew Kid” he specifically called himself “The Jew”. Pro wrestling was popular, and it was like how there was “The Rock”. Except he was “The Jew”.
Then one kid thought it would be funny to come in with a red armband with swastika on it. He asked The Jew if he thought it was funny. And The Jew said no…with his fist. Over and over and over and over. Usually school fights had an honor to them. Kid falls down, you won the fight. You walk away. Anyone tried contining the fight on a downed opponent, and the whole crowd would step in. They’d end the fight for you, and it wouldn’t be good for you.
That didn’t happen here. This kid went down, and The Jew just kept punching him. Over and over and over. For what seemed like forever. Nobody stepped in. Usually during fights, the crowd was rowdy. It was exciting. This was dead silent.
In normal times, The Jew was the most chill laid back easy to get along with guy. It’s 20+ years since I saw him last, and I still remember him and refer to him as that. By his request. So you can kind of get an idea of how he didn’t let things get to him. No ego. Just a good kid really.
When he saw that swastika, he just went off. And everybody had the same silent collective thought. Not to step in, and when teachers get here, we all stand behind The Jew. And we all did. Literally 30 kids all got detention for a month, because not one of us ratted out who beat the fuck out of gary. Eventually the teachers pieced together what happened, when gary came out of the hospital and was able to talk again. We still had to serve detention. Even after they “knew”, we still didn’t talk.
And now, I’ve gotten so sidetracked that I don’t even remember the point of this story. Other than to say fuck nazis. Fuck gary. And fuck anyone who owns a swastika armband. Gary had it coming.
His middle name was normal, I honestly don’t remember exactly what it was, because we barely ever spoke to each other. The only reason I knew the kid even existed was because his name was Gaylord. Jacob, maybe? Something like that.
I don’t know why you would use a third Party Tool that estimates your purchases, when it has always been right there in your account, without estimates.
Main reason for me is that I have bought humble bundles, donated to gamejams, and gotten keys off of legit and grey-market sites in the past in conjunction with buying directly from Steam. Those aren’t included in the Steam spend category.
The tool doesn’t know how much you paid for it, though, so it’s completely ignoring sales, donations and in app purchases, and just applies a price to it.
This isn't a 3rd party tool, it's a separate Steam Support page that lists your total purchases. It basically takes the data from the Purchase History section (assuming that you usually pay directly and not using Steam gift cards) and totals it so that you don't have to do that manually.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
Just for the record, this is exactly what any museum would do, because they’re not going to actually run anything on the original hardware. Those systems are part of the collection, and it behooves a museum to not put any wear on them.
Plus you can do stuff like reset the emulator to a certain state pretty easily. Without having to reboot the hardware or anything. So you could do an exhibit on level 7 and have the game queued up to the level the exhibit is about.
That is highly depending on the type of Museum. Many Videogame and Computer Museums (at least in Germany) are showing the real Hardware running, some are even allowing the visitors to use and play at the old machines. And yes, they are often very used to repairing the hardware too.
I would expect from Nintendo that they would show and use real hardware in their museum, and not some emulators. Because I can see the games on an emulator at home (for example using my Switch Online or my SNES Classic), I don’t need a museum for that experience.
I know to be a certified museum in the US, you must work to preserve your articles in perpetuity, meaning anything that could be detrimental to the article is discouraged if not totally disallowed.
Unless they store everything in high vacuum and near absolute zero, it’s going to get oxidized and fail eventually. There is no such thing as perpetuity. Might as well give them some use.
You really think an old parchment document would survive being in a high vacuum and near absolute zero?
Yeah sure, nothing lasts forever, but the really not the point. Your goal is to attempt to preserve your articles forever.
Are you going to fall short? Absolutely, but your still required to attempt to do so. So you avoid doing anything directly harmful, such as operating an old computer, firing an old cannon, or diving an old car.
Parchment would survive the vacuum and near zero most likely quite good, parchment is a type of leather after all and way more sturdy then paper, the process of thawing would be a way bigger issue. And should it ever thaw fast and uncontrolled that would for sure ruin it completely
Ok that is not the case in Germany, here you can have items multiple times, to have some to archive and some to use.
I can see that the preservation aspect is very valid for highly rare or one of a kind items, but that is generally not the case with retro hardware. Yes there are examples for that too (like C65 or other prototype stuff) but nobody would expect a museum to put that to use.
No one would have cared to preserve a Mosin Nagant from 1892 when they were making 500,000 of them, why would they? You can just go and buy more, the factory is right over there. Fast forward 132 years later, they are scarce antiques. And in another 100 years, there may only be a dozen left.
The entire field of computers as we know it, integrated circuits, is about half as old as that particular rifle, and the technology has changed so fast, it’s really crazy.
So while it might seem like that’s reasonable now, I mean the people who designed those systems are often still alive, even still working. Of course we can still fix and use them.
