There are a lot of reasons that this makes sense for them. But also, given the other things they’ve been promising, I think this is going to be an expensive piece of hardware that basically just hides Windows under the hood.
PS5 Pro wanted to do RT at smooth framerates but turned out to be way too undercooked. We’re seeing glimpses of that on XSX too with Indiana Jones and Dragon’s Dogma 2 (that 40 FPS VRR window makes it work). It’s working as a tech demo that’s building appetite for more because of how transformative to the experience in both games that is. If Microsoft could deliver it at this timing it would be extra awkward for Sony who need to keep on going with current hardware for a couple more years not to look like Sega with 32X and Saturn. Even if Nvidia shows something revolutionary with new line of GPUs it will be prohibitively expensive in the context of consoles anyway.
IF 2026 was a real date that wouldn’t matter that much. Microsoft wants to be the first one to sell you the last console you will need be able to afford to. People will get it for generationally better experience but there’s not much else to look out for on the horizon. Hardware got too expensive for the consumer and games beyond certain budgets are much too risky. Consider upcoming trade wars and overall bleak economic outlook and you have to assume every player is looking for a survival strategy. Market analysts say that Microsoft is going to become software publisher primarily again but this makes no sense to me. Game Pass Cloud and Xbox are the only places where they don’t have to share the spoils with owners of other platforms. Obviously they’ll want to keep it going regardless of circumstances. Microsoft could be banking on getting high-end market for now and transition with revisions of the same hardware into lower segments with time as market conditions improve.
I’m very stoned currently so I can’t vouch for the quality of my analysis long term but I will stand by it for now.
Bit of a shame they’re moving away from being able to run FSR on any GPU, but it makes sense since it’ll be using their AI cores similar to how DLSS does it for better quality and performance.
They made FSR vendor-agnostic for reasons that turned out to be irrelevant in the long run. It was just couple of years ago when games supported DLSS only and engines weren’t ready for plugging multiple different upscaling solutions. Nvidia and AMD tried to get exclusivity deals and things seemed fire for a moment. AMD hoped FSR would be enough for smaller players to adopt it but being vendor-agnostic handicapped them so much that everyone developed their own solution anyway (PSSR, XeSS). Not that it really matters that much because in the end modern AA gives similar results to old FSR and game devs will use what works best.
[alt text: Text which says, “The 2 genders according to chuds”. Below the text is two images. On the left is an image of Geralt from The Witcher 3, and he is labeled, “Male, parentheses (white)”. On the right is an image of Ciri from The Witcher 4 trailer, and she is labeled, “Political”.]
Please stop blaming those things on everything except people. I’m Polish. Polish people drink homophobia with their mothers milk. We didn’t need to import it from US or Russia (it’s still better than in the 90s). Average developer is a young male who predominantly votes for outright fascists. The reason CDPR appears progressive is because they calculated it to be more profitable.
People 18-39 vote predominantly for Konfederacja (far right), KO (populist centre-right), PiS (populist right). I could dig some more precise sources with gender data but I think it’s telling that these are the results even with women in the mix. Coincidentally even among young women voting for far right is more common than for centre-left. I’m not mentioning left since their popularity is within a margin of error.
Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.
We know that certain games are big, like BG3 or Persona 5. But recently games like FF7 rebirth and Indiana Jones just kept going on and on past “Act 3”. Also Rise of the Golden Idol seemed a little short to me...
Is that correct? Kojima bought full rights to the IP couple of months ago and released Death Stranding on everything immediately. Seems like it’ll be timed exclusive at most.
Won’t the tariffs incentivise domestic production and give work to more regular folks? There’s also less stuff to be hauled around the world so there’s environmental benefits too. Sounds like a leftist idea to me.
Tariffs can serve as a stimuli to build out local manufacturing capacity, which sounds pretty leftist to me. I understand arguments for laissez faire policies but at heart they are liberal and not left. It’s the refusal to accept it that led to far right being as popular as it is.
I’m not here to convince liberals that they should try to care for the poor. I’m here to argue that the jig is up - people are voting for literally anyone, including fascists, that promises to change the course.
Are you arguing that tariffs and other market restrictions are ineffective at incentivising moving of production sites? I guess that’s why Biden lifted tariffs Trump imposed. Oh wait.
Or are you arguing that container ships full of plastic trash are good for the environment?
If you proposed something else that would uplift lower classes sooner they’d probably vote for it. What Democrats were offering wasn’t credible enough because people have been deceived for too long.
Politicians lie so I’m mostly interested in outcomes, not the narratives that politicians use to make things happen. Why would I care that something I want and is mostly outside of my control happens for the wrong reasons?
They usually are free to play with predatory monetization mechanics. That was especially back in 2016 when thanks to these games, the mobile gaming revenue outpaced PC and console gaming revenue.
If you own an iPhone just get Apple Arcade through Apple One, it’s really worth it if you game on your phone. No predatory monetisation, regular self-contained games, plenty of high quality titles.
I understand that half of the world is currently healing psychological trauma from the US election results but Atlus has been commenting on politics in their games for much longer.
I’ve recently seen a lot of videos from Hearthstone creators about the game The Bazaar created by an ex-hearthstone creator. They are selling closed beta access for around $30 for the basic pack, which gives you and a friend access to the game, as well as enough premium currency to unlock the three currently available heroes....
Apple Arcade is still going and getting plenty of releases. I don’t know anyone buying it specifically but including it in Apple One (competitively priced subscription for most Apple services) means lots of people have access to it. Me and my partner use it a lot. It’s very nice knowing that those games won’t try to shove microtransactions down my throat.
I wait for a Digital Foundry tech review before making a purchase on AAA game these days. They tackle what’s quantifiable and add their thoughts on the game in general which is about as much as I need from a professional outlet.
