Game Pass is a profoundly stupid decision. It doesn’t make it’s money back and now Xbox users are used to not paying for games. And from a consumer perspective, enshittification always eventually happens with subscriptions.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.
Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.
If the game has a good enough character creator I’ll play a male. But most games and especially most Western games with character creators don’t allow me to make a male character I’d actually want to look like or at.
I could see there being fatigue with particular genres of indie games (Metroidvanias, Rougelites, First-Person Horror without combat, speedrunner-oriented 2D platformers) but not with the very concept.
Michael Eisner once called himself “the last of the creative types in Hollywood” after he left Disney, and I can’t help but see what he meant when he said that when I look at the current American film and TV landscape. It’s like today’s Hollywood bigwigs don’t even understand why people watch TV and movies.
I kinda think this happened to Western video games too (yeah Sony is a Japanese company…but PlayStation has shown a pretty square focus on the Western market in the past 10 years.) From a consumer perspective I don’t think a new CEO is the answer. It wasn’t for Disney’s fans with Bob Chapek.
I still think the N64’s overall technical superiority over the PS1 is very visible. Notice how much more closed in most PS1 games’ environments are. Spyro is the main exception, but that needed a lot of special tricks where N64 just does that. I say this as someone who doesn’t really like the N64 library.
I don’t disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.
And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.
Considering piracy equivalent to hardware theft is just intellectually dishonest. In a lot of ways, but relevant to this discussion is that piracy is way less risky, so more people do it. If you try to steal a PS5 from a store I’d go as far to say you’d probably get caught and jailed. With piracy you almost definitely won’t get caught.
I’d say they are. “Mom groups who want to play Animal Crossing-esque games” certainly aren’t what I’d think of when I’d think “dedicated gaming enthusiasts,” at least not what most people are thinking of.
Steam Deck lacks publicity relative to Nintendo Switch or even traditional PC gaming, but the product itself is absolutely more accessible than traditional PC gaming, even if not as accessible as consoles.
If I was seeing RISC-V get widespread adoption in consumer-grade hardware, I’d be thinking about it (granted, having X86-64 and ARM on the market could make room for a third competitor compared to the 15-year x86 hegemony.) But I don’t see a push for that, and there probably won’t be unless RISC-V delivers better results than ARM. Keep in mind that you and I probably care more about CPU architecture than the average gamer.
While only the Steam Deck has achieved massive success, it shows there are ways to reduce the prep time for PC gaming, to almost as little as modern consoles (since you do, ultimately, have to install drivers on console.)