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I used to be a playstation, couch gamer. I pretty much quit gaming when the ps4 came out. Things have only gotten worse since. On the bright side, I did manage to get a bachelor degree instead.
Well done. I finished my degree once I quit drinking
That is fantastic! Congrats on both!
I’m a gamer from back in the days when a “games console” was a ZX Spectrum or an Amiga, not an open standard like the PC mainly because back then nothing was standard, but far more open than modern consoles.
Then came the PC and for a time it was the dominant platform for games (basically the good old days of Shareware and a few years after).
Then consoles were reinvented, with the modern console business structure and tech stack which most present day gamers are acquainted with. This time around consoles were a locked down tech and the business was a walled garden model.
At that point I was so used to PCs and to piracy as an alternative to source PC games (or even just a way to unlock purchased games by cracking their DRM), that I never really jumped into modern consoles as it was too locked down. Also by then I was already a Tech professional and aware of the risks of jumping into a tech stack wholly controlled by a 3rd party.
So, yeah, here we are now with the closed down walled garden tech stack were there wasn’t even a proper piracy culture to disincentivize abusing locked-in customers having enshittified to extreme levels.
This shit was entirely expectable already back then.
I hope that the whole modern day business model for game consoles dies a horrible death, though people being people I expect that a decade afterwards they will get swindled again en masse by a reinvention of this console model.
I’ve always had computers to play games on, but consoles have also always been my primary gaming hardware. The additional cost of PC hardware, as well as having to constantly tinker and upgrade parts to be able to run the latest games, was the main reason. But now that consoles are doing away with the used market and also no longer have significantly cheaper hardware, Paying more up front for PC is the only thing that makes sense.
Well, the upside of PCs is that you can keep on upgrading just parts of it, whilst console upgrading is generally just buy a new one, something that has become even more so around the late 00s when the upgrade cycle slowed down quite a lot, even for gaming PCs.
I think (but am not sure) that as long as you didn’t aim for top of the range parts and instead used the ones just below (generally much cheaper for only a little bit less performance) all in all it was cheaper to just keep upgrading one’s PC than keeping on replacing one’s console with a new one as they came out.
Mind you, I’ve jumped out of the “keep up with the latest titles” threadmill over a decade ago since, with the notable exception of Indie titles, I don’t actually find them as entertaining (they’re generally very “guided” linear experiences whilst I like lots of freedom and high complexity) plus I discovered that I derive far more enjoyment from great gameplay than I do from great graphics: the latter can indeed be amazing and impressive for the first couple of hours, but it’s the former that gets me back to a game again and again and again, even years later.
PCs and Patient Gaming is way cheaper than consoles, though I guess that by now there’s also a lot of Patient Gaming in consoles since people keep on using the older one rather than buying the new on.
Further, upgrading one’s PC or even just knowing what kind of things are better to upgrade at any one point and how to chose the right parts for upgradeability (such as enthusiast motherboards instead of just cheap ones and the kind of CPU socket that was recent enough that was likely to keep getting new CPUs for a while) requires quite a lot of technical expertise and is beyond most people. even gamers.
“Paying more up front for PC is the only thing that makes sense” for me, specifically. For others it would vary. I was thinking the other day of what I would recommend to a person who isn’t tech-savvy, has no gaming hardware, is on a budget, and wants to get into gaming on a TV. Oddly, the Switch 2 seems like the best cost to performance ratio right now.
You can be a PC couch gamer! Apollo/Moonlight or Steam Link work pretty damn well. If I can play cyberpunk two rooms away from my PC…
it isn’t without its issues, and my ISP’s router keeps messing with things, but hey, my wife went from “watch him play over his shoulder on a 24” screen" to “play in the living room on a couch and controller with him”
It’s their walled garden, which they control and were they get to do whatever the fuck they want.
Never, ever jump into a tech stack which is a walled garden, because sooner or later you’re almost certainly going to get shafted by those who control it. This applies just as much as a tech consumer as it does as a tech professional.
The amount of companies that I’ve seen dive face-first into walled gardens because “they wouldn’t screw us over, we’re paying customers!” is mindblowing.
2 years later, and those same CHUDs have
and are yelling at me because prices have gone through the roof, and there’s no way to get out of the stack without a complete redesign.How do the idiots that make these decisions keep failing upwards?
In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.
Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.
So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:
The
- Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a “superhuman effort” “saves the day” by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.
is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.
Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.
So, it’s like Nintendo, but the console is twice as expensive? Yeah, no.
No, the games are also worse.
Nintendo also still sells physical games for now.
only some. some or most new switch 2 cartridges are actually keys on the cartridge that just unlock an online download. no game files in sight. you can still resell the cartridge, but for how long is dubious, given that eventually the online store will be shuttered.
Some, yeah, but for how long? The issue facing Nintendo is that storage and RAM prices are way up. Looking at a game like Cyberpunk 2077, you can probably get most of it on a 64GB card, especially if they reduced the textures some. But 64GB cards aren’t cheap, so they have to eat that cost if they want to price it competitively. And let’s not forget, using that example, they had to do extra work with that game to port it to ARM64. I’m sure us Mac users aren’t making up the costs. I mean, I already own the game on Steam, so I damn sure wasn’t going to pay full price to buy it on the Mac App Store, not when Steam works on macOS and the native ARM64 build is right there. (The Mac App Store is pretty shit anyway.) But even then, I have an M2 MacBook Air and an M2 Pro Mac mini, and it runs like shit on both computers. I mean it runs okay, but there’s no traffic, pedestrian or car. So that’s where they’re cutting it. I get the full experience on my Xbox, so I’m not playing it on the Mac.
