In terms of their financial health I think too many people are forgetting just how much in the way of operating expenses they've shed from closures, downsizing, and staff reduction to arrive at these figures. Getting figures up like this is the reason all the closures and layoffs occur to begin with.
@twitchtvpat It's not the fact that they're covering a new product that's a big deal, it's the manner in which they're doing so that raises red flags. Grasping at straws for minute content, beating the drum larger and louder to drown out all other goings on (even when the Pro will account for a tiny percent of even hardcore fans), and most of all the blatant hyperbole and bait language. @Banjo- cited a few of those great examples "mind boggling", "will melt your face", "lightyears beyond" - there's quite a few other gems around in the articles that go not just beyond excitement, but beyond even ad copy, where even actual marketing departments would be cautious about so much exaggeration. It's both comical and very bizarre, to say the least.
F-off Totoki. There's a certain level of understanding a for the online games on their own servers, but for single player games to sit there and say "we learned and will change nothing" and lie about it. "We need to protect the players?" From what? playing privately offline without targeted marketing data collection occurring? "Offering" accounts? Absolutely nobody has a problem with being offered accounts. People have a problem with being forced to use an account. PC players dislike games that require a second layer of DRM on top of the layer of DRM they already chose. PC players have always disliked games that do that and the publishers that force them to. If Sony wants to put themselves in the basket with EA and Ubisoft in terms of customer perception, that's their choice. Just expect public discourse to put them in the same basket as EA and Ubisoft.
@Banjo- I think it's because the Sun, the Mirror, and National Enquirer are all carefully scrutinizing the articles to learn new ways to gain views.
I can't even come with a joke "I did X with a PS5 Pro for a week and you won't BELIEVE what happened next" headline, because none of them I can come up with as a joke are anywhere near as overstated and hyperbolic as the actual headlines have been. They hype words being thrown around in the headlines go far beyond tabloid headlines and all rational statements. It's a midrange GPU upgrade, not a generational leap, but you wouldn't know that from headlines and articles that hype the pro more than the PS4 to PS5 jump articles did.
IDK if it's just Sammy's personal enthusiasm or an organizational paid bias, but it's jarring and cringey. To be fair to Sammy, he was scathing when it was first announced, and hasn't even had one to play on prior to now (if he even has one now) and mostly just keeps echoing DF who has had such a cringey and obvious bias as one of the only outlets Sony granted a super early access machine to analyze (no conflict of interest there, and note even Push was not one of those outlets), so I'm going to guess the bizarre and uncomfortable hype is not his personal take coming through but something more.....business..?
Nintendo is an organization founded in a yakuza den specializing in making laundered cards for illegal gambling. It's not like their history isn't informative of who they are lol
We're talking about an organization that as soon as Japan was beaten in the war and surrendered, while most of Japan resented their new foreign provisional government and occupying forces, Hiroshi Yamuchi ran to the provisional government to secure an exclusivity contract on selling playing cards to the occupiers. Nintendo never changes.
I was against the pro, but this changes everything, an animated boot screen? Why didn't Cerny say this sooner? Not since the Xbox One have we had the console bliss of animated boot screens. And every UEFI ever. Sony take my money!
@tclarke90 yeah same boat for me. When I head what pro was rumored to be, I expected the price to be right where it is, saw Xbox capsizing and went back to PC as a result as well. Pro is a mess and this giant party everyone is throwing over crappie CPU and low mid-range GPU for $700 is baffling (especially from DF, everything feels off about their coverage. I blame push a bit less because they mostly live in a console bubble and don't know the difference)
Though I still blame the devs because they know the specs of the PS5 which is the main console in circulation. Build your game to run right on the hardware the customers use. And that goes to Epic too. They built that engine with the current consoles in mind early on. Why does it basically not work? Even ignoring the pro.
@Cerny To be fair, while Sony is f'd up, the issue isn't really Sony's fault. It's that devs by and larger are releasing games with trash optimization and relying on brute forcing to fix the game. The problem is the consoles don't have the grunt to brute force things the way super high end PC does, and the devs just seem to be relying on letting Nvidia and the consumer spending thousands to sort out their mess.
Where Sony's problem comes into play is the existence of the pro, much like the PS5 itself, is too expensive for the console space, and too weak to actually be able to brute force the way these games really require. It's an awkward product that probably shouldn't exist. Not that people that get what they want out of it won't enjoy it, but it's a VERY expensive way to not actually fully address the real problems. It's like a jet missing 100lb of fuel required to get to it's destination, so they emergency refuel mid-air another 60lb of fuel. Not only did they take the most expensive way to address the problem, they still can't get to the destination anyway but they'll feel better getting closer.
The only way to fix the real problem is to fix the entirety of the software side of the industry and return them to making games fit for the console rather than last minute ports of PC games. To do that Sony and Nintendo and MS would have to put their foot down and force developers to meet quality standards on their hardware for licensing. But they're not going to do that because people buy the garbage anyway.
@Rich33 I'm probably the one that you're thinking of talking about that, and yes, it's only using between 7-28% CPU on a 7800x3D, usually in the single digits, and that's with the praydog VR mod running on top of it and SteamVR/OpenXR + Virtual Desktop encoding/streaming to a Quest 3. That said it's not struggling at all on that CPU but it's informative that it's actually using so little, implying it's all on a single core, and explains some of the issue on consoles and weaker CPUs.
Am I the only one who finds Push's hyperbolic extreme marketing of the Pro incredibly uncomfortable? Let alone that DF is really the main one with hyperbolic extreme marketing for pro, and then Push keeps regurgitating it, but adding even more hyperbole to it.
Whether for or against pro, I'm finding this very obvious marketing push on both parties to make me as uncomfortable around their objectivity as any Keighley presentation.
I also like the reference to "the scene" like we're avoiding spoilers for a movie released in 1942 😂. I thought we're were over the spoiler avoidance for Aerith but this is a new level lol!
Yeah, Disney was really different back then. Not at all like the saccharine stuff of today.
@Raffles All very true and until the spec reveal today we've all been going by the 4070-ish comparison card based on Cerny quoting 40%, so if that is proving true then you're correct, the original estimate is not affected by today's reveal.
@Raffles PS5 is closer to 2070 or 3060, not 4060. I've previously compared pro to 4070, expecting from the leaks and Cerny it would be close but just below 4070. But at 16.x tflops it's very marginally better than a 4060 (15.x tflops) only. That's shockingly lame. We've been thinking 33 this whole time!
The discussions that @windxtravelerx posted about screams 4060 territory as well
@somnambulance that's a good point about him saying no major IP release this year while releasing concord which he said was the future if the company and a star wars level ip. And clearly he didn't think much of astrobot. Pretty sure he doesn't think highly of Japanese studios and their "not god of war" numbers.
Lol about abandoned. Yeah that was the most bizarre possible thing. Sometimes I think PlayStation is nothing but a marketing agency that doesn't actually know anything about its video games business. Ever since kutaragi stepped down, hirai, tretton and house carried the torch for a while but after them, we got this.
@KundaliniRising333 Spot on. We've been comparing prices to being a bit under a base 4070. In reality it's equivalent to a $300 4060 you can get for $250. Ouch! Actually in AMD terms is worse than the $260 RX7600 you can get for $200 but with a better scaler. Double ouch. It may be better than a PS5 but it's still terribly below even bottom barrel PCs.
@Northern_munkey There's a certain irony in comparing the PS5 Pro to a Neo Geo without a hint of irony... 😂
" If you want the best PlayStation experience, this is it."
Reductive statements like this still bother me and read like marketing copy. If the newest most expensive model wasn't the best experience something would be extremely wrong. The question isn't if it's better, it's if the difference relative to price is a reasonable difference.
