1) Sony ending physical disks
2) potential high price of next gen.
1 is hilarious, even games that come on physical disks are already mostly useless without internet. I had a ps4 and bought "Last of Us" and the game is literally unbeatable without an internet connection. It has a game breaking bug that isn't patched on disk. Many other games are crap or broken without patches. Also jumping to PC where there hasn't been physical media in ages and 99% of games have DRM is just out of the frying pan into the fire. based on the market share for GOG I can assure you only a small fraction of gamers actually care about "owning" their games.
2 is kinda stupid, they mentioned a price point of $1,000, not sure you can build a next-gen-console comparable PC for that price. My current computer's GPU cost more than that by itself and anything but a pittance of RAM will too.
I mean go for it, more PC gamers the better (it's my chosen platform) but if you weren't already on board years ago not sure anything has really changed.
Last time I checked, the ps6 hasn't been announced, there probably won't be a Xbox one X/S/pro/whatever successor any time soon, and PC hardware is expensive or hard to get right now.
Just stay the road for 6 months and see how the market shakes out.
The industry and its fans are its own worst enemies. However, if you don't go bonkers over recent AAA games, gaming has never been more accessible or cheaper. I didn't buy a game this steam sale for more than $3, and each game would run on more or less anything.
I think I'm just describing mobile game studios pre-gachafication
Child, six, seriously considering running away from home after parents refuse to serve dinner on dinosaur plate.
People realize that Steam doesn't use physical media, right? The real issue is the lack of consumer friendly regulation, not the medium.
Steam has issues, and you certainly can't (legally) trade or sell your library, but nearly no single player games on the platform have DRM. Thus, you can have as many off-Steam backups as you want (which can't be remotely deleted/disabled), and you could certainly "give" the game to a friend (but don't copy that floppy), or otherwise preserve it for posterity.
That doesn't mean anything at all. The i7 is a family of CPUs which can be anything from a 2009 i7-860 (with DDR3 support only) to a 2023 i7-14700k (with DDR5 support). Insane performance difference.
As long as you give the older CPU enough RAM, an SSD, and a good GPU, it probably is sufficient unless your doing sim-heavy games where you want the simulation speed to be maxed out (e.g. HoI4 later years max speed simulation)
It really comes down to the next PS6 exclusive, would people buy a console just to play Dark Souls 4? That's the billion dollar question
Discounts are more common, also.
Used to be pretty 'PC Master Race' but then life got in the way.
I do miss stuff like modded Valve games and keyboard & mouse, but can run them somewhat on my laptop.
Serious question.
Xbox is fine, it updates itself (firmware/OS updates only take about 5 mins) and the servers are fast enough. There's basically no maintenance. Can be annoying if it's a game you wanted to play at the moment updating but then Steam is the same.
I actually rely on this quite a lot, indirectly. Beat Saber is a fun game, but it doesn't support a lot of fun features, like walls with boundaries that aren't aligned to the coordinate system. There are mods to add those features, but they haven't all been ported over to the new line of the game since it upgraded the version of unity it's using. So I use one of the mod managers that supports, among other things, maintaining multiple versions of the game in parallel so you can choose what you want to do when you start a game. This feature very explicitly relies on downloading older versions from Steam. Because that's a thing you can do with Steam.
In the same week that Sony announced they'd be ending production of optical media, they also removed hundreds of movies from user libraries that they'd lost the right to sell. I don't really care if they have yet to do the same with games - they've demonstrated they're willing to remove access from paying customers for their own reasons. And there's nothing the owner of a locked-down console can do about it.
Steam exists in a different universe than digital-only games from PSN. Conflating the two because they use the same method of delivery is ridiculous.
I don't know what the answer is, but there just seems to be unavoidable bloat all around. Staff, cost, complexity, system requirements, etc.
Good gameplay requires taste, nuance, experience. Things that are hard to quantify if you're an MBA.
All while getting cheaper in the process. Thanks capitalism!
The same problem exists in the airline market. Airline ticket prices are historically very low, but people complain about seats, fees, and so on. But then they keep buying the absolute cheapest ticket.
What consumers say they care about, and what they actually care about, are not the same. Otherwise they'd pay more for the less irritating product.
All while getting worse; advertisements, terrible interfaces, privacy invasions, frame gen, weird color options, etc. I don't hate capitalism or anything, but new TVs are dumb as heck.
This is true for every entertainment medium. Time filters out all the crap made so your left with a few timeless hits. Especially 30 years ago and in gaming?
Though to pick on 1996 , I just looked it up, that was a pretty crazy year of games in hindsight.
> Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing
Is unrelated. AAA Gaming companies relied so heavily on technical improvements when things were new and genuine leaps in ability that when we hit the graphics are good enough instead of just making great games that are fun, they had to do stupid graphics tricks.
Did every strand of hair need to be individually rendered to act as real as possible so the one guy who is dissecting ever frame would be happy? Did that horses scrotum need to be animated at all, let alone react to the environment? Did that thing that basically no one will ever see need to be created over the course of 9 months?
These stupid, pointless things to try and chase the same technical breakthrough selling points they had 25+ years ago are one of the major things driving the development costs.
Then of course there's the, 'ya whatever, you'll still pay for it, fuck you'[1] that publishers are latching on to.
Obviously this is subjective, but try some of that $5-10 stuff on Steam or GoG and you might be surprised how much there is to play out there. I'm playing Dread Delusion right now and it is amazing (estimate I'm 50% done but playing blind), Wicked Seed before that, Deformed before that, etc.
I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today. Things have hardly moved on at all. As an example to illustrate the point: GTA:V is 13 years old.
Gaming is so much cheaper than when I was growing up that I'm kind of blown away.
SNES games went for $60-70. That's like $130-150 in today's money. And they usually had less content than today's games, even if you never do microtransactions today!
In contrast, major AAA titles today are half the price, and you can find indie games packed with content for a paltry $20. Hell, with Steam sales, you can find them even cheaper than that! Some free to play games like Dota 2 make all of their core gameplay content free!
If you check when games like Quake were released, their minimum requirements were absolutely INSANE compared to today. We're talking about mid to high-end CPUs released within the last two or three years, none of this "oh yeah something lower-middle from 5 years ago is fine". Average prices for computers were much higher too (well, maybe the current RAM/SSD crisis has equalized that a bit, but other than that).
Controllers? 8bitdo and the like make highly competent gamepads for $30, which would've been $15 in the 90's. You couldn't even get terrible third-party shitpads for that little back then! It's disgustingly cheap.
If you want to game these days, you can spend a very reasonable amount of money on a mid-range gaming PC* and have it last at least a good 5-6 years. You can then buy games for a steal on Steam, and get surprisingly decent peripherals like gaming monitors and mechanical keyboards for almost no money. The idea that gaming is "too expensive now" is itself laughable.
* Well, other than the memory crisis fucking things up, but before AI companies ate all the RAM, things were very reasonable
downrightmike•59m ago