- 0 Posts
- 109 Comments
Why would Sony care about GameStop’s share price?
They don’t. They care about their games being on the shelves because that’s where grandma is going to pick up a game for Billy’s birthday.
PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers.
PSN has sales just like the stores for PC games, there’s no difference there. The difference is that the non-sale price on PC is lower.
You also seem to be under the impression that digital stores work like physical ones, where the store buys their wares from a distributer and then decides at what price to sell it to the consumer, maybe even at a loss when they want to clear inventory. This is not how digital sales work.
Digital stores operate according to what’s known as the ‘agency model’. They don’t set the price of the products, they just take a cut of the sale. The prices are set by the publishers. Even sales work that way, the stores don’t determine the sales price, instead they go to the publishers and say “we’re going to do a sales event, want to join in?”.
For each individual game, the publisher of that game has a monopoly. There is absolutely zero competition between stores on individual games because they do not have any control over the pricing of games in the first place. The publisher set the price for each store.
PC games don’t have an open market in the way you think.
The reason digital console games are more expensive than physical is precisely because physical console games are still a thing. Digital prices are kept high to not piss off the physical stores. If digital was cheaper then the brick and mortar stores would sell way less games. Shelf space in stores is limited and if they don’t sell enough games they rather use that space for something more profitable. As such, lowering digital prices would effectively end physical game sales.
Once you take physical sales out of the equation digital prices will drop. The fact digital PC games are so much cheaper proves this.
If it’s wafer thin it isn’t going to fit the battery I want it to fit.
Personally I don’t care about the size of the battery, I care about how long it lasts. There have been rumors that Apple is working on improved battery tech. Their SoCs are also crazy efficient and super fast.
What I expect to happen is that they will equip the iPhone Air with this next-gen battery tech (probably not a massive improvement, but something like 10-20% more energy in the same volume would already be a big win), combined with a throttled down SoC with fewer cores (still plenty fast for anyone but the most demanding users), that will allow them to reduce power usage by a lot. Add to that the already excellent power-management in iOS, maybe tweaked a little more aggressively, and they’ll have a phone that’s super thin and lasts all day.
People will hold this phone for 3 seconds and be sold.
A wafer thin iPhone won’t be shit though. It will be slick as shit. Sure, there will probably be compromises and it won’t be suitable for the most demanding users, but most people aren’t that demanding of their phone. As long as it manages to get through one day it’ll be good enough.
Don’t underestimate how important the size, weight, build quality and design is to the user experience. I have a 13” M4 iPad Pro which is also crazy thin yet feels absolutely solid and that makes it look and feel like a magical piece of technology. It has a huge impact on how it feels and that is ultimately what matters to people. Not the specs or the benchmarks, but how it feels to use it.
Slim phones are coming, but most of you don’t want them
Our polls show that, if anything, you want thicker phones.
Yeah, some poll on a site for tech nerds is not really representative of the general public. Thick phones with huge batteries exist and they sell like shit, it’s a super niche market.
Expect these thin phones to sell like hotcakes.
That’s not a solution at all. First of all, depending country, you will need a gambling license. This is a PITA as gambling laws will differ per country. In my country gambling is heavily regulated and you would need to check ID and keep track of how much a person gambles. You have a duty of care and if you notice a person’s gambling habits are becoming problematic you have to refuse them.
Fat binaries contain both ARM and x86 code, but I was referring to Rosetta, which is used for x86-only binaries.
Rosetta does translation of x86 to ARM, both AOT and JIT. It does translate to normal ARM code, the only dependency on a Apple-specific custom ARM extension is that the M-series processors have a special mode that implements x86-like strong memory ordering. This means Rosetta does not have to figure out where to place memory barriers, this allows for much better performance.
So when running translated code Apple Silicon is basically an ARM CPU with an x86 memory model.
I bought it on PS5 and I’m having fun playing it. Sure, it doesn’t do anything new, the gameplay is very familiar and the enemy AI is dumb as rocks, but you get to play in the Star Wars universe, the locations look great and the story so far seems decent enough (although I’m not that far into the game yet).