@NeonPizza Rebirth isn't pushing anything, it's just really really really bad use of ue5 😂
Composite cables in the early 90s? Man, I didn't we a composite until the late 90s, just before svideo. I was still rocking RF connectors back on the early 90s 😂
Second you on getting older on every level. My memories aren't fading yet, though! 🤣
The thing with VR is it's just really rough on hardware. Double rendering (2 cameras), super sampling required (lens distortion adjustment), and the higher the fps (remember DOUBLE, 60fps from 2 cameras means 120 actual frames rendered per second, 90=180fps!) the higher the CPU load. Vr is literally nearly double the work. At high resolutions. How does quest do it? Simple gfx, simple environments with much less going on etc.
Tldr: when you're playing a VR game you're playing 2 different scenes on two different high res displays simultaneously. Ideally you'd even want two different gpus, one for each eye, but that doesn't really exist and introduces other issues which is why Nvidia finally ditched SLI link. It's not exactly DOUBLE as demanding because some resources are shared, but some aspects are double and others are 60-90% more demand.
@somnambulance I don't think Concord could have become less generic and unnecessary though. And adding a campaign at the cost of an all new development cycle for a game already mired in bad press and a doomed IP when they could claim tax write of instead didn't make financial sense. They had to kill it. But the part that makes no sense is why Herman thought this was the future of the company. To me that's great insight as to his thinking. If it checks off the boxes of focus tested success it can't fail. No comprehension of what the market wants, just the ability to copy success metrics.
The problem is Herman isn't a games guy at all. He's a business suit from marketing, like Jim. He also doesn't get product. He's not a dev or designer, he's just a business man and marketer that painted his image to look like a rock star. He doesn't get gaming. He never did. He just sells product.
@somnambulance I want to see it being just because the sheer redemption arc would be golden. Though I think like Microsoft Sega has figured out that consoles aren't where the money is anymore.
"Titles like Elden Ring run much closer to 60fps in Quality Mode, although still fluctuate heavily."
$700 "to get much closer to the correct result than before!"
Imagine an airline pilot saying "I got so much closer to the runway this time!"
"Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is now almost locked to 60fps throughout"
My Asus Ally NON-extreme Z1 running bloated Windows and half a dozen launchers can manage Metaphor at 32-46fps at max settings. A PS FOURshould be able to run that game at 60fps. It's not PS5's fault, it's Atlus', but either way, that's a dreadful example if it takes a PS5 Pro to try to get that to 60 when the base hardware should be overkill for it.
I'm not really knocking the Pro itself, I'm knocking the faux amazement that it's "less sucky than before on games that perform far worse than they should be reasonably expected to on existing hardware", this isn't a problem to solve with selling ever more expensive hardware to fake fix things, this is an issue with the software side of the industry, and hardware like this simply issues them ever more excuses and enables them to continue doing it.
@Lyedecker RT has a lot of potential but is very overrated. From a dev perspective instead of manually lighting the scene to look good as intended, it lets them place actual sources of light and a physics engine basically simulates the path of real light photons as they travel through the world. It can improve the authenticity of light from an actual light source, and improve the casting of shadows and reflections because it's a simulation of the travel of real light, vs lighting the scene like a movie set with a bunch of individual lights to light each area, ultimately, the result to the player may not look all that different, a well lit scene is a well lit scene regardless of it it was manually arranged lighting or a simulation of a real source of light. It has most of its potential in its ability to speed up development by just placing lights in a space rather than manually lighting scenes. But for the player, the actual difference, assuming manual lighting was well done, won't really matter much. It's a bit of a gimmick having people invest in super expensive hardware to run super complex light tracing simulations, mostly to normalize it to pave the way for future development to be able to remove the lighting step. While it does look "better" side by side it'll rarely ever be enough to look remarkably different. Even as a 4090 owner, I can say it's a "nice to have" but mostly overrated thing. For players today we are much more affected by raw non-RT performance and resolution (and scaling.)
@NeonPizza Nah, Wukong is what happens when devs push too high a graphically demanding game on console. Rebirth is what happens when an incompetent team that can't use an engine well also DGAF. It's just UE5, it doesn't look that graphically demanding, it's just poorly made and not at all optimized.
The thing with getting VR to 90fps is probably CPU-bound by a lot. There's a lot of image processing going on for VR. DLSS sometimes is hit or miss on PCVR as well, and PSSR isn't up to DLSS standards either, so the main draw of PS5 Pro, the scaler may not end up that usable for VR. (may work better on some games than others. Most games on PCVR recommend against using DLSS, but in some cases it's so bad I've turned it on and have been pleased with the result.)
(Edit: The reason AI scalers are dodgy for VR, is that they have random/unpredictable scaling results, unlike a traditional scaler that does the same thing to every pixel, and for VR the left and right images can then end up scaled to different results, meaning they don't match, and you end up with artifacts.)
@Rich33 Great details, that does make sense, I think (and why does the interior need to fit into the exterior? This is Hogwarts! )
Yeah, I could see them using the physical designs, but it still sounded more like they wanted to connect plots or something, which sounds so "big publisher." Doesn't mean it'll be bad I suppose though, I suppose it could sort of indirectly connect, like earlier eras of the families (19th century Malfoys and the like, we already have a Weaseley headmistress), early work of Riddle's ancestors paving the way, or something like that.
@somnambulance To be fair to Hulst, Phil merely had a game that flopped on his hands. Hulst had the greatest failure ever recorded in the industry entirely of his own making. It might make sense why Phil reacted like he failed, and Hulst reacted like just discovered a body in his linen closet.
Interesting points on Hulst, and I agree, I never expected him to get PROMOTED. I often said that when I called for Jim to go, Herman also needed to go, but I didn't expect instead that they'd promote him to even half of Jim's job. And that's very interesting about Dreams, I'd never heard that!
Sega really maybe the only publisher that just keeps nailing it. Heck, even one of Nintendo's biggest IPs today, Splatoon, is given a very heavy dose of Jet Set Radio behind it.
@somnambulance Concord vs redfall is interesting because it's a truism in gaming. The only thing worse than a broken game is a boring one. Refall was broken but was still a unique game underneath it. Concord felt like a generic copy of a different game, even if it was a good copy. And predictably redfall massively outsold it even if it still failed.
I still think Jimbo put Hulst on this pedestal because he wanted him making that noise though. Jim built the monster that is Hulst. But hulst is just insane now. I think as soon as Hirai retired is when things started heading downhill. Hirai kept things in order after Tretton and House. There was just lag before their mission changed to Jim's.
For me between Yakuza, Atlus, new sonic etc, Sega is at a peak they haven't been to since the mega drive/Genesis.
Got to love when companies with no plan or knowledge of an industry create a new high budget team, do nothing, then close it.
All these executives heard how much money Apple make from gaming, wanted to get in on a piece of that, and then found it out takes tens of millions and 8 years to get an ROI and now want an out.
@Matroska LOL, so much this. I'm finding it honestly funny both from fans and media reading all the conversation around how absolutely revolutionary this is, that it's changing gaming forever, as though all these people are seemingly unaware that this has all existed before, since before the PS5 launched at all, and isn't anywhere near the top of what already has existed for years now. It's one thing to say that for one's own budgeting and options it represents the convenience to budget to performance ratio that works for them, but this hyperbole as though something new and unique is happening by being able to set sliders to medium-high is equal parts hilarious and depressing.
@Rich33 Maybe, it sounded more like they meant tying the narrative, but it just doesn't make sense tying the game's era to the actual Potter narrative. Maybe you're right, it's about the castle.
I feel like the game took more from the films than the games in terms of the castle (basing it off the 2 real castles it was filmed in), but did allow it to be much bigger which was great, as the real castles are quite small. I assume the TV show will use all CG/greenscreen because I doubt they have the budget to rent and rennovate real castles as the films did.
