I’m starting to think consoles are cooked. The massive jumps in technology between console generations have turned into small incremental steps. The game quality has dropped (independent games and a few others are exceptions). PC’s used to be slow to boot and load a game vs consoles and also required updates to download, but now PCs are quick and updates are mostly automatic. Consoles used to be nice to just turn on and play without thinking about all that other stuff, yet now they require downloads and updates as well. Loading times aren’t much better either. Consoles used to also be very cheap compared to PCs, but now with the “next gen” being around $1000 the price difference isn’t that huge anymore - especially when you factor in modular updates that can be done to a PC to cheaply extend it’s life. One of the last hold outs for consoles were physical games and now they’re taking that away too.
I think you’re underestimating the number of people who just don’t want to take on the secondary hobby of building a PC in the first place.
Cyberpower. iBuyPower. Even Starforge. There’s a bunch of builders out there to remove that “scariness.”
It’s a personal choice, but if they were willing to spend 5-10 minutes to download something like Bazzite and click the 10 total clicks to install it, you’d achieve a console-like experience too.
The information is out there, it’s just not forcefed to you because of a massive marketing budget.
Considering building a PC is too much, how do you figure that they will week out Linux, choose a distro, and successfully install it.
I’m not sure if you ignored both but:
As the original commenter said, pricing of next gen consoles will be $1000+. Which puts pricing into PC ballpark.
I said there are system integrators, always have been, to buy a prebuilt system.
So “too much” both fiscally and laboriously aren’t true anymore.
And I mentioned it, but choosing Bazzite is a locked down system. Installing it takes about 10 clicks of your mouse.
They could ask a friend. Or google it.
How braindead do you think people are? If they talk to anyone they’ll easily come across these ideas. Linux just jumped from 4% desktop usage to over 10%. So people aren’t completely gone. Enough friction and they’ll look for alternatives.
If they play sports games I can’t help them though. They’re already on life support.
How braindead do you think people are?
I experienced IT help desk.
Thus my answer is: Very.Me too.
I learned if things affect their wallet/affects them personally, they’ll learn.
Good ol republican ideology.
Eh…You’d be surprised how braindead some of my clients are…
I built my first PC 6 years ago, before PS5 was released.
My PC can still play new release AAA games at high quality graphics and probably will for a number of years still… when it starts to slack a couple hundred $ and it will be good as new.
Was pricey up front but in the end better quality, more choice, and longer lasting.
Me too. AM4 platform. Just upgraded the CPU to a 5800X3D and will get a 5070 TI (maybe super?) soon. This old machine will out perform a PS6 and I can use it as a regular PC as well. The price difference (assuming I would have purchased a PS5/pro and will have purchased a PS6) is minimal especially if you consider (which you have) the higher quality gaming experience.
Not to forget obligatory subscriptions.
The PS5 probably won’t see any noticeable decrease in game sales, because pretty much everyone who wants one already has one, but I’ll be interested to see if gamers call Sony’s bluff for the PS6 or not.
I don’t have much faith in them turning down the PS6 if the calls to boycott Hogwarts Legacy is anything to go by.
We’ll see. Boycotting a $1000+ digital only console will be easier than boycotting a $70 game. Will millions buy it? Of course. But shareholders don’t just want SOME of the money, they want ALL of the money. It needs to sell many tens of millions.
It doesn’t even have to be a morals-based boycott like Harry Potter.
Practically, just as an amoral consooomer, there’s no reason to purchase a non-upgradable, barely-customizable gaming device which is confined to Playstation’s walled garden when you could buy an upgradable, highly customizable gaming device that you can do whatever you want with.
My primary console since my teenage years has always been a Playstation. That will change probably before the PS6 even comes out. I have a PS5, I probably won’t sell it just in case of any interesting exclusives. (Lmao, I know, magical thinking, considering there are still only 6 such games, none of which appeal to me enough to buy them). I’m planning to get a PC and buy everything I can on there instead.
Some reminders of Playstation’s bullshit other than just physical media:
- Removed the ability for you to back up your PS5 game saves to USB, forcing you to buy PS+ or risk losing your save data permanently if something goes wrong.
