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That’s where the “analysis” part of “cost-benefit analysis” comes in and it doesn’t make sense to generalize like you seem to want to.
Is it really that much more responsible to run Windows 11? You seem to have a LOT of faith in Microsoft to keep you safe. There’s plenty of reasons to not switch to Windows 11.
I also use Linux on some machines. But I can also see why there are reasons why one distro or another, or even Linux in general, may not be the right call for some people.
You seem awfully optimistic about Microsoft’s response time lol.
How many people are out there today with broken locks on their doors or windows? How many stores do you think close every night with the minimum wage worker forgetting to lock up properly? How many people out their use incredibly weak passwords, share their credentials with others, or leave everything on post-it notes?
Security is a cost-benefit analysis. Depending on what exactly this hypothetical exploit requires I might very well be comfortable running Windows 10 anyways. The vast majority of security exploits require physical access to the machine- we only hear about the remote ones more often because they are scarier.
Right?
I never understand why people are so obsessed with not getting updates. They usually just break everything and bloat the OS.
“But my security!” OS updates are going to protect you from 99% of the bad actors out there. They do nothing against social engineering. They don’t make you use strong passwords. Most of the security flaws OS updates are addressing are the kinda of attacks that only state actors or organized crime rings have the resources and abilities to exploit.
Governments? Heck yeah they need to be concerned. Large enterprises? Definitely. Small businesses? Eh it’s probably for the best to protect your livelihood even if you aren’t the juiciest target. But for an individual using their PC for gaming, social media, streaming content, online shopping, etc… The cost-benefit analysis is different.
It’s not different from physical security. Theres a reason you don’t need to go through TSA to get on a bus.
The 9070’s on eBay are getting cheaper and cheaper the further we get from the launch. I think scalpers underestimated AMD’s stock and they are slowly discovering that.
Immediately after the launch the XT seemed to be starting at $1,200. Now they are down to $800. The non-xt is down to $650.
Depends on how much stock AMD can provide in the coming weeks and months, but I’m still thinking I’ll be able to get one at MSRP this year.
Been in my backlog for a while, and this may have convinced me to check it out soon.
Also I gotta say I love the idea of Mid game reviews. Everyone talks about great games to death. Terrible games get s ton of discussion and have the “so bad it’s good” angle. Mid games are often solid values and rewarding experiences that get forgotten about over time.
That’s been rumored for years. I remember back in the day seeing rumors about Halo coming to PlayStation.
Not entirely without merit. Minecraft has been released on pretty much everything with a CPU, although some of those may have been before Microsoft purchased Mojang. There were a lot of weird scenarios after the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard where the now-Microsoft-owned studios had pre-existing contracts with Sony they needed to honor. It looks like some of the IP they recently purchased that had traditionally been multiplat might remain that way, like the “Age of ___” series, Doom, and Call of Duty.
I’ve seen rumors that Starfield might come to PS5, but nothing substantial. I don’t think there would have been any chance of that if it had sold well on Xbox and Windows.
I’ve also seen rumors of Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, but I will not start buying those unless there are more signs that Xbox is giving up on hardware entirely. If they could get deals done to get GamePass on Playstation and Switch that might start to look more realistic though.
Most of their games are still exclusive though. Avowed just released last weekend for Xbox and Windows and no hint of a PlayStation release for example.
The reverse is also true. Sony has published MLB games for the Xbox and Switch for example.
Nintendo doesn’t “personally” do anything. They are a corporation.
And they do purchase both IP’s and studios. Just off the top of my head they bought Monolith from Bandai-Namco and Bayonetta has been exclusive ever since the second one.
Microsoft has been way worse than Sony. Zenimax alone was might have been bigger than Sony’s entire portfolio depending on how you measure. Activision-Blizzard was far, far bigger. And at least with Zenimax, it seems like most of their studios have gotten worse since acquisition, with a lot of them being shut down.
I don’t mean to overly defenf Sony, but just paying publishers for 1 year of exclusivity seems pretty mild in comparison. I’d prefer they didn’t buy studios like Bungie, but at the same time the acquisitions of Naughty Dog and Insomniac seem to have worked out pretty well.
It’s so weird to me how many people seem to just hate Sony for doing milder versions of what Nintendo and Microsoft have been doing for much longer.
Sony didn’t buy Zenimax or Activision-Blizzard. Or heck, you could point to the gigantic graveyard of studios that EA and Microsoft have purchased and shut down over the years.