@LifeGirl I agree, but I'm not sure we're sure they're going to be changing the direction of the TV show. The info that it was to be a strict adaptation of the books came from JKR, and I'm pretty sure she's an executive producer of it, so I doubt they can change the script without her approval. Yeah WB is WB, and they have the film rights, but I'm not sure they'd change the whole premise like that.
Not that I'd mind a TV show set in the WoW that was original and separate from Harry, too.
@Northern_munkey To be fair, I've always felt that the first AC was the best AC. I think it got the pacing of past/present right, and also told the narrative of the modern day much better, including that immersive narrative factor of being held prisoner in a room, and reading your captor's email etc. I think if they kept it going that way it would have been great, but as early as 2 they started really bungling the modern day part. I don't think having the modern was the problem, I think doing the modern badly after the first game did it so well was the problem.
Super hyped about all of this. I loved everything about the base game and enjoyed every minute in it. Very much more than the sum of its parts. The expansion, and the sequel are going to be absolute must haves for me. The only factor i don't understand is how they're going to connect the 19th century Legacy into the HBO series, as, if I recall what JKR said about the series, its' just a TV adaptation of the books that is supposed to stick more to the direct events of the books than the film adaptations that deviated and went their own way a bit. So how will Legacy 2 connect directly to Potter's story a century later? I don't mind trying to connect it, but I also enjoyed Legacy existing outside the Potter-Voldem--err, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named story.
@Northern_munkey At one time I agreed that all I cared about was the historical part, but after they kind of dropped that, it became obvious that the overarching narrative about the connection to the past and present, genetic memory, conspiracy theory stuff really was glue that set the series apart and held it together. It was this historical fiction world, that made sense being connected to a modern sci-fi conspiracy thriller, and that back and forth connection set the game and story apart as something unique. They bungled it badly, went with "Because Aliens." meme, and then forgot about it, but I think the woven narrative about genetic memory and reliving ancestors pasts was an important part of the identity of AC, and provided a reason why you have a HUD and xray vision, and icon markers, and all these things in a historical setting, because you're not playing Ezio or Altair, you're playing Desmond who's playing Ezio and Altair through a VR-type system neurally wired. It really helped with suspension of disbelieve because it provided an in-game believable reason why you can see and do things in history that aren't possible. If it's a simulator, it's possible, and there's a reason for it all to exist as it does.
Yes, let's celebrate buying brute force hardware to fix devs that can't optimize a game to work properly on the hardware you already have, even when said game is exclusively made for that specific hardware. Remember when console players made fun of PC gamers for this?
@LifeGirl ""PSSR isn’t perfect and it’s important to remember this is Sony’s first attempt at implementing the technology""
I find that quote so amusing. "Please beware this $700 product is just a beta test, just excuse the company for design flaws. They tried hard. You should offer them encouragement, understanding, and most of all, money, so they can learn from their mistakes and sell someone (you) something better after further R&D (you) provided time (and money) to them.
Yeah, DLSS isn't perfect either and AI upscaling will never be perfect, but this kind of soft-sell language to just accept an underbaked product for high price points because "getting products finished is hard." Rationalizing and justifying ever higher costs for ever less finished products has been the game for the tech media (and fandom) for so long it's become an expected normal.
@somnambulance Yeah, that's exactly it. I think both for fans, and for the company itself (and the image they paint for their shareholders) everyone across the board is blinded by Sony's raw sales figures in units, and their #1 position, without looking at the nuiance of what's really going on inside and the industry at large. While their revenues are great by being the default system, they've ended up in a position where there's no actual reason to purchase their product beyond that a competitor with a stronger reason to buy doesn't exist, and "because everyone else has one" becomes their main appeal. But there's a lot of competitors around the edges eating at that market steadily.
While I'm part of the Xbox mutiny in part, I agree, though the internet makes it seem dire, and although their console hardware sales are deeply stalled, their overall business seems steady, and, even if due to "buying the industry" poised for slow-but-steady continuous growth overall, even if mostly in software. Their platform is genuinely good, merely unpopular, and they have their fingers in many pies, for whatever way the winds blow, while Sony keeps retrenching to dig in, because they can not endure their existing model to falter.
Ironically, I think the market for a fixed console would have remained solid had Sony not gone the route of "premium brand" and jacking prices up and up. The Playstation is successful because it was an affordable commodity product. The more they try to drag it into being a premium luxury product, the smaller they shrink their TAM, and the more their core market erodes. Chasing the live service cash cows in a panic to offset this, ended up severely weakening their position instead, by losing large amounts of cash, and leaving giant holes in their product value/incentives, they've left the window wide open for competition to undermine them.
All they had to do was serve the customer rather than seeking endless growth and they'd have had a steady, loyal business.
I do think a lot of this goes back to Jimbo though. Yes, Herman is a massive problem, but remember it was Jim who ousted Layden and brought up Herman to replace him as a fellow traveler sharing similar ideals. No Jimbo, no Herman. Though we also ignore Ken Yoshida (not Shu, no relation) SGC CEO. Whether he prodded Jim to do as he did, or merely drank Jim's koolaid, he didn't help.
Capcom has been hitting sales goals, but IMO they've been doing pretty bafflingly poorly with games that people keep excusing despite being problematic releases. Sega, IMO might be the pinnacle of the game industry these days, doing almost everything right, which is just vindication if you're an old school Sega fan that watched them spiral down, only to see them now at arguably their peak.
@Porco gaming somehow caught up to Hollywood in half the time. Why make new things when you already have the things people like! Just keep selling those in new ways. We even have anniversary editions.
This generation has just been miserable. You know it's bad when even Sony itself is mostly selling its newest $700 console based on it being the best PS4 yet. I'm guessing the PS6 will be marketed as the bestest ever way to experience the PS4.
I swore off PC gaming 15+ years ago and this Gen was so bad it pushed me permanently back. Maybe it's "more expensive" in bursts but with this sales model and nickel and dining, not by all that much really
@somnambulance TBH with discounts I'm not even sure the piracy thing is a major factor even. It exists but I'm not sure it has a huge effect on sales. Even the pirates have more legal games in their backlog than they can play in their lifetime.
I think in a lot of ways, Microsoft actually got it the most almost right for the future. The streaming subscription model is how the world consumes media today. They got the trend better than anyone but then bungled the messaging, while publishers feeding at the PlayStation through actively rejected it because the old model was working..... But now it's starting to not. I think Ms actually saw it coming. But managed it all wrong.
I agree though, PlayStation despite being top, despite being default, is in a dangerous position. I liken current PS to Kmart. Ib the 90s they were #2 retailer behind only Sears. Management wrote off Walmart as a regional store, not a competitor, "grocery will kill them". They were comfortable at #1 and decided to not invest in remodeling their stores and instead spent all the money on buying new chains. Pizza (little Caesars), books (Borders), sporting goods (sports authority), home improvement (builders square). All of which went under. Meanwhile the #1 stores were dated and not at cheap and didn't have grocery like Walmart. They tried to add grocery but got retail guys to handle grocery and had aisles of canned goods and boxed goods and some frozen and staple dairy and not produce or much else. They rapidly were sinking. Then management lied to investors about how bad things were and gave themselves payouts (pleaded guilty in court!), sold the whole thing to a hedge guy who then spent the rest of the cash buying Sears itself. And they both sunk together. From the top 1 and 2 retailer from the 90s, thousands of locations, to, rumor says, 3 stores of each remaining with no inventory inside. With the management, ps reminds me a lot of 90s Kmart when they were "#2" behind Sears. Pretty sure I see Herman stacking cans in "grocery".
@somnambulance Unfortunately I agree. I think that's more or less exactly what's going to happen. I think Nintendo and PC will be fine and will remain home of the masses. Xbox and PS have a very very difficult, self inflicted path.
@somnambulance 😂 I love it! We need to get that started, #beachthewhales!
