paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virtual Boy: Nintendo Classics - Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨The forgotten war on the Walkman⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

  The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaks again hint at Valve doing a proper Steam Machine Console⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  2. 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨The year is 2001. You find this game in a demo disk. Your evening is going to be great.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. Personally I’m old enough to remember when my parents upgraded the living room TV from a CRT to a flat screen (I think it was a plasma?) and the upgrade so so drastic I’ve never had any urge to go back.

  I think part of it is that the only CRT’s left in existence are the ultra-high-end models that retro enthusiasts covet. Models that I never would have seen back in the late 90’s unless I had an ultra wealthy friend or visited a local TV station. The old console-style CRT with only a single coaxial input, with the faded phosphorus and the weird spots where someone got a magnet too close to the screen… I’m fine leaving that in the past lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The year is 2001. You find this game in a demo disk. Your evening is going to be great.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Demo disc? I had (and still have) the whole game. My older sister beat it, but I never got around to it.

  The last few years as I’ve gotten into emulation and retro gaming, I find this is a game I go back to more often than most. I have an RGB10MAX- a cheap Chinese handheld that has a 16:9 screen but is too weak to play modern HD systems.

  Luckily there were somewhere around 44 PS1 games with widescreen modes. Unfortunately it looks like 27 of those are racing games (and some of those are only slightly different variants of basically the. Same game). 7 more are sports games, including soen annual entries. 4 are just a single Visual Novel series. 2 more are just 2D (Worms and Galaxian), and Bloody Roar is technically 3D but like… It’s a fighting game so it’s not very 3D.

  So if you’re looking for a very videogame-ey videogame, that can run in a PS1 emulator, but still upscale nicely to a 16:9 screen, without using fan-made patches… You only have 4 options:

  1. Codename/Lifeforce Tenka
  2. Ghost in the Shell
  3. Mrs. Pac-Man : Maze Madness
  4. Pac-Man World

  Tenka and GitS are both shooters, which aren’t really my thing (especially on the PS1 before analog sticks were ubiquitous). Mrs. Pac-Man is arguably more of a 2.5D game. So Pac-Man World somehow ended up as my go-to for testing out Widescreen on devices. I still go back to it occasionally on my Steam Deck and maybe one of these days I’ll finally finish it off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton claim former Subnautica 2 leads have "resorted to litigation to demand a payday they haven't earned"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨trimmer roll breaking⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just had the exact same issue the last couple of weeks.

  Last summer I bought an extra pack of string and left it in my garage with the trimmer. I started using it about a month ago and found all 3 spools were like this. The string itself seemed more brittle than it should be, and some of the wraps managed to squeeze down under earlier wraps so it eor on getting jammed.

  So I suspect it was either just a faulty batch from the factory, or perhaps leaving it in my non-climate-controlles garage for almost a year may have damaged it.

  I suspect the solution is going to be buying different brands of string to find one that works. Some trimmers have options to replace the head for different styles as well, such as replacing an automatic feed system with a bump head, or heads with metal blades for heavy brush. Something like that may be an option too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony says it’s not done making Xperia phones just yet⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All the good phones are dying. I still quite enjoy my 1 IV, and honestly the Xperia line would probably be my choice in a couple years when I am ready to upgrade if they are selling them in the US at that point.

  I’m hoping Fairphone gets US support at some point because they seem like the best option.

  It really feels like design peaked a decade ago. Headphone jacks, micro SD card slot, removable batteries, front-facing speakers. Everything good has been removed and the phones are 5x more expensive. The few phones left with some of those features are the cheap weak models for people who only use their phones to call and text.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I keep seeing this same website posted on Lemmy and it’s always the same thing. A click bait title that makes unnecessary connections between two things attached to an article that just regurgitates basic concepts without adding anything. All the paragraphs are one, maybe two sentences so the whole thing feels like reading a series of tweets instead of an actual article.

  Maybe it would bother me less if this was poised less as the opinion of the authors and instead was just objective reporting on SKG. SKG has press materials available for that purpose that The Conversation is choosing not to use. Heck, they could even include some statements from game publishers or government officials. It’s still a good thing that they are spreading awareness of the movement, but I’m really confused as to what kind of person consumes and enjoys this website.

