What do people mean today? I've always been under the impression that a democratic country follows the majority rule to the greatest extent that's reasonably possible.
This argument never really holds water with me, why stop at card costs? Why not add on an additional fee for every other thing like, fuel surcharge on delivery costs, employee surcharges (I don't live in a place where tipping is expected), or even energy surcharges?
The cost of the product should be what's on the label. If that's not enough, raise the price.
Others have already mentioned that the credit card surcharge is something that the customer has control over. But in regards to the other fees:
> Why not add on an additional fee for every other thing like, fuel surcharge on delivery costs, employee surcharges (I don't live in a place where tipping is expected), or even energy surcharges?
A lot of companies already do this. As long as those fees are mentioned somewhere before purchasing, it's legal here:
It’s worth noting that EU puts clear limits on the size of credit/debit card fees. You can’t add card fees on top of the price either, with some small exceptions.
> Traders in the EU are not allowed to charge you extra for using your credit or debit card. The only exceptions to this rule are American Express/Diners Club cards and business or corporate credit cards, where your employer is billed instead of you. If you use these cards, you may still be charged a fee but the fee can't be more than what it actually costs the trader to process your payment.
The credit card fee is the only thing that changes based on the payment method. The fuel cost, employee cost, etc. is the same for the same product, but if you pay with a credit card, it costs the seller more money.
It's common for the price you pay to change when the method of purchase changes. For example, having a product delivered costs the seller more than if you picked it up from the store, so you have to pay a delivery fee.
Because, between all of these expenses, it is the one the customer controls. The customer chooses what card to use, but the merchant pays the associated cost.
Then what about a toilet cleaning fee? If you as a customer used the toilet during your shop visit, then you get charged a toilet cleaning fee on top of your transaction.
To me, surcharges should not be allowed. The sticker price the customer sees when they decide to buy ought to be the price. This makes comparisons much easier, and enables more competitive pricing.
So you want everything to be labeled with a cash price and a visa price and Mastercard price and discover price and Amex price? Labeling it with just the cash price seems fine, you can go to an atm and get cash if you don’t like the surcharge.
> labeled with a cash price and a visa price and Mastercard price and discover price and Amex price?
of course not. That's absurd.
I want a single price, regardless of my choice of method of payment. The cost should be built-in to the price. If the cost of providing one type of payment method is too high, i want the business to take out out to make their price more competitive (balanced with the amount of people unwilling to shop there without said payment method).
Merchants and payment providers compete to provide payment methods at as competitive rates as possible, because they needs to compete with cash handling (which isn't hard at all), and the consumer doesn't think about "cost of payment method" - they merely need to think about the cost of the item displayed.
This doesn’t make any sense. So the price should include potential transaction fees for the most expensive method of payment? Or you want the cheap payment method to overpay and subsidize the expensive payment method?
There’s also usually a flat fee plus a percentage, how do you bake that into the advertised price when the flat fee may be spread across multiple items? Should every item increase in cost by $0.30 or whatever?
This is just stupid. Advertise the cash price. You can go to an atm if you don’t want pay the fees associated with your preferred payment method.
Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.
Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
I dunno, 2 feels pretty on point. Unless you're trying to match an Xbox Series S, I guess. The components in my aging midrange desktop are worth ~$600 more than than I paid for them in 2022.
On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?
Oh boy, that time is long gone. Today you wait an hour for the game to be installed from disk and then for the day 1 patch to be downloaded and installed.
> Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware
I do not believe any current-gen console is subsidised? Though old stock thereof is probably cheaper because they locked the component prices in before RAM prices started going crazy
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
Power-wise Steam Deck isn't on par with current gen consoles nor even last gen consoles. It can play plenty of games, but we've reached a point that it can't run most new AAA games at an acceptable level of performance regardless of settings. With a console you can buy pretty much any game and assume that it will run at a playable frame rate (though there are of course exceptions).