Yeah I totally agree. The whales are ALL that matters now. And the money backs it up. On the other hand I can kind of get the appeal. As a vr nms fan that just played for months and months, splatoon addict, and recently getting into VR sim racing and elite dangerous games that live for years and suck you into another breathing world, there's a lot to like in some of that, and to actually get good you really need to play for years. But the industry isn't into that because it's not actually monetized at all. They only care about monetizing.
And yet I still love my fixed length games as much as ever . Problem really is the market can't bear higher costs, yet the industry committed itself to ever rising production costs. The numbers just don't add up. In a lot of ways naughty dog ruined the industry. Sony raced to bottle their success and capture Hollywood with a controller, competitors all lined up to copy it and then after committing to it they all figured out they can't quadruple revenue by doubling the budget.
I'm wondering how gta6 will go. It'll sell great but by all rumors they're spending far far far too much on it, betting the whole company on it, and theres no guarantee that gta6 will replace gta5 for shark card whales.
@Max_the_German @get2sammyb Exactly, it's all best on windows, Microsofts main platform, and reaches a much larger market there too. Followed in distant second by PS5 pro, then tie for third behind xsx/PS5.
Only down side of this game on PC at least on Xbox store is the download. It says 300gb, but actually downloads 200gb, and then after that you can delete the mp/campaign parts you don't want. The bundled mw3 multiplayer is 86gb alone.
Still this is a game that proves why Sony isn't bothering with disc drives, 😂
What has happened to Capcom? It seems like they went from unstoppable to gutter trash back to glimmers of unstoppable and now back to gutter trash. How could they mess up monhun of all things?
I like how every single article on push square is now "game runs better on better hardware" If the push square staff ever ran a PC site they'd have a hard time writing "game is better on x hardware" for the dozen or so current GPU configurations existing.
@Porco Yeah, I really don't understand the "capgod" meme, they've been pretty awful for quite a while now. And we're definitely entering the era of "ps5 game runs like garbage, because if you care how it runs you'd buy pro", and the cackling hyenas on the forums will follow repeating the refrain.
@GamingFan4Lyf Here's the weird thing with how DD2 uses CPU: I'm one of those 7800x3D players, and am playing with a VR mod running which clobbers CPU. In DD2? It uses between 8-28%CPU. Never hits 30. usually stays in single digits.The fans never even rev up. It's not even using much of the CPU, it must be just throwing everything into a single thread on a single core and calling it a day.
@somnambulance I think it's about percentages. Customer retention would be important if it were a majority share of their profits, but it really isn't, the "loyal" "exclusives only" customers are such a small percentage of their revenue and profits they really just don't matter very much. The money comes from the GTA/Fortnite/Roblox/whatever crowd. They either need to be concerned only with whatever keeps those players buying on PS, or they need to be concerned with generating their own must-have equivalent (the live service initiative.) Or they need to be like Nintendo and change their business model so that it's pretty much only about the exclusives as a whole model. But selling hardware to people "for the exclusives" is pretty much like paying yourself tips for serving yourself dinner. It moves product "number" but does nothing on finances.
I don't think the PC initiative is the issue, their games are pretty much useless without spreading beyond PS. PS customers don't buy enough to sustain their rising costs. Putting games on PC, just means PC-only players don't buy a console "for the exclusives" anymore. But PC players that bought a PS "for the exclusives" were hardly generating much revenue at all, while porting the games to PC native opens it up to a larger overall market, meanwhile Sony makes fewer overall games anyway.
At the end of the day the "exclusives only" console buyer nets Sony, maybe $20 on the hardware, and an extra $30% on a few games sold, at the cost of keeping their market for their games smaller than it could be and reaching more customers.
This isn't "the novelty is wearing off". This is "PC gamers have a lot more sense and patience than fomo child-minded console gamers. They expect games are good forever, don't buy into full priced "same game with a graphics mod" reissues, there's no $10 upgrade on PC, and the full game was $12 just weeks ago. Who'd pay full price for a shinier newer version when the old one looks better than it does on console already, then has mods to make to look even better, and costs $12?
The whole recent remaster thing is very much a console only kind of thing. In this case it's acceptable on console because it's pretty and it's cheap as a paid gfx mod. Was never going to move on PC. Well, not until it's cheap
@somnambulance the problem with that, which Sony realized, is that people that buy a PlayStation to buy a handful of exclusives but play third party elsewhere don't actually make them much money. They don't care about retaining customers that buy "for the exclusives" because they just aren't profitable customers. They make more money reaching market that doesn't buy consoles than they do from the people that buy consoles only to play those games.
How they ARE backfiring on strategy is requiring psn logins, where half they market they're missing on console, the stopped THEMSELVES from being able to access.
EDIT: I stand corrected, @LowDefAl pointed out that the upgrade exists on PC. I don't recall ever reading that but I checked after you said it, and so it does. I'm actually impressed. If Luke Ross updates the VR mod to support it, and he probably will because he already supports hfw and it's the same engine, I'll actually upgrade and consider playing again.
@IamJT Yeah, how the psychology works on kids has got to be a terrifying thing on its own, though "targeted" still isn't totally new, in that things advertised in places kids were already looking in the past were already well targeted, really, but yeah, is frightening how much of "advertising" is more like psychological warfare now. I forget how it works as I keep everything set anonymous and related advertising off, so all I get are generic ads for things I couldn't possibly be less interested in lol.
@IamJT You're probably right and yet being bombarded by marketing isn't really new for kids, yet this still feels radically different. Where participating in the marketing is the main activity.
@Ryu_Niiyama it defies all logic, but somehow Snoop actually is relevant. He practically reinvented himself as a kids star, which in context is incomprehensible, and yet, there it is.
Comments 7,028
Re: Sony Ships 65.5 Million PS5 Consoles, in Line with PS4
In terms of their financial health I think too many people are forgetting just how much in the way of operating expenses they've shed from closures, downsizing, and staff reduction to arrive at these figures. Getting figures up like this is the reason all the closures and layoffs occur to begin with.
Re: 'Mind Boggling' Horizon Forbidden West Has the Best Console Image Quality Ever on PS5 Pro
@twitchtvpat It's not the fact that they're covering a new product that's a big deal, it's the manner in which they're doing so that raises red flags. Grasping at straws for minute content, beating the drum larger and louder to drown out all other goings on (even when the Pro will account for a tiny percent of even hardcore fans), and most of all the blatant hyperbole and bait language. @Banjo- cited a few of those great examples "mind boggling", "will melt your face", "lightyears beyond" - there's quite a few other gems around in the articles that go not just beyond excitement, but beyond even ad copy, where even actual marketing departments would be cautious about so much exaggeration. It's both comical and very bizarre, to say the least.
Re: Sony Boss Says It's 'Learned a Lot' from PC Player Pushback
F-off Totoki. There's a certain level of understanding a for the online games on their own servers, but for single player games to sit there and say "we learned and will change nothing" and lie about it. "We need to protect the players?" From what? playing privately offline without targeted marketing data collection occurring? "Offering" accounts? Absolutely nobody has a problem with being offered accounts. People have a problem with being forced to use an account. PC players dislike games that require a second layer of DRM on top of the layer of DRM they already chose. PC players have always disliked games that do that and the publishers that force them to. If Sony wants to put themselves in the basket with EA and Ubisoft in terms of customer perception, that's their choice. Just expect public discourse to put them in the same basket as EA and Ubisoft.
Re: 'Mind Boggling' Horizon Forbidden West Has the Best Console Image Quality Ever on PS5 Pro
@Banjo- I think it's because the Sun, the Mirror, and National Enquirer are all carefully scrutinizing the articles to learn new ways to gain views.
