A 2TB Xbox Series X now costs more than a PS5 Pro (in the US at least).
That is mental. Xbox hardware division must be bleeding money hand over fist. I honestly doubt they’ll do another generation, and stick to trying to monetise GamePass through PC and streaming. Maybe you’ll even see GamePass for PS6 since they own so many studios now.
They’ll only get Game Pass on PlayStation with Sony’s blessing, which is unlikely. And the next Xbox will just be a PC. I don’t think any of the consoles are in the market of selling units at a loss anymore. Those days are done. So with tariffs and inflation, this is the only way it could go.
Assuming MS exit the console market, I don’t see why Sony wouldn’t allow it (as long as they get their pound of flesh from every sale of it). They’d basically just be another publisher.
The breadth of the Game Pass catalog is far larger, and Microsoft isn’t exiting the console market, as much as they don’t care about exclusivity. So personally, I doubt it, but I don’t have a crystal ball.
Yeah, there’s probably a fair bit of overlap between GamePass and PSN Premium games.
I suspect to try and push their own products, we’ll be entering an age where games are $80, and almost never go on sale, purely to make their own subscription services seem better value. And then they’ll crank the price of those as well.
Yeah, there’s always someone bringing this up, but you can’t just run Steam on it, and that’s what’s about to change. Xbox games still go through cert and need explicit ports above and beyond the PC SKU.
Ya for sure, I’m just speaking on a hardware level. Always been x86 as far as I was aware. I remember bypassing the disk encryption fighting every fiber of my being on the Xbox 1 by pulling out the IDE cable as it was booting to gain access to the HDD 😂
Trying to raise the “standard” price to $80 will have very nice ripple effects of more pricing diversity, where each game will really consider what it’s actually worth, which we haven’t had for a long time. Even now we’re getting first-party Microsoft titles releasing at $20, $30, and $50.
Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.
A lot of games priced at $70 right now are having a rough go of it, so charging more on top of that isn’t going to help, but there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50. If your game isn’t as hot of a commodity as Mario Kart, you’re probably going to try to lure people in with a lower price.
there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.
Steam doesn’t need to. It’s got the steam sale and a hundred million people to share memes of “sale so good spent all my money no time to play all the games I bought in such massive sale”
I bought it long before the steam release, back when multiplayer was in experimental. So glad that there are 1000s of hours that were never tracked so I don’t need to see those.
I think all it will do is raise the ceiling of what publishers are willing to price games at. If they think they can get away with it, they’ll charge $80 instead of $70, with the rest being $70 and less just like it already is now.
Not ALL steam games have DRM. Yes, you should buy from GOG whenever you can, but if you use Linux like me, GOG doesn’t give a shit. It can be hard to decide, support DRM free games and proper ownership with GOG, or expanding compatibility with Linux and improve it in general. If its cheaper on steam cause of a sale or something, I’ll buy on steam, then years later like with DOOM 2016 for example, I’ll buy it when it hits like 4 bucks on gog. That way, I have acces to an offline installer, and I show support and interest to valve for investing in proton.
Yeah, it just launches a web browser in the client, but behind the scenes, it’s using a referral code in partnership with GOG to make sure they get a cut. So you can support DRM-free and Linux gaming support at the same time.
Your not wrong. If it weren't for steam being absolutely stellar than I wouldn't be buying games from them. I would try to go through gog. But with their work on proton alone I personally give them a pass.
To run the games i wanna play would require a pc worth 3 ps5s
Edit: people here don’t like facts, but where I live a pc that matches a ps5 is around $1500+ it you’re lucky. Yes your pc is better than my ps5 in the same way that your Ferrari is better than my Honda. But I like Hondas.
Again no, that’s not my taste. I’m just saying steam doesn’t work for most people. The convenience of a console alone is always gonna keep me. To know i can buy a game 5 years after the console is released and it’ll run. PC gaming is superior, but it costs way more and takes way more work. Im it’s not convenient for casual people like me, especially since I want to sit on my couch with a controller and not have to interact with a computer
*laugh sitting on the couch playing PC games off steam using a tv to display and a wireless controller
What are you even talking about …enjoy paying more for less, and paying monthly to play games while also being locked to whatever terms they decide all willy nilly.