When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
Or, don’t treat it like culture but slop to be consumed and discarded. If law is not there, put pressure on publishers to release games under licensing that allows preservation after predetermined amount of time. Maybe make slop ineligible for game awards and remove it from review aggregators. There are ways I’m sure.
…Who am I kidding, nobody is going to do because it would require too much cooperation and people are selfish.
I love that game and it’s the best RTS I’ve played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age....
Not the same but StarCraft 2 is available on Macs and runs acceptably on my M1 Air. It probably runs quite well on M2 Max. Even though it’s seen as predominantly multiplayer game it has a very nice single player campaign with tech tree upgrades between missions.
I know there are many Total War and Paradox games on Macs but they don’t run well for me through Rosetta. Might be worth a try in your case.
Here I am at 2 months of attempting Shadow of the Erdtree final boss. I do it once or twice per week now, got incredibly close dozens of times (past meteor). Refusing to switch my weird ass incantations based build. Bayle was a complete pushover compared to this guy.
It’s like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit… And, uh… You know, you’ll, uh… You know what I mean.
The Dude
„Who benefits the most” from attacking Internet Archive? Big copyright holders whose content was distributed via Internet Archive. The reason given by the group claiming responsibility is so silly I don’t believe it.
[edit] I’ll add to this comment so that I don’t have to reply to everyone specifically.
I don’t believe that if you wanted to attack USA (as people claiming responsibility did) you’d attack it in a way that benefits big corporations most. It sounds like a flimsy distraction from true perpetrators.
There’s motive and circumstances. Nintendo opened every possible front in the last year or so. Now this happens. Even if not related to IA specifically this definitely looks like retribution.
Also, please read my first comment again. I think I made it clear it’s speculation.
This is a very valid point, yet companies do shady stuff all the time and some even get caught via subpoenas and such. Nintendo can do it in a way that will never be noticeable on their books for sure.
They say it runs better but isn’t that because it hovers around 35 fps on PS4 and is locked to 30 on PS5 (as it should have been on PS4)? Some of comparisons are in the yikes territory though.
How do you stand image scaling on 3DS? It’s either poststamp sized or horribly mangled by non-integer scaling on a very low res display. It’s the reason I keep DSi along NN3DS.
If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam. Steam didn’t become successful because of tags. It’s because they were first.
At some point you’re so entrenched in the market you don’t have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria.
Metal Gear Rising is seriously overrated
Only about 6 hours of campaign and it’s a shell of what was demoed.
Science paper piracy site Sci-Hub shares lots of retracted papers (arstechnica.com)
Next Xbox Rumored To Launch In 2026 With New Call Of Duty (www.gamespot.com)
There are a lot of reasons that this makes sense for them. But also, given the other things they’ve been promising, I think this is going to be an expensive piece of hardware that basically just hides Windows under the hood.
AMD announces FSR4, will only be available in RX 9070 Series cards (videocardz.com)
Bit of a shame they’re moving away from being able to run FSR on any GPU, but it makes sense since it’ll be using their AI cores similar to how DLSS does it for better quality and performance.
18+ 'Gooner 9/11' averted as Zenless Zone Zero's butt-obfuscation technology is rolled back in the face of horny outrage (www.pcgamer.com)
The Two Genders (beehaw.org)
[alt text: Text which says, “The 2 genders according to chuds”. Below the text is two images. On the left is an image of Geralt from The Witcher 3, and he is labeled, “Male, parentheses (white)”. On the right is an image of Ciri from The Witcher 4 trailer, and she is labeled, “Political”.]
What game surprised you with their length?
We know that certain games are big, like BG3 or Persona 5. But recently games like FF7 rebirth and Indiana Jones just kept going on and on past “Act 3”. Also Rise of the Golden Idol seemed a little short to me...
How Trump's Tariffs Could Cost Gamers Billions (kotaku.com)
Why are most mobile games trash? (fedia.io)
They usually are free to play with predatory monetization mechanics. That was especially back in 2016 when thanks to these games, the mobile gaming revenue outpaced PC and console gaming revenue.
Metaphor: ReFantazio's success is further proof that politics are good in videogames, actually—no matter what reactionaries tell you (www.pcgamer.com)
Issues with the current free to play model (The Bazaar)
I’ve recently seen a lot of videos from Hearthstone creators about the game The Bazaar created by an ex-hearthstone creator. They are selling closed beta access for around $30 for the basic pack, which gives you and a friend access to the game, as well as enough premium currency to unlock the three currently available heroes....
Last-minute PS5 Pro leaks indicate system will pack 16.7 TFLOPS GPU with 16GB dedicated GDDR6 VRAM — plus 2GB DDR5 system RAM (www.tomshardware.com)
Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope has made a free Game & Watch-style haunted house caper for Halloween (www.eurogamer.net)
Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread
Game Information...
U.S. Copyright Office rejects DMCA exemption to support game preservation (www.gamedeveloper.com)
This sucks.
12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development? (insider-gaming.com)
Are there any recent-ish single player, complete games that are similar to Rise of Nations and would work on Mac or at least on WINE?
I love that game and it’s the best RTS I’ve played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age....
How to Beat Elden Ring in Under 5 Minutes | Speed Break (www.gamespot.com)
Game Freak has been allegedly hacked, with source codes for Pokemon games reportedly leaked (gbatemp.net)
Until Dawn Remake Is Being Criticized For Looking "Way Worse" Than The Original (www.thegamer.com)
Let's discuss: Nintendo DS
As I have recently bought a secondhand 2DS, I thought I would change things up a bit!...
Bethesda Game Studios developers form 'wall to wall' union that includes artists, designers, and programmers (www.pcgamer.com)
Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal (insider-gaming.com)