Do people just seriously not give a fuck and buy this ancient thing because of the exclusive games?
This is pretty much true of all consoles. People play games, not consoles, and they’ll use whatever hardware they need to.
I mean, I get it, nintendo are royal pieces of shit for locking all their games down inside of a captive platform. But that’s a great reason not to buy this shit.
Again, universally true of consoles, though unlike Xbox where games have become more and more crossplatform, or PS where some games are getting licensed for PC ports, Nintendo’s head is so far up its own ass that it won’t even let you record gameplay without worrying about a DMCA.
Fuck Nintendo, but for the same reason as Oracle: because they spend more on lawyers than the people who actually do the work creating something. Also, they could use some modern hardware for a change instead of always being multiple generations behind.
When you tariff them by over 100% of their value, they tend to cost more to import.
My whole comment was on the tariffs specifically, and there is a 100% chance they affect sales in the US. Even with cost reductions in manufacturing over the total lifetime of the console, there’s no chance they cut costs enough to keep up with the tariffs, and there is no chance they planned for the tariffs to be this high in their planning.
Outside the US? These tariffs aren’t applied, but raising the prices globally limits the impact of them on one of their largest markets since they can amortize the cost across all their markets instead of just one.
This depends on the markets. For example, if prices in the US raised 50% due to Tariffs, then they might lose one of their largest markets, but if they can raise them 10% globally, then they can potentially limit that loss and still have a chance (as much as possible anyway) in all of their markets.
Either way, they need to raise prices because their costs have gone up. It’s a question of where that money is coming from, and how they can reduce its impact on them as much as possible.
I have a 16 with a discrete GPU. Couldn’t recommend it more. It does sound like a rocket ship sometimes, but performs like a midrange tower, which is exactly what I wanted.
For me, it highly depends. Turn-based strategy games, I can easily play at a much lower framerate (30 is fine tbh though I always appreciate more). FPS-style games? 60 is a bare minimum, but 100+ is what I would consider to be enjoyable.
Don’t forget Intel’s latest GPU launches either! For custom PCs, there are some really affordable and relatively powerful GPUs available now (for the price). Despite their performance otherwise, Intel is killing it in the GPU space now.
For a lower spec build, you could definitely put together something with a 12100F (or other cheap CPU) and a battlemage GPU. Depending on where you get all the parts, you might be able to hit sub-$500 and get great 1080p performance, or for sure sub-$1k 1080p and likely 1440p performance.
Handhelds also have a lot of good options available too. To save some cash, you can get low end Steam Deck and swap the hard drive yourself. Got myself the cheapest LCD variant and swapped the tiny drive in it with a 2TB drive off Amazon.
I don’t really care for multiplayer games as much since I don’t like to commit my time to others to play games (I like being able to get up and leave when I need to), but there’s a solo challenge that sounded fun, so I’m giving that a shot.
Factorio is not for everyone, but it’s also one of the all stars of its genre. With the upcoming expansion in a couple weeks, it’ll probably eat another few hundred of my free hours over the next few months, and I know I’m not alone on this one.
Fortunately, if you need character backstories and such, you could instead read the books or watch the TV series instead. I jumped straight into Witcher 3 and had no issues with missing background knowledge.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t play 1 or 2 though, just that there are other options.
For what it’s worth, I feel the same way about normal settings for FP1 in that it’s pretty easy. Switching to extreme though, it felt as though I needed to play perfectly to finish a scenario. To me, I think it comes down to most of the difficulty being frontloaded. A solid start sets you up for the rest of the game, while a rough start can ruin a run as the game continues to kick you down with every temp drop, event, etc.