Now give it 60 or so years, your sitting around in you retirement community, sad you lost the auction for a 2003 eMachines tower PC with all the stickers still attached, kicking yourself about how you tossed one out back in the day.
At least you kept your Atari Jaguar, kept in a hermetically sealed container, that managed to save when you had to evacuate from the 2nd Finnish-Korean Hyperwar.
They’re fucking Nintendo. They made the consoles they’re showing off in their museum. They absolutely have the ability to supply that museum with equipment and maintain it in perpetuity, because they fucking invented it
That’s not the point of it though. Not about whether you could fix or maintain it when operating it, it’s about not operating it if presents a notable risk of failure. The Smithsonian doesn’t start grinding cornmeal in a bowl from the Mississippians. The Connecticut Museum doesn’t take it’s colt rifles out the range for target practice. These organizations would use a replica to demonstrate what it was like, as opposed to risking damaging an original article.
Thats also not even necessary true either. While they may have invented there various consoles, at some point it will be nearly impossible to acquire replacement parts. They don’t manufacture the ICs or mainboards or the various discreet components. So if there’s no old stock, how would they “fix” a broken N64 (or later) console? It might be theoretically possible to fab a NEC VR4300 to replace a dead one, but probably cost hundreds of thousands, and it wouldn’t be broken anyway if you hadn’t left if running 16 hours a day so some sweaty tourists could play on real hardware.
And why would they? It would cost more, be more work, and have less reliable results than using a completely replacable computer running an emulator. The entire consumer facing side of the equation is worse if they run the games on the actual hardware, as long as the consumer doesn’t see it, which is really down to how they design the exhibit.
Do you think the public is understanding enough to accept that “The NES is really old and it broke so you can’t play super mario bros today”, when it’s the only day you are gonna be there? Temper tantrum, bad reviews, loss of face. From what I understand, Japan actually cares about all that, so Nintendo probably does as well.
They could replace all the parts in a SNES or NES with components indefinitely, because inside are either off the shelf components or specifically made components made after schematics from Nintendo. So even if nobody makes such parts anymore at the moment there is nothing (but time and money) that would stop Nintendo to order new parts based on their schematics.
Most issues with old consoles can even be fixed by hobbyists and if they can’t that’s because they don’t have access to the needed information to create new versions of the tailor made components.
So there should be no issue for Nintendo to supply their museum with replicas forever. Yes it would cost way more money then using Emulators, but it would be way more appropriate for their own museum. But no they have chosen the lazy route.
Oh no, poor Nintendo, how could they possibly afford a custom IC fab? They only have more money than God.
The way I see it, they have two choices. Make the investment to supply their museum with original hardware, or be ok with emulation. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too, and that’s shitty.
That would just be wasteful, and wouldn’t really be the same thing? Analogue already makes N64 FPGAs make things that are almost N64s, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to care.
Your forgetting that Nintendo emulates there own games all the time, literally since the GameCube.
There argument has never been about what they can do, it’s about what you can do. Now they are wrong under US law, but it’s not like it’s hard to go find ROMs of these games, they aren’t even on torrents or shady websites, you can download them directly.
I disagree. If they actually care about the preservation of their history (which is the whole point of museums), they should be willing to invest a tiny fraction of their incredible wealth to do that, if they want to run it themselves.
Your forgetting that Nintendo emulates there own games all the time, literally since the GameCube.
I’m not forgetting anything. That’s my whole point. Nintendo has their own emulators, in both software and hardware. Why are they running some Windows emulator on a Windows PC in their own museum? It makes me think that they just took one of the myriad open source emulators (that they’re probably trying diligently to get shut down) and installed that, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re playing ripped ROMs on it, given that they include ripped ROMs on their own emulation libraries (that they charge people to access, btw). Because they’ve proven that they’re hypocrites when it comes to emulation.
There argument has never been about what they can do, it’s about what you can do.
Right, again, that’s my point. Emulation is fine and dandy when Nintendo does it, but not when anyone else does it, yet they still benefit from those other emulators. That’s shitty.
Or they could just, I don’t know, not burn out console after console running them constantly so they don’t have to spend exuberantly. That’s if the they can even produce that process node somehow. If not, making a new fab would cost 10s of millions, to produce old and completely antiquated hardware that they can already emulate on there current hardware.
What do think Nintendo does there development on? You think they run the unity editor on the Switch? They have probably used windows emulators for development since the Gamecube, and they absolutely have there own versions. Which open source emulators are they trying shut down? Something from this decade? If you mean Switch emulators, that’s just piracy, which I’m all for, but it’s not a exactly a moral high ground.
I thought they had included ripped ROMs, someone mentioned in another thread that were packaging the ROMs the same way. I’m not sure if that means the used the same tools or got to same result another way, buts it’s only a way of packaging ROMs.