And it doesn't have to be on-par. Show me a gameplay enhancement that the current gen hardware has enabled - something that just wasn't possible on previous gen hardware.
Well, PS5 has an incredible audio processing chip that can actually use GPU geometry directly - and it does its own equivalent of audio raytracing to model accurate behaviour of audio inside whatever room you're in, based on geometry and material properties. It's extremely cool and works pretty well, but unless you're an audio geek you won't notice.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
The scale of things has somewhat improved, but the gameplay improvements in GTA V over IV are hardly there due to hardware capabilities. Gran Turismo still, afaict, does not have a visual damage model, but of course the simulation has improved somewhat. I do not believe Fortnite would have captured a bigger market had it leaned harder into cool graphics.
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
AMD TrueAudio was doing the audio raycasting thing many years before the PS5 released [1]
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
I am aware. But the question was what can the current generation do that the last one didn't - well, PS4 couldn't so that, PS5 can. And because it's built right into Wwise a lot of games support it(whether it's wired in correctly in them is a different question, but I know all games I've worked on had it)
Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.
I was specifically referring to PS4 and Xbox One. Power-wise Nintendo platforms since Wii are essentially (at least) one generation behind the other consoles, and generally speaking Nintendo platforms have their own games rather than relying on big multiplats, outside of indie games.
I own a Steam Deck and its one of my favorite devices but its specs are now not really at par with standard (given its age it makes sense). They need to release a newer version but I doubt they can keep the same price value as they did with the original given the market conditions
On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
Did we live in two different “2006s”? I remember 2000s laptops to be near-unusable for anything 3D, let alone a 400 dollar one. My mid-2000s gaming PC could do it at 60-ish FPS, but the graphics in that alone were like 300 dollars :D
You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)
$400 buys you a decent laptop from 10 years before.
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago (2006) a $400 laptop from 1996 had a pre-Pentium CPU barely able to run Windows 95. In fact I’m not even sure you could find laptops that cheap, used or new.
In general dubious binaries aren't really a problem, because releases tend to be done by people or groups with reputations. Lots of people are ideologically or technologically motivated to release stuff and have been doing so for many years.
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
Unlikely most of the Denuvo cracks actually remove the virtualized code from the executable. Not feasible without extensive binary rewriter tooling (that, while being sloppable, still takes a lot of time to slop).
Interesting yeah you're right. Looking it up it seems that only 2 of the Denuvo cracks have completely removed Denuvo - oddly enough Assassin's Creed games both times. Usually they just use various tricks to fool the authentication, but leave the performance degradation and other issues of Denuvo.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
I can't edit this post anymore but if you wanna read a bunch of stuff on the topic https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/ is a nice blog. All in Japanese, but it should be perfectly translatable.
Funny thing is they removed all their blogposts on Griffin (an obfuscator several anticheats, including EA's, Riot's and FaceIT's utilize) for whatever reason.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time.
I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
Even if I pretended what you said might be true, the ISP would still be noisy between you and Nvidia. So you would still have the latency between you, Nvidia and the game server.
It still doesn't make sense, however you try to create imaginary scenarios where it might make sense. A lot of people in tech seem to do this, where they will try to invent fantasy scenarios to prove people wrong. It is extremely tiresome.
This ignores all the obvious other problems with game streaming, e.g., what happens when their servers have an outage? What happens when they decide they aren't going to support a title anymore?
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
Myself I am very sensitive to latency, which is a bit more evidence that I have a somewhat unusual nervous system. People who are much better at other game genres are amazed that I can usually beat levels from any rhythm game the first time unseen but...
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Just run a private server and kick/ban them? That's how things worked in the 00's and there is no reason why it wouldn't work now. You can even whitelist your vetted friends.
consoles and thus games are hacked just as thoroughly and completely as PC, for quite a few years. i cannot think of a single console ive played MP and not seen the same blatant cheating since xb360 days
Even in an online FPS all your inputs need to be sent to a server running the game logic so what you're seeing is not an actual state of the game but rather the predicted one. I think it would make sense to have a competetive game run all it's logic and rendering on a single machine for all the players in a given match so that it works a bit like a split-screen - the only difference being that instead of showing it on a single combined screen it would send those screens to remote players. This way a lot of problems with latency and movement prediction would be gone. Also cheating would be impossible which is a good enough reason to do it on it's own.
