You also some aspect of this old XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.

Re-using engines has been around for basically as long as game development has existed. This idea of some mythical age when game development was more “pure” is a fantasy. What has changed is that expectations on AAA titles has grown to the point where it’s extremely difficult to roll your own engine if you are committed to many, many years of work.

Not to mention, it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the engine performs well. Look at Starfield or Baldur’s Gate 3. Both have noticeable issues with performance, and both are built on in-house engines by their respective studios.

No he means in the vanilla game. The first 10 levels go extremely quickly if you have even a basic idea is what you are doing.

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I guess it depends on how much you trust a company (both now and in the future) to do something they shouldn’t with this kind of setup, whether on purpose or though incompetence.

Personally, I don’t software silently installing unrelated services to my machine just in case the company decides they want to have it running on my machine in the future.

Within a system you can bring up the “scanner tool” view in the ship to then point yourself to a planet and travel that way.

But to to travel to various systems, yes you’ll need to use a menu. But then I’m not sure how you would expect to fly between systems without some form of menu to select where you want to go.

That’s surprising to hear. Netflix has always been a step above, Hulu is decently behind. The rest are pretty rough from my perspective, but slowly getting better over time. Amazon was definitely miserable to use for a long time and I don’t think had anything but a basic “fast-forward/rewind” functionality with no thumbnails for quite a while.

The Peacock app and streaming has been hit or miss on plenty of occasions.

I think the worse is the Disney app that makes it difficult to just replay a movie that’s already been watched. It likes to resume at the end of the credits of the episode you want to watch rather than realize I want to watch the whole episode not just the final 10 seconds of credits. Or that switching between an episode when watching something from your “Previously Watched” list means finding the series on an entirely separate list in the UI.

Yup its the remake.

Being the market leader, Sony will have a much harder time making larger acquisitions than MS did, and this ABV merger didn’t exactly breeze through.

It’s hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.

Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block “large but not monopolistic mergers” without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.

That’s not what “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” means. You just came up with three numbered items to correspond to the fact that there are three words in the phrase.

That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?

It has no real meaning anymore. It’s now a phrase people throw around as effectively a meme. You won’t get anything but a wrong answer to this question.

IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years…

It is ten more years. If Sony isn’t able to come up with a decent alternative in a decade, well, I won’t exactly feel sorry for them.

I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit, but then BG3 and Starfield released and I just haven’t come back to it.

I did feel like the first season stuff was a little bare, so that didn’t help things.

You have the PSVR2 which is comparably priced but requires a PS5 console. You have the Valve Index which is $1k.

So, it may not be “cheap” but it’s definitely cheaper than some of the alternatives.

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Can anyone confirm that my understanding of the source article is correct?

The “Windows 12 may require a subscription” is coming from the fact that the word “Subscription” exists in a Windows config file somewhere?

That seems like a pretty big leap to me. Not that I don’t think it’s impossible that Microsoft would do this, but the evidence here seems thin to say the least.

The competition should be about having the best platform, not exclusive content.

Those both sound like competition to me. What you are really asking for is “I want things to be cheaper” which is a separate and sometimes related issue to competition, but separate nonetheless.

The path to lower prices the way you want would be government-mandated price controls on the industry.

Only problem was that I forgot to get a memory card so I couldn’t actually play the games that my coworker gave me, but hey it works!

That’s an interesting take on “works” for a game console. Being able to play games seems like a pretty important piece.

Only downside imo is that the actual storyline is short, like just a few hours.

People tend to understate how short the campaign is. Phrases like “it never gets old” are used, but it’s true because, as you mentioned, the campaign is one of the shortest you’ll find in anything close to a AAA game.

Edit: Not to say it’s not a great game, because I think it is. But it’s a great game that you’ll finish in potentially a single sitting.