We’ve only just got to the point where games don’t run on PS4 any more.
Current gen has good SSDs, 16GB RAM, fast CPUs and 4K (or at least scale to 4K acceptably) graphics. Most stuff runs at 60fps (with an option to turn on the graphical wankery and drop to 30-40), and when it doesn’t there’s VRR to paper over the cracks.
The only area it’s really lacking is RT performance, and only nVidia are there right now. The pricing for cards capable of dropping old lighting paths entirely (e.g. for Cyberpunk Overdrive mode) is obscene. Frame generation is a red herring. It won’t make games feel more responsive. Only real frames can do that. We’re a long way from dropping traditional lighting.
I’ve no doubt that Steam, PSN, etc can avoid complying with the spirit of the law on this, but the writing is on the wall as far as subscription services go.
Since I got my PS5 just over a year ago, I own 2 games for it. GoW Ragnarok that came with it, and BG3 that was only available digitally. PS+ has provided all the rest. I’ve spent the last week playing Teardown which is great. If this law actually happens, then all devs, not just indie ones, will be relying on game subscription service revenue.
I can only assume that you never touched co-op, or started playing in the last week, because that absolutely was not the launch experience for me and many others.
It is much better now, but it’s clear it was rushed out with a few months of development still to go. Which allegedly they did because they were worried about Starfield.
Even broken it’s probably the GOTY, but it did make certain things a lot more frustrating than they should have been and we spent a lot of time doing saves and waiting for the save to finish before continuing such was the prevalence of crashes to PS5 desktop. There was more than one fight we had to do from scratch because the following cutscene shat the bed.
The inventory management in the game is shockingly bad.
“Oh, I got a new companion. I wonder what I can equip them with.”
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
“I need to take a potion mid combat”
It’s somewhere in those 20 inventory wheels!
The whole inventory weight is kind of pointless as well, since you can send to camp at any point, and there’s very few places where you can’t just go back and get something. It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
Gear especially should just be kept in a separate place from consumables and quest items, with maybe some quick swap wardrobe feature for e.g. switching to a bludgeoning weapon for smashing walls.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
Isn’t Android very heavily based on Linux too (even if a lot of it is hidden at the surface level)? I can’t think of anything more mainstream than that.
I’m old enough to remember the Phantom Console bringing PC gaming to the masses too. Safe to say the Steam Deck is quite a lot more successful than that, given the only part they ended up making was a keyboard and mouse you could use from the sofa.
There absolutely can be a market like that. We’re in a digital utopia where we don’t actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn’t charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just “own” it.
But I suspect most of his stats show that there’s a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn’t even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn’t want to say goodbye to that money.
I don’t want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?