paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FromSoftware didn’t want Sony to publish Dark Souls as it was ‘disappointed’ by how Demon’s Souls was treated⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FromSoftware didn’t want Sony to publish Dark Souls as it was ‘disappointed’ by how Demon’s Souls was treated⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FromSoftware didn’t want Sony to publish Dark Souls as it was ‘disappointed’ by how Demon’s Souls was treated⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on whether you consider Xbox and Windows to count as 2 different platforms or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FromSoftware didn’t want Sony to publish Dark Souls as it was ‘disappointed’ by how Demon’s Souls was treated⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do they self-identity as Jews?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Their actual name is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” and they self-identity as Christian.

  They don’t call themselves “the Church of Joseph Smith of Latter-Day Saints”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Jehova’s Witneses and Mormons are both Christian. Each would argue they are the TRUE Christians and all the others are misguided. They worship Christ. Jehova’s Witnesses actually started as a Bible study group.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah my problem is not that they offer smaller sizes, but when they try to deceive consumers about how much they are getting in order to increase the unit price. Calling attention to it the way that this pizza box does almost feels honest in comparison to what most companies do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t say for sure, but it looks like it includes the controls based on this mock-up from IGN:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Switch 2 is supposedly going to be 206mm L x 115mm W x 14mm D.

  The Deck is 298mm x 117mm x 49mm. So still 1.5x the length of the S2 and 3x the width.

  I can’t find any reports of the Switch 2’s weight, but I expect it to be significantly less than the 640g of the Deck. The Switch 2 will have a slightly larger screen, but is a smaller device overall.

  But all that aside I still expect Nintendo to offer another, smaller version of the Switch 2 within a couple years. They had the Switch Lite, 2DS, DS Lite, DSi, GBA Micro, GBA SP, Gameboy Pocket, and probably more I’m not thinking of. So they will probably do a Switch 2 Lite or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would also add other handhelds like the Legion Go that are starting to use Steam OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck sales drop hard following the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even outside of being kid “safe”, the Deck is too big and heavy for kids. Heck, I know a lot of adults who have that issue.

  It’s also fairly expensive and while I would not call it “fragile”, I don’t the Deck would survive being owned by your average 10 year old as well as a Switch Lite does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resident Evil 2 remake has sold fewer than 10,000 copies on iOS, estimates suggest⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resident Evil 2 remake has sold fewer than 10,000 copies on iOS, estimates suggest⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon fixes Super Mario Bros⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this is a sarcastic troll post but some QoL improvements can actually help old bad games.

  And yes, Super Mario Bros was always bad. I never understood how it got so popular, even when I was a kid in the early 90’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon expects more⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  These “Western AAA studios”… Are they in the room with us right now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yeah, am I right fellas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience the people who describe themselves as “sex addicts” are people who were caught hurting their loved ones and trying to excuse their behavior, either socially (cheaters) or legally (rapists).

  Somewhat adjacent, I have heard of people claiming “sex addiction” to pressure their partners into more sex than they would otherwise want. Apparently there’s a whole section of feminists who believe that “blue balls” is completely made up by men, because it’s really common for men to claim blue balls is a more serious issue than it is. I’ve had to explain to multiple women in my life that it is both real and just a minor inconvenience.

  You’re not wrong about the religious zealots, I just wanted to bring up that there’s a TON of sex disinformation being spread by different people for different goals. And “sex addiction” is particularly ripe for such disinformation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And there was no on line manual⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Trick question: none of the stations are worth listening to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indian start-up Yes Madam fires employees who indicated being stressed in the survey⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This has got to be from The Onion… Right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rumors of Sony Acquiring FromSoft’s Parent Company - GAMESCENSOR⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rumors of Sony Acquiring FromSoft’s Parent Company - GAMESCENSOR⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rumors of Sony Acquiring FromSoft’s Parent Company - GAMESCENSOR⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reliable bank account⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “I kept overdrafting my account even though I opted out”

  Is this some SovCit shit where they think “opting out” of the terms of service for their bank account is an option?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haters will say it’s fake⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haters will say it’s fake⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

  I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nostalgia and remake culture⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nostalgia and remake culture⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heavy Metal Darwin⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No thats Nostradamus

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's coming! :(⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.

  As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.

  Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.

  It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.

  Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.

  I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.

  It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.

  And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's coming! :(⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

  It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

  One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

  I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

  But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.