Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.
That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.
Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.
Every other F-Zero game is third-party.
Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.
But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.
Especially since Oblivion seems to work fine on modern Xboxen. Back on reddit, all the Morrowind first-timers were using OpenMW, and all the Oblivion first-timers were playing on console somehow.
Wait, they rehashed a Super Nintendo game from thirty years ago, and didn’t even launch with all of its dozen levels? The original weighed less than a megabyte! Opening day should’ve been every track from all two of the 2D F-Zero games Nintendo ever made.
Second-biggest chunk of the console market, effectively necessary for the PC market, gobbling up studios and publishers like fucking Galactus, and these empty suits still treat “making less money than the number we pulled from our asses” as losing money.
Horseshit. It targets a feature right-wing cranks are frothing about, and it has exactly the same effect as ignoring the option. Stop feigning ignorance about what diet Nazi trolls openly despise.
Nobody cares about your willful apathy on this topic. If you don’t care, stop talking.