I don’t think it’s really that bad, because it enables them to sell the upgrade for $10 without just being a steep discount path for new purchases.
I’d much rather previous owners be able to upgrade for $10 than new buyers be able to get it for $20. Funding a remaster on new customers instead of double dipping is way more fair, and price conscious customers can still likely find used physical copies cheap.
They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It’s a handheld.
The fact that there are still very few games it can’t run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.
Hell, the whole reason for “deck verified” is because their default assumption is that a game won’t work.
The “fastest selling” is literally the title of the article, then they make no effort at all to point out that all of that volume is from accessing China, which most games don’t.
There’s no legitimate way to use the title “how game became the fastest selling game” and ignore the only factor that played any meaningful role in that outcome at all.
Because the whole premise of the article is the “global” impact and bringing Chinese culture to a “global audience” when only a small fraction of its sales are outside China.
The actual impact it’s going to have is much less on the development of AAA games by Chinese studios and much more as a demonstration of the Chinese market’s interest in single player games.
Basically Nazi stuff. Which still isn’t awesome, but isn’t comparable at all to China. It’s a small side effect of them trying to prevent actual Nazis from regaining power and not properly recognizing games as art.
It also isn’t comparable because anyone who can’t be bothered with multiple versions is going to ignore Germany, not ruin their game.
Because the article completely ignores the source of the sales volume it keeps mentioning and is pretending the sale is some runaway success in the west instead of acknowledging the reality that it’s doing moderate sales here.
Moderate sales is a good first effort, but ignoring the actual market altering affect it will have to pretend it’s actually a giant outside of China completely undermines the article.
There’s a huge difference between a publisher or two censoring their games and the industry as a whole systematically sucking up to their insane restrictions.
PS4 Pro was still obscenely underpowered. Jaguar was terrible at PS4’s original launch, and the boost on the Pro was marginal because it was still the same terrible underlying design.
Going into the PS5 pro, everyone projected this pricing, because it’s actually modern hardware and their costs have went up instead of down.
I played like 900 hours of D1 with the same or mostly the same gear because shooting stuff in the face felt better than anything else I’ve ever played.
The actual gunplay is really good. It’s just killed by all the other shit.