i think the magic box is poisoning you

Cow Bees took me a second…I usually see “Beeple” more than anything else

okay i have to come back to this one later because it’s longer than i thought, but if you came straight to the comments, know that this post definitely fits the sub

aha i respect your linux dedication. Steam Deck has been a renaissance for gaming on Linux!

i mean they’ve been doing refurbished consoles for multiple generations now, no? The only new thing is that they’re selling them directly from Sony’s site, rather than going through GameStop like they used to back in the day.

I think this is a net positive for sure. Two manufacturers competing to be the most affordable can only mean lower prices overall!

I think they definitely have a strategy that is timed around the age of the base PS5 release. 4 years old = PS5 Pro and beginning of refurbished console sales, to grab the consumers that weren’t enticed by the base PS5.

Here’s a link to the Tom’s Hardware post about AMD’s new GPU strategy, cited in the GN video.

Some thoughts after watching this part of the video:

• Sounds like AMD is hitting the point where AMD cards are a complete afterthought for devs, because NVIDIA has both dominant market share and the best performance by all metrics except price. But devs don’t care about what consumers are paying for cards, they only care about developing for the card that most users have. And so, AMD is giving up on the top-end to focus on clawing back market share in the mid and entry level where NVIDIA doesn’t compete as hard.
• AMD is essentially swapping rivals, from NVIDIA to Intel, as Intel is targeting the same market that AMD is pivoting to. It’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out.
• NVIDIA will essentially have a monopoly on the top-end GPU market. I am not looking forward to that.

EDIT: I’m noticing on my Sync app for android that the bulleted list doesn’t seem to be working right, although the bullets are working correctly on desktop. Just wanted to point that out for mobile only users - this is supposed to be a bulleted list!

Paprika is great, but it kills me that there is no landscape mode. I go to prop my phone up on the popsocket, which naturally puts the phone in landscape, but Paprika stubbornly stays in portrait 😑

Many agree with you! I personally bounced off of it, but I don’t know if I gave myself to it completely when I played.

The gif from that article was very good and i need to find reasons to use this

Strange to see a game like Nex Machina on the top 10, but I appreciate Eurogamer providing unique and surprising picks. Funny to see Outer Wilds and Tetris Effect in the top 5 - makes me think Eurogamer might be staffed with more than a few old Giant Bomb fans.

soooo…all 13 games they showed in the release trailer. Coincidentally, also about 90% of all “next gen” exclusive titles. I guess it’s not surprising that games compatible with the PS4 are not getting PS5 Pro upgrades, but it also kind of highlights how Sony has barely taken advantage of the base PS5 as-is.

I guess my thinking was that people will sell their base PS5 after they buy the Pro, and basic supply-and-demand says that more PS5’s on the used market equals lower prices. It might not come down a lot, but I think it will come down.

That announcement stream was so weird. 4 minutes of Mark Cerny talking about the features of the PS5 like it didn’t come out 4 years ago, 3 minutes of explaining the PS5 Pro “Big 3” features of GPU upgrade, advanced ray tracing, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and 2 minutes of trailers that looked too (heh) similar to current PS5 gameplay. It’s like they know that it’s impossible to make a new console look good in trailers anymore, so they just rushed to get it over with because everyone has already decided whether or not they want to pay even more for an upgraded PS5.

At least the price for the base PS5 should come down on the used market?

the pandemic really muffed it all up. The truth is that those product launches were lined up well before the pandemic truly began in March 2020, and it would have cost both companies an exorbitant sum to delay the launches at all. And really, they had no reason to believe that a pandemic would hurt their sales numbers, because the gaming market had never gone through an event like this before. And ultimately, the pandemic actuallly ended helping their sales because everyone was at home with nothing to do. The gaming market reached its highest revenue peak ever due to the pandemic.

I agree that it has made this whole generation feel weird as a consumer. But I think a lot of that feeling would be there with or without the pandemic, and the pandemic just exacerbated some things. Xbox is firmly in second place to the point that the PS5 is dominant, and it would have been dominant without the pandemic there. There are so few current-gen games, and even fewer PS5 exclusives, but this isn’t because of the pandemic. We live in the age of crossplay and cross-platform, mostly caused by Sony and Xbox both moving to x86 architecture last gen, and sticking with it this gen. That common architecture makes it way easier to port games to other platforms, so it takes quite a lot of money to convince a dev to go exclusive these days. Why dev for PS5 only when you could also scoop up some money from PC gamers, Switch gamers, hell even PS4 gamers! The pandemic certainly hampered some dev ability to pump out first party games, but the bigger cause is probably the ballooning size of AAA game budgets. These games have become so massive and complex that it has become very difficult to pump one out faster than once every 4 years. The only thing I would pin mostly on the pandemic is the rise of PC gaming. PC gaming is at an all-time high because many took their pandemic stimulus as an excuse to finally switch to PC, and that has further fragmented the market in ways that definitely change the “vibe” as a consumer.

TL;DR: the pandemic was a factor, but I think most of the “weirdness” of this gen has come from other market forces.

lolol i love meme monday! I see so many memes across the week that make no sense to non-gamers. Long Live Meme Monday!!

I need something to do while I’m avoiding work all day!

because all lore is essential, right?

Yamaha watched all those “I made a guitar out of…” videos on YouTube and finally had enough