A humble choice like subscription service would be pretty great honestly. $10ish a month for maybe 1 AA/AAA modern game and a handful of retro and indie games would have me on board immediately. Starting to charge for things they currently or have previously offered for free is not the way to win people over.
My brain says 8dx, wii and DD are all good enough that I don’t think I could pick between them. My heart says OG is the GOAT because it’s what I played the most and I still think it has the best battle mode.
I recall an interview back during the wii/ds era where someone at Nintendo was asked how they felt their online service compared to psn and xbl at the time and their response was that they had never used them.
To be fair, it’s not just a steam thing. My understanding of the situation is that chromium is dropping win7 support so anything using chromium will stop working on older operating system.
Out of all the Nintendo consoles I have owned (everything except the n64) the switch is the one I have the fewest games for. I don’t often buy games at full price so I guess I don’t buy Nintendo titles anymore.
If the Dreamcast didn’t get discontinued in early 2001 then sure, it’s possible they could have released an mp3 player vmu. We don’t even know if the TGS prototype was a functional unit or just conceptual mockup. Either way, it would still be a case of too little too late.
When I said it would rip CDs very slowly I was referring to the processing speed, not the drive speed. Comparable processors of the time would encode at about 0.6-0.8x speed depending on the encoder used and I doubt the average consumer would want to spend 2 hours to encode a single CD worth of music on their dreamcast.
You’re grossly overestimating what mobile tech was capable of in 1998. The dreamcast had enough power to play an mp3 but the VMU definitely did not. On top of that, the VMU only has enough storage space for a little over 6 seconds of music at 128kbps. Even if the Dreamcast could (very very slowly) rip CDs to MP3 , you still had no where to save the data.
N64 and PS1 have not aged well. I’d absolutely take a dreamcast over the N64 and the PS1 really only beats it on RPGs. If you don’t have nostalgia for the 5th gen consoles, most of the games just aren’t very fun anymore.
I’d argue that xcloud and gamepass are equally disruptive to the industry. In either case you don’t own the games and they are tied to a subscription. Whether the game is running locally or in remote hardware doesn’t change how it impacts development and sales of games.
Cloud based gaming is not going to replace owning hardware unless they can ensure sub 20ms response time for every and I don’t belive that target is feasible but either case is bad for gaming as a whole. Games with 100 million dollar budgets are never going to see a positive ROI on services like gamepass and are reliant on gamers being willing to pay full price at launch.
My point is that Gamepass and similar services will kill AAA games if they become the primary way people access games and that is something that is best avoided. Games need a 6-12 month buffer to hit sales targets before they are considered for subscription services, otherwise the entire business model will fall flat on its face and take gaming with it.