It’s the next stage of corporate capitalism. It’s actually been underway for the past 20-30 years. We’ve seen the rise of the class of corporate overlords, none of whom could actually do the jobs beneath them, and add value of dubious quantity and quality. They take their MBAs and leveraged debt, and hack and chop, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunctional broken companies behind them.

AI is just the next phase of this, and is going to be an economic destroyer, not value creator. Nobody seems to care that it can’t actually really do much useful, let alone replace people in their jobs. This seems completely lost to all of these corporate dweebs though, because again, none of them could actually do any of the jobs beneath them when the chips fall.

What AI could maybe replace though, is the executive lair of most companies. It’s not like neither add any fucking value, actually having AI in an executive role would probably lead to value creation, as everyone else could just largely ignore it unless it was useful.

What a world we live in.

Broderbund is right up there with top tier game makers, their games may be largely relegated to the history books now, but for all the right reasons. You didn’t even have to be a big video gamer, to appreciate one for their products (think Carmen Sandiego or Sim City). They definitely had an outsized impact on the industry, and I think we’d all be in a better place today if companies like them were allowed to thrive. Instead we get private equity, beta tier releases and preordering. Not to even mention all these stupid remake$

How is this a patient gamer, didn’t this game just come out literally this week?

The Horizons are just literally too much, they are overwhelming. Yet at the same time, they start to feel repetitive, like there will be a few good speed challenges or a handful of races that are enjoyable. Other than that, there’s so much, yet it feels so dead.

Forza Motorsports, the latest iteration was straight up trash. The online multiplayer has been wrecked by people that just outright cheat, like it’s so bad it’s blatantly obvious. You have no way of winning if you aren’t cheating, and most likely will end up in a pileup somewhere in the back because no one can drive. The story mode has been wrecked by a progression system that just literally makes no sense. It’s arguably a fairly attractive game to look at, but totally empty inside.

Sure as shit would flip the PC market on its head. That’s needed.

I’m not a big believer in customer shaming. This shifts the blame from the root cause.

This last iteration of Forza was awful. If that’s how it was going to be for this franchise going forward, good riddance. I’m sorry for the human impact this has though, that parts not lost on me. But the product was complete shit. Leaves a cavern sized hole in the market now. Forza has had a monster sized impact on the genre. That cannot be ignored.

She said see you later boi

So is AMD with their availability of literally three video cards in stock for all of North America at launch. Which in turn just fuels the scalpers. Downvote this all you want guys, AMD is just as complicit in all of this, they’ve fuelled this bullshit just as much.

If you could happen to fall into a 5800x or a 5800x3d for a decent price (getting harder to find I’m sure), I’d skip the upgrades and AM5. It doesn’t look like it’s going to go the distance like AM4 did, there’s already AM6 talk going on for 2027. There’s very little real world actual advantage to AM5 vs 4, it’s just largely more anti-consumer behaviour and marketing from PC chipmakers.

Maybe to their inventory department too, because let’s be frank, that’s what AMDs downfall really will be. Every product launch for them is now a faux launch, because no one can get their hands on the hardware. It’s not quite as bad for the processors, but their GPUs? Forgeddaboutit.

That last one is especially horrifying. You don’t own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that’s done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.

Problem is preordering has been normalized, as has releasing games in pre-alpha state.

It’s just kind of unnecessary. Gaming in 1440p on something the size of your average computer monitor, hell even just good ol’ 1080 HD, is more than sufficient. I mean 1080 to 4k sure there’s a difference, but 1440p it’s a lot harder to tell. Nobody cares about your mud puddle reflections cranking along in a game at 120 fps. At least not the normies.

Putting on my dinosaur hat for a second, I spent the first decade of my life gaming in 8/16 bit and 4 color CGA, and I’ve probably spent the last thirty years and god only knows how much money trying to replicate those experiences.

Not to mention the cards have gotten huge and you just about need a nuclear reactor to power them. Melting cables and all.

Those cards were like what though, $199?

Fuck those guys too honestly. AMD is fueling this bullshit just as much as Nvidia.

The PC industry has turned into a scuzzy hellscape for average joes that just want to have decent options at realistic prices. They don’t even care about gaming anymore, it’s about YouTube and BitcoinBruhzz now.

I’ve still got a still pretty decent setup (5800x3d 4070ti), but it’s the last stand for this guy I’m afraid. Looking over the past decade or so, I’ve honestly had better gaming experiences on consoles for mere fractions of the price of a PC build. Mods and PC master race nonsense aside. Sure you don’t need a subscription for online PC playing (I rarely play online), but you can barely get a processor for what a PS5 costs anymore. Let alone a video card, which is upwards of a lot of people’s take home pay for a month, the way things are going.