For things you can't control, like other players, prediction works fine and can be almost entirely invisible when well done. But prediction doesn't work fine with things you control, like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
> like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
The problem is that things are dynamic. Pressing fire does rather different things if the gun is loaded or empty. You might argue then you could just start doing some small amount of local computation, but then this small amount rapidly grows to a not so small amount because you bump into these issues endlessly and you end up learning why so much is done locally on most games to the point that cheating becomes possible.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
What if you render a spherical view from player's standpoint on a server and then merge it with locally rendered hud + weapon? The biggest source of cheating is that your pc knows the position of other players, only rendering your local state locally would make this kind of cheats impossible while maintaining ms-level response to actions like shooting and looking around (moving has a lot of inertia anyway).
Imagine you're at the corner just before a hallway and you want to quickly peak around the corner where you think an enemy might be. If you didn't have local copies of player locations, then when you look around that corner you might not see anything even if there's a guy right there. At best he'd do this weird pop-in thing which would look awful.
Maybe but VR FPS isn’t such a huge category. The biggest problem there I suspect is almost certainly variable lag (particularly random spikes) as that’s harder to compensate.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.
As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
I don't even know if a smaller company like Nintendo can pull something like that off. They have been behind so much in the tech space because they spend modestly and their primary differentiating factor is their IP. Their lawyers are going to be working non stop until they figure something out. I guess have a strategic partner?
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this characterization. They've certainly been behind in tech that's like "stuff the most FPS and fanciest graphics into this small box as possible", but I'd argue they've been pretty much the only one playing in the "make a good experience for most users without configuration with relatively cheap local hardware" up until relatively recently (SteamOS certainly has made some inroads, but I've yet to see anything particularly impressive in terms of an Xbox handheld, and Sony has basically given up it since the Vita). I don't think either of these broad technical areas are particularly aligned with making cloud streaming viable for gaming, but if I had to pick one side, I'm not sure I'd pick the side that's invested way more into expensive hardware on the local side rather than figuring out how to make the constraints of lower power go further.
You make a very valid point but it really sounds like you are describing whether a company provides immense value to their customers whereas I am describing: are they up to date technically?
Nintendo is excellent at providing that value using low tech. They managed to make a compelling product using cardboard and sell it for 80$. They are the masters at providing good experiences with relatively cheap local hardware.
Cloud game streaming has gotten to be extremely impressive, at least on a wired connection, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell you’re streaming. It’s been hard for me to consider upgrading my old gaming PC considering how good GeForce Now is for the $20 a month that I spend.
I subscribe to XBox Game Pass and used to subscribe to Geforce Now too. They're both really great for me as more of a casual gamer, but at the competitive level in the fighting game genre, it's totally insane and people will notice a sub-100ms lag in their inputs because they're sort of pushing the limits of human reaction time.
I didn’t say only on a wired connection. All of my experiences streaming wirelessly have also been great. I’m just not willing to make the same level of claim when I’ve probably spent less than ten hours streaming on WiFi and hundreds on a wired connection.
I can't tell if this is what they're talking about, but I frequently stream from my desktop to a SteamOS handheld on my home network, and on pretty much any game that I can max out on my desktop's specs (Radeon 6900 XT, so not exactly the newest GPU, but it's able to do quite a bit), I can get 120 FPS on the handheld without much noticeable input lag.
I don't have any reason to believe this would translate into a good cloud gaming experience though, because it mostly seems to have become viable from local wifi just getting a lot better in recent years. I would expect the latency to still be pretty high for a remote server, and it's possible that the streaming server I use is just able to "correct" things more easily for a local connection in a way that a fully remote connection might not be able to.
