paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Germany⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
China kind of depends on who you ask and how you look at it. Some historians argue that if you remove a euro-centric bias, WW2 really started with the 2nd Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Or you could look further back to territorial disputes and skirmishes between Japan and China going back to 1931.

India was a British colony until 1947 and participated as part of the British Empire.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good Halloween Games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Pumpkin Jack. It’s a 3D platformer. I haven’t played it in a couple years, but I remember it being mostly linear. Not a ton of collectables, but some. 11 months out of the year it’s a pretty “meh” game, but it absolutely NAILS the Halloween aesthetic. Not “horror” or “scary” or “autumn” but very specifically Halloween.

MediEvil is similar, though much older. I have only played the original for PS1, though there is a modern remake on all platforms that looks pretty good. Not quite as explicitly Halloween-y, but still pretty close. Flawed in its own ways, but I would still say a better game overall than Pumpkin Jack. The levels were a bit less linear and it was a bit more like an adventure game than a platformer.

Luigi’s Mansion is a classic too.

A lot of other games have levels or worlds that are good for Halloween even if the whole game isn’t. Like Pumpkin Hill in Sonic Adventure 2, or Subcon Forest from A Hat In Time. Honestly one day I want to compile a list of all of these themes areas across my favorite games and the play all of these levels seasonally.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Master Race⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
They’ve increased in other countries too. The PS5 digital edition costs £70 more today than it did at launch. In 2024 Sony increased the Japan price of all PS5 versions by ¥13,000.

The tariffs aren’t helping, but this has been a trend for years. The gaming console market is not very volatile- prices changes in the US usually happen once every few years, not every few months. The tariffs keep fluctuating all over the place and I would not be shocked if there are more pricing adjustments for consoles specifically next year.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Master Race⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
That’ll get you… The lowest storage tier Series S. Or a Nintendo Switch OLED. Yay.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Master Race⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Nah it’s the GPU market. Cryptocurrency briefly exploded and now AI is sucking up all of the GPU manufacturing capacity. Back in 2019 I got my RX580 for $175. The AMD 9070 that released this year is a tier down from that and had an MSRP of $550, but an actual price more like $650. The sweet spot of value PC building has shifted from $750 to $1,500 in just a few years. Some of that is just general inflation that affects all parts, but roughly half of that increase is just from the GPU.

It’s impacting consoles too. Consoles uses to get cheaper over time, with both price drops to existing models and new, cheaper models being released (Sony’s Slim models, things like the Wii Family Edition and Wii Mini, the DSLite, etc). Looking at this generation… The original PS5 with a disc drive debuted at $500 in 2020. The “Slim” version also debuted at $500, and just got a price increase to $550. They released a PS5 Pro at $700, and just increased it to $750.

Nintendo is doing it too. The Switch was $300 for its entire life, and now that the Switch 2 is out consumers would typically expect a price cut to move the existing stock. Instead, Nintendo raised the price to $330. The OLED model went from $350 to $400, and the Lite went from $200 to $230.

And of course Microsoft is in on it too. It’s more complicated to write up since they have different storage variants of the Series S|X, but for example a Series S 512GB was $300 at launch (For some reason I remember seeing them for $250, but maybe that was a Black Friday sale or something). Now it’s $400!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I hope that once my account turns 18 they will stop asking my for by DOB to look at mature content.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.

I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.

It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon plays Skyrim⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Honestly she was one of the few characters in the game that I felt had enough depth and interaction with the player that marriage could make sense.

Pretty much everyone else is like “oh you fetched that alchemy ingredient for me? Sure I guess I’ll marry you, I’ve got nothing else going on that day”.

Don’t get me wrong- i still love Skyrim and I’m perfectly happy with marriage being basically just another quest that gives you some buffs. It’s just funny to me that Serana is one of the few characters where we can learn a TON about her, meet her parents, go exploring together, share interests, wash blood off our hands together, eat food together, go on dates. She’s accomplished enough that she is not at all intimidated by the Dragonborn, rather relates to them for being granted these supernatural powers and responsibilities they didn’t ask for. My first time playing Dawnguard ii really thought the devs were hinting that she would be the canonical spouse of the Dragonborn moving forward because it makes so much sense. So I was quite surprised she wasn’t eligible.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do video game leaks (such as the huge GTA VI videos leak) cause "low morale" for the staff working on it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
So what are you looking for here? Some sort of objective and peer-reviewed academic research of the morals of videogame developers and the impact of leaks upon that? I think you’ll find that does not exist.