If you can afford the cost of console game prices, more power to you. They’re pricing me out and I know I’ll have no choice but to switch to PC in the future if I want to be able to keep playing games.
Steam doesn’t work for most people? You sure about that? It has 132 Million active users, that’s nearly double the number of PS 5s that have been sold!
Very odd comparison, you need to buy a ps5 to be a ps5 user, you don’t need to buy anything to be a steam user, you just need to sign up and you’re considered a user.
Well, that settles it. $80 games is going to be the new standard and Sony will quickly trail along. Oh well, nothing much has changed for patient gamers.
$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.
What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.
Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.
As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.
Except that if no advertising is done, the game’s sales are probably a lot lower (which is why they do it). If the game doesn’t do well initially, it’s less likely that you’ll find it years later as well
Oh well, nothing much has changed for patient gamers.
Aye. I wait until games are finished before torrenting them.
Feels good being off the consumer bandwagon. Games are coming out faster than I can beat the ones that came out years ago. I have enough digital entertainment for the rest of my life without ever having to spend a dime.
Yup. The reality, while shitty, Microsoft still publishes games on multiple platforms (2 at minimum - PC and xbox). On PC, the games are sold on multiple storefronts with varying discounts and sales. Oblivion remastered just launched with a 17% discount on another store on PC for example.
Nintendo has a complete monopoly on the platform they publish for and completely control the prices.
For me, all these price increases are doing is moving me more towards PC. And to a larger degree off AAA titles all together.
That’s fair… But the point I was more trying to make is that Breath of the Wild, an 8 year old game that has a sequel out, is currently full price. It went on sale earlier this year for 40% off.
40% off a $70, 8 year old game is very different than 40% off an 8 year old game that was selling at $40-$50 without a sale.
That is because the job of Game Pass isn’t to make money, it is to funnel customers into subscription services and destroy the idea that people buy games from artists.
Game Pass either succeeds and destroys the gaming industry like spotify did to music or Microsoft will abandon Game Pass.
They’ve already plateaued and basically admitted to it. It’s a large revenue stream that’s not as large as they thought it would be, so now they’re going to coast with it and rely on just being a massive publisher instead.
Renting games and music seems like a bad idea to me, but I am in the minority. Buy a new album once a month for $8, after a year I have 12 albums. Pay that to spotify and I have nothing.
Gamepass is priced more aggressively at $12/mo, but I assume it’s a loss so they can eventually raise prices. Even so, if I buy a new somewhat discounted game for $36 every three months, after a year I have four games. With gamepass, I’m pretty sure I end up with nothing.
But I don’t think humans are known for long term thinking.
It’s happening across the board at every industry.
Rather than try to appeal to a larger audience, they’ve found it’s more profitable to take greater advantage of an ever-shrinking pool of saps.
Mark my words, they legitimately don’t want the business of people with standards or self-respect. They want to cultivate communities where the only participants are Stockholm Syndrome victims and their abusers.
GamePass used to be such a good value, but it’s gotten so overpriced. I’d rather keep the money and spend it on a few games a year I get to keep. Plus, not being available on Linux and/or Steam Deck makes it easier to ignore. Never going back to Windows.
It’s a pre-written balanced set of classes to try out, it’s not a requirement to play d&d and you can also just homebrew your own stuff. I don’t see how shouting at the sky about an optional purchaseable module helps
That’s cool, but I hope it doesn’t auto update on my PS5, because I’m still on Act 2 and took a break. Worried this will break my mods again and I’ll have to start over. I think I’m on my third unfinished run at this point.
Not to develop mods, but the PS5 version of the game (and Xbox) supports some mods available from the mod manager that you can also find on PC. I think the console versions of mods require an approval process to make sure they work.
Thanks, I did that and I hope it works. PS5 often updates games even if you have updates turned off. Not sure if that happens with BG3 but I’ll soon find out I guess.
Oh shit good call, I’m in the same boat. I have like 100 hours and I’m still at the end of Act 1. Had to take a break, but it’s a hard game to come back to after a while.
