But nowadays it seems like they’re just as expensive, still not as good for specs and the games are just as bug-riddled as PC games half the time.
No they aren’t ‘as expensive’, LTT did a video a while back where they tried to build a PC that could beat a PS5 for a similar price. They had to buy used parts to match the price and the PC did not include a controller ($69). If you’re going to use used parts, then also compare it to the price of a used PS5.
And Sony has been releasing all their big hits on PC anyway so yeah really no reason for me to get a PS5 that I can see.
Sure, if you want to play old-ass games, get a PC.
For self-hosting I have several Linux and *BSD machines, but that’s server-grade hardare, not gaming hardware. None of those machines even has a GPU.
Drawing I do on my iPad Pro, for everything else I have a MacBook Pro. If I got a desktop PC it would only be used for games, I have no real need for non-server PC hardware.
I also am a Mac user who has a PS5 and a Steam Deck and honestly my SD is collecting dust. It’s a cool bit of hardware but it has too many compromises. The main problem is that it’s just not comfortable to play on. The screen is too small and the way you hold it you end up constantly looking down at is, which is just not ergonomic. The PS5 is also on in seconds from rest mode, and has the benefit of being hooked up to a 77” OLED and a nice 5.1.4 surround sound system.
How are story games shallow? They are much deeper than the next generic multiplayer shooter. I happen to like stories in all forms, books, movies, series and video games. Video games are unique in that they allow you to be part of a story. For me the story is the single most important thing of a game. Often I simply play games on easy or story mode, mainly to keep up the pacing of the story.
More broadly, games with different narrative choices (eg: Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts).
I kinda like it that it makes my decisions in the game more impactful. If you’re going to go back and play the other option anyway, then it kind of makes the decision meaningless.
Yeah, the hardware in a console is mass produced, the hardware in an arcade cabinet is made in relatively small batches. Mass producing something is always a lot cheaper per unit due to economies of scale.
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
If you sell individual games, you have basically two ways of making more money: make more games or make better games so more people buy them.
The economies for a subscription service are completely different. People don’t subscribe to GamePass for a specific game, they subscribe for the entire collection. More games or better games don’t really drive up the number of subscribers. The only way to make more money is to drive down costs. You don’t make expensive, awesome games. Instead you drip-feed a steady stream of low-budget titles. You just have to make sure that the value of access to the entire collection is just about worth the subscription price.
Microsoft doesn’t care about games, they care about making money. They didn’t get into gaming because of a love for games, they realized it’s a market they didn’t dominate yet.
They lured people into GamePass with day-1 drops of AAA titles and now that the subscribers are there it’s time to squeeze as much money out of the service as possible.
And it’s not just GamePass. It’s all subscription services. Netflix is a good example: quality has been going down there for years.
The only real exception seems to be music streaming, but that’s mainly because there are so many artists and practically no exclusivity. In other words: there is healthy competition in the music streaming business.
No, it’s not just an USB-C USB3.0 connector. It uses an USB-C Alt-mode called VirtualLink. This was intended as a standard for connecting VR headsets and was briefly supported on PC, on 2000 series Nvidia cards, but no modern day cards support it.
It combines USB3, DisplayPort and some other stuff, and has some specific power output requirements. The pinout is completely different from the common DisplayPort + USB2 alt mode.
It will probably need an external box + power supply to work. Something like that already exists but hope/suspect the Sony version will be cheaper that his.
This is what I expect as well, with maybe some reassurance that they have no intention of pulling Xbox Series S/X off the market. Then, when Sony announces the PS6, people will be waiting for an announcement on the next-gen xbox. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting…
They will continue selling it this generation, and quietly drop out after that.
They don’t have to give Sony or Nintendo a 30% cut on anything sold on Xbox.
The question is if it’s worth it for them. They have to design, manufacture and support that hardware, which is sold at low or maybe even negative margin. They get a percentage from 3rd party sales but with their low sales numbers it may not be worth the effort.
There is also the fact that Microsoft’s core business is software, not hardware. Even if the hardware business makes a small profit there is also a cost associated with a lack of focus in a company.
