ampersandrew

joined 1 year ago
[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 15 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 16 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

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

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

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

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

“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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 3 points 8 months ago

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

[–] ampersandrew@kbin.social 7 points 8 months ago

Also known as the Daisuke Ishiwatari method.

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