I’m talking about cloud streaming though I used to do local streaming through steam and remote streaming through parsec. GeForce now in my experience has worked better than either of those options running on my own hardware regardless of the hardware being local occasionally.
I did preface my comment with "I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about", because I didn't know if it was what you were talking about. I guess it's not.
I know that you did and didn’t mean anything by my comment if it came across a certain way. I just thought it would be worth clarifying and sharing my experience with having done local and self hosted streaming previously versus the cloud streaming I’ve been doing in place of it.
As someone who used to upgrade their GPU every year to the newest top card I find it to be indistinguishable from local hardware 95%+ of the time. It’s fairly mind blowing how well it works. Also just to clarify again I pay for the ultimate or whatever the highest tier of GeForce now is for like $20/month and use it primarily on a wired connection so that’s where my experience comes from. With their service you still need to pay for and own the games (though it also connects to Xbox game pass) so you’re only paying for the streaming. It’s also not something that depends on developers allowing it to be on the service so not every game is on there but the catalogue is quite large. I play on a 3440x1440p ultrawide at 100hz and I believe the ultimate sub supports up to 4k@120hz
I think this is only true if you assume the classic server model where the remote rendering streaming is overhead and not colocated with the game server itself.
Well Microsoft always seems to be making the wrong decision at the wrong time and this is probably yet another one. Probably due to competing factions hat don't really have a unifying vision for the company. It provides enormous amounts of comedy and I guess we will find out if this was another instance of "whoops we closed down that thing we could really use right now"! :)
Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.
Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".
Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.
On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
Valve can be trusted to maintain its current customer friendly policies only as long as GabeN is in charge and he is approaching retirement age. Perhaps we'll be fortunate and he manages to appoint a successor that has the same vision he had and, then again, perhaps we won't.
People forget the social aspects of console gaming and underestimate the ”it just works” factor. Nintendo in particular has a rather unique hardware platform with their controllers. Sure, you _can_ somewhat replicate it on PC, but the portability and OOTB experience is pretty good. Of course the switch is underpowered as hell, but you don’t need PC perf for the games you want to play in the social console form factor. You pay for the complete experience.
Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.
Cloud gaming is nice, I use GeforceNow regularly to play on my mac. However, there are several games that I couldn't complete/play due to the latency (around 60ms). Claire Obscures quicktime events were a pain (plus I used a PS5 controller which adds some latency), also Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had a bossfight mid-game with quicktime events that became so frustrating that I couldn't complete the game - halfway through. Same is true for Battlefield 6 - impossible to play, you just get continuesly fragged from player you didn't even see (remember the netcode does not consider you cloud gaming latency).
This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.
Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).
The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.
The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.
The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".
Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?
I'm not.
And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.
Wii U and Switch aren't x86 at all. All of GameCube, Wii and Wii U used a PowerPC CPU and an ArtX/ATI/AMD GPU. And Switch has moved to Nvidia ARM chips; they had been using ARM for portables since GBA.
I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case.
For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.
There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away.
It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.
I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.
Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.
Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.
Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.
I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.
There is a lot of work and research behind the (quality) major learning tools you are possibly likely overlooking. How do you know these learning games and activities are actually doing anything for your kid? Why not just use them?
I’m genuinely asking here. This isn’t bait or a challenge, and I’m not really sure how to avoid that tone so apologies if seems antagonistic.
It could just be that I don't know the right words to use, but my attempts to find some kind of quality edutainment has led me to conclude that basically the only thing that exists since the 90s is Khan Academy Kids, which itself just doesn't have a very tight loop. So I've made some variations on number munchers/word munchers, e.g. find all expressions that sum to N. Or a "what's the missing number" that deletes a number from a sequence of e.g. counting by 4, and they have to answer. It then immediately gives them the same sequence with a different number deleted. Or have expressions pop up/disappear and they need to quickly click the ones with the target sum. Or just straight up rapid answer math questions lol.