- Discontinued free multiplayer services, ostensibly to improve the security of their network after North Korea hacked their shit for releasing a movie about assassinating Kim Jong Un (or Kim Jong Il, I don’t remember). Morally, idgaf about mocking North Korea, but economically, I do give a fuck about paying a corporation $80 per year to cover their operating expenses for doing so.
- Discontinued most forms of customization. PS3 and PSP could install full-on user-made themes, or you could make your own, even customizing things like the sound the interface makes when you scroll through it. Now you literally cannot even set a proper background.
- Refused to manufacture their controllers with hall effect joysticks (which prevent controllers from developing stick drift). Both ridiculously-expensive PS5 controllers I bought developed stick drift, and I’m not particularly rough with them or anything, not at all prone to gamer rage lol. I bought a third-party controller (SZ-5005B) with hall effect joysticks and haven’t had any issues since.
I’m sure there’s tons more too. Also the PS5 interface just generally sucks shit, like sometimes my Media Gallery is on my homepage and sometimes it’s not despite me not changing any settings, or just other stupid design choices.
I think a lot less people care about consoles now. People are moving over to mobile, not necessarily solely Android or iOS, but stuff like Switch or Steamdeck.
Well… That goes against the theory of economics, Sony will learn the hard way, like they did with memory stick.
If I were an investor, I’d be worried they aren’t listening to the
wallets with legsconsumers.Most of the ‘‘smart money’’ is just in it for the short term. Get all the value possible out of their position and be the first out. The bagholders will be the same wallets with legs, us, who hold all that shit in our pension funds, IRAs and whatever.
We are very much in a post sustainability mindset when it comes to the investment market. Enshitification is just scrapping the bottom of the barrel to keep the numbers good for another quarter.
im never buying a sony title again.
Last Of Us 3 would be the only digital game I’d still buy for my PS5.
For the rest, no disc, no buy as I’m moving to Steam/Gog anyway.
“Last of us” :/
I’m shocked
I haven’t bought a physical game in years. But I also haven’t owned a PS since 2 so fuck Playstation.
Are there analog console titles?
I can’t think of any.
The closest I can think of are games distributed on cassette for 80’s microcomputers like the C64 but I can’t think of anything you’d call a “console” that accepted those.
Pinball?
whoops wong place
They know you won’t leave, you’re all junkies at this point.
The rumored price point for the ps6 is going to be about the same as the steam machine. People will be able to get their fix just as easily somewhere else.
I’m curious what PlayStation fans would think about changing from a disc plus download, like it is now, to a cartridge like Switch uses?
I think it would be a thousand times easier to get Sony on board with that idea.
What difference would it make?
I’m struggling to understand what this would achieve as well. They’re objectively more expensive to manufacture.
Well there’s an argument that plays right into their hands. Nothing at all is even cheaper.
Whose side are you on here, anyway?
I’m pro physical media, but real physical media, not not key cards, not code in a box, not requiring an always on connection, not full base game but DLC is a code.
I think all games should be able to work in perpetuity without any external validation or activation across it’s entire life.
Hope that clears things up.
If that’s the case then I hate to tell you that the war left without you, like 15-20 years ago. And we, consumers, lost.
There is/was a time that game size was way bigger than media could conveniently handle. I think we are or will be past that soonish.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just think all the outrage could be better applied.
I have an exceptionally large game collection that includes even current generation console games - so PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2.
There are still games on those platforms that are fully playable from the physical media with no download required to ensure it’s playable to completion.
Switch 2 is unfortunately the biggest offender with key cards, but those are easily identifiable. Other consoles I just avoid specific publishers.
No Ubisoft, no Activision-Blizzard, no Bethesda, no Microsoft Game Studios and so on. It’s very possible to find completely on disk playable games, a good example of this is Pragmata and the latest Resident Evil for PS5.
Sony does love its proprietary parts lock-in. Having a cart that doesn’t work on anything else would appeal to that urge.
I’m mostly curious if this is about having a physical copy of the game or something else.