For example, AWS is super popular even though it would be a lot cheaper for a lot of companies to run their services on their own hardware. They simply don’t want to have to deal with all that because it’s not their core business. At heart, Microsoft is still a software company, it makes sense for them to focus on the software side of the game business.
I think different people have different reasons for disliking it.
For me it’s the writing. Specifically: the first half does it very best to make you hate a specific character, then the the second half has you play that character. I get what the writers were trying to do. The problem I have with it that is doesn’t make for a fun game. I don’t want to play a character I hate.
The writers were so intent on making a specific point that they forgot that they were making a video game. A video game is different from e.g. a movie in that the player is a part of the story, they take on the role of the character they are playing.
For this to work there has to be some part of the character the player can identify with. When playing Ellie, the player can identify with the rage she’s feeling. For Abby, there’s nothing to identify with. She’s mad that Joel killed her father but Joel was entirely justified in killing him. Her father was a bad person and deserved to die.
It makes it very hard for me to put myself in her shoes. As a result I just didn’t enjoy playing as her and quit the game after realizing that it wasn’t just a short section but the entire second half of the game.
Let me guess, you haven’t written a single line of production code in your life?
Writing code is hard, writing bug-free code is neigh impossible. To give some perspective: the seL4 kernel is a formally proven microkernel, meaning they can actually prove is conforms to it’s specification. It took 3 years to write and prove this. It comprises 8,700 lines of C code and 600 lines of assembler. 9,300 lines or code in 3 years.
It is only feasible to do this for small bits of very critical code, like a microkernel. Even NASA doesn’t write code in this way.
If you wanted to do this, a game like Super Mario Bros. would probably not even be for sale, as they would still be working on it. It would probably sell for a couple of million dollars per copy.
Commercial software has in average 1 to 5 bugs per 1000 lines of code. Very critical and well tested software (think the software controlling aircraft) has maybe as little as 1 bug per 10,000 lines (and this will cost an absolute fortune to write and test).
Games have millions of lines of code and are certainly not critical. The idea that games can be bug-free is beyond absurd. Even a low number of bugs is a ridiculous ask. Or are you saying you’re willing to pay $10,000+ for a game?
But that’s gone again now, and we are just left with the overly technical people who are going to circlejerk about the same things over and over.
I’m one of those ‘overly technical’ people and have zero interest in PC gaming. I prefer my PS5. I don’t want to mess around with computers too much in my spare time when I already do that for 40+ hours a week at work.
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I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.
Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.
How this worked from the developer’s side:
You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.
Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.
So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.
There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.
WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.
Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.
I will simply never have the time to play again to 90% of my games. It’s just impossible (even if I stopped playing new games today, I am not sure I will be able to do so before I die). Since it’s way cheaper to play this way, I don’t see the point of buying new games anymore
My reason is kind of the opposite: I have very little time to play games, so I choose quality over quantity. What I see on GamePass is an endless supply of mediocrity. I’d rather buy a few really good games at full price than spend the little time I have playing whatever Microsoft padded their catalog with.
I don’t think games like Ori, Hades, Hi-Fi rush, Call of the sea, Persona 5, etc are trash
I’m not saying they are trash, they are either really old or just decent games. I would say it’s mostly games I would rate a 7 or 8 out of 10. But with limited time available for gaming, there are enough games that I would rate a 9 or 10 to fill the available time. So why would I not just exclusively play only very top tier games?
GamePass is nice if you’re 16, can’t afford to buy full price games and have lots of free time. You get a lot of play time out of a limited budget with decent enough games.
But when you’re 40+ with a full time job, you make a different trade-off. You have much less free time but a higher income. You then tend to go for quality over quantity. Make every hour you can spend gaming count.
Yeah, and convenience used to be putting multiple different functions in one device
Yeah, I always use my Swiss army knife in the kitchen, way more convenient than using my chef’s knife, because it combines so many functions.
Convenience is often a tool that does one thing and does it really well. Combining multiple functions almost always complicates things.
I used to own a combination microwave/oven/steamer/grill that I replaced with a simple microwave, as I rarely if ever used any of those other functions. Guess which one is more convenient to use?
Compare a simple black and white laser printer with an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax combo an tell me which one is more convenient.
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