Basically, quick arcade-style games that can give them "points" so they feel good about just doing problems over and over for repetition. I can handle the conceptual discussions myself, but I find that gamifying works well for the portions where there's no alternative but to just practice until memorized.
I had also been working on a Treasure Mountain/Mathstorm/Galaxy clone with expanded activities, but I think the arcade format actually works better and is easier to make.
My daughter can also read a couple years ahead, but her writing's still very basic/phonetic. So I had codex whip up a standard template where I can put a picture (that codex generates) and she can write about what's happening in the picture and then color it. The template includes a word bank where I can add words relevant to what's happening (e.g. that I used to prompt the picture creation) that have irregular spelling, and I had it print a reminder sheet of different ways to spell the same sounds (ai, a_e, ay, etc) that she can refer to while trying to remember how to spell words. Previously when she was earlier in learning to read, I had used it to generate a couple simple coloring storybooks as a little fun activity.
That doesn't really answer your question about how I know it's effective, but I get a general sense that educational research struggles with that question too.
Huh? Maybe this is a reasonable take if you only consider the original series, but TNG heavily used holodecks as a form of entertainment, with computer-run characters factoring in heavily to plot advancement in the episodes.
Moreover, the exploration of Data’s personhood as an android is like… incredibly pervasive throughout all of the seasons of the show.
Absolutely and I was thinking about this when I wrote my initial comment. It's a good consideration. Star Trek _does_ have an AI computer capable of generating code and stories and all it requires of the user is a little prompting.
TNG shows humans are using this technology to engage themselves. People rock climb, ski, perform Shakespeare. Holodeck authors are well-respected throughout the galaxy. They also warned us of holodeck psychosis.
Data is an android, but what about his story suggests we should slurp up doggerel? His existence is the pursuit of humanity's "essence."
It really depends his good it is. There are so many shows where stories just don't pay off well. I could see an AI developing a show with a complex web of throughlines kept logically consistent and fleshed out.
But why? I feel like there is always this implied notion that media is just about “being good.” But “being good” requires a lot of things, and a big part of that is somebody sitting down and deciding they have a story to tell. An LLM cannot do that. It cannot speak from experience, it cannot explore novel concepts, it cannot express actual meaning.
A pretty photo is not enough on its own. Hotel lobbies have all kinds of pretty photography. That’s not the stuff people hang on the walls in their home. There is nothing wrong with it, it is fine to have hotel lobby photos. But acting like that is the ultimate target, that we should use AI to just manufacture this at a large scale… I mean what is even the purpose of that? Am I missing something here? Do people really just want to sit around with their local agent generating facsimiles of existing shows/movies for cheap entertainment?
There is always space for cotton candy and general purpose work, but we should not be advocating for a massive facsimile machine to drown out all media. People have been whining about Hollywood not writing new things for decades, so the alternative is to accelerate that? I just don’t understand the draw. I have no desire to sit around watching my computer make a fake, derivative Star Wars show for me to watch later.
The most popular human-made media is all derivative. Look at a list of the top games and movies for the last 10 years: sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations.
Call of Duty 27, the myriad sports franchises, Halo 8, Fast and Furious 11, a remake of some Disney movie, the latest Marvel-slop...
I’m not arguing about what is popular I’m arguing about what is worth our attention and consideration. And I don’t think I at any point implied I think those movies aren’t derivative, but clearly we’re not talking about the same type of “derivative.” LLM’s literaly make facsimiles of existing content in a direct way.
It also bears mentioning that Coke and Pepsi are popular too.
Well isn't Roblox kinda this? I play it all the time with my niece and nephew...it sucks, its enshittification to the max. Part of an entertainment property is you are devoting time to enjoying the creative process of someone who put in the effort to produce something polished and with effort. The end result is the culmination of all the work done (possibly years/decades) to get to that point and you are paying for the result of all that effort. Could a Roblox game be like that? Possibly but the incentives dont seem to be as aligned despite the democratizing force it has had.
