I readily acknowledge mobile numbers have risen fast across the board, but I think a lot of people are wrong about it being quickly comparable or “taken” from console sales. They’re just not as convertible as industry pundits might claim.

Finally relented to an upgrade to get new drivers and stop Resident Evil Requiem from freezing.

Much love as this grants me, I still hope for a modern game about killing Nazis.

This is a valid observation, but also much more widespread than just Sony.

Xbox, Google Android, Apple, Oculus; there’s probably others. Many electronics companies have made devices that can only interface with their own App Store, in a digital fashion.

And that’s not me excusing it. A perfect world should probably have alternatives - but it does also make one worry that in that future, manufacturers wouldn’t have any incentive to sell their consoles under manufacturing costs.

Something the lawsuit may have to deal with is whether Sony can be aggressively forced into building a disc reader into consoles, in a world where many devices have no such thing.

2B is a combat android built to fight machine lifeforms. Moreover, she’s staunchly anti-emotion, a veil which only breaks slowly over the course of the game. She wears a miniskirt and a provocative thong. The resulting outfit just feels kind of brazen, as well as staunchly contrasting the scifi mood of the game. Satisfying, if you swing that way, but if you don’t, it just feels like a loud reminder: “This game was made by a basement manga author”. What’s worse, there ARE many character designs out there that would fit the theme of “Emotionless combat android who slowly admits to her emotions” but also have a sexy appearance. Horny kinda overrode fitting character designs. Oh yeah; and they build in a mechanic to strip her clothes.

XC2 builds half of its premise around an intrinsic “bond” between Pyrah and Rex. It’s often very physical, and Pyrah is kind of forced into it. In addition, there’s a pretty large number of scenes that are very factory-printed gooner anime moments: Trying to get the girls to wear maid outfits. An inventor making his own cute-girl android. A Hot Springs scene with zero creativity to it. On top of that, the core gameplay involves a gacha to draw other “blades”, many of whom fit right in with something like Goddess of Victory.

When I know what I’m getting, I’m totally okay with horny-driven designs. When someone is baited by other elements like a fun adventure, I can’t totally blame them for feeling they were trapped into scenes like those.

And, just to calm some statements: I do think a game can be based around sexy women without being misogynistic. It’s tricky, Bayonetta is definitely a great example though.

“Rent everything, own nothing” is a complete non sequitor. Ori and the Will of the Wisps came out. I could buy it, in which case I own it forever on my Microsoft account, or if it’s a game I have less confidence in, I could play it on Game Pass. And if I only have mild interest, then at some point if/when it’s removed or I unsubscribe, I don’t care.

I get so fucking irate at these doomfantasizers that claim because a rental method exists, games are being “stolen” from them and the purchase option is being killed. This is why no analyst worth their salt listens to gamers.

Ensuring games we buy still run after 10 years is mostly a technical challenge, which we should still try to push devs to finish by legislation. It is not a war game makers are actively fighting against (Xbox even put HUGE amounts of effort into helping you emulate your old x360 games). I’m all for preservation, but so often picturing it as a battle against a corporate boogeyman really exaggerates their role.

Make this claim about a city’s subway system. Or Market Basket’s rotisserie chicken.

Your numerical claim around profit is irrelevant because it gets people in the door - both new gamers, and new developers. They were making bank not just on game purchases, but DLC, games outside of Game Pass, etc.

They could make a new Halo, that goes past even normal numbers. They don’t even have to settle for billions of gamers. They could call it…Halo Infinite.

I genuinely think there’s a little bit of a sliding scale. Like, it’s not often vocal, since they know they’re coming from the “No fun allowed” club, but I’ve heard it a few times.

The two games that are used the most for examples are Nier Automata, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first is a philosophical action RPG about death. The second is a party-based RPG about friendship and saving the world. But BOY HOWDY, will you have a bad time in those games if you don’t love boobies, panties, and a bit of misogyny.

To put it short, I’ve heard from people that actually felt a bit grossed out by both games and how they actively treat women. Nier a bit less so, but a fully-torn-away miniskirt on a combat android wearing a thong doesn’t exactly pull people into the sci-fi premise.

