I think there are populations of both patient and impatient gamers on both.

The absolute worst platform is Nintendo. You might as well buy the game on launch because it’s still going to be the same price 10 years later. Or even more expensive in some cases.

Consoles have been moving to digital, but they still have physical games. I can’t go to a local store or eBay and buy used Steam games. At the same time, Steam has great sales that do a lot to offset that.

In general I think media hypes up new releases, and there’s blame to go around omamong publishers, media outlets, and media consumers for that. But most online discussions on games are going to default to new releases unless it’s a specific “patient” or “retro” community. So it’s easy to underestimate how many people are fine waiting a couple of years. Or how many kids are waiting until their birthday or Christmas to play a game.

Sony has been paying that toll and, per the article, plans to continue to do so.

Am I missing something here?

What do you mean by “shifted to”. Was there ever a time when these were more common on consoles?

The game widely attributed to starting “micro transactions” was MapleStory, a windows MMORPG. PC games adapted online features like digital-only delivery, DLC’s, and micro transactions before consoles even had the capability to do so figures out. Even before online capabilities, I remember going to game stores in the 90’s and seeing “expansions” for PC games, which is what we used to call DLC back when it was physical.

When think “microtransaction”, I think of a handful of different games immediately. MMO’s, which are much more common on PC (chat features, complex inputs requiring a keyboard, add-ons or other enhancing programs running in the background). Simulation games (the Sims, Truck Simulator, Farming Simulator, Cities Skylines, Civ, etc) that usually are much easier with a M&KB than controller. Multiplayer battle games like MOBA’s or shooters (Valve has DOTA 2, TF2, CSGO and most others are either PC exclusive or multiplat). When I think of Sony in particular, I think of their cinematic single-player experiences. Which may have some DLC, but I don’t associate with predatory micro transactions like cosmetics or P2W schemes.

Consoles have tons of that too nowadays, but it seems like kind of weird to act like PC users are somehow less interested or susceptible to predatory pricing schemes.

Both pale compared to the mobile market though.

https://www.techspot.com/news/103189-ps5-becomes-sony-biggest-money-maker-crushing-past.html

Seems like almost every business area of PlayStation is doing well. Hardware, subscriptions, DLC, other micro transactions… The PS5 just became officially their most profitable generation.

They’re looking to maximize revenue and profit by expanding into the PC market. It’s great to see because it gives consumers more choice. That absolutely should not be interpreted as any sort of sign of weakness for the PS5. The PS5 seems to be doing better than the PS4 did, and the PS4 did well. They have crushed Xbox to the point where people are speculating Microsoft might want out of hardware. The Switch is harder to compare against because it’s near (really should be past) the end of its life, but the PS5 has been selling at a faster rate.

PC gaming is just starting to get back in track after a few down years for hardware sales (largely related to supply shortages and price gouging, especially GPU’s). But it’s starting to turn around, and it seems like Sony wants a piece of that. The question should not be “why is Sony pushing PC ports”, but “Why is Nintendo not porting to PC”.

Square-Enix has been mismanaged for decades and I don’t think is worth paying attention to.

Is the CEO underestimating patience or is the author overestimating?

It’s not as if PlayStation is struggling right now. The PS5 seems to be selling pretty well.

Not to mention that consoles and PC’s are indirect competitors. A lot of people want to use a controller form their couch without jumping through hoops. Gen Z is trending away from desktops and laptops entirely in favor of mobile devices.

I use Steam Link on the Deck to do this often. Personally I just leave it in 16:9- the Deck just displays horizontal black bars to get from 16:10 to 16:9. For me that’s just part of the Deck experience because even a ton of games I play locally are 16:9 only, or even 4:3.

You can choose to match the resolution as well. On your host PC go to steam -> settings -> remote play -> [advanced host options] and look for something like “Match desktop resolution to client”.

It also depends on what you are doing. I find that more resource-intensive games are often better streaming- better battery life with less heat and fan noise on the Deck. So changing the individual game settings to 1200x800 works well.