I am reminded of a scene from the Jobs movie where they were arguing Open vs Closed systems. This feels similar...
Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.
It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.
The clock is ticking even for that. We're not far off from anything being able to be copied, including streaming only games. If it can be observed, a reasonable facsimile can be created. The reasonableness will increase over time.
Gacha games do this, e.g. Genshin Impact. When you turn off your internet while playing a lot of game logic fails (e.g. damage calculation) before it tries to reconnect.
> Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing
Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.
Maybe some indie games will even be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)
(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)
We're not far away from playing a screen grab and prompting "Hey $HOTTEST_LLM, make a clone of this game". There really isn't anything new under the sun with gaming. The assets can be easily reverse engineered, reconstruct the 3D world, and work out the inner logic (damage, etc).
Even if it starts out really crappy, people will iterate and contribute until it's virtually identical to the real thing.
But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.
It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits.
In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.
I could imagine a Counter Strike RTS,
Also one of the best selling games, Pokemon, is a turn-based game.
Genres are design problems rather than descriptions
No one thinks RuneScape is a "topdown RPG", rather than a "fantasy game with a lot of freedom and many things to do"
The genre can be made secondary to the design, so I don't doubt game designers can make turn-based games widely appealing
Turn based isn't really a genre, it's a play style. A lot of people out there actually want fast paced action and wouldn't enjoy Pokemon. Baldur's Gate 3 also did quite well recently but real time games consistently perform better.
RuneScape as an example is a funny one because it is comparable to turn based games at a competitive level due to its slow tick rate. You're basically taking very fast (0.6s) turns and can stack certain actions within those turns to do better. But there is no pause between turns so it's just (ab)using game mechanics, which also means it is latency sensitive.
there will be eventually people who grew up with nothing but lag introduced by the cloud streaming. They won't know how much better they could have it. So they won't complain.
Revenues suffer because game studios and publishers make awful decisions. See the botched releases of Marathon (Bungie) and the more infamous examples — concord and split gate.
Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.
How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.
I honestly welcome cloud gaming.
Action RPGs might be dead in the water,
But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1.
Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games
This is saying you'd be ok with books being only permitted to be read at the library, behind a sealed kiosk screen, because otherwise people might post spoilers online.
If the library is completely AI generated, and only the sealed kiosk screen contains (possibly) human-authored content,
How does the equation change?
I am saying I'd rather enjoy POSSIBLY human content, than AI generated ones. And if cloud gaming cannot deliver on this, I'd rather stop gaming altogether. The idea of consuming AI generated content is completely disgusting to me.
Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.
someone else mentioned how their blood pressure spikes from using microsoft products...
The sheer anger that I feel over how fuckingly stupid it is that they named everything copilot that basic conversation is difficult... I tried going to the article and got swarmed by paywall, finally checked the archive link and I think you're right.
OP here: I wish that were the case, however we're targetting old school businesses who unfortunately in my experience get weirded out by .io style domains
Because the size of the market was/is so small that you're actually able to corner it. Oil or Treasury futures are far too big that no single person could ever corner it.
> Treasury futures are far too big that no single person could ever corner it.
Well, you'd think, but squeezing the CTD bond was completely accepted practice well into the noughties until PIMCO flew too close to the sun and faced regulatory wrath.
The point is that it's silly that the law is specific to onions, and the explanation "it's because onion market was small enough to be cornered" is unsatisfactory because there are other small markets too
Just like solving math or programming in a general sense is much harder than a specific solution , so is passing a broader law.
We don’t complain about switch cases in code when there is two or three switches we start refactoring once it starts to proliferate.
The law is no different , passing a wider ban would not get the votes easily or quickly and the interested parties the onion industry have no reason to push for it neither does the lawmaker acting on their interests.
If said small markets also had exceptions passed seeing the onion one there could have been case to be broad.
It would premature optimization to otherwise, based on just need for elegance , code or law has to work first even if dirty .
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