Not every meal needs to be a 3 Michelin star gourmet affair, sometimes having a Big Mac with fries is perfectly fine.
Apple and Google are working together as part of the GMSA committee on RCS to add encryption to the standard, instead of using Google’s proprietary incompatible extension for e2ee.
It’s probably going to take a while due to the whole process needed to add it to the standard, which is also why RCS in general is a terrible idea: you can’t really innovate if everything you want to improve has to go through this whole layer of bureaucracy.
If you’re using the built in speakers on any device, you deserve the bad audio quality lol.
It’s possible to make good built in speakers. The MacBook Pros sound great, even the new iPads sound way better than you’d ever expect from such a thin device. My 13” M4 iPad Pro even has decent bass, it’s ridiculous.
Is it as good as a stand alone amplifier with two tower speakers? No, of course not. But I’m not bringing those along with me either.
Roguelikes.
Roguelites.
Chess.
Deck builders.
Not my cup of tea.
More broadly, games with different narrative choices (eg: Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts).
I kinda like it that it makes my decisions in the game more impactful. If you’re going to go back and play the other option anyway, then it kind of makes the decision meaningless.
How are story games shallow? They are much deeper than the next generic multiplayer shooter. I happen to like stories in all forms, books, movies, series and video games. Video games are unique in that they allow you to be part of a story. For me the story is the single most important thing of a game. Often I simply play games on easy or story mode, mainly to keep up the pacing of the story.
I also am a Mac user who has a PS5 and a Steam Deck and honestly my SD is collecting dust. It’s a cool bit of hardware but it has too many compromises. The main problem is that it’s just not comfortable to play on. The screen is too small and the way you hold it you end up constantly looking down at is, which is just not ergonomic. The PS5 is also on in seconds from rest mode, and has the benefit of being hooked up to a 77” OLED and a nice 5.1.4 surround sound system.
For self-hosting I have several Linux and *BSD machines, but that’s server-grade hardare, not gaming hardware. None of those machines even has a GPU.
Drawing I do on my iPad Pro, for everything else I have a MacBook Pro. If I got a desktop PC it would only be used for games, I have no real need for non-server PC hardware.
But nowadays it seems like they’re just as expensive, still not as good for specs and the games are just as bug-riddled as PC games half the time.
No they aren’t ‘as expensive’, LTT did a video a while back where they tried to build a PC that could beat a PS5 for a similar price. They had to buy used parts to match the price and the PC did not include a controller ($69). If you’re going to use used parts, then also compare it to the price of a used PS5.
And Sony has been releasing all their big hits on PC anyway so yeah really no reason for me to get a PS5 that I can see.
Sure, if you want to play old-ass games, get a PC.
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
Lots of movies sold on 4k bluray are upscales/‘remasters’ of the 2k version. Some are re-scans from the original 35mm film, those can be pretty good, depending on the source material. There is a huge variety in the quality or 4k movies.
If you can get your hands on it, try the LOTR 4k extended editions. If you get them from an ‘alternative source’ make sure you get one with untouched video (e.g. a remux). They are huge, about 100-120GB per movie but they look amazing. Wonder Woman 1984 also looks really good in 4k HDR, especially the opening scene.
4k content on streaming services varies a lot in quality, but is generally not as good as 4k bluray. Amazon Prime Video looks quite bad, terrible compression with lots of artifacts. Out of the streaming services, Apple TV+ has the best 4k video quality by far.
The LOTR 4k bluray is in my opinion on of the best showcases, especially if you compare it to the HD version. The HD bluray looks good, don’t get me wrong, but that’s all it is. Just a good movie with nice pictures. In 4k HDR with Dolby Atmos it’s something completely different. It’s like magic, almost impossible to look away from the screen. You end up starting it up just to see what the quality looks like and before you know it you unintentionally watched the entire extended edition.
That’s not how it works at all. Valve doesn’t set the prices in their store, the publishers do. Valve just takes a cut of whatever the publisher decides to charge. If a publisher for a game decides to double the price for a game, why would they do so only on Steam and not on every other store that game is sold?