I’ve barely played it, but I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m not biting.

I mean at the end of the day, it’s the gamers opening their wallets though, right? That’s the biggest behaviour that’s leading to this, when the chips fall. It’s like when people complain about preordering, well thats got a super simple solution: just don’t do it.

I’ve never bought a lootbox or a gaming pass. That sort of stuff irritates me, like sell me the game or fuck off. I’m ok with a DLC that expands a storyline or a new world or something, that comes a couple years later. I’ve always viewed that a bit differently, as long as the content of the core game isn’t affected. But even when companies are like buy the deluxe tier of our new game that has the Broken Road Protagonist Best DLC ever, releasing June of this year, that pisses me off because it’s like you purposely held that back to sell as additional content. I don’t tend to buy games that do that, and if I do, I never purchase nor participate in the additional content.

I mean this game is a banger, and the Williams’s contributions to gaming history is all time, but wtf is this and how is it an actual article?

I’m absolutely sure this is going to suck. What a way to wreck a legendary franchise. These games were sooo good too. Shame on EA

So I had a 2070 in mine, and updated last year to a 4070ti. I’m not going to lie to you here, the difference hasn’t been earth shattering. I mean it’s obviously better, but if you are gaming in 1080p, you should still be good for a bit yet. Games are released so horrendously optimized anymore, it doesn’t matter if you have your own personal nuclear power plant powering a video card the size of Texas, it’s still going to suck.

What card do you currently use?

But it’s ENHANCED this time.

Now shut up and give us your money. We have shareholders to enrich, won’t anyone just think about the shareholders…

That’s just it though. The top managers who make these decisions will probably be fine, half of them are probably at their desk this morning. It’s always everyone else that has to pay the price for their management missteps.

I desperately wanted one of those a couple years ago, but no dice. It was largely a paper launch in Canada. Still don’t see them very often either.

I fell for it last gen. Once I was done shoehorning (and I mean shoehorning) an oversized power supply, a video card that’s the size of a bus terminal, and all those stupid splitter cables, I swore any further purchases off.

Everything is just way too expensive, the gains are marginal, and it’s a lot of fuss all to just largely play re-rereleases of games that are 30+ years old, and other horribly optimized games that will take 2 years to sort out and in the meantime the computer you are using is irrelevant because it’s just going to run like shit no matter what. The hardware itself is questionably optimized too.

I’m running this setup into the ground and when it comes to gaming, I’m a console guy going forward.

You could have a video card the size of a nuclear power plant, and it’s still going to struggle with this unoptimized POS. Rockstar sucks at optimizing their games for PC, and it’s kind of inexcusable at this point (most of their games are a decade+ old at this point). RDR2 was the only large exception, but it still struggles here and there. They especially seem to struggle with grass textures. Case in point, watch GTA 5, it’s fine in the city. You’ll be chugging along, 180FPS or whatever, but the minute you leave the city your frames drop to like <30 FPS in spots, unless you really turn the detail down.

It’ll be unplayable. GTA Online as it is, is barely enjoyable and mostly unplayable.

The Chyna flu

I’m here for it too, I mean my PS5 sucks and I’m sick of spending thousands of dollars on my PC. I just have some doubts about the viability, that’s all.

Didnt they already try this and it flopped? Is my memory playing tricks on me?

It would be a pretty dumb business move. It’s going to take a lot to unseat Sony and Microsoft, and the people familiar with Steam likely already have pretty powerful PCs. Case in point, the steam deck. Novelty product, it’s pretty cool, but it’s nowhere even close to unseating Nintendo Switch, let alone PS or Xbox.

Not very many people had a dedicated GPU in the 90s and 2000s. And there’s no way the failure rate was higher, not even Limewire could melt down the family PC back then. It sure gave it the college try, but it was usually fixable. The biggest failures, bar none, were HD or media drives.

You are just short of needing a personal sized nuclear reactor to power these damn things, so I mean the logic follows that the failure rate is going to climb

The stupidly minor marginal gains you’d get from one of these cards vs a four series, isn’t even worth the time it would take to crack your case, let alone 6 grand. Worlds lost it’s god damn mind.

I bought it in September, and it’s still downstairs with the wrapping on it. I’m desperately trying to get through Watch Dogs Legion, and then I’ma give it a go.

Anytime you see anything from this “Gamespot”, just ignore it. Total click bait.

Epic has had some good holiday giveaways over the years, but this one is a dud. This has to be the third or fourth time they’ve given Control.

…a wooden sloop suddenly pulls up, and a man shouts out

“Arrrrrr there matey. Have you tried searching one of the repackers?”