What about something completely new? Not cartridge, not a disc. Something that hasn’t been invented. Maybe something like a PSP memory stick.
And they’re Sony, this is lemmy. Nothing here is going to make a difference.
Digital isnt the worst thing, but how “ownership” is controlled can be. I wouldn’t blame Sony for the move but their method is garbage, and their past practices with digital ownership is too.
GoG on the other hand knows how it should be done. I have tons of games from them on a thumb drive. I’ve never actually needed to use it, but its nice to know I can. Major kudos to them.
That said, most of my games are owned on steam, which still has DRM, but at least I can play those games on a 20 year old PC, a modern one, a box in my living room, or on a multitude of hand helds. With Sony you are tied to a specific console and thats that. Good fucking luck when they stop selling that console.
DRM on Steam is up to the publisher.
Steam is DRM
Only if publisher wishes.
You can totally play games downloaded via Steam without launching the shop, if the game is DRM-free.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises year after year and aggressively sues anyone for anything.
Sony (somehow) believes that investors are what give their company value, not customers, and certainly not employees. They’re abandoning physical media and not backing down on their anti-consumer practices that only continue to get worse.
Microsoft has become the new EA, aggressively buying up every single schmedium-sized gaming studio they can get their hands on, mismanageing them all into the ground, then selling them off for parts to save their own asses while leaving talented studios to die on the vine. They’re basically buying the right to scrap their competition and they’ll get away with it because they have enterprise IT subscriptions to absorb the losses.
AAA gaming is dead. And greed killed it. I’ll be playing indie PC games and emulators for the foreseeable future.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises
looks at most highly rated video games of all time
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
Ive thought slop is ai specific. Looks like the word may be seeing a change in meaning.
Slop has always had the meaning of low effort and non-artistic meant for mass production. It alludes to the vats of gray mush that would get fed to kids for lunch on an industrial scale. Or to the random mix of pig feed.
People tend to use it to mean, “thing I don’t like” far too often these days.
Slop slop
This is criticism slop
People just love stating their opinions as facts, and you can’t really give entirely objective opinions about art. When people say this game was amazing/terrible because of some subjective opinion they usually mean I loved/hated this game because that’s what I love/hate.
I’d argue boiling a thing down to “slop” is a lazy way to avoid saying why they didn’t like it.
Slop has a long history as word used about art. Joeseph Cambell mentions it, people criticsed hollywood of it, publishers complained about it.
I remember those days using the term slop for lazy, uninspired, thowing anything that stuck on the wall, etc. AI is just a logical progression of the same term.
Popularity does not imply quality.
I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.
The use of superlatives on a highly subjective statement also don’t signify quality. If anything, their presence implies irrationality.
Slop implies bare bones, generic, repetitive design, and thrown together quick. Say what you want about Zelda, but it has never been any of those.
op probably meant pokemon, which is pretty SLlop since SWSH.
And have you played Splatoon 3/Raiders, Metroid Dread/Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders, Donkey Kong Bananza, Rhythm Heaven Groove, etc?
They’re painfully mediocre. The gameplay is straight out of Assassin’s Creed 2 with some Skyrim sprinkles for good measure. Run to the tower, reveal the map, do the quest, check the box, go to the next one, maybe stumble across a cave with some minor loot. Snooze.
That’s funny, because I would describe Breath of the Wild as the antithesis of the open world design, popularized by Ubisoft, that was most ubiquitous when BotW came out. You climb a tower and decide what’s interesting by seeing it from the top of the tower, not because climbing the tower labeled it as a checklist item on your map. In fact, if you do all of the shrines visible from the top of the towers, you’ve only done about half of them, and late in the game, after stumbling across a few shrines by happenstance, you realize from the negative space on the map that anything you couldn’t see from the top of the tower would tend to have a puzzle to solve that would reveal it.
You’re disgustingly overrated. Botw is the greatest game ever. You wouldn’t know good game design if it kicked you in the ass.
Botw is the greatest game ever.