I can't even come with a joke "I did X with a PS5 Pro for a week and you won't BELIEVE what happened next" headline, because none of them I can come up with as a joke are anywhere near as overstated and hyperbolic as the actual headlines have been. They hype words being thrown around in the headlines go far beyond tabloid headlines and all rational statements. It's a midrange GPU upgrade, not a generational leap, but you wouldn't know that from headlines and articles that hype the pro more than the PS4 to PS5 jump articles did.
IDK if it's just Sammy's personal enthusiasm or an organizational paid bias, but it's jarring and cringey. To be fair to Sammy, he was scathing when it was first announced, and hasn't even had one to play on prior to now (if he even has one now) and mostly just keeps echoing DF who has had such a cringey and obvious bias as one of the only outlets Sony granted a super early access machine to analyze (no conflict of interest there, and note even Push was not one of those outlets), so I'm going to guess the bizarre and uncomfortable hype is not his personal take coming through but something more.....business..?
Re: PS5 Pro Makes Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Look Like a Whole New Game
@GASEOUS OMG it's still using UE4 and still manages to run that poorly?? I do not have enough palms to face.
Re: Nintendo and The Pokémon Company Want to Stop the Sale of Palworld
Nintendo is an organization founded in a yakuza den specializing in making laundered cards for illegal gambling. It's not like their history isn't informative of who they are lol
We're talking about an organization that as soon as Japan was beaten in the war and surrendered, while most of Japan resented their new foreign provisional government and occupying forces, Hiroshi Yamuchi ran to the provisional government to secure an exclusivity contract on selling playing cards to the occupiers. Nintendo never changes.
Re: Hypnotic PS5 Pro Boot Screen, Background Worth the Upgrade
Oh 😮
I was against the pro, but this changes everything, an animated boot screen? Why didn't Cerny say this sooner? Not since the Xbox One have we had the console bliss of animated boot screens. And every UEFI ever. Sony take my money!
Re: Hands On: $700 Later and Dragon's Dogma 2 PS5 Pro Performance Is Still Far from Perfect
@tclarke90 yeah same boat for me. When I head what pro was rumored to be, I expected the price to be right where it is, saw Xbox capsizing and went back to PC as a result as well. Pro is a mess and this giant party everyone is throwing over crappie CPU and low mid-range GPU for $700 is baffling (especially from DF, everything feels off about their coverage. I blame push a bit less because they mostly live in a console bubble and don't know the difference)
Though I still blame the devs because they know the specs of the PS5 which is the main console in circulation. Build your game to run right on the hardware the customers use. And that goes to Epic too. They built that engine with the current consoles in mind early on. Why does it basically not work? Even ignoring the pro.
Re: Hands On: $700 Later and Dragon's Dogma 2 PS5 Pro Performance Is Still Far from Perfect
@Cerny To be fair, while Sony is f'd up, the issue isn't really Sony's fault. It's that devs by and larger are releasing games with trash optimization and relying on brute forcing to fix the game. The problem is the consoles don't have the grunt to brute force things the way super high end PC does, and the devs just seem to be relying on letting Nvidia and the consumer spending thousands to sort out their mess.
Where Sony's problem comes into play is the existence of the pro, much like the PS5 itself, is too expensive for the console space, and too weak to actually be able to brute force the way these games really require. It's an awkward product that probably shouldn't exist. Not that people that get what they want out of it won't enjoy it, but it's a VERY expensive way to not actually fully address the real problems. It's like a jet missing 100lb of fuel required to get to it's destination, so they emergency refuel mid-air another 60lb of fuel. Not only did they take the most expensive way to address the problem, they still can't get to the destination anyway but they'll feel better getting closer.
The only way to fix the real problem is to fix the entirety of the software side of the industry and return them to making games fit for the console rather than last minute ports of PC games. To do that Sony and Nintendo and MS would have to put their foot down and force developers to meet quality standards on their hardware for licensing. But they're not going to do that because people buy the garbage anyway.
Re: Hands On: $700 Later and Dragon's Dogma 2 PS5 Pro Performance Is Still Far from Perfect
@Rich33 I'm probably the one that you're thinking of talking about that, and yes, it's only using between 7-28% CPU on a 7800x3D, usually in the single digits, and that's with the praydog VR mod running on top of it and SteamVR/OpenXR + Virtual Desktop encoding/streaming to a Quest 3. That said it's not struggling at all on that CPU but it's informative that it's actually using so little, implying it's all on a single core, and explains some of the issue on consoles and weaker CPUs.
Re: 'Mind Boggling' Horizon Forbidden West Has the Best Console Image Quality Ever on PS5 Pro
Am I the only one who finds Push's hyperbolic extreme marketing of the Pro incredibly uncomfortable? Let alone that DF is really the main one with hyperbolic extreme marketing for pro, and then Push keeps regurgitating it, but adding even more hyperbole to it.
Whether for or against pro, I'm finding this very obvious marketing push on both parties to make me as uncomfortable around their objectivity as any Keighley presentation.
Re: 20 Years Later, Identity of Metal Gear Solid 3 Eva Voice Actress Revealed
I still can't watch Bambi 😂
I also like the reference to "the scene" like we're avoiding spoilers for a movie released in 1942 😂. I thought we're were over the spoiler avoidance for Aerith but this is a new level lol!
Yeah, Disney was really different back then. Not at all like the saccharine stuff of today.
Re: Gran Turismo 7 Clocks Native 4K/120fps on PS5 Pro Via Game Boost, Pre-Enhanced Patch
120 is great if they mean vr mode. The I do hope they also clean up the visuals because I'm vr it's pretty darned blurry from mid distance on .
Re: 20 Years Later, Identity of Metal Gear Solid 3 Eva Voice Actress Revealed
Since when is The Little Mermaid family friendly? There's more euphemisms in that movie than any Kojima game 😂
Re: Take-Two Has Sold Its Private Division Subsidiary to an Unnamed Buyer
@Bluemoon2008 Take2 is arguably the worst of all. Even EA looks squeaky clean next to them.
Re: PS5 Pro vs PS5: Full Tech Specs Comparison
@Raffles All very true and until the spec reveal today we've all been going by the 4070-ish comparison card based on Cerny quoting 40%, so if that is proving true then you're correct, the original estimate is not affected by today's reveal.
Re: PS5 Pro vs PS5: Full Tech Specs Comparison
@Raffles PS5 is closer to 2070 or 3060, not 4060. I've previously compared pro to 4070, expecting from the leaks and Cerny it would be close but just below 4070. But at 16.x tflops it's very marginally better than a 4060 (15.x tflops) only. That's shockingly lame. We've been thinking 33 this whole time!
The discussions that @windxtravelerx posted about screams 4060 territory as well
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance that's a good point about him saying no major IP release this year while releasing concord which he said was the future if the company and a star wars level ip. And clearly he didn't think much of astrobot. Pretty sure he doesn't think highly of Japanese studios and their "not god of war" numbers.
Lol about abandoned. Yeah that was the most bizarre possible thing. Sometimes I think PlayStation is nothing but a marketing agency that doesn't actually know anything about its video games business. Ever since kutaragi stepped down, hirai, tretton and house carried the torch for a while but after them, we got this.
Re: PS5 Pro vs PS5: Full Tech Specs Comparison
@KundaliniRising333 Spot on. We've been comparing prices to being a bit under a base 4070. In reality it's equivalent to a $300 4060 you can get for $250. Ouch! Actually in AMD terms is worse than the $260 RX7600 you can get for $200 but with a better scaler. Double ouch. It may be better than a PS5 but it's still terribly below even bottom barrel PCs.
@Northern_munkey There's a certain irony in comparing the PS5 Pro to a Neo Geo without a hint of irony... 😂
Re: PS5 Pro Does a 'Much Better Job' of Enhancing Games Than PS4 Pro Did, Says Tech Experts
" If you want the best PlayStation experience, this is it."