Same thing on Switch. The game goes on sale pretty cheap often enough, but then to play it on Switch 2, you have to pay nearly full price. Not a bad deal if you never owned it before, but I gotta wonder how a Switch 2 benches against M2/M2 Pro. This site doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence for the Switch 2: https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/nintendo-switch-2-gpu-vs-apple-m2-pro-gpu-19-core/
I’m not sure how much is actually known about the Switch 2, since I doubt it’ll just run GeekBench. But it sounds like, from the way that site has it, the M2 Pro in my Mac mini is 2-4 times better. So, seeing how the game runs on the M2 Pro… I gotta wonder just how much they cut from the Switch 2 version to make it look as good as it does… and I wanna know why base/Pro Macs can’t just run that version. I suspect a lot of games are gimped for the Switch 2. That may include Fallout 4, but Fallout 4 runs nearly perfectly on my M2 base MacBook Air. There’s a couple things you have to fiddle with, like disabling gore (the flying eyeballs thing). But the game runs great. So the Switch 2 version will probably be fine.
Grow a fucking pair and make a sacrifice for the world you want to see. Ppl are so fucking weak. Adjust your life to remove the liability of corporate greed, whenever possible.
The used market is called ‘emulators’ for some odd reason.
I’m sure everyone can afford that with the world collapsing. Joke’s om them.
People buy this shit on installments. Consumer culture has turned the average person into a product chugging zombie.
No market? Is this communism?
/s
You don’t have to pay them anything.
Arghhh
Sooo hot take I really don’t understand the extent of outrage about physical media. I don’t want physical media. It’s outdated. It feels like at this point we are just making up reasons to be angry, and millenials entering the “back in my day” age is feeding into this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m angry too, but I’m also a contrarian piece of shit and very pedantic about being angry for the right reasons. A used market is important for physical tech and all kinds of things to prevent waste and encourage re-use, but that doesn’t make sense for digital goods. I dunno am I way off base here?
Physical goods aren’t here for nostalgia, they’re here for media that can’t be remotely recalled the moment the corpos decide for whatever reason you can’t own it anymore.
Its very important in the legal space. On the high seas, a HDD thumb drive or archival mdisc/tape drive are the same.
I’ve bought plenty of games that turned out to be dogshit, and the only solace they’ve provided is the ability to recoup some of the money by selling or trading the games. The physical games I do own are carefully curated, and I can still play all of them. I don’t want to be put in a position where I can’t get my money back AND I’m stuck with some shitty Hogwarts game.
You aren’t off-base, you just aren’t taking Sony’s, Nintendo’s, Microsoft’s tendencies to say “You don’t own that game you bought anymore” into account. Games are way too expensive to be able to brush off the full price of a game that you have every reason to be able to go back to after years of not playing them. Don’t put your trust in companies, especially after decades of eroding consumer trust.
Steam doesn’t do this (anywhere nearly as often). The lesson you should be getting from this new game sales trajectory is that if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft. Don’t reward companies for clawing back any benefits you have of buying something. All you’re doing is ceding ground that you won’t get back.
The issue is removing another option for acquiring a game as well as a lack of ownership.
Physical media allows you to do whatever you want with your copy of the game. It allows the market to determine the price of the game instead of just sitting at whatever price they want on the digital store.
There is also the issue of download speeds. There are still many people in the world who have awful download speeds and/or data caps. Those people will lose the option to have the entire game on the disc.
People just want physical discs so they can own what they buy.
I agree with the theory. the reality is that there is no structure to resell digital goods and doing so isn’t in the favour of the corps controlling it.
if there were a third party way to transfer ownership of digital goods? absolutely. but there isn’t, you’re at the mercy of the corp that wants more money and fuck you give it to them
You’re not way off, digital is superior and less wasteful in theory, and in a progressive society we’d have already realised that digital goods should be transferable and should not expire (= should not have DRM), certainly not sooner than physical goods! We do not live in that society atm (:
A practical example from experience: a steam game can only be gifted (aka transferred) to another account if you buy at least a second copy/key. The first copy is therefore less valuable than a game on a physical copy, that I can lend or gift to a friend.
I do have that childhood nostalgia for cartridges, but that aside the modern joy of physical media is usually something like works offline, works 20 years from now, can’t be remotely disabled. But I’ve found that once you’re paying $599 for a brick with a 5 year expiration time bomb built-in, $70 per game, 20GB downloads before you can start playing, the dark patterns don’t end there, and the whole ecosystem just isn’t worth all the hassle.
My view is that with a physical copy I own it for life and there’s no way for Sony to come and take it away after they decide to “end support” or something. I can (and do) still plug in my ps2 and boot up any of my games from back then perfectly fine, and barring age/wear and tear I can continue to do so as long as I want. I’m also able to go buy old ps2 games from anyone who’s selling them, I don’t have to hope Sony has Mercenaries 2 on sale for $69.99 even though it’s older than a decent chunk of PlayStation users.
I don’t want it either, but look at this and look at gog.
I like being able to touch the things. The tactile feedback of something in my hands is nice.
Also: Don’t have much digital storage.