My experience on the Deck and Switch is the opposite: different games lend themselves to different form factors. And both of those (along with other handhelds like the Logitech G Cloud, PlayStation Portal, AYN Odin series, etc) are not really in the mobile space. I can’t imagine a middle schooler taking their Deck or Switch to school. I can’t imagine breaking one of those out on a 15 minute break while working retail or food service. I would not have lugged those devices around campus to play between college classes. The Switch is an exception because it’s a home console too, but the rest of those devices are incredibly niche products that sell orders of magnitude less than either consoles, gaming PC’s, or phones.
And you said yourself: you pick the right game for the job. I could totally emulate Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 on the Deck, maybe even 4. But I would inevitably get stuck in a 30 minute long cutscene from Kojima. It may be possible to either use a save states or just hit the power button to suspend, but that’s still a bad experience. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good. I do keep a selection of games on the Deck for different situations.
My wife and I love Skyrim and have almost every version of it. I probably have 1,000 hours in, she is probably close to 10,000 at this point. We always joke about how one of the worst things you can do for yourself is save and stop playing mid-dungeon. You get in a groove and reserve some of the RAM in your brain for keeping track of the in-game space, and if you stop and come back to it a day, week, month, or year later it takes some work to mentally recover. We always try to go back to a house, or at least a town, to save.
For something like Candy Crush or Sudoku? No problem, I can get right in. For a big AAA action game? I need to remember the controls, the map layout, what’s going on with the plot, what my items or build or whatever is, what the enemies are like and how to deal with them, etc. If I’m sitting down for a 2 hour gaming session it’s no problem if I take 3 minutes to get up to speed again, but for a 15 minute break that’s 20% of my time.
Another factor is how long it takes to get in game. I recently played through Subnautica (streaming with Steam Link to either my Deck or Shield), and while it was a great time I was annoyed at just how long it takes to get into the game. Even on an SSD it simply takes forever to load, sometimes close to 2 whole minutes. And I know of plenty of other games that are even worse with all the splash screens and BS before the start menu- the Crash N Sane Trilogy is a big offender for example. If I’m on a 15 minute break I don’t want to spend 20% of that time waiting for the game to start.
It’s exit points and entry points. Most console or PC games are designed with play sessions of at least 30 minutes, usually more like an hour. If you don’t take the exit points, you’re starting a new dungeon or new quest line or whatever and are locking in for the next 30-60 minutes. (You could argue games like Civ might have intended play sessions more like 8-16 hours). Successful mobile games have much more frequent entry and exit points.
RE2 would certainly work fine on the Deck and Switch, but not in those “mobile” contexts. And I don’t think there is enough demand to add Android and IOS support on top of that.
So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.
When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.
These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.
So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.
There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.
The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.
The Series X|S combined has sold less than half the units of the PS5. I can’t find sales numbers on the X vs S, but it seems like a lot of studios have determined it’s just not really profitable to do that level of optimisation unless you can also squeeze the game onto Switch, which does not have as much overlap in demographics as the Xbox and PlayStation do.
The article cites Larian having similar issues with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Remedy with Alan Wake 2. This isn’t just one shitty lazy dev studio- this is Microsoft forcing hard decisions on devs by insisting on walking the Series S like they’re in Weekend at Bernie’s.
Once again: mobile space vs console space. There are plenty of revenue streams and opportunities for profitable ventures here.
The article itself points out one of the reasons that Microsoft might be interested is to maximize the utilization of King, a studio they got as part of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, makers of Candy Crush and Bejeweled. That’s just one example- off the top of my head I remember Ratchet and Clank had “Going Mobile”, Knack had a tie-in mobile game where you could earn extra currency and transfer it to the PS4 games. Nintendo has done tons of stuff like Pokemon Go, Sleep, TCG, Cafe, Mario Runner, Fire Emblem, and more. And Microsoft owns more than just King.- Bethesda has done a handful of Slder Scrolls mobile games, and Fallout Shelter was an incredible award-winning game that was so good it goy ported to PC. It wasn’t long ago people were speculating that AAA single-player experiences might be getting killed off in favor of these smaller, cheaper, much more profitable mobile games.
