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Joined 27 days ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2026
  • TimothyOilpants@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•Gamers push back: 71% say they’re not ready to let physical games die as PlayStation and Xbox move toward a digital-only future”English
    1·
    1 day ago

    Both Microsoft and Sony had this exact infrastructure built ready to go for Xbox One and PS4 prior to launch.

    We were going to get full digital collections with a marketplace that would allow entitlement sales AND the ability to loan entitlements to friends for set periods of time.

    When Microsoft announced the plans at E3 2013, a whiny minority of “core gamers” kicked up such a fuss that Microsofts stock tanked and they backpedalled… Sony hadn’t made any announcements yet and presented the EXACT opposite of Microsoft’s plan literally 8 hours later despite the fact that their existing hardware DevKits and system software functioned exactly as Microsoft had described. Sony got to look like the “hero” while both of them then scrambled to completely reengineer their hardware and system software prior to launch…

    We lost a bright future that day.

  • TimothyOilpants@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•Gamers push back: 71% say they’re not ready to let physical games die as PlayStation and Xbox move toward a digital-only future”English
    2·
    1 day ago

    The commitment to physical media has crossed the line from nostalgia into change resistance, driven by manufactured conspiracies. This transition is in the best interest of the majority of gamers; the vocal minority is just out of touch with how the broader community actually consumes that media.

    For millennia, non-static art (song, theater, performance, and oral storytelling) existed purely in ephemeral mediums without physical storage. The concept of “owning” a physical piece of interactive software is a historical anomaly that has existed for barely forty years.

    Economically and technologically, video games are the cheapest and most accessible they have ever been. Simultaneously, the depth, breadth, and quality of content are light-years ahead of what was imaginable in the 80s. We are living through the golden age of the medium, yet critics are lamenting the hypothetical loss of the 99% of games they were never going to replay in ten years anyway.

    Like it or not, software IS fundamentally a service now. A modern video game is not a static painting or a collectible display piece like a Funko Pop to put on your shelf; it’s a dynamic, adaptive, and interactive ecosystem shaped by ongoing player data and developer iteration. Holding a plastic disc hostage provides no value when that disc only contains an unpatched, broken, Day 0 build of the game at its literal worst.

    The romanticization of physical games is no different than audiophiles insisting that vinyl is the only “pure” way to experience music. It is an aesthetic preference masquerading as a consumer rights crusade.

  • TimothyOilpants@lemmy.catoGames@lemmy.world•Some Retailers Are Refusing to Sell GTA 6 Due to the Lack of a DiscEnglish
    9·
    12 days ago

    It’s like anything… Think about how many people ride bicycles. Now go to ANY online community where people talk about cycling; it will likely be the most insufferably pedantic assholes you can imagine.

    99% of people who buy video games don’t identify as “gamers”, they don’t read gaming media, and they certainly don’t interact with gaming discussion online.

    As both an industry professional (former), and a self-identified gamer, I stopped giving a shit what “core gamers” had to say 10 years ago.

  • TimothyOilpants@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•“Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisisEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    I disagree. You’re comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it’s in orbit.

    An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.

    A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.

    When people say the “care and polish” isn’t there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren’t getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.

  • TimothyOilpants@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•“Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisisEnglish
    9·
    13 days ago

    The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.

    The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.

    The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.

    The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.