A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
Yep, Xbox Is Bleeding Out
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Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher. Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.Well, putting together a trailer with Aerosmith or Beatles music playing over it isn't helping the ballooning "development costs" either. Neither is studios overhiring and then figuring out you can't just hire 500 people and then not let them go. Game studios have become bloated. Overstaffed. And so have their games. They just can't understand not every game needs to be a 150GB+ open world game, or have the latest realistic graphics. Small games are okay, good even. Imagine how much more detailed a game could be from a AAA studios if it launched with highly stylized retro inspired graphics. They will never do this of course, but just imagine it. Imagine how much more there could be, with way less time and money being required to do it. A single barrel that might take an artist a whole day to make could easily mean multiple variants of barrel in the same time. They could drop a 20GB game that feels like a 200GB game, and do it in like 6-12 months. It would be so easy to split their already massive studios into like 20 smaller teams of 50 or less people to work on these kinds of smaller games and they could pump them out quickly. Just flood the market with these highly concentrated titles. But they won't, because its easier to convince a shareholder to make billions from a single game that looks really good visually but plays like trash with MTX for short term profit than it is to convince them to play the long game and make trillions with the volume of smaller games sales and the massively reduced development costs. Its all about short term profit these days, and its why all the businesses in the world seem to be racing each other to the bottom. Because why play the long game.when you might be dead before you hit the jackpot? Nevermind that you can't take any of it with you to the grave.
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The writing has been on the wall for a while. I remember hearing quotes about wanting to turn Xbox into a Steam competitor back in like 2018. I was honestly surprised when they released the Series. I was pretty sure we would get some sort of streaming only console after the One X|S. I imagine going forward, in addition to the streaming services, we are going to see Xbox leveraged as “certification” for other manufacturer’s hardware where consumers can be assured that this device meets some set spec for this year’s Xbox games.They couldn't go full steaming at that point, X Cloud wasn't fully ready, and gamer sentiment was against it on the whole. The Series S was intended for this use, but the timing was off. So they set about building up infrastructure using massive AI investment money, which also increased the price of hardware, eventually releasing a console costing over $1000 pricing most gamers out of owning the top end hardware, making the Series S type devices much more appealing, and getting them onto the streaming service, raking in fixed income off everyone, and raising prices when the investors want another payout.
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Neglected Pixels? Lol, truth is they were always poorly made midrange phones sold at high end prices. Google has never made good hardware, not even accidentally.They are basically the exclusive target for GrapheneOS for their feature set: ``` Non-exhaustive list of requirements for future devices, which are standards met or exceeded by current Pixel devices: Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs) At least 5 years of updates from launch for device support code with phones (Pixels now have 7) and 7 years with tablets Device support code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they're released) Linux 6.1, 6.6 or 6.12 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable) Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent) Hardware-based coarse grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) for baseline coverage where type-based CFI isn't used or can't be deployed (BTI/PAC, CET IBT or equivalent) PXN, SMEP or equivalent PAN, SMAP or equivalent Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode / decode, image processor and other components Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot) Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better) StrongBox keystore provided by secure element Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted) Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support 64-bit-only device support code Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller Reset attack mitigation for firmware-based boot modes such as fastboot mode zeroing memory left over from the OS and delaying opening up attack surface such as USB functionality until that's completed Debugging features such as JTAG or serial debugging must be inaccessible while the device is locked ``` From https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-support
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I’ll play out my remaining games that I purchased for my Series X and then bail for the PlayStation (or maybe steam box) ecosystem. I’ve never owned a PlayStation or steam computer, I went straight from Dreamcast to Xbox and have been buying each generation. They got online gaming right, but now they’re so rudderless it’s astonishing. What a shame, after the 360 they had all the momentum and squandered it.Why Playstation?
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Why Playstation?Because that’s the only other major console, outside of Switch 2 which I don’t have much interest in.
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Because that’s the only other major console, outside of Switch 2 which I don’t have much interest in.Are you using it for streaming various video services? If not, get a Steam Machine. Playstation pricing is severely expensive, and their selection is limited. There are so many cool things I see on Steam that I wish were on PS5 for ease of use.
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Are you using it for streaming various video services? If not, get a Steam Machine. Playstation pricing is severely expensive, and their selection is limited. There are so many cool things I see on Steam that I wish were on PS5 for ease of use.It definitely has my attention. The price will be a determining factor. I am way more casual about games than I used to be, so I don’t need some incredibly deep library. Just something I can pop on a few hours a week.
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Were the authors aware that everyone is broke this year and the "deals" to be had were previous mark-ups going down slightly? The game is rigged, we are all aware these "sales" are nothing more than a sales gimmick and very little of worth is available by an actual deal. No one is even trying to hide that fact anymore, and the populace is broke and fed up with all the stupid games we get forced to play
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I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits.... am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don't get close to reaching the full hardware capability, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
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It's a bias you have, because there are no nostalgia driven docs about current work. If you watch Game Developer conference videos you see lots of "we had to be creative to..."moments.I don't discard it, but how much they have to be creative on technical aspects today unless it's to port a new game to older gens (do they even do that?), it just seems the hardware has so much power and potential they barely tap on it before the industry release new hardware.
