Tried to get it working but never could. Not that I tried very hard. But Immy iPad would connect to my Mac and I would see is a black screen.

The founders sold it, it’s not like they were put a gun to their heads to sell.

I mean. Why exactly does this website need so many employees? You could probably run the website with less than a 100

The Switch 2 seems doomed to fail. “Fastest selling console yet” isn’t much to say when your loyal base is huge. But as in most things the Pareto principle applies to sales, and most sales of any product comes from casual buyers. I don’t see casual buyers putting up with this. Parents might just buy mobile games for their kids, and teenagers and adults might as well just buy a PC handheld.

Honestly the difficulty setting problem almost entirely disappears once you get to like level 10 or so and then at some point, like around level 25, mobs can fuck you up if you’re not paying attention in the adept setting.

I’m a console gamer, I’ve never cared about my library to the point I actually threw away games from previous gen’s once I got the new console. That was me as a kid mind you. Nowadays, I just don’t buy games at all thanks to gamepass. So yep it kinda tracks, at least anecdotally.

So what you’re saying is that it’s good for research, because you can’t research what you don’t know about.

It’s good for giving starting points which is exactly what I meant.

Next time I’ll write a dissertation with hyper specifics because it seems it’s necessary every time LLMs are involved as there’s always someone looking to nitpick the statements.

Honestly they are pretty good for research too. You can’t imagine the amount of obscure shit that my ChatGPT has surfaced when I bounce ideas on it. But yea it’s terrible in finished products, I think everyone knows that and in a year or two if they don’t improve I expect we will be back to shoving it behind the scenes as had been done before ChatGPT. It’s for the best.

Most rational AI hater.

“Emerging”- what does that mean? Whats the timeline on them? The failure rate? The cost at the scale needed? I mean if you’re gonna complain about nuclear being more expensive then the batteries need to be cheaper necessarily. Also what materials are they made out of?

You are literally a nazi /s

If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.

The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.

I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.

All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.

The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.

Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.

Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.

Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.

Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.

But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.

I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.

It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.

Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.

It describes the budget of the game. It’s always relative to the average budget in the industry but it is a business term.

I still don’t know why you keep bringing the consumer into this. The consumer doesn’t and should not care whether Gamepass hurts sales, only that it is a good deal for them. And it is. Whether sales are affected (obviously they are) is an industry conversation, but the real question is whether it boosts profitability or not.

Quality of games etc etc is all irrelevant in this specific conversation.

A) it’s already profitable, as per Phil. Unless you think he’s misleading shareholders there’s no reason to doubt that claim. B) they would never be able to buy enough studios to create industry pressure to be on GP, it’s just not possible and the service would crumble under its own weight

I mean from a consumer perspective no, but this isn’t something the consumer would even need to be concerned with. The conversation is from a business point of view.

The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.

The number may be high but it’s an almost insignificant proportion of the industry. There’s no industry pressure to be on Gamepass.