Statements like these sure as shit ain’t gonna help your case. I’ve seen a few videos of the game and it looks just about the same as every other open world game - with mid graphics. Let me know when the game releases on pc and i can actually try it though.
I played it on PC. Highly recommend.
Yeah i know about emulation, me not playing it is more about them fostering a closed platform.
And the Switch titles in all of those franchises range from some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TotK may as well be DLC for BotW, and Windwaker would have been more similar to those titles were it not for the technical limitations of the Gamecube.
They still can’t seem to get Starfox right since 64 and even that was a reboot of the NES title. You’re really gonna look at all those 3DS attempts to reboot the same NES game and tell me that’s not slop?
Pokémon is seeing the worst quality of the whole franchise on Switch and apparently Pokémon Go was just to train military robots or some shit. You’re really gonna look at 3DS models in a Switch game and tell me that’s not slop, my opinion is just wrong?
Smash Ultimate’s online play has 11, ELEVEN frames of input lag under ideal circumstances, the metagame has been busted since Steve, DLC characters are OP, patches were promised, then canceled, and support is over now. You’re really gonna tell me that’s acceptable, totally not slop, my opinion just sucks?
I hope you play Switch games forever, and I hope you love it.
TotK may as well be DLC for BotW, and Windwaker would have been more similar to those titles were it not for the technical limitations of the Gamecube.
You haven’t played ToTK at all. And what is this weird statement about WW supposed to prove about how the Switch games are the worst? Are you suggesting WW would have been the “worst” Zelda game if the GC had the power of a console that came 15 years later?
This isn’t even getting into how you’re going to need to show your work for how Zelda 2, Skyward Sword, some of the mobile entries, and that CD-i game are all better games than BotW or TotK.
You’re really gonna look at all those 3DS attempts to reboot the same NES game and tell me that’s not slop?
Yes. Things aren’t “slop” just because they’re not great. Otherwise most things in existence are slop. You haven’t thought this through.
Pokémon is seeing the worst quality of the whole franchise on Switch
You don’t know much about Pokemon games if you think the recent entries are the worst received generations.
apparently Pokémon Go was just to train military robots or some shit.
Pokemon Go is notably not a Switch game.
You’re really gonna look at 3DS models in a Switch game and tell me that’s not slop, my opinion is just wrong?
Yes. An uninformed opinion that misuses terms is a wrongly derived opinion.
Smash Ultimate’s online play has 11, ELEVEN frames of input lag under ideal circumstances, the metagame has been busted since Steve, DLC characters are OP, patches were promised, then canceled, and support is over now. You’re really gonna tell me that’s acceptable, totally not slop, my opinion just sucks?
Yes, the opinion of someone who forgot about Brawl isn’t worth much.
I hope you play Switch games forever, and I hope you love it.
This does not hit the way you think it does. Most people don’t have such an irrational hatred for the Switch that they’ve convinced themselves of a lot of untruths to justify their weird hatred.
some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TOTK/BOTW
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
And your other cases are pokemon (who’s been accused of sinking since the 3DS days) and Smash’s online. Not even the game, its netcode (which if we’re being real is bad for 99% of Nintendo games). We don’t need to invent reasons to hate Nintendo, okay.
Greed has been a problem in the AAA game space for a long time. It’s just that before reliable Internet connections, it was harder to exploit people.
Before this, it was lootboxes and gambling mechanics, before that, it was microtransactions, balancing the game to incentivise spending money, and before that it was chopping bits off the game and selling it as DLC.
Prior to that, the worst we got was cheap sequels and shovelware.
It’s all about maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately, companies have come to the realization that happy customers are no longer the path to success. There is more value in capturing a market and then gutting services to squeeze those pennies out. Long term this can’t be sustainable but here we are.
they will just end up putting mtx into everything.
There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
The big games you mention here are what most would coin AA titles, AA is absolutely still able to hit homeruns at time.
But the AAA (biggest budget games) plays a bit too safe, I have a feeling GTA VI might be a banger. But that’s an anomaly for a AAA game.
