Don’t worry about not having any insights, I still valve-ued the pun.

I don’t think you can claim that the team behind concord is incompetent. I think they delivered something that nobody wanted but they delivered that competently.

I agree that incompetence generally doesn’t end up with a good product but sometimes even good competence all around doesn’t win. Sometimes it really is luck and timing.

Corporate meddling gets blamed for ruining things all the time but the truth few want to admit is that some amount of meddling is necessary.

Look at all the big flops Xbox has released over the last year - Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.

When it comes to AAA, it’s so expensive you need some amount of corporate input to make sure people will actually buy the damn game.

Of course there’s extremes to both sides - pretty much anything Activision ever touched was ground to a lifeless micro transaction shell.

But everything we know about concord is trekking6 us that the team itself, including the big bosses, were overly positive internally. Nobody had the balls to interfere.

If they had just one exec who was willing to piss the entire team off, maybe the result would be different.

TL;DW the stuttering is also present on console and doesn’t appear to be shader compilation.

Ray tracing actually will directly change the way games are made. A lot of time is spent by artists placing light sources and baking light maps to realistically light scenery - with ray tracing, you get that realism “for free”.

DF did a really interesting video on the purely path traced version of Metro: Exodus and as part of that, the artists talked about how much easier and faster it was to build that version.

I think you just need to look at the PS5 Pro as proof that more GPU power doesn’t translate linearly to better picture quality.

The PS5 Pro has a 67% beefier GPU than the standard PS5 - with a price to match - yet can anyone say the end result is 67% better? Is it even 10% better?

We’ve been hitting diminishing returns on raw rasterising for years now, a different approach is definitely needed.

This is why they’re one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They’re very good at “business”, which is just a way of saying they’re good at maximising profits.

All corporate social media accounts are trying to sell you stuff.

Who said anything about Netflix giving up a market, they just offer a worse service. But hey, iPhones offer a premium service, right?

Netflix being older is hardly relevant to this discussion.

Maybe you’re unaware, but the higher quality streams are only available on devices netflix has certified. You can still use netflix on GrapheneOS but you won’t get that quality, it’ll be downgraded.

This is a common problem for cheaper Chinese devices as well.

I feel like a huge aspect that this article and the GrapheneOS developers are overlooking is DRM content.

They’re focusing on user security for a user’s own data, but there’s a whole other side to it with companies wanting to protect their own data - think Netflix and the like who use the same systems to ensure that nobody’s been tampering with the device as a way of bypassing the copy protection of their media.

Now I’m not saying I support DRM at all, I’m very firmly in the camp of being able to own the media you purchase without restriction, but my point is that it’s not as simple as Google being dismissive, lazy or ignorant but rather there’s a lot of commercial sensitivity at play and if Google fucks it up, they could potentially lose certification of the entire android ecosystem.

You uhhh…you might have missed the sarcasm on that one.

That context is exactly why Karl’s content is what it is, it’s the same reason so many YouTubers use click bait titles and stupid thumbnails - it gets more hits and more hits is more money.

If it takes you a week or more of your time to make a single video, of course you’re going to want as big a return from the video as possible. And if the choice is 3x the return for the same effort then it’s a complete no brainer.

He makes billions of dollars from YouTube videos or something

If the game is good I’ll buy it, if it’s shit I won’t. I don’t see how these NPC’s will make the game good and I haven’t personally bought an Ubisoft game in several years.

I understand where you’re coming from, but you’d have to really go out of your way to ignore a lot of stuff in the game to just get the gameplay without any of the dialogue or text that is absolutely dripping with satire.

You make money by both selling more and spending less.

Think about it, you can have none money left over at the end of the month by working extra hours at your job or by spending less money on something - but what if you can’t work extra hours because there’s none available? And what if you need that extra cash at the end of the month? The only thing you can do is spend less.

Phil is kind of saying the same thing you’re saying here, but it’s not easy to just “sell more”, not when everyone else is struggling to have that extra cash to spend.

The games industry right now, as a whole, isn’t growing. That means companies are selling less. Phil end everyone else would love to sell more, by all means if you’ve got some solid ideas on how to do that then every games industry veteran out there will happily listen to you, but the sad and shitty reality is that sales are down and when you’re a business, if you can’t increase sales you’ve got to cut costs.

And that means job losses. It fucking sucks and we can have debates all day long about the merits of capitalism and all that, but that’s the reality of today. That’s the game. Phil is being honest and up front here, it’s a shitty game but he’s playing it and if he wasn’t playing it, someone else would.

I don’t know why you’re getting down voted, it’s completely reasonable to ask for sources.

Here’s an example, look at the tweet referenced which shows an except from the legal filing: https://twitter.com/gamr12/status/1765098920521461869

Essentially, the Devs were writing articles and posting messages about games working before they were officially released. As in, before people have legal means to purchase them.

You might argue that it’s not uncommon for people to get pre orders early, sure, but this is clearly pushing it.

No he’s right, Yuzu’s Devs were openly encouraging piracy. It was all over their discord.

That’s why they settled so quickly, they were fucked otherwise.

There were several sequels, but they were all terrib-ohhhhh, I see what you did there

I’m convinced its a mistake, especially given that origin hasn’t dropped the price

So a cartridge?

I feel slightly obligated to buy it day one.

I love this right up until the random rule gets applied, then it’s just frustrating.

It sounds more like they’ve consolidated build pipeline and this obfuscation is part of it.

Supposed to yes, but when I last checked (which was a few months ago, admittedly), it would crap out if you tried to transcode more than a couple of streams at a time. Which given that an intel CPU with quicksync can easily do 20+ 1080p streams, was a bit of a let down.

Have people actually used them for transcoding in anger yet? I was very interested in buying one for transcoding on a Plex or jellyfin server but last I checked, there were still lots of driver limitations

You said that modern games were terrible cash grabs

I said:

Yes, good games exist today,

You seem intent on putting words in my mouth.

Lol okay buddy, have yourself a nice day.

You care enough to reply.

Please highlight where I said all video games were good at a period of time.

I am doing. What you’re saying is a non statement given the context of the discussion.

Yes, good games exist today, that doesn’t mean lots of games aren’t also terrible live service cash grabs.

Game pass is legitimately great. I’ve played loads of games I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with thanks to it.

Maybe I’m a bit of a luddite but many of those “outdated” games have far better gameplay and stories than games today.

They were already at 283k followers when they said they’d add it in if they hit 300k. Sounds to me like they wanted it to happen.

I’m pretty sure the developers have already planned this out and that “the sex update” isn’t going to be anywhere near as hardcore as the article implies. The Sims had sex, remember.

Then it should fit, it might need a spacer or something but I can live with that.

yeah I’ve seen reviews of that and I am not keen

I just want to know if they’ll let me replace the screen. I can live with the battery but I’d love an OLED screen.

Not quite, they promoted some folks and reorged the upper structure of Xbox a bit but Zenimax is still operating fairly independently:

“ZeniMax will continue to operate as a limited integration entity led by Jamie Leder, President and CEO, reporting to Matt,”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933049/microsoft-reorg-xbox-marketing-ai-leadership-changes

Clearly Microsoft is trying to avoid more bad game launches, they need to exert some amount of control but I’m looking at that and seeing them trying to do it with a minimal touch.

Microsoft has had a spat of sub-par, underwhelming releases lately - Redfall, Starfield, even going back as far as Halo Infinite and to my knowledge, none of the war stories there have said it had anything to do with Microsoft meddling. I’d go as far as to say that Microsoft needed to keep a closer finger on the pulse of all these studios, not less.