I’m just pointing out that the only people who seem to be complaining are managers and PR departments. And it’s not that dev’s don’t have voices- there are plenty of current and former developers who are now producing social media content and talking about the industry, and I cannot remember this ever even being addressed as an issue. I DID bring up my personal experience in the corporate world is that management and marketing craft these narratives for public consumption which are just lies, and I don’t have any reason to think the videogames industry is any different.

The very topic is one that is nebulous and subjective. That’s why it’s on c/nostupidquestions and not c/askanexpertwithameritoricalbackground.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do video game leaks (such as the huge GTA VI videos leak) cause "low morale" for the staff working on it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
My assumption has always been that this is just the usual made-up corporate nonsense that comes from management and marketing departments, to try to turn public opinion against leakers.

My guess is that most of the humans actually creating the game don’t have strong opinions. Marketing teams probably care because it disrupts their plans. Management of course cares because it could impact sales. And with big dev teams with dozens or hundreds of people working on a game there will never be a consensus opinion. Maybe some would be upset that people get to see placeholder work or rough drafts, but only a fool would look at a leaked game and judge the individuals who made it based on that. Heck, even when games are officially released in functionally unfinished states I think most fans these days know to blame management and ownership rather than the workers.

I don’t remember ever seeing an actual dev talking about leaks much. Even content creators that are former devs. Absense of evidence is not evidence of a sense of course, but like… If I apply that to my own work I don’t think I would really care.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The article seems primarily focused on new games. And the article still makes some great points, but when you factor in older games the problem gets bigger.

I am not going to say that old games were better or that “they just don’t make them like they used to”. What I will say is that a lot of older games that are super cheap on Steam or out of print entirely are still great. There are occasionally new great games being released of course (I haven’t played Hades 2 yet but I expect it to be great, for example). But there’s a lot of new games being released where I think… “Why would I spend $70 or $80 on this when I already have this backlog of older games? Why would I spend my time playing 7/10 games when I have dozens of 9/10’s sitting in my library waiting for me?”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Back when I was on Reddit years ago, one of my favorite subs was the Patient Gamers one. There are a couple of similar ones on different Lemmy instances but they’re nowhere near as active.

I remember friends of mine assuring me I absolutely HAVE to get games like Atomic Heart, High on Life, Avowed, the Oblivion remaster, Starfield, Prey, the Outer Worlds, and many more. There are series that I have enjoyed in the last that have way too many entries to keep up with- 3D Sonic, Assassin’s Creed, Monster Hunter, Yakuza (with all it’s spinoff games like Judgement and others). I’m sure a lot of those games are great, but I just don’t have the time to play then all. And with hundreds of games in my backlog already, these games need to be on sale for dirt cheap and without anti-features like DRM and micro transactions and online requirements in order to get me to buy them.

