But even before recent tariffs, modern console prices weren’t dropping nearly as fast as history suggested they should. In fact, Sony first raised the nominal starting price of the PS5 Digital Edition back in 2023, way before Trump’s current trade war was even on the horizon.
I’m not saying Trump is to blame but this is misleading. Trump hurt our economy with tariffs during his first term nearly 10 years ago. During 2023 he was releasing “Agenda 47” policies, in which he specifically mentioned more tariffs. Here’s Trump threatening tariffs 8 months before Sony raised the price
For regular people, Trump tariffs came out of nowhere in 2024. Corporations and people holding stock have different perspectives.
Or if you really want the feeling of playing those original CARTS on new hardware funny playing sells a GBC fpga board, shell and buttons for about $100. You just can’t play GBA.
If your concern is “value for dollar” you wouldn’t be buying an FPGA console in a limited edition material. Seems like a weird comparison. You can also get an R36S for like, $30 on AliExpress that will play everything from N64/PS1 and earlier.
A standard Analogue Pocket is much cheaper, this is just an option for those that really want a metal shell. Also, a metal “unfolded” shell for a GBA SP (which is I’m sure is what inspired this offering) is like $150 so it’s not even that crazy a markup.
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.
We continue to be able to make faster chips, both via smaller nodes, but also via advanced packaging and architecture improvements.
But the costs of every new generational increase is rising faster than the % performance improvement.
I am personally hoping this will eventually lead to a culture of total optimization (similar to what we saw in the 90s on both PC and console), but there are likely significant barriers to implementing such a new development culture at scale.
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
Before the ill-fated Stadia, Harrison helped lead Sony’s gaming efforts during the troubled launch of the PlayStation 3, at one point going so far as to brag that “nobody will ever use 100 percent of [the PS3’s] capability.” He then worked in Microsoft’s gaming division during the disastrous rollout of the Xbox One and its confused used game policies.
It’s honestly very sad how corporations can just throw their work in the trash if they think it will make them more profit there. I’m glad Deery was able to release it on his own for free so the game won’t be lost, but it’s unclear if all the developers will be able to do that.
I can’t imagine how frustrating and disheartening it must be as an artist to create something to share with the world only for it to be essentially buried underground because someone decided they could make a little extra money if no one ever sees what you made…
Ooo, that’s interesting. I was looking at “Deery clarified that the game will be pulled in the next 60 days.” and thought that meant the publisher had exclusive distribution rights and was choosing to destroy the thing. From that site it looks like your interpretation is correct, which is good! Sometimes it’s good to be wrong 😅
I’m curious what uses you have in mind–anything that’s an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players–doesn’t need to be esports sweaty) game I don’t think there’s a strong case for allowing injected code, since that’s an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players’ enjoyment, and anything offline I can’t see it being worth a company’s time and money to prosecute.
I think the problem is that the ruling now establishes that overlays and injected code are a copyright violation. Therefor any overlay or injected code is now illegal unless you have permission from the authors if the game.
This. Nintendo is one of the least ethical videogame companies out there. Even when they come up with something new and innovative, it’s so locked down you’re better off waiting to play someone else’s copycat of it.
It probably will. Given the modest spec bump and the high even for Nintendo hostility to switch emulation, it’s probably trivial to support switch 2 as well.
Apart from the bait title it’s a reasonable article. If they’d have called it “Six things Microsoft need to do for their portable Xbox to compete with the Steam Deck” it could have had exactly the same content.
arstechnica.com
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