  It’s frustrating because I largely agree with their sentiments. I support Stop Killing Games, and I support worker’s rights, but this article is just… Bad. It doesn’t even make a connection between SKG and the working environemt- it just makes a claim that such a connection exists and leaves that claim unsubstantiated. Such a connection DOES exist, these authors just fail to communicate that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Transgender, nonbinary and disabled people more likely to view AI negatively, study shows⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, EVERYONE hates AI except for a very small number of executives and the few tech people who are falling for the bullshit the same way so many fell for crypto.

  It’s like saying a survey indicates that trans people are more likely to hate American ISP’s. Everyone hates them and trans people are underrepresented in the population of ISP shareholders and executives. It doesn’t say anything about the trans community. It doesn’t provide any actionable or useful information.

  It’s stating something uninteresting but applying a coat of rainbow paint to try to get clicks and engagement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is Microsoft’s new strategy just to cancel every other game so everyone has nothing left to buy but Call of Duty?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure what you are saying here?

  Are you saying that Valve and Itch did not respond to Collective Shout? Well, so did I… My comment was saying they were justified in doing so.

  Are you saying Collective Shout are not religious nutjobs? That’s an easy mistake to make because their website and branding does a really good job of trying to hide it from a casual researcher, but the founder Melissa Reist is pretty obviously a devout Catholic- she gives interviews with Catholic organizations, appears at Catholic youth camps, and describes herself as a “pro-life feminist”, which is of course an oxymoron. She’s definitely a religious nutjob.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As they should have. Why should Steam or Itch.Io have to respond to every tiny cult of religious nutjibs making ridiculous requests?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay your first two paragraphs are just ad hominen attacks at this point. You aren’t refuting anything by just claiming I’m backpedalling on… Something? And just assuming the other people didn’t read the article when in fact it seems they did and are also making great points that you’re also just refusing to talk about. Like… Why did you even post this if you didn’t want to actually talk about points, methodology, potential explanations, etc?

  Xbox is just plain doing badly. They’ve tried a lot of different approaches to change that over the years: leaning hard into alternative control schemes with Kinect, trying to push Xbox as a general multimedia machine rather than just a videogame console, pushing hard to develop small indie studios, then pushing for mega-acquisitions of publishers and developers. I’m not even sure which “old model” you’re talking about because they are constantly, desperately pivoting to something else. They seem to be terrible at predictjng what consumers want or how markets will react to their decisions. So I’m still waiting for you to explain why copying them is a good idea. As I said earlier: they have always had less focus on exclusivity because their hardware sells at a loss, and they haven’t changed that.

  Nintendo is coming off the 3rd best-selling console of all time, the best-selling console in 2 decades. The Switch 2 not only had the best 1st week on history, but the best 1st month too. I suppose it is still early and totally fair if you want to wait for the first full year to make a judgement, but it seems to me like Nintendo produce a unique and innovative product that people want back in 2017 and are continuing that success now. That product is in a very different market than the Xbox, and uses a very different business model where the hardware itself is profitable. They’re the only one of the 3 that hasn’t shut down studios or laid off employees lately. So, once again, the idea that thinks he knows better than them seems pretty far-fetched right now.

  There’s something else that’s been bothering me…

  He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work

  I’ve been following the videogame industry for decades and I’ve never heard of this guy. Which is not all that outlandish on its own. But I also have never heard of The Game Business- it seems like a new website just created this year. And you seem to be incredibly defensive of this guy- completely ignoring any discussion of the industry and binging your entire argument here on his credibility. Are you Mat Piscatella himself on a burner account?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t backpedal on anything at all so I’m not sure why you think that. My initial statement was that he did not provide enough data to reach his conclusion and seems to be drastically oversimplifying the problem to reach his conclusion, by focusing on the unit sales of singular pieces of software in a vacuum and assuming that games are fungible. I pointed out how different videogame companies operate with different business models that are more or less condusive to exclusive 1st party titles. None of that has changed, and the only thing you’ve said to try to dispute any of it is “this consultant said in an interview that he thinks exclusives are bad”. No attempt at discerning causation or explaining it, no attempt at even refuting the arguments I present, just “you should trust this guy, who also happens to be selling a product”. If I wasn’t bored killing time at work I wouldn’t even bother responding because this isn’t really a conversation, you just keep going “nu uh”.

