Oh well, still not buying a PS.
I can almost guarantee you that dude has a board or shareholders or whatever, breathing down his neck, and his yearly bonus is depending on the number of units sold. So he will canibalize the whole system with a complete disregard for the long term effects, so long as the magic number goes up in the short term and he can cash in his bonus.
You just described all business in the modern day.
This is exactly the reason the saying “they don’t make them like they used to” is a thing for everything.
Exactly why Valve doesnt want any shareholders
Oh no, all 3 games.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
They will come crawling back after the current moron in charge gets fired. Until then, its like 4 games.
Exactly! They’ll cut jobs and trim the fat until they run out of half-assed, short-term methods of increasing quarterly profits year over year. Then they’ll remember PC gamers are almost exclusively adults and some of those adults have deep pockets and no interest in the closed ecosystems that consoles provide.
Just watch.
Fired? You mean given progressively larger bonuses until he’s poached by a completely different moronic public company just to repeat the same cycle until he dies happy, healthy, and wealthy beyond measure?
“Everyone keep buying our console even though we keep raising the price. No? Fine, we’ll keep all the games just for our platform, surely that will get you to buy a PS5.”
How else would they? Honest question: what do any of the video game consoles have to offer except exclusivity?
Once upon a time, video game consoles offered the convenience of plug-and-play gaming, and living room comfort.
Not everyone wanted to build a PC and play with keyboard and mouse, and even still playing those PC games can be a hassle to set up on a TV if you’re common-denominator-levels of tech unsavvy. (Read: not the average Lemmy user)
Valve has brought that forward some with Steam Deck and eventually steam machine but by and large most PC gamers are Windows users.
That said, console platforms have gotten so increasingly hostile towards customers between pricing, licensing, download times and walled-garden tactics that they’ve painted themselves out of an increasing chunk of the games market.
People would rather set up a computer and a controller than buy a console, and it’s the corpo’s own fault.
People generally buy consoles because they are very simple, plug-n-play devices. Historically, they’ve also been able to produce cutting edge graphics for cheaper than a gaming PC, and although that price gap has narrowed over time I do still think it’s true by a bit. (People like to point out that this is not true when taking into account the average price of games on console vs PC, which is completely valid, but I’m talking about the hardware alone here)
From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.
From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.
As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.
Let’s raise the price of the console by hundreds of dollars just to sweeten the deal!
Indies and AA games on PC ftw.
PC prices are also going up by hundreds of dollars. Look at what RAM and storage are doing.
PC players arent starving for games. We’re drowning in them
I could buy no new games for the rest of my life and still not get around to completing everything in my library (and I’m excluding bundled games I have no intention of playing).
And in 10 years time, all of these exclusives will be available via emulation even if they never officially leave the console.
Dude, the last 10 games I bought haven’t even been installed yet. Kiddo and I are still trying to wrap up other stuff.
plus you can choose to play 1 game until you get bored of it. not so for console where you have to keep chasing the next new thing that comes along.
Oh yes they will. You’ve just decided to stop making money on them. Fine by us.
yup. if they can emulate the ps3’s insano-architecture they can sure as fuck figure out whatever comes next. they’re simply guaranteeing a wave of piracy instead of profiting off their already developed IPs.
That’s a bold move, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.
Tap for spoiler
Valve has made the console model irrelevant. This is Sony officially giving up on the gaming market.
Valve still hasn’t figured out physical copies and reselling.
But then, maybe they eventually will, or Sony and Nintendo give up on physicals (as they seem to want to)
Both companies are leaning hard on digital only sales. Between the standard PS5 shipping without a disc drive and Switch 2 cartridges being little more than download keys the physical retail market is in its last dying gasps. Steam handily has both companies beat in terms of game catalog availability and affordability. A few console exclusives might be enough to maintain steady sales, but it’s an obvious trend that PC gaming is gaining dominance with third party publishers.
Also they want you to buy physical games then to activate them for your account, making them useless for resale (like with steam games, whether bought digital of physical). Sony and Nintendo are eyeballing it for a while now, it’s just something causing insane resistance from their player base when hinting the idea. Same with single-player games requiring your device being online.
All they want is taking away your rights. Like digital games, making them the same price as physical but you’re not actually buying the game, just the right to play their game for as long as they want to support it.
Back in the days you missed nice features when pirating software or movies (like the DVD extras) but these days the pirated version is better and with less restrictions than the purchased licence.
For example, I am leeching YouTube premium from a friend. But using the grayjay app gives me more rights and features than the premium version of YouTube, with sponsor block implemented, offline downloads don’t require a connection to watch and you’re not constantly fed with shorts slop. And you can categorize channel subscriptions and video recommendations are better.