It’s there IP, they can choose what’s allowed to be done with it. If they want to emulate it, they can. If they want it to only ever play on a N64DD, then thats also up to them. If they benefit from open source emulators, which I mostly doubt, then they as the fault on the emulator developer for being open source. Close it down, make Nintendo license it if you think it’s benefiting them unfairly.
I assure you they are currently runnng there in-development Switch2 games on in an emulated environment as we speak.
Or they could just, I don’t know, not burn out console after console running them constantly so they don’t have to spend exuberantly.
You’re grossly overestimating the number of consoles they would “burn through” by having a few of their original original hardware set up in their museum. If you’re worried about them running constantly, they could easily have a couple consoles per station that get swapped between throughout the day so that no one console is ever on for more than a few hours. People used their regularly NESes and SNESes for several years, I’m sure you could stretch that to decades of you had the expertise and resources of the company that invented the hardware behind you.
You’re grossly overestimating the amount of money it would cost to maintain original hardware. As another user said, hobbyists can maintain an original system themselves for decades using mostly off-the-shelf parts. The rare occurrences where a proprietary Nintendo part needs replaced wouldn’t cost tens of millions of dollars. There’s thousands of shops that can manufacture small runs of custom ICs or circuit boards for a few thousand bucks. They wouldn’t need to maintain a custom multi-million dollar facility.
to produce old and completely antiquated hardware that they can already emulate on there current hardware.
Then emulate on your current hardware, if you’re going to use emulation! Don’t use a Windows emulator from who-knows-where, when you’ve repeatedly made clear that you’re against other parties emulating your hardware! That’s certainly more embarrassing by the way, if your Windows emulator crashes and museum goers are greeted by a Windows BSOD or whatever, instead of the Switch home screen or the Nintendo Online interface.
What do think Nintendo does there development on?
We’re talking about NES/SNES games here (which Nintendo doesn’t develop anymore, btw), because that’s what they were caught using a Windows PC and a Windows emulator for. So either they’re using someone else’s emulator, or they ported the emulator that runs on the switch to run on Windows (which would be a huge undertaking, considering the architecture and OS differences between a Nintendo Switch and a Windows PC).
If you mean Switch emulators, that’s just piracy
Emulation is not piracy.
I thought they had included ripped ROMs
Some of the ROMs on their official library contained signatures from popular ROM rippers, which indicates they straight up just downloaded them from one of the various ROM sites they’ve been trying to shut down for the last couple decades.
It’s there IP, they can choose what’s allowed to be done with it. If they want to emulate it, they can.
That’s fine, I don’t have a problem with anyone emulating anything, including Nintendo. My problem lies with their hypocrisy. If they want to emulate NES/SNES games in their own museum, go for it. But at least use your own emulator on your own hardware, given they have the ability to easily do that. Using a Windows PC and a Windows emulator for that is hypocritical.
NES and SNES processers? Those should be simple enough, although I’m not sure it would be 1 to 1 swap. Anything later? No.
You’d have to make the same processor on the same process node. That’s not even just to do transistor size, as that’s just one aspect of a particular companies process. No one has made 350nm MIPS dies since, well, the late 90s or early 2000s. So the equipment likely doesn’t exist anymore. I think they licensing is open now, but otherwise they would also need to relicense the design, which would be something that would be very hypocritical for Nintendo to do.
Sure a hobbyist could swap a dead passive component out, and probably fix a damaged trace on the PCB, that’s where it would stop. I’ve never seen a hobbyist or even small company make a PCB that complex. I know from personal experience that getting a batch of those made would run in the tens or hundreds of thousands. It actually may also need leaded solder, which would violate Japans version of RoHS. I’m not familiar enough with that standard to know if that would be permissable.
If hobbyist do have the capability to recreate the processor, why would a company like Analogue make an FPGA instead for there N64 clone? Think about all the development they put into that instead of trying to do what you’re suggesting is commonplace.
They don’t need to make an IC, the need to make the same IC. There are more powerful chips running smart toasters, and they cost a couple of dollars a piece, but that’s not the original hardware
Your also assuming that expertise and resources lies with the company, and not the staff themselves. I also know from personal experience how big of mistake that can be.
Anything later than an N64 is going to be progressively harder and harder to fix. By the end of the decade they will probably be emulating N64s. And so on and so forth.
The whole point is to not damage original articles, not to damage and then fix them. That’s what’s required of US Museum at least. It will matter more and more as the hardware ages and becomes scarcer.
On the next point, I think your giving the public too much credit. The BSoD is probably the most common failure screen in the world, but how many people would know to equate that with a windows PC and just with any computer?
What percent of the population knows what an emulator or emulation is? 1%? Maybe among people who are visiting the Nintendo museum, probably in the double digits, but not by much. The only embarrassment would be a reddit post, which would get turned into garbage news articles and shorts which everyone but us will forget about 3 seconds later. Basically every person that sees it would just be mad it’s not working when they happened to be there.