The article also mentions cloud gaming- the Portal and Logitech G-cloud are already exploring this space a little bit and I expect that to continue (personally I love using my Deck to stream from my PC or PS4 to save battery, reduce heat and noise, and have better graphics settings, albeit only when I’m on my home network). These companies absolutely love subscription services, so I could see that even subsidizing the hardware. Xbox is trying to push gamepass onto every device it can- what if they could subsidize a low-powered handheld with excellent battery life that could be another avenue for that? I know things like NVIDIA GeForce Now and Stadia have failed, but I think it’s only a matter of time before global Internet bandwidth and latency gets good enough for that to make sense. I hate the idea of cloud gaming personally, but it seems like what the market is trending towards.
But that’s still a janky workaround compared to the elegance of design.
What about if you don’t get to resume play for a while? Hours, days, weeks, months? If you stopped in the middle of a cutscene, a battle, a puzzle… Just because it’s mechanically possible doesn’t mean it’s a good experience. Games typically require the player to temporarily store information in their own minds to be used later. One of my own personal rules I have learned from experience is to never quit Skyrim in the middle of a dungeon. Because inevitably a month later I’ll get the itch to go and organize my house, only to get disheartened and change my mind when I see i left myself halfway through a draugr crypt.
There are also hardware considerations. I love a big, high-res screen. One of my biggest problems with the Deck is that it’s not 1080p. But big screens, more pixels, better refresh rates, more brightness, and better graphics settings has tradeoffs. More weight, more volume, more heat, more fan noise, worse battery life. Around the house I usually don’t care because I have decent chargers in key locations.
But if I’m out and about traveling, or if I had to go somewhere for work where I only got 15 minutes in the break room, I would just use a different device. Something small, light and power efficient. Like the 3DS or my Powkiddy RGB10Max. Typically just 2D or very lightweight 3D games, and if I’m emulating I can settle for lower resolutions and framerates. It’s an entirely different experience and use case.
And that’s why I said that it’s really two different markets- those smaller devices are more directly competing with smartphones than consoles, while the big boys like the Deck are competing with laptops, desktops, and console setups. The Switch is probably closer to the deck, although the Lite version really toes that line.
What doesn’t get talked about enough in this conversation is how these devices are expected to be used and how that influences game design. Most crucially- exit points.
I remember taking my Gameboy, GBA, and DS everywhere. The school bus, recess, boy scout meetings. Always in my backpack as I walked around campus in college. In my locker when I worked retail and got 15 minute breaks. It was part of my every day carry, and most of the games were designed with that in mind. Really short load times, plenty of check points or opportunities to save. Very rare to get into a battle or dungeon that would take more than 10 minutes to get to a spot where you can leave without losing progress. Very rare to have to hold ton of information in your brain’s working memory for long periods of time to really enjoy it.
Console games can have long build-ups. More complicated plots. Bigger dungeons. Long cutscenes. A wider range of pacing available. There are some truly great experiences that are possible if you can make the assumption that you have most of the player’s attention for a solid 60 minutes or more.
Imagine trying to play Death Stranding or Metal Gear Solid 4 on a 15 minute break at work and entering a cutscenes that is 25-30 minutes long, for example.
That being said, the Switch really started the trend of handheld gaming in the home. Perhaps families where someone is is using the main TV. Dorms or small apartments where it’s hard to get a good couch setup. Personally I love using the Deck to play in bed, or outside on my covered porch, or even just on the couch while my wife is using the main TV. Or sometimes I just don’t want to put my glasses on because my eyes are tires. Those situations can easily lend themselves to longer playing sessions. This is where the PlayStation Portal falls, for example.
So if Sony or Microsoft were to make a new handheld they would have to target one of those two use cases. Essentially, they would either be competing with Consoles/PC’s in that space or the mobile gaming space.
The retro handheld scene is still pretty niche, but most of them are small, cheap, and lightweight which makes them great for the mobile space. They can emulate games that were designed for handhelds, and even adding things like save states is at least a feasible workaround for some other games.
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I don’t know the details of how hands-on or hands-off Microsoft has been or should have been with studios, but even at the time of the AB acquisition the reputation for results was bad. I found an article from 2018 looking at the studios Microsoft had purchased up until then. Mohjang is really the only success story- Bungie never got back to where they were with HALO and got spun off, Rare has never reached their N64 peak again, and several other studios just closed.
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Things have not been close to “okay” since these acquisitions. Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 people from Activision-Blizzard in January 2024. Then in May they closed 3 Zenimax-owned studios- Tango, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog. They then announced another 650 layoffs in September, with more expected in 2025. Microsoft is throwing money at buying up IP and then firing the employees and closing down.