That’s just what little I know of from hearsay. But since it’s not something arisen in public conversation much (since no one wants to be a party pooper), I’m curious if it makes it into any game-testing focus groups that had already picked out people with hundreds of hours in other games.

And I can certainly imagine some friend circles would avoid mentioning Goddess of Victory, out of shyness around how gargantuan the nikkes are stacked.

I got to the block about Netflix, and got furious - because you’re exactly right.

During Netflix’s rise, I heard a common quote: “So in order to watch all the shows, I now have to subscribe to 8 different streaming services?? Screw that. Put it on Netflix, or I’m going to pirate it.”

There was a key detail of that generic quote that always infuriated me from how much people glossed over it: “…to watch all the shows…” There are some very cool games out that I haven’t even bought because there’s so many options. What kind of media junkie is watching every popular show right now? And obsessing over centralization so much they want a monoculture service that can raise its prices as easily as flushing a toilet?

Much as I like Steam, I like that it’s only one PC option. That’s important. Inconvenient, sometimes, but key to competition. Even Valve needs to be kept in check to promote consumer-friendly practices. I’m just upset no one believed in that when it came to TV, or some of the lesser services might not have needed to sell out to AMC or Disney.

Much as I’ll admit all such debacles are silly, sometimes I wonder if games have been harmed in other ways by that type of prude adjustment.

Like, I was playing an Atelier game, got to a city, and there was a tall building that intrigued me. I wanted to pan my camera up to it, but the Y axis was tightly restricted. As the protagonist wears a skirt, you can guess why.

It makes me wonder what’s the absolute worst reaction of someone less pervy who’d trigger such a view by accident - whether they’d actually feel a sense of violation or creepiness at their own camera movement, or more likely just giggle it off and pan back.

Nepotism?

My clear answer: Some (not enough) of the Democrats, none of the Republicans.

Extrapolating a consumer usability problem into grandiose, vague fearmongering of the ultra-rich Epstein class isn’t helping anyone. It’s more likely to make people defeatist.

If you actually care about things like tax havens, or believe they have a relation to this issue, show people what they can do to fight them.

One thing to point out is, consumers haven’t gained so much from the secondhand market; GameStop quite often took a lot of the value of the turn-in copy, and even pushed 2hand games as new.

There’s hobby stores where this isn’t the case, and obviously friends can trade/sell in private. But it’s not a lot of what tended to happen.

When looking at that $40 resale, some publishers had instead suggested “Hey, how about we sell for $35 to both of you, and neither of you can resell it.” That nets the publisher more money, and means the second person pays less. Obviously, that relies on the publisher deciding that reduction. But it’s hardly the only consumer good/service whose price is controlled by its maker that way. Try reselling used bread, or used movie tickets.

The shorter version I’ve used to describe this concern is: Imagine game resale could happen through a script kiddy’s Python program. Rather than individuals arranging sales over chat, anticipate that most sales would be arranged by online sites that are copying the model of GameStop, and twice as scummy as CSGO skin gamblers.

You sell your copy of a game you bought for $50, down to $20. It’s bought instantly by an AI algorithm, and then relisted for $34.99. Then that one’s bought instantly to resell for $39.98.

If I’m right, it’s meant to be two sentences. There’s a silk bag in the graveyard. And, ducking is a way to avoid many enemy attacks.

NFTs are useful in a system in which you fully trust no one, but also fully trust everyone to adhere to the NFT system.

(In other words, yeah, I could tell as an engineer they are 100% useless in every scenario anyone could ever imagine, bar none)

This might not be as big a news article as people claim, though I see how it can feel that way amid the disc closure announcement.

If they do it like some systems, you might be able to open a web browser to make the purchase, and then download it on the system. When it’s happened before (I forget which system), the main reason was simply that the device didn’t support newer HTTPS connections for payment info.

I remember the line from Slippy in the trailer “Cover me while I fine-tune my sensors!” and then the ensuing “Oh! You got em? Thanks.” to be so much more needlessly forcing in his engineering personality. No particular issue with voice acting, I think esp coming off the FF7 Remake, I just get annoyed at Japanese devs trying to overcomplicate a script.