We need more innovative games, triple A’s should be able to invent new things. Studios quite often does so, and then has it gutted by publishers/investors because it carries too high of a risk
I think that’s just the Overton Window shift. If a game’s budget is in 9 figures of USD to make, I don’t see how you couldn’t call it AAA. Even the likes of Elden Ring and Metaphor are similarly big, and they’re probably only short of 9 figures USD by way of being made in Japan for a comparable amount of labor. There’s a wide spread between GTA VI and the next-most-expensive games ever made. The AAA of yesteryear was made by a team the size of The Alters or even far smaller.
Indie doesn’t mean “small and pixel art game”. It means the studio is independent. Kingdom Come and BG3 were made by independent studios with little to no help from pubblishers (if any at all).
The rest you mentioned at max could be considered AA or simply A games IF there was a pubblisher behind them helping with development. What you said was a world of AAA games aside those mentioned is actually a world out there aside AAA games.
Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.
And all of those are available on an open platform digitally if not available on physical media.
Maybe controversial, but I and most of my friends have said fuck GTA6. We’ll wait to see what happens with the PC release.
they are lucky pokemon is sustaining nintendo directly and indirectly, even its mostly slop games. even the physical card game became kinda like slop.
luckily they wernt succesful against Palword, which is producing a better game than the consoles.
I’m reluctant to buy any digital games on anything but Steam at this point, and that’s because Valve has begrudingly earned my trust over 20 years of use. I do wonder what plans are in place for the point at which Gabe isn’t around to steer Valve.
I have zero confidence in any other game related corporation to have a long term view in mind, and especially not one in which the platform is designed to be consumer friendly.
I would trust GOG too. At least as long as they let you download offline installers.
Putting your trust on any company is already a mistake. The only correct answer is GoG, or other similar DRM free distributions. You don’t have to trust them, because it doesn’t matter what they might pivot to: you still have your downloaded games, and they still work without any connectivity.
Also, when you end up passing away, guess what happens to your steam library? You cannot pass it on to anyone else.
Idk bought 3 games on Steam just the other day and all three came with pop up when I went to install them to let me know that I was only License to use them.
While I bought 3 games on GOG same day and they only asked if I wanted to donate to their fund to keep games DRM free and letting me know that I own all my games I purchased.
Valve might be going to shit.
Is there anyway to backup our games purchased on Steam?
It’s a license to own a copy of the game because you’re not buying the actual game.
A license is ownership. That’s how all software has always worked, same as music and movies.
What remains to be seen is if courts will enforce the ownership in the light of the anti-consumer practices by publishers and developers removing people’s access to that which they have purchased.
This is a great video explaining everything from the guy who started Stop Killing Games.
I think if the license is revocable, then you never really own even a copy.
I only fully trust licenses that use wording like: "All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. " (from GPLv3) “Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.” (from ApacheV2)
Is there anyway to backup our games purchased on Steam?
Yes, you can copy the install folders and saves for them. Some can be modified to run without Steam fairly easily, some will need more involved cracks. Generally it’s easier to just redownload the whole game cracked and move your save files over.
Do you or anyone have steps for those cracks. I definitely want to play and keep my games without needing Valve.
You want the Goldberg Emulator, which is basically a replacement for the steam_api DLL that lets you play those games offline.
Mind you, not all games using Steam DRM will work with it, but many if not most will by just replacing the game’s steam_api DLL with the one from the emulator.
Alternatively, just prefer GOG over Steam for games available on both stores and make sure you download the offline installers from GOG and back them up - GOG itself is not entirely immune to the kind of legal shenanigans that would force them to delist a game from their store and remove them from a buyer’s games collection but, unlike Steam, their setup makes it impossible for such legal orders to stop you from playing that game if you already have the offline installer.
You can download installers from Fitgirl.
You could use something like SteamAutoCracker (SAC) or Goldberg, both are available on Github. A lot of smaller indie games don’t have any DRM, so you can play them without steam or on another computer once you’ve copied the files. For games that have 3rd party DRM like denuvo, you’re better off just downloading a cracked version of a game if it exists, since that DRM is borderline impossible to remove on your own