  Not just me: You’ve spent this whole thread arguing with myself and everyone else who are pointing out the obvious and glaring holes in what he’s saying.

  One of my favorites is this one. Xbox has failed to make a profit throughout the entire history of the company. They’ve spent the last few years shutting down studios and laying people off, which has led to a lot of industry speculation. Insiders have reported rumors that Spencer might get pushed to resign or even fired. There’s been speculation that Xbox might be considering exiting the hardware side of things entirely, in part because of their own marketing campaigns. I am not saying I believe that, but these are strong signs that Xbox is doing badly.

  Nintendo, by contrast, just had the single best launch week 1 in the history of videogame consoles. Pretty much every way you look at the Switch 2 sales numbers they are breaking records. And this guy saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. That is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence for me to take seriously.

  And while anecdotes are pretty useless, I agree with you that many publishers have trended towards multiplatform releases and I said that earlier. I’m not disputing that: I’m disputing his comments about 1st party publishers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out.

  Well first of all, this interview was published today so the only people who have had a chance to really respond to this are the general public on the internet. Beyond that, it is not safe to assume that any of their competitors would have any reason to respond to this publicly at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and maybe that decision has more to do with wanting to either keep up with Circana or differentiate from Circana than anything related to the truth. That’s kind of the problem with dealing with bias in sampling like this.

  People have been saying this exact same thing for decades and it hasn’t happened yet.

  And I’m all in favor of the end of exclusivity. Exclusivity is harmful to consumers, and to society as a whole from the perspective of preserving culture and history. But just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean I’m going to believe some consultant casually speculating while promoting his company.

  If he provided data and outlined the methodology of projection they used them we could at least have an interesting conversation about this. But right now he’s just about as credible as the 3rd grader at recess whose uncle works for Nintendo and says the next Halo is coming to Switch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That still doesn’t include most of the data necessary to reach this conclusion, and furthermore the bigger issue is that THE ARTICLE ITSELF DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY. It is an unbacked claim that we cannot verify. If he can’t share the data because ris propriety, he shouldn’t be making the claim publicly.

  He’s looking at software sales in a vacuum, and he is probably correct that any singular piece of software would sell more units if it were released on more platforms. That’s not new or interesting: that’s obvious.

  What he’s missing, even in the screenshot of claimed data he has, is everything else.

  Consultants like this are not trustworthy sources. They’re trying to sell their own product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Does he have access to the proprietary sales data of Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, Valve, and Google?

  I’d be shocked if he did, because those companies are all big enough to have their own in-house departments for that. He’s trying to sell consulting services to smaller publishers. Consults don’t get paid for saying "well I don’t really have enough information to say that for sure*, they get paid for making executives feel smart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.

  As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.

  I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.

  He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.

  You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.

  If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.

  The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This may just be me, but I see delayed exclusives as basically being equivalent to multiplatform releases. Especially for single-player games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do they hate money now for some reason??⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, those costs are already built into their margins and they have acceptable thresholds for them. Do porn games in particular exceed that threshold? We would need their proprietary data to determine that.

  My hypothesis would be that these games have much lower rate of these charges. The reason being that these sorts of games are already subject to stricter restrictions and parental controls. I would expect the strongest association with charge backs and fraud investigations to be with games that are recurring subscriptions (people forget to cancel) or micro transactions. Which could include both pornographic and non-pornographic games.

  I would also expect to see spikes in charge backs for specific games at specific times. Like when. Publisher adds Denuvo or some other draconian malware, or when 2K decided to add launchers to their game that hurt Steam Deck compatibility, or when some update happens that ruins gameplay, or when some executive comes out and says something stupid. But those would be events, not trends.