Same with games. Want to play hitman? Sure, 60 bucks for a few missions, plus 140 for all DLC content so you actually have some decent amount of content and playtime. Or pirate it with all DLC content included. I’m fine with paying full price for a proper game, but if most content is locked behind a paywall, I’ll just pirate it instead. Fuck them.
that was largerly due to the fact that consoles were getting more expensive and that it was getting to the point you could build a computer, that would look better than console, for the same or cheaper than console.
but the whole AI bullshit kinda blew that ship out of the water… so Consoles may start gaining ground again as the affordable gaming option (compared to paying a console price for ram, a console price for storage, and 2 console prices for a GPU)
Console makers have to pay more for those parts too. Next gen is going to shock people I think.
yeah, but they still get the advantage of bulk buying and economies of scale.
While we don’t. So their costs don’t increase nearly as much as ours do.
nintendo is so reliant on pokemon, People are still buying the slop game freak is producing.
or Sony and Nintendo give up on physicals (as they seem to want to)
Sony was already very clearly migrating in that direction since the PS4, but didn’t go all in thanks to microslop shooting itself in the foot with the Xbox 1 reveal
Love it or hate it, this is why we don’t want Xbox to fail.
Can they both fail? Consoles kind of suck. Closed platform owned by mega corps. Their main appeals of “easy” and “cheaper” haven’t been true for years.
Microsoft could have done like a … Steam machine for windows like 25 years ago. Optimized windows install on certified hardware, games that also play on desktop windows. They could’ve made steam. Except they couldn’t because they’re a souless corporate husk full of parasitic ghouls.
Fuck em. Fuck them all.
25 years ago, they weren’t going to get any closer than the original Xbox did. PC gaming was extraordinarily different from what we know today, and much as you might not want to hear it, a lot of the reasons it got better were also because of Microsoft. The truth is we can only have something like a Steam Machine today because of incremental improvements that have been done over long periods of time. Valve basically started work on Proton right after the first batch of Steam Machines came out and bombed, and it took until 2022 for their next batch of hardware to materialize that made use of it. Closed platforms can fuck off and die these days, but they solved real problems for decades.
Their main appeals of “easy” and “cheaper” haven’t been true for years.
Please help me get a machine that compares to the PS5/XSX in terms of performance and cost. I’m being serious. Every time I look at putting something together it’s gonna be like $1500-$2000.
The up-front cost of a console is probably cheaper, barring putting some labor in and getting lucky on sales. You’re right about that.
A PC has more utility, a larger library, and no subscription fee. That $80/year PsPlus subscription eats into the savings pretty fast. And when your playstation is end-of-life, it’s far less useful than an older PC.
I’m sure some PC-building nerds would be happy to help put together a cost effective machine for you, but sadly I’m not that kind of nerd. I splurged on a pre-built machine when I had a nice job.
What did you buy?
Buy a used liquidated office PC, add GPU and SSD. Done.
The current market’s kind of making it rough to find that at the moment though.
1500-2000 PC would be twice as powerful as PS5.
If you pay 1000, you get:
- 1440p@60 at max settings gaming machine
- you can play games from all systems (if they are ported to PC)
- if games are not ported, you got emulation!
- ginormous backwards compatibility log
- ability to do whatever you want with it (watch movies, work, browse internet, code, edit photos, whatever you can think of)
- You also do not have to pay subscription fee to be able to play online
- Games generally are cheap and can be acquired in bulk
- 4 times a year Steam sales and free games offered by competitors
- Can be used with pretty much any gamepad out there + tons of insanely good 3rd party options.
- If you do not like Windows, Linux can run almost any game.
Btw, 1000 is for a Steam Machine. You can get used parts that are better for even less. And you got a huge bump up if you already have some hardware beforehand.
Consoles failing isn’t going to make PC gaming any better, though. It’s certainly not going to drive prices down. Though I’m not sure the inverse is actually true: hugely successful consoles with good competition isn’t going to drive component prices down.
Microsoft actually sort of did try that. The Xbox was originally (internally) referred to as the “DirectX box”; it was basically a computer stripped of all parts not necessary for gaming. Microsoft has been pushing DirectX and gaming technologies for decades. You’re right though, the games should have also been Windows compatible. I don’t know why they weren’t. Microsoft is going that way now, sort of, with Play Anywhere games that, if you buy them on Xbox, you can also download them through the Windows Store (which still sucks).
. I don’t know why they weren’t.
I don’t know for certain but I have guesses. They probably thought they could make more money from a more closed system. Some middle manager probably had a kpi that benefitted from incompatibility.
Oh no, I’m so sad I won’t be able to play their diverse library of third person action adventure games with linear narrative and light stealth and RPG elements!
They must not like money.
It makes me wonder what the PC profits were for the God of war games, last of us, etc., whatever else made it over. They really blew it with the forced accounts thing, but God of War was great. I always hoped they would port the demon souls remake but I guess that’ll never happen.
We don’t want any of that… What do you call it? Money? HAH!
That’s funny because I’m not coming to PlayStation.
I guess they just sell less then.
And going forward, Sony won’t get my money
I swear, this time I’m going to build tall and do a federation-focused, fanatic pacifist ethic! Honest!
10.5 hours later - I’m becoming the crisis whether I like it or not.
After the third war of choice your vassal has launched only to be reduced back to your borders until you fly in and save them, maybe it’s better if we just ate their planets.
You play nids in 40k don’t you.