Reductive statements like this still bother me and read like marketing copy. If the newest most expensive model wasn't the best experience something would be extremely wrong. The question isn't if it's better, it's if the difference relative to price is a reasonable difference.
Re: PS5 Pro Makes Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Look Like a Whole New Game
@NeonPizza Rebirth isn't pushing anything, it's just really really really bad use of ue5 😂
Composite cables in the early 90s? Man, I didn't we a composite until the late 90s, just before svideo. I was still rocking RF connectors back on the early 90s 😂
Second you on getting older on every level. My memories aren't fading yet, though! 🤣
The thing with VR is it's just really rough on hardware. Double rendering (2 cameras), super sampling required (lens distortion adjustment), and the higher the fps (remember DOUBLE, 60fps from 2 cameras means 120 actual frames rendered per second, 90=180fps!) the higher the CPU load. Vr is literally nearly double the work. At high resolutions. How does quest do it? Simple gfx, simple environments with much less going on etc.
Tldr: when you're playing a VR game you're playing 2 different scenes on two different high res displays simultaneously. Ideally you'd even want two different gpus, one for each eye, but that doesn't really exist and introduces other issues which is why Nvidia finally ditched SLI link. It's not exactly DOUBLE as demanding because some resources are shared, but some aspects are double and others are 60-90% more demand.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance I don't think Concord could have become less generic and unnecessary though. And adding a campaign at the cost of an all new development cycle for a game already mired in bad press and a doomed IP when they could claim tax write of instead didn't make financial sense. They had to kill it. But the part that makes no sense is why Herman thought this was the future of the company. To me that's great insight as to his thinking. If it checks off the boxes of focus tested success it can't fail. No comprehension of what the market wants, just the ability to copy success metrics.
The problem is Herman isn't a games guy at all. He's a business suit from marketing, like Jim. He also doesn't get product. He's not a dev or designer, he's just a business man and marketer that painted his image to look like a rock star. He doesn't get gaming. He never did. He just sells product.
Re: SEGA Is Bringing Back Its Iconic Virtua Fighter Franchise for PS5
@somnambulance I want to see it being just because the sheer redemption arc would be golden. Though I think like Microsoft Sega has figured out that consoles aren't where the money is anymore.
Re: PS5 Pro Has a Remarkable Impact on Unpatched Games
"Titles like Elden Ring run much closer to 60fps in Quality Mode, although still fluctuate heavily."
$700 "to get much closer to the correct result than before!"
Imagine an airline pilot saying "I got so much closer to the runway this time!"
"Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is now almost locked to 60fps throughout"
My Asus Ally NON-extreme Z1 running bloated Windows and half a dozen launchers can manage Metaphor at 32-46fps at max settings. A PS FOUR should be able to run that game at 60fps. It's not PS5's fault, it's Atlus', but either way, that's a dreadful example if it takes a PS5 Pro to try to get that to 60 when the base hardware should be overkill for it.
I'm not really knocking the Pro itself, I'm knocking the faux amazement that it's "less sucky than before on games that perform far worse than they should be reasonably expected to on existing hardware", this isn't a problem to solve with selling ever more expensive hardware to fake fix things, this is an issue with the software side of the industry, and hardware like this simply issues them ever more excuses and enables them to continue doing it.
Re: Round Up: PS5 Pro Reviews Love New Tech and Its Glimpse of PS6 Potential
@Lyedecker RT has a lot of potential but is very overrated. From a dev perspective instead of manually lighting the scene to look good as intended, it lets them place actual sources of light and a physics engine basically simulates the path of real light photons as they travel through the world. It can improve the authenticity of light from an actual light source, and improve the casting of shadows and reflections because it's a simulation of the travel of real light, vs lighting the scene like a movie set with a bunch of individual lights to light each area, ultimately, the result to the player may not look all that different, a well lit scene is a well lit scene regardless of it it was manually arranged lighting or a simulation of a real source of light. It has most of its potential in its ability to speed up development by just placing lights in a space rather than manually lighting scenes. But for the player, the actual difference, assuming manual lighting was well done, won't really matter much. It's a bit of a gimmick having people invest in super expensive hardware to run super complex light tracing simulations, mostly to normalize it to pave the way for future development to be able to remove the lighting step. While it does look "better" side by side it'll rarely ever be enough to look remarkably different. Even as a 4090 owner, I can say it's a "nice to have" but mostly overrated thing. For players today we are much more affected by raw non-RT performance and resolution (and scaling.)
Re: PS5 Pro Makes Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Look Like a Whole New Game
@NeonPizza Nah, Wukong is what happens when devs push too high a graphically demanding game on console. Rebirth is what happens when an incompetent team that can't use an engine well also DGAF. It's just UE5, it doesn't look that graphically demanding, it's just poorly made and not at all optimized.
The thing with getting VR to 90fps is probably CPU-bound by a lot. There's a lot of image processing going on for VR. DLSS sometimes is hit or miss on PCVR as well, and PSSR isn't up to DLSS standards either, so the main draw of PS5 Pro, the scaler may not end up that usable for VR. (may work better on some games than others. Most games on PCVR recommend against using DLSS, but in some cases it's so bad I've turned it on and have been pleased with the result.)
(Edit: The reason AI scalers are dodgy for VR, is that they have random/unpredictable scaling results, unlike a traditional scaler that does the same thing to every pixel, and for VR the left and right images can then end up scaled to different results, meaning they don't match, and you end up with artifacts.)
Re: Hogwarts Legacy a Huge Priority for PS5, Will Connect to HBO TV Show
@Rich33 Great details, that does make sense, I think (and why does the interior need to fit into the exterior? This is Hogwarts! )
Yeah, I could see them using the physical designs, but it still sounded more like they wanted to connect plots or something, which sounds so "big publisher." Doesn't mean it'll be bad I suppose though, I suppose it could sort of indirectly connect, like earlier eras of the families (19th century Malfoys and the like, we already have a Weaseley headmistress), early work of Riddle's ancestors paving the way, or something like that.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance To be fair to Hulst, Phil merely had a game that flopped on his hands. Hulst had the greatest failure ever recorded in the industry entirely of his own making. It might make sense why Phil reacted like he failed, and Hulst reacted like just discovered a body in his linen closet.
Interesting points on Hulst, and I agree, I never expected him to get PROMOTED. I often said that when I called for Jim to go, Herman also needed to go, but I didn't expect instead that they'd promote him to even half of Jim's job. And that's very interesting about Dreams, I'd never heard that!
Sega really maybe the only publisher that just keeps nailing it. Heck, even one of Nintendo's biggest IPs today, Splatoon, is given a very heavy dose of Jet Set Radio behind it.
Re: SEGA Is Bringing Back Its Iconic Virtua Fighter Franchise for PS5
@somnambulance LOL! It's insane, we've actually lived long enough to see Sega return. At this point they should announce a console again lol
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance Concord vs redfall is interesting because it's a truism in gaming. The only thing worse than a broken game is a boring one. Refall was broken but was still a unique game underneath it. Concord felt like a generic copy of a different game, even if it was a good copy. And predictably redfall massively outsold it even if it still failed.
I still think Jimbo put Hulst on this pedestal because he wanted him making that noise though. Jim built the monster that is Hulst. But hulst is just insane now. I think as soon as Hirai retired is when things started heading downhill. Hirai kept things in order after Tretton and House. There was just lag before their mission changed to Jim's.
For me between Yakuza, Atlus, new sonic etc, Sega is at a peak they haven't been to since the mega drive/Genesis.
Re: Netflix's Recent AAA Studio Closure Part of Planned AI Pivot
Got to love when companies with no plan or knowledge of an industry create a new high budget team, do nothing, then close it.
All these executives heard how much money Apple make from gaming, wanted to get in on a piece of that, and then found it out takes tens of millions and 8 years to get an ROI and now want an out.
