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I agree with your argument overall, but I think it would be reasonable to say they are broader-purpose computing devices now, and are not yet general-purpose. Consumers don’t have an expectation to reach for their game console to do an arbitrary thing. They generally can expect their phone or laptop to.
“There’s an app for that” just isn’t true for huge swathes of apps on almost all consoles.
I don’t have explicitly what you’re looking for as I am not a lawyer, but game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device (despite theoretically capable of being one if appropriately jailbroken), and as such, prior case law for PC doesn’t apply.
iOS/Android tend to be classified a general-purpose computing device because it does all the same things a PC does (or did) and more. It plays games and does banking and plays music and browses the web and displays pictures and movies, etc etc. For some, it’s their primary and only computing device.
Best I’ve got for you is this
Post in thread ‘Nexus Mods site has been sold’ https://www.resetera.com/threads/nexus-mods-site-has-been-sold.1219452/page-2#post-141554013
It’d be easier to side with Epic if they put really any effort at all into the Epic Games Store. I know there’s a lot of features to catch up on to be competitive to Steam, but considering they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusivity, you’d think they would spend more on improving EGS.
To some extent, people will hate EGS anyway, but if they just quietly trucked along adding feature after feature, those that use it would spread the word. Instead, it largely stagnated and people kept reporting to others that it generally still sucks.
Playing catch-up takes time but at least the company that does already has an enumerated list of features to implement and can glean ideas about how to do so.
I’m so happy this other large company which wants to embed itself as a storefront and soak up fees won against the other large company which was already doing it.
Like, genuinely I am, but Epic isn’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Epic/Sweeney is mostly sad they didn’t have the monopoly first.
Yeah, I feel the same. Revolt Chat is just an eventual Discord 2 if it gains traction. It doesn’t really matter how open-source it is. It is centralized, and so will eventually need funding for hosting. Without the ability to run my own server and everyone be able to connect to it in their clients, it’s not a valid alternative.
Alternatives that move us backwards towards the old days are things like TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo.
Alternatives that are similar to Discord and not owned by a for-profit company are:
- Matrix
A huge missing piece of almost all not-for-profit alternatives is a lack of low-latency game streaming / screen streaming. The best Matrix gets is running a jitsi meet. I think Matrix is the only one that theoretically could work for some users because Discord bridges allow people who are finally fed up to move to Matrix for text chat.
It’s difficult, though.
I’m working my way up the generations and I need to replay Alola in the Ultra games since I only had Pokemon Sun before and had different livingdex rules when I played it. A bit unfortunate for time-sake, but I really liked the Alola games. Good luck on your dex!
To add some naming inspiration, my friend and I like dumb nicknames like:
Blingo Splorp Gunch Slizbop Boizo
PlayStation and Xbox continue to lose their competitive edge almost entirely due to a lack of exclusives. Okay, I’m lying there are more reasons but I posit that games are the primary reason players choose to play where they play. If games aren’t locked to consoles, players don’t need those consoles.
That’s good for players but bad for these console businesses, long-term. It’s the reason why you so commonly see that people have a <console/PC> and a switch. Players still need the switch
You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.
I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.
From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).
No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.
Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.
Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.
It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.
Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.
I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.
Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.
Yep, this video is highly antagonistic like the rest of theirs. On the whole, they’re talking about the right thing, but the video tends towards generalization and ragebaiting.
Also months and months later there’s yet to be any news or progress on their “alternative” Unreal Engine fork that fixes TAA or whatever, despite the host talking very quickly over technical rendering jargon. You’d think with the ability to do that, they could manage to … disable TAA in Unreal. Vibes feel like a scam.
If everybody has to finance their purchases, something might be fundamentally wrong with the economy…