I don’t use that just to access files though. I have several folders on my desktop set up as SMB shares and installed another file explorer (Nautilus) to access it. I mostly use it to move around PS2, GameCube, and Wii roms- everything else is either just permanently on my SD card or I’m able to regularly install via Steam.

For non-Steam game saves, I set up SyncThing to synchronize across devices.

You can also do the opposite though. The Switch had 0 backwards compatibility. The GameCube, N64, and SNES had 0 backwards compatibility. Hopefully this article is legit.

Before I even open the article I see comments correcting its misinformation. Go and read it and see they are just trying to shit on Bethesda for improving their user experience because it’s popular to criticize Bethesda.

They really just let anyone write anything on the Internet these days.

Lemmy simply hasn’t been enough content. I still use Lemmy (obviously, I’m here) but I also supplement with other places.

For example, I used to enjoy the sub for one of my favorite sports teams. A lot of posts tended to be articles from the same handful of news outlets. Now instead of reading through Reddit I just have that website up and routinely check for new articles.

I use the Google News app occasionally. It usually sucks.

I also use Instagram a lot more. I only reluctantly downloaded it and created an account because my wife and a few friends wanted to send me things. Then I used it more when my band released an EP as a way to promote that. For pure entertainment rather than informational purposes, I usually go to Lemmy first and exhaust what is good quickly, then go to Instagram after.

I know it sucks. I don’t like having an app from Meta on my phone. I know it can become an unhealthy habit. But I also drink and eat junk food, so there you go.

Pokemon Sword and Shield.

Rose is trying to move the country off of fossil fuels and onto sustainable green energy. Somehow Gamefreak manages to portray this as being a terrorist and extremist. How dare he try to move Galar away from coal?

I’ve been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the “enlightened centrism” where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.

I think it’s similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There’s a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It’s simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don’t think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine’s message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.

There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the “good” guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because… Reasons?

I do both. Jellyfin is way better if you put in the work of having a good folder structure and file names for metadata to scrape.

VLC is good for weird file types or non-video media. If you want to have a stash of reaction gifs in a playlist, I don’t know if JellyFin has any way to do that. Or if you want the tablet to display a random slideshow of pictures, like a diy digital picture frame. Also it’s easier to use if you don’t have good file names and metadata scraping.

This happens again and again and again. At every level, public and private.

The answer is not “filter these people out of these jobs” because very often they have no prior records. Or sometimes someone gets phished. The answer is to stop enabling this in the first place.

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

Unironically yes. Sonic 1 had 'tude: it was always part of the IP.

Steven Universe

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

As long as they don’t take free mods away I’m fine with it.

Almost every mod out there is addressing some (real or perceived) deficiency in the base game

Emphasis on “perceived”. In my experience, the vast majority of mods are for things that I would never have asked for or expected from the developer.

Like Thomas the Tank Engine being everywhere. Or the other day I visited a friend and he was playing Civ 6 as Luigi from Mario. Or adding guns to Skyrim. Or adding tons of sexual content.

Should that content just not exist (licensing issues aside)? While I’m grateful to the noble people making and giving away mods for free, if I could start a decent side gig with it I might start making mods myself.

I can’t imagine myself ever buying a mod, but it seems like opening the platform up to allow creators to monetize is better than closing the platform entirely, or relying on the generosity of a few enthusiasts. Seems like this closes a gap on the spectrum from making your own indie game, getting a job as a developer, or using some DIY creator like Dreams.

PlayStations are not sold at a loss either.

They usually start out selling for a loss, but Sony reduces costs and scales production so they’re usually profitable (or at least even) after a couple of years. As far as I can tell the PS3 took the longest, releasing in 2006 and not breaking even until 2010, still 3 years before the PS4 launched.

It seems Xbox has always sold at a loss though.

Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.

Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I’ve found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.

A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it’s pretty decent. I’ve even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it’s functional now.

Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.

It’s only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it’s mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don’t fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don’t know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.

I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.