I sort of picture this happening more often at the graphical plateau. It used to be that these franchises needed big face lifts to stay relevant, but even that can sometimes happen with a lighting update.

The other reason might be if they want to do subtractive redesigns of the core concept but I’m still not sure what that should be for The Sims.

It’s a small measure, but I’d really like to see a law where gacha games need to publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.

The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static. Many gacha systems have been accused of putting a hand on the wheel, assuring someone “so close to their needed item” must keep going through a series of failures.

I honestly tried to get back into it with an old account. Apparently, the entire world went up in power level with no exceptions, but not my character - meaning there was literally not a single enemy I could kill across the PVE environment to gain better gear/levels to contend with enemies.

I did not feel like making a new character or redoing the tutorial so I decided to not even bother, taking it as a sign the game was poorly thought out.

The article author honestly made a very valid point, but wrapped it up with a terrible headline.

I even feel like the PS4 and Xbox One currently serve the use case of being “the cheap consoles”. There are a number of games they cannot run or would run poorly - but for their price point they’re much more of an option for the non-wealthy, primarily in other countries. It’s like it’s all one console generation with no signs of ending, and a varying range of specs.

I’m going to agree with you, but only in the sense they hired more people than they should’ve, not that they should be firing people.

I really blame Telltale Games as one studio that demonstrated this issue in a microcosm. They had some successful games. Then they hired enough extra hands that they MUST make excellent games. Their next few games were not excellent. Then, everybody gets fired.

I mostly play new games, but I respect admiration for old games. It’s fun to see people speedrun old SNES games - but it’s disturbing to think an entire generation will just become inaccessible to history, even if a lot of the games in question were kind of bad.

I actually agree with you in the case of online multiplayer games - I don’t think the devs can keep them available forever. But when a game is singleplayer, like The Crew, it feels like planned obsolescence.

Downvoted for censoring Gamers. I will always downvote people using that stupid fucking asterisk. Don’t be a child.

Yup, the Xbox does that; but it’s at least good to acknowledge that was not an insignificant effort on their part. They had a lot of people slowly putting out compatibility packages for old Xbox games based on popularity.

I’m guessing Sony doesn’t feel like doing that when they can also provide that hardware via more expensive cloud systems.

I’ve definitely had some of those issues. I won’t count an old issue where my GPU needed a special connection to attach audio to its DVI output (rare oddity). Some others:

• Most computers would need to swap default audio device between whatever you use at a desk, and the TV registered as an HDMI audio device.
• Bluetooth connections to arbitrary controllers have gotten better, but they had often needed manual enablement each time through mouse-based menus or a number of firmware updates to work with Windows/SteamOS.
• My Steam Deck, even in its current iteration, takes some time to recognize the connected TV and swap resolution.
• The mouse cursor issue can come up if you had to do any mouse-based option swapping, like that thing with audio devices.

I’ve definitely gotten it working and had a blast, but the number of button presses to get to starting the game can sometimes be hard to predict. Even when I had a computer dedicated to the TV (a long time ago when SteamOS was fledgling) it was pretty unreliable about having all the right updates and not needing a mouse.

On the idea of random drives: Many of them might not be able to read the encryption on Playstation discs. I could be wrong, but I think the way they operate involves more than just software encryption. Sony is best off making their own. Hence why pirates burn special copies.

On reading prior generations: I think they’d be capable of reading those if they wanted, but running old Playstation games is more a matter of correct CPU architecture. Most of us have played old games on the new consoles, but often there’s a bit of manual porting/emulation logic going on to get it working - so the package delivered from PSN isn’t exactly would come from an old PS2 disc.

Props for accepting a counterargument on the internet graciously. Not something we see often.

It’s hard to tell if this would have been the case in past generations. I think this only became true once we crested the graphical plateau where all games look “good enough” in HD.

Myself, I count the catalog of PS+ as an “exclusive feature”, plus it’s nice to play some of the PS4 games that struggled on a better machine. I loaded my God of War save and went from 30 to 60fps, which was great (sad that it was one of few games to offer PS5 enhancements in the PS4 version)

If a PC GPU is only slightly better than a console counterpart, typically its games will run slightly worse - since it loses the benefit of devs spending time optimizing for that profile.

Okay, totally off topic…what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it’s a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

They do exist; but also constantly debate with stores like Steam about what can be allowed since Steam is ultimately much more visible. They make it murky with the occasional VN that’s “90% cryptic folk mystery, 5% romance, 5% visuals of non-consenting animated minors in the nude being victimized by a tentacle”.

Steam, for very understandable reasons, has waffled back and forth on whether to allow those games.

They can still kind of kill physical games with good service. The whole “honey rather than vinegar” argument.

That’s what happened with the PSVita. While overpriced game cartridges existed, most of its lifespan people were buying its games digitally which worked great for indie developers that didn’t have a budget for physical releases.

I was very close to getting a digital PS5, but I still need the drive for my old PS4 games and movies. If I were just getting into Sony now though, I imagine the story would be different.

What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare “One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation.” Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes “We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we’ll replace that first navigation.”

I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that’s not possible.

Much as I’ve come to hate Xbox, this could be the beginning of signs of monopoly - they don’t have so much competition anymore, so they can do what they want. Certainly doesn’t help that unofficial controllers have never been good.