What I took away from the story is that they’re still going to sell cartridges, but the games won’t actually be on them … they’re essentially bulky, overengineered QR codes to be able to download the game you just bought a physical copy off. So, services gone? Congrats on your useless $80 piece of plastic.
In my opinion, that oversimplifies it. PlayStation and Xbox have disks without the “Next Gen” Version on it for years, but nobody cared. At this point there are also no games that have this license-on-a-cartridge.
After all, you can still sell the cartridge, something you cannot do with a completely digital game.
The game key cards are only an option developers can use. Afaik no Nintendo published games are using them. Most games still have the game on the cartridge
I love my emulating devices that are full of nintendo games I may or may not have paid for. I definitely paidbthe emulation company, nintendo? Nodidtho
My first Nintendo console was an NES that I got for Christmas the year it was released in the US. You can say thay I have been a Nintendo fan for a bit. Nowadays I repeat the same thing over and over again.
So the Switch is essentially for rent. You can play it, as long as Nintendo decides you’re in its good graces.
You don’t own something to which somebody else has the master off-switch. And with their continued abuse of their own fans and other game developers through the courts, it’s a testament to FOMO and fandom that they are still in business.
Vote with your wallets, y’all. This kind of behavior only makes you the loser.
OG Xbox - nVidia GPU - never gets a price cut and is discontinued almost immediately after 360 releases (with an AMD GPU from which MS never looked back at nVidia)
PS3 - nVidia GPU - Only got small price cuts very late, discontinued almost immediately after PS4 release (with an AMD GPU from which Sony never looked back at nVidia)
Switch - nVidia SoC - never got a real price cut either (though Switch2 is also an nVidia SoC)
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
The console market ever since the PS3 and xbox 360 has been a leech on the PC platform market. They turn up every X years apart to buy a cheap GPU and CPU on a chip and demand rock bottom prices for volume and pay for none of the research and development in the intervening years.
I respectfully disagree. AMD basically said that they survived the Bulldozer debacle because of Sony and Microsoft ordering their APUs. The custom designs also have trickled down with AMD making iGPU that are desktop levels now (8060S).
But that’s what they’ve always done. The NES used a 6502 processor that no one used anymore, and the Sega a Z80 after CP/M went the way of dinosaurs. The Xbox and PS2 used out of date Pentium processors.
“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.
The PS5’s price is higher than it was 4.5 years ago at launch, a device with identical function. While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price, we see a pro version at 50% more. Crazy.
We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
There is a lot of content on semiconductor manufacturing (both in context of gaming and beyond) on !hardware, in one way or another anything related to semiconductors does impact both PC and console gaming (since CPUs and GPUs are key).
I just started playing this remaster, and only played to Skyrim before. And I really love this title! I feels the same waves than when I was on Skyrim. I think this release is the best occasion for newcommers and younger players
I think oblivion was the best RPG of the series. And the remaster just made it more enjoyable to play. The original had some…interesting ideas that ultimately flopped (that god awful levelling system they bastardized from morrowind).
The quests are peak, quirky, and actually have rewards at the end since you can’t make god tier equipment right out the (oblivion) gate. Levelling feels good again, and you don’t have to cry into a pillow because you ran too much and leveled your athletics and now you HAVE to take a speed point as an attribute on level up even though you wanted strength.
Don’t expect a 2025 game in terms of mechanics and level design. For it’s time Oblivion was a very good game. This is a polished version of the original with updated graphics and somewhat modernised combat and movement. They ironed out a lot of clunky mechanics and bugs too.
As far as remasters go the GTA ones were absolute dogwater just like warcraft 3 remastered. This one is very good and imo comparable with the command and conquer remasters.
I dont think they could have done much more without making the game completely different.
the doomed king and his armed guards need to escape through a secret passage that just so happens to cut through my jail cell seems a little too convenient
I remember playing it for the first time in 2006 and I had completely forgotten about that guff by the time I got out of the tutorial. My character went on to ignore the main quest for many dozens of hours.
Of course several of those hours were spent struggling to defeat boars that started appearing on the road at level 5. They were insanely tough since I'd accidentally made the most difficult possible custom class. At least the remaster doesn't have that problem. Instead the combat is very easy — unless you go up one level in difficulty in which case you'll probably be killed by a mudcrab.
Tbh, I actually think this ends up being a win for Skyblivion. I think a lot of first-time Oblivion tryers were hoping for more dramatic changes, as opposed to basically unchanged Oblivion with a weird facelift running on top.
arstechnica.com
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