ampersandrew

Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.

And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?

That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you’re in a market dominating position like they are.

Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.

This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it’s stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can’t ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it’s doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I’m no analyst. There’s certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there’s no Blu Ray copy of it, you’re just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else’s machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.

Gen Z is coming through and they’re going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I’ve got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?

And when consoles aren’t so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it’s not like there’s a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.

It’s not a story when it’s a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It’s a story when it’s hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.

BG3 is available DRM-free on PC. I’d say that’s better than any sense of security offered by physical media.

Some of these things really do seem to be luck of the draw. Maybe they run A/B tests. Did you get bombarded with ads on Windows 10? I did. My friends had no idea what I was talking about. I for sure got nagged over and over again to use OneDrive back when I still used Windows, and stories like this one were in the news all the time.

I think the industry is in a hurry to stop spending $100M+ per game, so I’d say that’s unlikely.

“welp we’re out of budget so we’ll do a recap episode” that StarGate pulled every season

I’ve never seen StarGate, but functionally, this type of episode makes a lot of sense for a serialized story in the era before streaming, which is why serialized stories used to be very rare.

The case Nintendo was making, as I understand it, was that their site provided pretty clear links to sources where you could circumvent encryption, even though they weren’t doing it themselves.

Whatever their reasons, I’m glad they opted for this. It makes the game translate better to controllers, and that’s just a more comfortable way for me to play games.

Just play The Outer Worlds if you haven’t already. It’s Starfield if they threw out all the parts that didn’t work, and it’s got a sense of humor, too.

Man, this site on mobile is like psychological warfare. You read a paragraph, and it’s interesting, and you scroll down a bit to read more, and they spawn another ad that takes up ever so slightly more of the screen until the article is a postage stamp in the middle like I’m playing Quake on an old machine in 1997.

Well, they finally started appealing to me, because the new crop cares less about trying to survive and more about building stuff.

Also known as the Daisuke Ishiwatari method.

A Linux OS isn’t enough either; I know from experience with a GPD Win 2. You really need a distro that is built with gamepad controls at the forefront. There are far too many ways for things to steal focus from the game window or require keyboard input unless you intercept those calls the way Valve does on SteamOS.

It has been the beginning of a paradigm shift. This is just to lay people off without paying severance.

But can’t you see the other comments in this thread? Clearly this encourages piracy for some reason and is worse than EA somehow.

On the other hand, maybe they took a look at Helldivers and decided to keep going down that route anyway.

Long-term, it is in fact cheaper to not pay 900 people than it is to pay them.

If only costs, personnel, and risk could be divided that easily.

I think the new management at Sony agrees, but what that means is that people get laid off.

On a Game Mess Mornings (yesterday, I think?) it was something like $600M profit on a $7B investment, which are some thin margins, and things are trending in the other direction, which means it’s not sustainable. Anyone looking at $300M budgets for a Spider-Man game and $200M for Horizon could wager a guess that it’s not sustainable. The blame still lies at the feet of Sony for stretching themselves so thin in the first place and then axing these people who potentially uprooted their lives to take these jobs, but it doesn’t make sense to keep throwing money at things like PSVR2 games or live service schemes that won’t make their money back.