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Software has won. Every game wants to be on every platform, because platforms are an obstacle to customers. The only exceptions are from studios getting bought off or bought up.
Consoles don’t even have any special sauce left - they are computers, full stop. Do you want the blue AMD laptop, or the green AMD laptop? Or the red Android tablet?
Microsoft saw this coming a mile off, and is still getting walked by Valve. The Xbox brand was invented to computerify the console market. The first one was literally a PC. The second was a generic compiler target. They’ve been breaking down barriers because they expected to own everything.
Sony saw this coming… last year, maybe. Helldivers 2 showed them how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. That’s why they burned a lot of customers by forcing them into the PSN ecosystem. Force is the only way they have an ecosystem. People say “PS5 has no games” despite that object supporting hundreds of titles and basically the entire PS4 library. What they mean is: having a PS5 is fine. But why should you buy it instead of something else? What’s the difference, anymore?
Sony’s been fucked since 2005. The console war is over and nobody told them. Developers want to sell games to customers - and platforms are an obstacle.
Nintendo doesn’t care because they want “blue ocean” gimmicks with no competition. So: motion, tablet, handheld. Microsoft actively encourages the shift because they expect they’ll be The Only Platform, despite Steam selling so many Windows games that Windows is optional. Meanwhile - Sony has clung to exclusives because that’s what made the PSX and PS2 super duper successful and they do not have a Plan B.
They keep winning each generation, as if the blue AMD laptop is meaningfully different from the green one. The libraries are 90% identical. They keep having “no games” in the sense they have no games to lord over the other kids on the playground, when their core demographic is 30. This is how disruption always works: fantastic margins on dwindling control. Whatever you have is more profitable than what you don’t! Until suddenly you have nothing.
The economic case for bribing studios into a single platform is doomed. Has been ever since GTA 3. Really, ever since RenderWare made a generation of PC / PS2 / Xbox / GameCube titles look identical, until EA bought that company and destroyed them. Now every machine is powerful enough, to the point the last-gen PS4 is still relevant alongside the endgame PS5 Pro. Crossplay is the default, because fuck you, of course everyone who bought the same game can play each other. The writing is so clearly on the wall that Microsoft may not bother with another proper Xbox. Does anything think that’s because they’re losing money? Even the studios they delete are profitable. They are fucking around on a level above the 1990s cosplay that Sony desperately wants to maintain.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
There is no ethical form of that business model. Games convince you to value arbitrary worthless rewards. That is what makes them games. That fiction can never be the same form of value as US dollars. You might as well try buying a hamburger with soccer goals.
Loot boxes barely even exist anymore, because people finally acknowledged they’re awful and abusive. Every alternative people rush to defend is that same abuse. Surprise - game developers made their manipulation more effective and less noticeable.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. It is in $70 single-player games. It has been added to games people already bought. The skeeze factor does not matter, because of how much money this abuse makes. It’s now half the industry’s revenue. Only legislation will fix this.
Three mods make Oblivion the peak of its era:
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Leveled list fix. Any one will do. The base game fumbled it, and everyone knows that, so plenty of people have rebalanced it their own ways.
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Darnified UI. As with SkyUI: it scrunches things down to where they make sense on a 1080p monitor instead of a 480p television in the next room, and it adds a few sort-by options for loot goblins. There’s nothing to be done about the nested tabs because they’re fine. Morrowind has its mouse-driven WIMP setup, Oblivion has its 360 blades dashboard, it’s fine. They are endgame versions of what shaped their era.
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Quest message popup removal. You absolutely do not need a modal fucking dialog, ev-er-y single time your journal updates. The little ching! is enough.
Dysfunctional diva bullshit is what killed Sega’s hardware business.
And what made Sega spicy was marketing. They noticed how Nintendo countersteered out from the crash by convincing retailers that video games were toys, and instead embraced teen angst and transgressive humor… insofar as one can, using a cartoon animal with an Archie Comics series.
And then Sony did it a thousand times better.
ESH.
For a clear-cut case of the publisher being scum, Mindscape fired the entire Lego Island team immediately before the game launched, to avoid paying royalties to any of them. Which should fucking obviously be illegal. They did the work - the game made money - pay them their cut, you rat bastards.
Patents in general should have mandatory licensing, because there’s no artistic concern. You did something clever? Great, here’s a pile of money. All you care about is the height. Do not hold us back.
Holding back software for twenty years is obscene. Twenty years ago, mobile gaming meant the Game Boy Advance. Twenty years before that, IBM PCs were still 5 MHz in 4 colors. Twenty years before that, microprocessors hadn’t been invented.
TLDR: sRGB.
For more complex errors in rendering assumptions, consider roughness. Lambertian lighting assumes surfaces are isotropic, i.e., the same from all directions. Brightness is the cosine of the angle to the light source. It’s why a lot of old renders look like smooth plastic. To my knowledge, Oren-Nayar was the first model to get diffuse brightness right, by looking more like chalk.
The latter is solved by better colorspaces, like OKLAB.
Sony’s white-knuckle grip on their platform is an exciting hint of things to come.
They’ve been cosplaying the PS2 era since about 2005. That’s when it became evident to everyone that games can just exist, and be for every platform, so long as the studio has a bit more money and time. Previously your game was for one gizmo, and you might hire some third party to follow up and coerce it onto another gizmo. Nowadays everything’s a computer and all computers work basically the same way. There’s details. There’s exceptions. But anything that doesn’t work the normal way becomes irrelevant.
This nonsense is the only thing Sony can do to pretend Playstation is anything more than a brand name. Microsoft has stopped pretending and it’s weirding people out. Nintendo had a unique feature for their gizmo, as they do, but now they’re competing with Valve - on hardware - and their follow-up is probably a merely numeric upgrade.
There are no platforms anymore. To consumers, there is nothing but software and obstacles.