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What don’t you like about Sony releasing their games on PC? Almost all of Microsoft’s games have been (at least most of the ones worth playing) throughout the history of Xbox. I think timed exclusivity is reasonable and I can be patient. Some of the ports had better or worse launch experiences but it’s been a while since I can remember a bad one. If anything I wish Nintendo would get with the program and release games on PC too, though that probably will never happen.
The PS5 is leading the Xbox, but neither are anywhere close to the Switch. Microsoft absolutely dwarfs Sony as a parent company- Sony never would have stood any chance at buying Zenimax, let alone AB. I do agree that this isn’t necessary to remain competitive and would be and for the industry, but this isn’t anywhere close to the scale of those deals. I will note that the Activision-Blizzard merger is still pretty recent, and Phil Spencer has mentioned wanting to continue acquisitions (like King, the maker of Candy Crush), so this could also be Sony trying to respond to that.
The estimated I see have all of Kadokawa values at ~$2.7 billion. My uneducated guess is that FromSoft is probably a couple hundred million of that, just knowing how many other assets Kadokawa owns (and remember- Sony has non-gaming-related interest in Kadokawa too). Activision-Blizzard was sold for ~$69 billion.
Also it’s worth pointing out that Sony are already partial owners of FromSoft. And Sony, while not perfect, had a much better record of managing their acquired studios than Microsoft. Look at Naughty Dog and Insomniac for examples. I’d have to go back and do research to confirm, but I think the only studios Sony has closed have been ones they started. London studios (which was mostly focused on toe-in titles for hardware gimmicks like the Move and Wonderbook) and Japan Studios, which for years was more of a support studio and an incubator for talent they would move to other studios later- like Team Icon and Team Asobi.
I don’t mean to come across as a PlayStation fanboy- Sony has made a ton of mistakes of their own over the years. But most of their mistakes have just been side projects like VR, Move, the EyeToy. You can argue whether the PSP and Vita were successful or not. On comparison, Xbox has consistently sold less and has still not been profitable in close in 25 years, while Nintendo has been wildly volatile with huge hits like the Wii and Switch and huge misses like the WiiU.
I got into a lot of discussions with people who seemed to believe that Microsoft would “save” Activision-Blizzard. Clean up the culture, create a better work environment, shift the focus away from live-services and micro-transactions. People were expecting a lot of their older games to make their way to GamePass… Which is a whole other kind of predatory pricing.
Lo and behold- AB went ahead and laid off almost 2,000 redundant positions after the acquisition and don’t seem to have changed their business structure much.
It’s so funny to me how vigorously the internet defended Microsoft, a much much larger company than Sony, buying Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, each much larger companies than Kadokawa.
Consolidation is bad for everyone except owners and I hope this doesn’t happen.
Silver linings: at the very least this would probably result in the Bloodborne re-release people have been begging for. If it were Microsoft purchasing them I would expect a ton of immediate layoffs and maybe studio closure after a few years. While Sony has closed a couple of studios (mostly their own home-grown ones that were re-structured into other things) they seem more focused on actually using their acquisitions than just gobbling the IP and eliminating competition.
What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?
How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.
As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.
Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.
The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.
I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.
It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.
You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.
And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.
I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.
I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.
But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.
Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.
Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.
Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.
As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
Lol that’s absolutely not an excuse, or else we would see dozens of games with this happen every year. Somehow almost every game to every feature tastefully censored nude scenes managed to do so without modeling genitalia, but Beyond: Two Souls is an exception.
In a world where modeling costs money, studios are looking to spend less time modeling than they need to. Not more.
I remembered something else just after I posted this- i’m surprised it didn’t come up in my first searches.
The other controversy was in Beyond: Two Souls. It was one of the first modern games to use motion capture for voice actors to get more realism. After release, people found that the devs had made a fully nude model of one of the characters. They never scanned the actor (Elliott Page) nude, but modeled what was missing. It doesn’t appear in normal gameplay, but was accessible in debug mode.
Creepy as fuck.
In fairness to David Cage, his response to those (and other) allegations was:
“I have never said or even thought such things. I fully understand people were shocked by seeing those words, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and confusion they have caused to women and the LGBTQIA+ community. The quotes are abhorrent, and they do not reflect my views, nor the views of anyone at Quantic Dream.”
Did he say it and/or believe it? I have no idea. But certainly something to think about before buying a Quantic Dream game.
Tell me you did r read past the headline without telling me you didn’t read past the headline.