I love companies swinging between "we have to increase your subscription costs to allow us to offer more great features" and "our customers are excited about our new features so we need to leverage advertising to continue providing them". Just repeat until everything is loaded with ads AND costs twice as much!
The big thing I've run into is regular use vs occasional use. I only use my PS4 as a Blu-ray player these days, and each time I turn it on, it has to figure out if it shut down correctly last time(of course not). Then, after a memory check, it boots. I sign in, and then it yells at me that it has a mess of OS updates to install, which I don't want to wait for because I just want to watch this damn movie. Plus, my controller barely holds a charge anymore, and if I don't use the right USB controller plugged into the PS4, the controller doesn't pair and control the damn thing. If I were using the PS4 every day like I did back in 2016, a lot of these problems wouldn't be there, but because I boot it once every 3 months, it's a hassle.
I would love to be able to just slide in a disk and watch in the rare cases I've decided to. As it is, I'm about to buy a dedicated Blu-ray player instead of using the hardware I already have.
I better sell my 1,000 copies of Celeste I've been sitting on then. I was waiting for retirement, but might as well take the tax hit.
Another vote for a backlit e-reader. Much easier on my eyes in a dark room than the dark mode on my phone.
The huge update that completely rebalances the game, improves UI, and changes the gear system is free. As for PL itself, I'll happily continue BG3 until the hype dies down and I get a feel for whether it's actually worthwhile.
Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it... Well an 8 year timeline doesn't seem crazy.
"Dull on Purpose" is a hell of a box quote. Do you think that will be on the Game of the Year edition?
BG3 is the one I'm thinking of. Specifically, the issue was the Series S didn't have enough RAM to allow them to do split-screen, a feature that has been notoriously difficult to implement. Even 343 had to throw the towel in on that one for Halo Infinite.
Though apparently, that position has changed, and now BG3 will be able to launch on Xbox without that feature.
Yeah, the comparison to what's happened in the TV and Movie streaming space had occurred to me. Major studios burned down their existing businesses to try and jump into the streaming space, only to very quickly hit a hard cap on the possible number of subscribers.
Gaming is obviously a very different market, and apparently, console and PC gaming make less revenue than the Mobile/Freemium market, so maybe Microsoft sees it all as moot at this point.
Is it just me, or does the Xbox brand seem in a really bad place - outside of Gamepass - right now? Microsoft's strategy of rotating contractors through its first-party development studios seems to have squandered a lot of talent. Games are being held back by the requirement that all features are available on the Series S.
It sort of feels like they're so focused on the Gamepass revenue that they've just let their console business wither outside of that. I only have a PC and Switch this generation, but none of the games that have made me consider a console have been on Xbox.
Pro-tip: if a low-health enemy is close to escaping to call for help you can just throw Baldur's Gate 3 at them for that last bit of damage!
A fucking sword.