So I think it’s worth asking- are there enough whales willing to buy these games for $70 or even $80 to subsidize people like me picking them up for $10 in five years? If not, perhaps these developers and publishers will need to move to a different business model. Maybe there are simply too many devs and too many games getting made.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get texting and driving being a danger. But back in my day you could eat drink change radio stations etc. Why weren't laws implemented back then?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
1. People died. A lot. Ralph Nader, who is today probably better known for being a former presidential candidate for the Green Party in the US, first got famous with his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” that brought just how dangerous cars were to the public attention. Which led to a ton of laws that regulated the manufacture and operation of motor vehicles. It was similar to how Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was with the food industry.
2. Density has increased. It was easier to get away with driving when there were fewer cars on the road, fewer intersections, fewer buildings and other property nearby. Our signs and signals have grown more complicated. I live in a major US city, where there is a main thoroughfare that cuts through the southern suburbs with a 5 lane stroad (2 lanes each way with a central turning lane). There are traffic lights every couple hundred feet to allow interesections with feeder roads. My grandfather still tells the stories about how when he was a teenager, that was a 3-lane DIRT road, where the center was still a turn lane. He could drive for miles before getting to the densest part of the city where there was 1 traffic light.
He also tells the story of how the police radios used to only be one-way, so officers in cars could receive messages from the station but not send anything back. On top of that, their big heavy cruisers were slower and less maneuverable than his motorcycle, so he used to commonly blow by and ignore cops trying to pull him over. It was a completely different world.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disney 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
You know that Godwin’s Law waa just some random guy making something up, right? It’s like claiming that the average person eats 7 spiders a year or that the average male thinks about sex once every X seconds.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hardest battles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
For a long time I was confused by two seemingly separate pieces of information.
1. The majority of people I seem to interact with seem to act like communications are effortless. “Just pick up the phone”. “It’s just an email”.
2. Most communications I get are terrible. Like, the number of times I need to restrain myself from typing “as I mentioned in the email below” is insane, or how often I send an email with a bulleted list of issues that need to be addressed and the response only addresses a fraction of them while the rest are ignores.
Then I realized that most people are stupid, casual, and oblivious. They put very little effort into communications, so while they seem so easy and effortless they are harming the quality of that communication.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virtual Boy: Nintendo Classics - Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has a problem with Bioshock⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Well I kind of alluded to it, but both of the games lack any clear solutions other than “play the game kill the bad guy”.

Which, to be fair, is probably the reason BioShock 1 at least got so popular. I would say this point is much more important to BioShock 1 than any commentary about Ayn Rand, or any commentary about how worker’s movements can get subverted by selfish actors like Atlas. It takes the usual tropes about videogames and turns them into a commentary on how easily our assumptions and expectations can deceive us. Players do what the game tells them to, they progress the way the game allows them to, without ever questioning whether that is the morally correct thing to do. I would say that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do considering the money these games cost, but BioShock at least shines a light on that and makes the player think about it.

There are plenty of other examples of games that DO engage with political ideologies, and use games as a mechanism to think about then. The most famous one is probably Monopoly, which was stolen from the original creator who called it “the landlords game” to show how capitalism eventually leads to one rich person and a bunch of broke people.

If you want a videogame, Disco Elysium is a fabulous, recent, and well-reviewed example. Personally it’s a bit dense for me to play for too long (sometimes it feels more like reading a textbook than playing a game).

I don’t think BioShock 1 or Infinite are terrible or that they shouldn’t have delved into politics at all. I think that they are overrated in part because they get credit for political commentary that ends up being pretty superficial. I think they could have executed the ideas better.

Fitzroy for example: either give us a better reason to fight her or don’t make us do it. Maybe she gets killed by Comstock and leaves a power vacuum, with the chaos of rebel leaders trying to promote solidarity, fight for their own power, hold off or even negotiate peace with Comstock. Or maybe someone like Lady Comstock or Fink could be a source of division within Comstock’s ranks. Or maybe Fitzroy gets convinced that she needs to kill Elizabeth because she’s some dimensional McGuffin protecting Comstock. Maybe get rid of the rebellion entirely and have another country attack Colombia. They already ceded from the US- surely Uncle Sam isn’t cool with losing this technological marvel, nor having this independent state potentially floating above US territories. It’s been a while since I replayed it but I remember the Boxer Rebellion being a key piece of the story: maybe some fallout from that cones to Colombia.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has a problem with Bioshock⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Ah I hadn’t - it’s still in my backlog. But it sounds like it just re-affirms what I had drawn from the main games.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has a problem with Bioshock⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.

In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.

I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.

In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.

Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It seems you believe the myths that media wants to tell you about modern courtship. Yes, such shallow people exist. And yes, there are thresholds of hygiene and stability someone should be expected to meet. But a lot of women want to get laid just as bad as men, not for the money or the status but for the sex.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
1. My first question about studies like this is always “how do they know this?”. And I while I know I could find the study and dig into the setsils, I don’t have to do that to know that this is the result of surveys taken over this time period. Unless technology develops to grant us a way to monitor and track the sex lives of people objectively and unobtrusively, that’s just the best way can do. So any conclusions drawn really should be “the decline in people’s surveyed frequency of sexual intercourse has gone down over time”. Just to throw out some baseless speculation: could people in the past inflated their answers to appear “cool” or similar? Could there be cultural shifts pressuring respondents to deflate their numbers now? Personally, I’m inclined to believe the results of the study ARE true, but I’m not confident in that.
2. The decline of 3rd spaces, which is a big concept with multiple causes. Car-centric infrastructure, industrialization, women moving to the workforce, capitalism, technology, etc. It has become harder for people to have intimate personal interactions with others who live nearby. I believe the rise of things like social media, dating apps, and now AI companions is less about “hey we developed this new technology to replace and maybe be better than real human interaction” and more about “we need to develop something to replace what we have lost”.
3. Consent. Reductions in arranged marriages and child marriages. Protections and rights for women and children.
4. Economics. Everyone is overworked and tired. I’ve seen this in a lot of the other comments here but I actually don’t buy into this quite as much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and birth rate, at least recently. Most of Europe, Japan, Australia, the US, Canada, Korea, and perhaps most notably… China. All have experienced declines in birthrates, and in a lot these cases there is good modern data showing the birth rates changing as these economies develop. The countries having the most children are poorer countries.
Now, it could be that these wealthier countries have access to birth control, so this does not necessarily dissolve economics as a factor. But, my own theory is that sex is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available to humanity (if you don’t factor in the costs of children). So the citizens of these wealthier countries are spending their time and money doing other things. Not just skii vacations or going yachting, but reading books and watching TV.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What age gap is too big of an age gap if someone's in their early 30's?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.

I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaks again hint at Valve doing a proper Steam Machine Console⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
1. I would be surprised if a Valve-made console had a discrete GPU in this current GPU market. Part of what helped the Steam Deck succeed was that it was an integrated GPU. The Steam Deck was able to be sold at presumably a low margin (maybe even at a loss), and Valve expects to profit from the games purchased on Steam. If they were to sell a pre-buikt PC at close to cost, people would scalp the GPU’s for profit and Valve would probably lose out on that predicted Steam revenue.
That does not entirely dismiss this news though. Could be that the 7600 reported here is a temporary workaround for them to test the CPU while the GPU (or even just the drivers) are being worked on. Or maybe for them to do comparison testing easily. I’m just saying I would not expect to see a 7600 in the final product.
1. There is a huge gap in the market right now. The Switch 2 starts at $450, the PS5 slim is going up to $500. The Xbox Series S is woefully underpowered and holding the entire Xbox platform back while costing $380. There are no more $200-$300 console options, unless you want to go with something janky like a mini PC or a cheap Chinese handheld. And like, yes inflation is a thing, but it’s not THAT bad. I was able to buy a PS4 slim bundled with 3 AAA Sony games in 2019 for $199.99. Plug that into an inflation calculator and I get ~$250.
Imagine Valve releases a home console for $300. I think it would have to be slightly more powerful than the Deck, to be able to target AAA games releasing over the next 5 years with 1080p 30 FPS. (And for anyone complaint about how “unplayable” that is, go buy a $600 console or $2000 PC instead. This theoretical product is not for you). What I’m not sure if is whether that would be feasible. Can we shave $100 off the Deck by consolizing it? No screen, no battery, probably of design restrictions revolving around it being portable and dust/water resistant could go away and bring the costs down. Plus general performance gains AMD has made since 2022. If Valve could do something like that they could potentially push Microsoft out of the hardware market (they have been rumored to be considering that for a while anyways).

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in tough economic times, the ultimate answer is that most people just don’t have the disposable income for videogames, so it makes more sense to downsize and focus on the premium high-end market where the volune is lower and the margins are higher. But this rumor is giving me a little bit of hope.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.

What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.

I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC

The keyword here is “my”.

It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.

I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.

It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Civilization 7's latest update has "hit mods harder than usual", but for a good reason⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think anyone mentioned early access here. Civ 7 “released” with version 1.0 back in February.

