What’s the downside? This almost looks too good. I don’t like the battery size but this is hitting almost every other desire-list checkbox. I love the prospect of having touchpad options, and that 6-button panel is such a great idea.
Maybe the button-swap panels will feel weirdly loose over time? Can it run SteamOS?
I don’t see why you’d spend $900 on this when you could get a better handheld for that money but I’ll give them this, the swappable joystick/button thing is cool.
You’re right, it’s a pretty big downgrade and probably reason enough to cancel for a lot. Especially with CoD, they could save the subscription for a few months and then buy it and keep it.
It’s a ton of money when comparing it to mainstream electronics, but I’d imagine that $300 single payment is a drop in the bucket for something medical. Anyone who needs it probably spends similar amounts or more adapting other everyday things for ease of use.
It’s a niche probably low volume product that requires a good amount of hardware and software engineering.
You ever look at how much a basic, non-powered, used wheelchair costs?
These high prices come with the fact that by definition, the equipment can be incredibly specialized. Unfortunately this is something most people with any sort of disability are probably completely used to.
There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.
Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It’s far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.
Edit to add:
I don’t know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush’s director:
It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.
And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:
For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.
It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
I see the contradiction. And I’m not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It’s a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.
My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of “Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built.” We’re talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.
Yes, of course they have complained to the courts. That's not the point. This simply will go nowhere, or do you expect that the court will somehow separate Activision out of Microsofts hands again to fix this? Or punish the managers at Microsoft and make them withdraw the execution plan to remove redundant jobs?
At the end of it, Microsoft will eventually pay a small, symbolic sum which they consider "cost of conducting business". Nothing more.
As pessimistic as it sounds, I think you’re right. There’s likely some back pay they will have to give to the workforce they fired, which is a pittance compared to what they stand to earn as they milk their purchase dry.
If the appellate court is unhappy with the lower court’s ruling, then there is no reason for it not to reverse it and tell Microsoft to stop the process of merging with Activision until the proceedings have completed. Admittedly this outcome might be inconvenient for Microsoft and Activison, but it is not the job of the court to care about this.
Yes, of course they have complained to the courts. That’s not the point.
That is moving the goalposts. In your other comment, you said, “What is the FTC going to do about it? Most likely do nothing, or issue a stern warning.” I have demonstrated that they are doing neither of these things but instead are going through the courts to get injunctive relief.
This simply will go nowhere, or do you expect that the court will somehow separate Activision out of Microsofts hands again to fix this?
If the appellate court decides that the lower court erred in its reasoning, then there is no reason why it could not issue such an order. It is not like this would be the first time that the government broke up a company.
Or punish the managers at Microsoft and make them withdraw the execution plan to remove redundant jobs?
There is no reason why the court could not issue an injunction preventing it from executing this plan until the proceeding concludes.
At the end of it, Microsoft will eventually pay a small, symbolic sum which they consider “cost of conducting business”. Nothing more.
If the FTC considered this to be a sufficient remedy then they probably would have settled with Microsoft by now rather than taking this to the courts.
All the people blaming “clickbait youtubers” or “AI bots” for this game blowing up are idiots. Its actually fun, it delivers a satisfying game loop that no pokemon game ever has, and it has support for multiplayer. It’s big enough to explore a lot, has a deep tech tree to unlock, some pretty interesting base automation mechanics, and over 100 pokemon to discover and catch, and a surprisingly robust breeding system to unlock new pokemon instead of evolving. It’s just FUN, and lots of games lately lack that. Despite it being buggy and early access, its very playable. I hosted a dedicated server and my friends and I can play together and explore and adventure and find bosses, and work on our base together. Haven’t had a game that lets me do that in a long time.
@Sheeple@thorbot I personally love Palworld, it really plays nothing at all like pokemon...
But my kids keep asking 'which pokemon is that! Is that a legendary! Where is Pikachu' whenever they see me play, so it's definitely a little close for comfort.
I don’t think folks realise how much effort and investment Valve has put into making Linux a viable gaming alternative for modern-ish games.
Most distributors use Windows because it is easy to install and setup for gaming. Is it perfect? No. But any vendor can pay Microsoft and get a viable OS for gaming.
Linux will need a lot of custom graphics card drivers and a lot of tweaking (think power as well as graphical features, memory, CPU etc) to get the optimum performance. Most OSes out of the box have OKish performance for gaming, which is OK for any hobbyist but would be a disaster for a consumer product.
And before Valve came along, Proton wasn’t even a thing. Proton is now a thing, and the way Steam utilises it makes it effortless, but it will need a fair bit of custom args to get it working well.
Each of these things separately can be quite painful in its own right, but altogether it would be a headache for any company not well versed in Linux. Not only that, but having to provide customer support for a Linux OS would put the fear in most companies.
I would imagine most vendors would just slap Windows on their machine and be like “you know what to do with this” and let them go nuts.
I guess. It’s not like he’s being thrown out on his ass though. Which is more than the actual workers can say. You know this merger will require “consolidation and remove redundancies” or whatever bullshit term they like using.
And what about that free next gen update for Fallout 4 that Todd announced last year as coming in 2023 and never has been mention by Bethesda ever again?
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