It’s is quite literally only there decision what hardware there IP can run on. In every legal way, they are the arbiters of that. Why are we supposed to care what emulator they use? If it’s open source, it’s as much there’s to use as everyone else’s. I wouldn’t run it on Windows certianly, but that is objectively there decision.
They probably have there own way on running NES/SNES games for development for Switch online or the NES classic, so your silly comment about them no longer developing those not only pointless but also probably wrong.
I’ve used mGBA on both my Switch and a PC, I’m not sure why you think that would be so hard. That’s literally made by a hobbyist, for a more modern system, and runs on several other platforms as well.
All emulation is probably (but not 100 certainly) piracy. It depends on how you read the law, but it seems clear to me that you can’t legally transfer software copies without transferring the original. Meaning for it to be legal, you would have to make the copy yourself, and continue owning the original. I say this as someone who fully supports pirating from AAA publishers, including Nintendo.
Can you provide a source for the ripped ROMs? I’ve been well actually’d on that before, now in both directions, but I can’t find an actual source.
These are in the most certain terms possible “rules for thee and not for me” but it’s there IP, and they get to set those rules. I wouldn’t describe there rights they fight tooth and nail for as hypocritical.
Funnily enough, I’m guessing the whole reason they are emulating NES/SNES is because they were having reliability issues.They probably picked the simplest thing they could get working on short notice.
Even if they don’t use the real old hardware then at least they could have created something that is closer to the original hardware, for example a SNES/NES/N64 console based on FPGA in a recreated original shell. Anything but a stupid emulator running on a Windows PC.
I am sure that Nintendo is using FPGA for internal R&D, so they have people capable of writing cores for FPGA. Add to that the fact that Nintendo has all the schematics and detailed information about the original hardware and designs.
Yes, a FPGA would have been work, but not lots of work for them. And we are speaking of 8 and 16 bit hardware, that is very small and limited hardware.
Besides that: Windows can run on a Raspberry PI, so maybe the emulator on Windows used by Nintendo is already using that. Who knows?
Why should they do that? They already have their own SNES emulator with Canoe (used for example on the SNES Classic Mini). It is much more logical to assume that they compiled Canoe to run on Windows for this exhibition.
I have and if the code is well written and prepared then such a port can be done with just a recompilation for the different platform. Yes, often it is not that easy but the developers at Nintendo are neither dumb nor incompetent.
You’re making my point for me though. Each of the other things you’ve suggested is more work than requires more expertise. Popping up an emulator on an existing box and dumping a ROM in there is something an intern can do.
All of these other things can be done, but they’re not as quick and simple, and that’s why we’re seeing this in the first case - Nintendo went with a quick and simple solution, and someone found a bug (it still plays Windows noises).
You have your view at the world, a view where everyone is lazy on every level, and I have mine. Thank you for the nice conversation and have a great day!
This is a “Museum” run by Nintendo in Japan. Meaning they could have used or even created more original hardware to run the titles, but instead cut costs by using the same Emulators that they’re hoping to take down.
Them being the original creator of the products doesn’t necessarily imply that they still have running production processes for every product that they ever made.
If I obtain all the original schematics and software and make 1 Nintendo internals for commercial purposes wothout their permission it would be illegal.
If they do it, it costs them the price of a couple of family dinners at most.
This museum IS NINTENDO. They are the only people allowed to do this job correctly.
I mean they have old games available for new platforms and have had that for multiple generations. One of the things you get with a Nintendo online subscription is a switch catalog full of a bunch of SNES and NES games for play on the switch.
In other words, emulators are crucial for game preservation? This shows that Nintendo knows that, and when they say it’s not the case, they’re not simply wrong, they’re lying.
Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
Yeah, the people behind it always seemed to be more interested in getting corporate funding and thus gave corporations more what they wanted/needed instead of typical users and mods. This is part of the reason why I’m no longer interested in matrix main and more hard forks of it.
Discord routes over their own servers and uses a private I3Dnet backbone to spread the signals across the world. The latter is one of the reasons why discord video is very good.
If discord did any p2p there would be stories all over of people getting ddos-ed after joining a voice call / screenshare.
In general, discords tech is pretty solid overall. The platform itself is just getting shittier.
TeamSpeak has been working on a new TeamSpeak 6 client and server that allows users to set up effectively their own personal federation of gaming servers with text, voice, and video chat rooms in a modern cross platform client that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile operating systems.
They’ve also built up their own infrastructure so less technical folks can directly rent servers from them rather than needing to buy through a third party.
I’ve got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club
Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.
this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord
you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should’ve copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can’t search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn’t require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)
I don’t even see rooms linking back to their Space?
tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(
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