Honestly I can kind of appreciate the honesty of early access games, especially from smaller developers. It’s a bit of a risk, but at least on Steam everything seems to be labeled and disclosed well. Early access games are often cheaper. I had great times with games like Hades and Subnautica in early access. There will be some duds, some projects that get abandoned before they release, but that’s also why early access games tend to be cheaper: the discount should offset the risk if the market is working as it should.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Direct Announced for Tomorrow Focused on Kirby Air Riders⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
So Mario Kart World was the big launch title with bundles, and they already released a new Fast game, the series that seems to have basically replaced F-Zero.

Seems like a lot of racing games early on from Nintendo.

I think the Switch 2 will do well, as it’s already had a better launch than the WiiU or 3DS. But it’s kind of in an awkward spot. The community reaction seems to be “yeah Mario Kart World is great, but it’s still just a Mario Kart game at the end of the day, and it will need some DLC to catch up to the level of content of MK8”. Donkey Kong was received well but doesn’t seem to have the staying power of a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild did. Pokemon Legends Z-A is probably going to do well, but I don’t think these kind of spinoff games are going to drive console sales like the main games do (especially when there is a Switch version coming out too).

My point is that a few months after launch I still don’t see a game where I say “wow that’s worth grabbing a Switch 2 for!”. It almost feels more like the “Switch Pro” that was rumored for years rather than a true sequel- the main reason to upgrade right now is that Switch 1 games run better. That is enough to launch, but I’m looking through the list of announced games and trying to find what the big system seller is going to be. What’s going to release this holiday season that makes parents stand in line to buy the latest Nintendo for their children?

Maybe this is by design? Maybe Nintendo has purposefully left a bit of a drought to avoid having a ton of cross-gen games, and plans to start announcing more projects in 2026?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton claim former Subnautica 2 leads have "resorted to litigation to demand a payday they haven't earned"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, the easy analysis is just to ask “what would be in Krafton’s best interest?”

Anyone who has paid attention to the videogames industry will tell you that games releasing in an unfinished state has been a problem throughout history, and one that has gotten much worse in recent decades as the budgets have increased and the ability to patch games post-launch over the Internet has granted an opportunity for redemption. Recent Mario Party entries, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk, Redfall, Concord. Some games get salvaged and some games get dropped. In all of these cases, the community consensus seems to be “wow these games should have been delayed, the publishers were greedy to sell an unfinished product without labeling it as pre-release or beta properly”. So my gut reaction when I hear that any publisher is delaying a game is not to think “wow that’s a greedy publisher”, but rather “wow it’s good to see a publisher actually caring about the quality of their product who is willing to incur more costs and delay their revenue in order to get it right”.

Delaying a game is expensive. This is going to incur another year’s worth of development time. Another year’s worth of salaries and associates payroll costs, licenses, office space, all sorts of ongoing costs. Krafton would have been expecting to see revenue from the game hit 2025, and the studio to begin work on their next game, which is now getting pushed back. If Krafton has any debt that means they have increased interest costs. Their equity will suffer from this.

Let’s say that Subnautica 2 WAS in a great, finished, release-ready state whenever they fired the founders. The costs of delaying the game by a year are going to far exceed the costs of bonuses. Afaik the actual structure of the bonus has not been released, but typically these sorts of things would be structured in a way where the bonus would not have been paid if the game didn’t meet it’s sales targets

There are two pieces of information the public does not have which I think are necessary to make a judgement here. What was the structure of this promised bonus, and what was the state of the game at the time that Krafton decided to delay it? While I don’t have those answers, both Krafton and the founders do. Looking at their motivations, I just have a hard time seeing why Krafton would look at a fantastic, complete game ready for release and say “nah, we would rather sit on this thing for a year”.

The only alternative explanation I can come up with is that Krafton wants to stuff the game full of micro transactions or other live service elements. But that’s just pure speculation on my part: even the listed founders have not mentioned anything about that.

I am generally inclined to side with individual artists over these giant corporations, but what the founders are claiming just doesn’t add up. And what Krafton is claiming - that the founders basically abandoned the game to work on other things and did a pretty terrible job- seems like something that would be easily either proven or disproven in court. So either Krafton is lying just to try to get good PR for a few months until the discovery happens, or Krafton expects to be vindicated in court.