Ben_H

I don't actually completely agree with this. The social aspect of Fortnite cannot be denied, of course, but there's more to the domination of Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. I'm not sure if the kids truly actually would rather play Fortnite or if they simply aren't aware that other things exist.

The fact of the matter is that most people need to be shown things to even consider them at all since they don't know where to look or what is interesting and the current internet is not financially incentivized to show people things that they might actually like versus simply funnelling them to the thing that is a safe bet to make money as fast as possible. This happens all the time across all media now because of how current recommendation algorithms work. On Youtube, for example, the algorithm now massively favours time watched and clickthroughs, so if a kid looks up video games on Youtube, they're most likely going to run into Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft since videos about those games have had an unbreakable foothold on the platform for many years now and are heavily favoured by the algorithm since it knows they will generate more traffic and ad revenue than most other video game related content. The chance of these kids running into anything else is extremely low now unless they specifically go out of their way to look for it, and most people won't do that. Other games also have no chance of breaking this dominance in search priority either so now games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft have a huge built-in advantage. Even if kids do try to go out of their way to find new or interesting things, the algorithm will fight against this and try to push them back towards the mean since it still is the most likely way for the platform to make money (I had this happen recently. I was watching videos on reverse engineering software, a niche area of cybersecurity. Youtube decided that meant I wanted programming videos so it filled my feed with aggressively generic web development videos, since that's the most popular area of programming. No matter how much I tell Youtube I'm not interested in web development, it keeps trying to push me to watch web development videos. This is the perfect example of why modern Youtube is broken. It no longer is designed to give you videos or information relevant to you. It now gives you videos it thinks will drive you to click on more videos trying to find something relevant and in doing so you will watch more ads).

It's no different with music. You can see it every time some song goes viral on TikTok. Most of the songs that go viral, especially older ones, are always extremely obvious, well known tracks for the artist in terms of popularity that anyone who had listened to music before the current reliance on algorithms for music playlists would have probably run into before. However, because the current way most people listen to music, Spotify, by default pushes people to listen to largely the same specific sets of artists, users have to go out of their way to train their recommendation system to give them other music to listen to. Even with me, despite it having years of listening habits and dozens and dozens of playlists, once in a while Spotify still tries to get me to listen to top 40 pop music and whatever Sabrina Carpenter is. It's because of this that suddenly the kids think it's a hot or unique take to say that Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Paramore, or other well-known-to-the-olds-but-not-pushed-to-young-people-by-the-algorithm musicians are good artists. The algorithm ferries them all towards the same generic stuff so they have to rely on others outside of it (be it movies, shows, their friends, parents, etc.) to expose them to new cool things. It's a failing of the platform that huge swaths of the population are entirely unfamiliar with artists and music that used to be otherwise considered mainstream and had widespread appeal for a reason. The platforms have no interest in helping people find their tastes but instead push them all to have the same taste since that is easier to market to and the safest bet to drive whatever metric they think is best at the time.

Of course, the counterargument is "but all of that other media is out there, you just have to look for it" but that's easier said than done. Modern internet search is essentially useless for this type of thing now, and everything else for that matter. If you try to look up information or a list of interesting games/songs/shows to try, chances are you are not actually going to find that list or anything else relevant unless you already specifically know where to look. The first few pages of the google results will be either aggressively generic listicles telling you the most obvious info possible, recommendations to watch clickbait Youtube videos, or machine-generated garbage crammed full of ads. Google, Bing, etc., no longer incentivize their search tools to provide useful searches, but instead to maximize the number of clickthroughs and searches so that they can make more ad money (See Ed Zitron recently unearthing some internal communications from a Google anti-trust trial that showed an ad exec essentially pressuring the search team to sacrifice search result quality if it could boost ad revenue, then taking over the search team and making things much, much worse). The fact that all these companies are making AI tools to parse search results tells on them because it shows they know that their search products are so bad that they're unfit for human consumption now.

The next counterargument is "But the monoculture has existed for decades so this is nothing new" but there's a huge difference now that makes this argument also irrelevant. When you went to a video rental store, music store, or wherever back in the day, outside of specific obvious promotions like the new releases, every item on the shelf had a chance of being looked at and it was up to the item to present itself in a way that would catch the eye of the consumer. I ended up renting dozens and dozens of niche games from the Family Video that I never would have tried otherwise simply because they looked neat to me. This scenario allows people's personal tastes to factor in heavily, and allows people who don't know what they like to experiment until they find something that works for them. This type of experience doesn't really exist anymore with modern digital storefronts. There's simply too much stuff and none of it is organized in a way that's useful to humans. All of the digital storefronts are so full of junk that unless you know specifically what you are looking for, you can't just browse them now and instead have to rely on curated lists. This pushes everyone to using the same products and services and severely limits the chance of people to find anything different. The storefronts push what they think will make them the most money and this drowns out anything smaller from being noticed.

I don't blame the kids for all playing the same small sets of games. They don't know any better. It's the fault of the platforms and publishers. They've chased the easy money for so long that they've forgot that there needs to be diversity in an industry for it to flourish. For there to be a next big thing there need to be people making it, and right now the games industry is chasing out all of the people who could make those big things in favour of concentrating everything around the few golden geese they currently have. The entire media industry is set up this way right now and it seems like it's not going to last. The indie scenes in all forms of media are the only things actually keeping things going right now.

I'm in the same boat. I was listening to the recent Brad & Will Tech Pod episode on the state of gaming on Linux when I fired up my PC, which wanted to update Windows 11 the day before but I had told it not to, and it not only had updated but forced me to go through that 5-6 screen post-update thing where it tries to convince you to use OneDrive, subscribe to 365, and now asks you what your interests are for ad purposes (gross). I took that as a sign to try out Linux on a separate partition.