Re: PS5 Pro Makes Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Look Like a Whole New Game
@Matroska LOL, so much this. I'm finding it honestly funny both from fans and media reading all the conversation around how absolutely revolutionary this is, that it's changing gaming forever, as though all these people are seemingly unaware that this has all existed before, since before the PS5 launched at all, and isn't anywhere near the top of what already has existed for years now. It's one thing to say that for one's own budgeting and options it represents the convenience to budget to performance ratio that works for them, but this hyperbole as though something new and unique is happening by being able to set sliders to medium-high is equal parts hilarious and depressing.
Re: Hogwarts Legacy a Huge Priority for PS5, Will Connect to HBO TV Show
@Rich33 Maybe, it sounded more like they meant tying the narrative, but it just doesn't make sense tying the game's era to the actual Potter narrative. Maybe you're right, it's about the castle.
I feel like the game took more from the films than the games in terms of the castle (basing it off the 2 real castles it was filmed in), but did allow it to be much bigger which was great, as the real castles are quite small. I assume the TV show will use all CG/greenscreen because I doubt they have the budget to rent and rennovate real castles as the films did.
@LifeGirl I agree, but I'm not sure we're sure they're going to be changing the direction of the TV show. The info that it was to be a strict adaptation of the books came from JKR, and I'm pretty sure she's an executive producer of it, so I doubt they can change the script without her approval. Yeah WB is WB, and they have the film rights, but I'm not sure they'd change the whole premise like that.
Not that I'd mind a TV show set in the WoW that was original and separate from Harry, too.
Re: Assassin's Creed Shadows Lays the Foundation for a New Modern-Day Narrative
@Northern_munkey To be fair, I've always felt that the first AC was the best AC. I think it got the pacing of past/present right, and also told the narrative of the modern day much better, including that immersive narrative factor of being held prisoner in a room, and reading your captor's email etc. I think if they kept it going that way it would have been great, but as early as 2 they started really bungling the modern day part. I don't think having the modern was the problem, I think doing the modern badly after the first game did it so well was the problem.
Re: Hogwarts Legacy a Huge Priority for PS5, Will Connect to HBO TV Show
Super hyped about all of this. I loved everything about the base game and enjoyed every minute in it. Very much more than the sum of its parts. The expansion, and the sequel are going to be absolute must haves for me. The only factor i don't understand is how they're going to connect the 19th century Legacy into the HBO series, as, if I recall what JKR said about the series, its' just a TV adaptation of the books that is supposed to stick more to the direct events of the books than the film adaptations that deviated and went their own way a bit. So how will Legacy 2 connect directly to Potter's story a century later? I don't mind trying to connect it, but I also enjoyed Legacy existing outside the Potter-Voldem--err, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named story.
Re: Assassin's Creed Shadows Lays the Foundation for a New Modern-Day Narrative
@Northern_munkey At one time I agreed that all I cared about was the historical part, but after they kind of dropped that, it became obvious that the overarching narrative about the connection to the past and present, genetic memory, conspiracy theory stuff really was glue that set the series apart and held it together. It was this historical fiction world, that made sense being connected to a modern sci-fi conspiracy thriller, and that back and forth connection set the game and story apart as something unique. They bungled it badly, went with "Because Aliens." meme, and then forgot about it, but I think the woven narrative about genetic memory and reliving ancestors pasts was an important part of the identity of AC, and provided a reason why you have a HUD and xray vision, and icon markers, and all these things in a historical setting, because you're not playing Ezio or Altair, you're playing Desmond who's playing Ezio and Altair through a VR-type system neurally wired. It really helped with suspension of disbelieve because it provided an in-game believable reason why you can see and do things in history that aren't possible. If it's a simulator, it's possible, and there's a reason for it all to exist as it does.
Re: PS5 Pro Makes Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Look Like a Whole New Game
Yes, let's celebrate buying brute force hardware to fix devs that can't optimize a game to work properly on the hardware you already have, even when said game is exclusively made for that specific hardware. Remember when console players made fun of PC gamers for this?
Re: What Is PSSR for PS5 Pro?
@LifeGirl ""PSSR isn’t perfect and it’s important to remember this is Sony’s first attempt at implementing the technology""
I find that quote so amusing. "Please beware this $700 product is just a beta test, just excuse the company for design flaws. They tried hard. You should offer them encouragement, understanding, and most of all, money, so they can learn from their mistakes and sell someone (you) something better after further R&D (you) provided time (and money) to them.
Yeah, DLSS isn't perfect either and AI upscaling will never be perfect, but this kind of soft-sell language to just accept an underbaked product for high price points because "getting products finished is hard." Rationalizing and justifying ever higher costs for ever less finished products has been the game for the tech media (and fandom) for so long it's become an expected normal.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance Yeah, that's exactly it. I think both for fans, and for the company itself (and the image they paint for their shareholders) everyone across the board is blinded by Sony's raw sales figures in units, and their #1 position, without looking at the nuiance of what's really going on inside and the industry at large. While their revenues are great by being the default system, they've ended up in a position where there's no actual reason to purchase their product beyond that a competitor with a stronger reason to buy doesn't exist, and "because everyone else has one" becomes their main appeal. But there's a lot of competitors around the edges eating at that market steadily.
While I'm part of the Xbox mutiny in part, I agree, though the internet makes it seem dire, and although their console hardware sales are deeply stalled, their overall business seems steady, and, even if due to "buying the industry" poised for slow-but-steady continuous growth overall, even if mostly in software. Their platform is genuinely good, merely unpopular, and they have their fingers in many pies, for whatever way the winds blow, while Sony keeps retrenching to dig in, because they can not endure their existing model to falter.
Ironically, I think the market for a fixed console would have remained solid had Sony not gone the route of "premium brand" and jacking prices up and up. The Playstation is successful because it was an affordable commodity product. The more they try to drag it into being a premium luxury product, the smaller they shrink their TAM, and the more their core market erodes. Chasing the live service cash cows in a panic to offset this, ended up severely weakening their position instead, by losing large amounts of cash, and leaving giant holes in their product value/incentives, they've left the window wide open for competition to undermine them.
All they had to do was serve the customer rather than seeking endless growth and they'd have had a steady, loyal business.
I do think a lot of this goes back to Jimbo though. Yes, Herman is a massive problem, but remember it was Jim who ousted Layden and brought up Herman to replace him as a fellow traveler sharing similar ideals. No Jimbo, no Herman. Though we also ignore Ken Yoshida (not Shu, no relation) SGC CEO. Whether he prodded Jim to do as he did, or merely drank Jim's koolaid, he didn't help.
Capcom has been hitting sales goals, but IMO they've been doing pretty bafflingly poorly with games that people keep excusing despite being problematic releases. Sega, IMO might be the pinnacle of the game industry these days, doing almost everything right, which is just vindication if you're an old school Sega fan that watched them spiral down, only to see them now at arguably their peak.
Re: Dragon's Dogma 2 Set to Run Significantly Better on PS5 Pro, Early Footage Reveals
@Porco gaming somehow caught up to Hollywood in half the time. Why make new things when you already have the things people like! Just keep selling those in new ways. We even have anniversary editions.
This generation has just been miserable. You know it's bad when even Sony itself is mostly selling its newest $700 console based on it being the best PS4 yet. I'm guessing the PS6 will be marketed as the bestest ever way to experience the PS4.
I swore off PC gaming 15+ years ago and this Gen was so bad it pushed me permanently back. Maybe it's "more expensive" in bursts but with this sales model and nickel and dining, not by all that much really
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance TBH with discounts I'm not even sure the piracy thing is a major factor even. It exists but I'm not sure it has a huge effect on sales. Even the pirates have more legal games in their backlog than they can play in their lifetime.
