At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.

I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations’ units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don’t know that it has, but it’s possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation’s revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation’s own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There’s no L for me to take here.

Me too. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t refute what I said. It’s a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn’t. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it’s behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can’t convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?

EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as “an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future”, emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it’s counted in that same metric.

Their current pricing model is between $10 and $20 per month for somewhere north of 30M subscribers. The ability to get Game Pass for less than that was largely discontinued two years ago. You can conservatively estimate that to be $300M in revenue every month. Every two months, they can fund a Call of Duty game. Every month, they can more than fund one Starfield. That’s only Game Pass revenue without including game sales. I’ll also remind you that Microsoft publishes 6 of the top 10 PlayStation games last month; they’re still selling lots of games outside of Game Pass. “Excluding the [studios] they bought over the last 4-5 years” is a major omission. Their licensing deals for third parties on Game Pass have seen significantly less investment in the past few years; as their first party library increases, they’re less and less necessary. I’m also curious where you got that number for Starfield units sold, because my back of the napkin math puts it at more than 3M copies on Steam alone.

Microsoft didn’t have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn’t gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.

Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? “Everything is an Xbox”, and they’ll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they’ll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.

I don’t think everyone does know that. There’s a very real, perhaps likely, chance that Game Pass is sustainable.

Season passes and updates are what they’re doing now rather than splitting their player base with a new SKU. But of course, that new SKU comes with advantages like being able to freeze the game at a certain point in its life.

What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.

Thanks, it’s worth a couple of experiments, at least.

Would that same command also work through Heroic, or do they handle that kind of thing differently? Sorry, sometimes things are so abstracted from us that we don’t have to think about what it’s doing under the hood.

Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).

Search “online tournament X” where X is the name of the game you want to play. Tampa Never Sleeps does tournaments for the likes of Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear Strive every week, for instance. They’re all free.

Why would I watch your channel when I could watch someone else’s? A good answer to that question is how you grow an audience. I watch a lot of fighting game content on YouTube, and I can find value in Maximilian Dood for being good at explaining the legacies of old games or what makes new ones tick; I can find value in commentary and breakdown from those who win major tournaments and break down the subtleties that I might have missed. But there are hundreds of channels YouTube wants to show me of people playing those same games with no reason for me to actually click on them in the first place.

I made what people seem to think are a couple of good video tutorials to teach Skullgirls quickly. It’s got a reputation of being exceptionally hard, but I disagree, and I thought I could explain them quickly. They worked, but the more general fighting game tutorials I made after that didn’t do so well. Maybe there isn’t as much demand for them as I thought, or maybe they just weren’t as good. Still, I was making something that I felt like people couldn’t easily get elsewhere.

I did fuss with it according to the directions in forums, and it didn’t change anything, but I also barely understood what I was doing.

I have that crackling thing sometimes too, but only on desktop and not on Steam Deck, so the issue lies in something that’s different between those two things. On my desktop, my usual use case is to have a bunch of programs open at any given time and put it to sleep at the end of the night rather than close everything and power off. While low spec games like Skullgirls are fine, if I boot up a higher spec game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II after waking my computer from sleep, I’ll get the crackling. If I just rebooted, the crackling is gone. I don’t understand the problem, but at least I have a workaround, and it’s better than Microsoft determining when I should reboot my computer. It’s my computer. I decide that.

The Mac thing is two-fold. Apple moved to new architecture before it was primed and ready for gaming, and Valve has been slow to adapt Steam to it. Apple’s solution, which will not work, because Valve tried the same thing a decade ago, is to juice the market by funding ports. Apple’s putting far more money into it, because it’s such small potatoes on their balance sheet, but the result will be much the same. This isn’t a situation where getting a few heavy hitters will solve their library problem and get everyone else to fall in line. The problem is Apple and its platform are hostile to getting this sort of game on it.

A little dramatic, but yes, I’m already not playing those games.

There’s definitely some selection bias for me that made it easy to not even be interested in buying the types of games that won’t work on Linux, and that made my switch easier. I hope the solution that we eventually arrive at isn’t, “Here’s a custom kernel compatible with our anti-cheat,” but instead, “Here’s a way to play our game without kernel level anti-cheat.”

Even this is only a guess. There are a lot of reasons why developers got away from this model, and there are one or two reasons why I’m the weirdo who wants us to return to it.