How can you have that much time without having finished act 1? Is it from multiple saves? You can totally clean out everything there is to do in act 1 in about a third of that time.
Man Ioved BG3 but I’m hard pressed to play again. First run was resist Dark Urge. Is there any other storyline to follow that’s worth another ton of hours?
Correct, just trying to get a path forward instead of kind of stumbling around. I usually fall into the same routine if you will during runs. Guess I could embrace Dark Urge?.
I have over a thousand hours in BG3 and i still find new stuff sometimes. Far less often now but still. You’ll find plenty of new story in a second or N+1 run.
But yeah year or two here there, the DualShocks and PS controllers after that were very good controllers.
But those first decent ones came out more like at the turn of the millennium than halfway through the 90’s as you imply.
Back then it ps1 without joysticks and from 96 on N64 with extremely shitty joysticks. Gamecube came out in 2001 and Nintendo had clearly learned it’s lesson — to an extent.
I got a Gulikitt KK3 Max and have really liked it so far. I got one because I got tired of having to resynv my Elite 2 to the PC via Bluetooth (it NEVER saved it as a device, some kinda issue I imagine switching from Xbox connection to BT), and I wanted to try to get out of the Elite 2 swap every 7 months. No complaints so far, other than I can’t monitor battery level. I like the back paddles more too, they are more spaced than the Elite.
Hall effect sticks, swappable ABXY mechanical buttons, and the triggers can be mechanical switch with the trigger stops engaged. Really nifty controller.
Did you even read the article? This solution also uses magnets but requires smaller magnets, is more sensitive and the response curve is more linear compared to Hall effect sensors. So it’s more accurate than Hall effect sensors, smaller and uses less power.
Is accuracy or size even an issue with hall effect sensors? Hall effect sensors can have plenty of resolution and can also be small, the PSVita 1000 had hall effect sensors and those are smaller than the switch joycons
These new type of sensors require less power so that’s the biggest advantage. But them needing smaller magnets probably could mean they can be manufactured cheaper than Hall effect sensors. The increased accuracy and size shrinkage is just a bonus on top.
Also, Hall effect fixes all problems, since decades. Why weren’t they used widely? Because that would cost poor little Nintendo/M$/Sony a few cents more. So they sure as hell won’t implement that new thing.
Its not that i disagree with you, they should have used them and its pretty bad ( though a lot can be fixed with some good old wd40 for electronics lol)
However, its not a few cents more. Its way way more. A regular stick is around 1.84 - 2.73 euro a piece depending on how many you order from official components store. A hal sensor stick is often 2-4 euro.
Lets say 150mil switches are sold, each having 2 sticks and its 0.2 more per stick. That gives us the following
150,000,000 * (0.2 * 2)=60mil
60mil difference in cost for the company, at least, for using different sticks. And thats just sticks that come with the console, not separately sold controllers or pro controllers.
Manufacturing cost is very different than just ‘its a few cents more’.
Nu nu, it would be way more expensive, have you thought about all the not sold controllers with incredible markup due the stick not drifting? I not saying that it is planned obsolescence but it really quacks like a duck
8bitdo sells a fantastic controller that does everything the Switch Pro controller does besides gyro for $25. It has hall-effect sticks, hall effect triggers and a much better d-pad. It really sickens me how greedy the console manufacturers have gotten with controller prices.
I’m disagreeing. It’s really that simple. $60 million fewer dollars from $1 billion in revenue over 8 years (using your numbers here, please correct me if you think it’ll make your case stronger) is still about $1 billion. Any way you cut it, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a few cents
And a switch costs, MSRP, ~300€/$. So they just got 45,000,000,000, 45 billion dollars. Or, in other words: They could raise the MSRP by 6$. Which would be justified for a then better product.
Hall effect sensors are crazy expensive. Sony has controllers with them and they’re more than twice as expensive as the normal ones. It’s very unlikely that Sony would set this insane price without a good reason.
Don’t worry, we’ll find another part that’s going to be broken instead. TBH it already happened to my friend’s Gullikit controller, his shoulder and trigger buttons are already broken, but not his analog stick.
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