I think in a lot of ways, Microsoft actually got it the most almost right for the future. The streaming subscription model is how the world consumes media today. They got the trend better than anyone but then bungled the messaging, while publishers feeding at the PlayStation through actively rejected it because the old model was working..... But now it's starting to not. I think Ms actually saw it coming. But managed it all wrong.
I agree though, PlayStation despite being top, despite being default, is in a dangerous position. I liken current PS to Kmart. Ib the 90s they were #2 retailer behind only Sears. Management wrote off Walmart as a regional store, not a competitor, "grocery will kill them". They were comfortable at #1 and decided to not invest in remodeling their stores and instead spent all the money on buying new chains. Pizza (little Caesars), books (Borders), sporting goods (sports authority), home improvement (builders square). All of which went under. Meanwhile the #1 stores were dated and not at cheap and didn't have grocery like Walmart. They tried to add grocery but got retail guys to handle grocery and had aisles of canned goods and boxed goods and some frozen and staple dairy and not produce or much else. They rapidly were sinking. Then management lied to investors about how bad things were and gave themselves payouts (pleaded guilty in court!), sold the whole thing to a hedge guy who then spent the rest of the cash buying Sears itself. And they both sunk together. From the top 1 and 2 retailer from the 90s, thousands of locations, to, rumor says, 3 stores of each remaining with no inventory inside. With the management, ps reminds me a lot of 90s Kmart when they were "#2" behind Sears. Pretty sure I see Herman stacking cans in "grocery".
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance Unfortunately I agree. I think that's more or less exactly what's going to happen. I think Nintendo and PC will be fine and will remain home of the masses. Xbox and PS have a very very difficult, self inflicted path.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance 😂 I love it! We need to get that started, #beachthewhales!
Yeah I totally agree. The whales are ALL that matters now. And the money backs it up. On the other hand I can kind of get the appeal. As a vr nms fan that just played for months and months, splatoon addict, and recently getting into VR sim racing and elite dangerous games that live for years and suck you into another breathing world, there's a lot to like in some of that, and to actually get good you really need to play for years. But the industry isn't into that because it's not actually monetized at all. They only care about monetizing.
And yet I still love my fixed length games as much as ever . Problem really is the market can't bear higher costs, yet the industry committed itself to ever rising production costs. The numbers just don't add up. In a lot of ways naughty dog ruined the industry. Sony raced to bottle their success and capture Hollywood with a controller, competitors all lined up to copy it and then after committing to it they all figured out they can't quadruple revenue by doubling the budget.
I'm wondering how gta6 will go. It'll sell great but by all rumors they're spending far far far too much on it, betting the whole company on it, and theres no guarantee that gta6 will replace gta5 for shark card whales.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Upgrade the Xbox-Owned Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
@Max_the_German @get2sammyb Exactly, it's all best on windows, Microsofts main platform, and reaches a much larger market there too. Followed in distant second by PS5 pro, then tie for third behind xsx/PS5.
Only down side of this game on PC at least on Xbox store is the download. It says 300gb, but actually downloads 200gb, and then after that you can delete the mp/campaign parts you don't want. The bundled mw3 multiplayer is 86gb alone.
Still this is a game that proves why Sony isn't bothering with disc drives, 😂
Re: Fans Work Out Why Monster Hunter Wilds Feels So Weird and Weightless in PS5 Beta
What has happened to Capcom? It seems like they went from unstoppable to gutter trash back to glimmers of unstoppable and now back to gutter trash. How could they mess up monhun of all things?
Re: Dragon's Dogma 2 Set to Run Significantly Better on PS5 Pro, Early Footage Reveals
I like how every single article on push square is now "game runs better on better hardware" If the push square staff ever ran a PC site they'd have a hard time writing "game is better on x hardware" for the dozen or so current GPU configurations existing.
@Porco Yeah, I really don't understand the "capgod" meme, they've been pretty awful for quite a while now. And we're definitely entering the era of "ps5 game runs like garbage, because if you care how it runs you'd buy pro", and the cackling hyenas on the forums will follow repeating the refrain.
@GamingFan4Lyf Here's the weird thing with how DD2 uses CPU: I'm one of those 7800x3D players, and am playing with a VR mod running which clobbers CPU. In DD2? It uses between 8-28%CPU. Never hits 30. usually stays in single digits.The fans never even rev up. It's not even using much of the CPU, it must be just throwing everything into a single thread on a single core and calling it a day.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
@somnambulance I think it's about percentages. Customer retention would be important if it were a majority share of their profits, but it really isn't, the "loyal" "exclusives only" customers are such a small percentage of their revenue and profits they really just don't matter very much. The money comes from the GTA/Fortnite/Roblox/whatever crowd. They either need to be concerned only with whatever keeps those players buying on PS, or they need to be concerned with generating their own must-have equivalent (the live service initiative.) Or they need to be like Nintendo and change their business model so that it's pretty much only about the exclusives as a whole model. But selling hardware to people "for the exclusives" is pretty much like paying yourself tips for serving yourself dinner. It moves product "number" but does nothing on finances.
I don't think the PC initiative is the issue, their games are pretty much useless without spreading beyond PS. PS customers don't buy enough to sustain their rising costs. Putting games on PC, just means PC-only players don't buy a console "for the exclusives" anymore. But PC players that bought a PS "for the exclusives" were hardly generating much revenue at all, while porting the games to PC native opens it up to a larger overall market, meanwhile Sony makes fewer overall games anyway.
At the end of the day the "exclusives only" console buyer nets Sony, maybe $20 on the hardware, and an extra $30% on a few games sold, at the cost of keeping their market for their games smaller than it could be and reaching more customers.
Re: More People Are Playing the Original Horizon Zero Dawn Than Its Remaster on PC
This isn't "the novelty is wearing off". This is "PC gamers have a lot more sense and patience than fomo child-minded console gamers. They expect games are good forever, don't buy into full priced "same game with a graphics mod" reissues, there's no $10 upgrade on PC, and the full game was $12 just weeks ago. Who'd pay full price for a shinier newer version when the old one looks better than it does on console already, then has mods to make to look even better, and costs $12?
The whole recent remaster thing is very much a console only kind of thing. In this case it's acceptable on console because it's pretty and it's cheap as a paid gfx mod. Was never going to move on PC. Well, not until it's cheap
@somnambulance the problem with that, which Sony realized, is that people that buy a PlayStation to buy a handful of exclusives but play third party elsewhere don't actually make them much money. They don't care about retaining customers that buy "for the exclusives" because they just aren't profitable customers. They make more money reaching market that doesn't buy consoles than they do from the people that buy consoles only to play those games.
How they ARE backfiring on strategy is requiring psn logins, where half they market they're missing on console, the stopped THEMSELVES from being able to access.
EDIT: I stand corrected, @LowDefAl pointed out that the upgrade exists on PC. I don't recall ever reading that but I checked after you said it, and so it does. I'm actually impressed. If Luke Ross updates the VR mod to support it, and he probably will because he already supports hfw and it's the same engine, I'll actually upgrade and consider playing again.
Re: Fortnite Mixing It Up with Hip-Hop Chapter 2 Reboot
@IamJT Yeah, how the psychology works on kids has got to be a terrifying thing on its own, though "targeted" still isn't totally new, in that things advertised in places kids were already looking in the past were already well targeted, really, but yeah, is frightening how much of "advertising" is more like psychological warfare now. I forget how it works as I keep everything set anonymous and related advertising off, so all I get are generic ads for things I couldn't possibly be less interested in lol.
Re: Fortnite Mixing It Up with Hip-Hop Chapter 2 Reboot
@IamJT You're probably right and yet being bombarded by marketing isn't really new for kids, yet this still feels radically different. Where participating in the marketing is the main activity.
@Ryu_Niiyama it defies all logic, but somehow Snoop actually is relevant. He practically reinvented himself as a kids star, which in context is incomprehensible, and yet, there it is.