I'm using the Pop_OS! distro (it's Ubuntu-based), which has been almost entirely hassle-free so far. I've tested roughly 40 games or so (there's a trick to use games installed on Windows already with Linux Steam, saving me from having to re-install them) and the only ones that haven't worked are, to no surprise whatsoever, Microsoft games or games with certain anti-cheat systems that don't work on Linux. I also got the Epic Games Store and Battle.net working fine and was able to bring in my installed games from Windows on Battle.net.

I've basically given myself two weeks to test Linux and if I don't find anything that gives me a reason to go back to Windows, I'm just gonna wipe my Windows install and move over to Linux full-time.

Yes, absolutely. If you like the console experience, it's still there for you, and probably will be into the future since there is still a fairly big market for it.

It's more that the traditional focus on consoles as the primary platforms games come out on is likely to keep being less of a thing and games will diversify to be mostly platform-agnostic in many cases (this is already mostly the case outside of specific publishing deals and the like), especially given the news that growth on the current consoles is slowing quite a bit. Sony, Microsoft, and Square have all indicated they are moving in this direction in the last few weeks/months. Square said they're shifting their focus from exclusivity deals to aiming to have their games available everywhere. Sega has already been on this path for the better part of a decade now rather successfully (Many of their formerly PlayStation-exclusive franchises like Persona and Yakuza/Like a Dragon are available everywhere now). It's likely that in the near future, unless you want to play Nintendo games, you won't have to buy specific consoles anymore to have access to the extreme majority of games (well, ignoring mobile games. I'm talking more traditional PC/console-style games) and it will come down to preference for where you play them.

Grubb and Gerstmann have both talked about the potential of consoles to turn into a phone-like device where, rather than there being concrete differentiators between generations of them, they become devices that instead get spec bumps and redesigns every once and a while but otherwise function the same much like phones or tablets do these days ( i.e. outside of specific, small changes, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 14 largely function identically. One just has a faster SoC and better camera setup than the other). Microsoft has already been doing this to a certain extent since the Xbox One and it wouldn't be surprising to see Sony doing the same in the future. It makes sense too. It's not like the old days where each platform was dramatically different under the hood, making porting games from one platform to another or to the PC a complete nightmare (e.g. the GameCube had an PowerPC CPU and ATi GPU, the original Xbox was basically an x86 Pentium III PC with a Geforce 3, and the PS2 had a custom MIPS CPU with a custom GPU. All different CPU and GPU architectures. Cool). Now both the PS5 and Series consoles use relatively similar x86 AMD APUs and PCI-e-based storage so port work is more concerned with conforming the the various platform-specific requirements Sony and Microsoft have for publishing games on their platforms along with optimizing for the specific configurations of those consoles.

As I said, I don't think consoles are going to disappear. It's just more likely that they will exist as an option for playing games but will no longer be the primary focus of publishers like the were for the last 30 years or so until extremely recently. Meeting people where they are is probably the way forward.

Yes. In terms of how much money they've made I'm sure they're just fine but in terms of future prospects, they've both failed badly and have potentially started the end of traditional consoles as a going concern.

Neither Microsoft or Sony have provided actual reasons to buy their consoles beyond a person having a personal preference for consoles. With these two, along with other major publishers, chasing the giant blockbuster games that take forever to make and have most of the interesting things focus grouped out of them, they don't give us many games that drive console purchases anymore. The games they release are not actually worth playing on their consoles specifically. Most first-party games are now either day and date available on PC or are going to be available on PC eventually, which kills the entire reason people buy these consoles in the first place (for example: I want to play FF7 Rebirth, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a PS5 just to play that one game when there's nothing else in the handful of exclusives that interests me. Doubly so when I already know that FF7 Rebirth is going to hit PC sooner rather than later. In the PS4 era, I bought a PS4 Pro for Persona 5 but I justified it by also wanting to play Horizon, TLOU Remastered, and a bunch of other then-exclusives. That library of exclusives doesn't exist on PS5. It's even more dire on the Xbox side of things).

The pandemic and related FOMO factor that made these consoles extremely desirable for 2020 and 2021 gave the manufacturers a large boost early on, but both Sony and Microsoft have squandered all of the momentum they received from this time by not releasing enough exclusive games and not giving people reasons to go for their platforms specifically. A lot of people back then were buying consoles either as something to do during lockdown or as a fill-in gaming solution for the fact they couldn't get PC parts without selling their vital organs and limbs. Once people started going outside again and supply issues eased, we were left with two consoles that don't actually do much on their own merit to exist beyond being competent but boring game boxes.

At this point the only reason to buy a PS5 or Series console is if you prefer the console experience. PCs have now become simple enough for normal people to play games on and in many ways can either match or exceed the experience of a console when hooked up to a TV. Market preferences are also shifting. The younger generations play a lot more multiplayer games as a means of socializing with their friends and that is extremely easy to do on PC nowadays ,which has caused the PC to increasingly be the preferred platform of these people. With fewer games pushing graphical boundaries anymore (since it's so expensive and time-consuming to make games that do), what constitutes a competent gaming PC has also become so broad that it's to the point that unless you are playing stuff at 4k, you can kinda get away with playing many games on anything that isn't a Chromebook or extremely budget laptop. This is really driven home by the Steam Deck, whose GPU is equivalent to a discrete GPU from 10-12 years ago, being as popular as it is. You just don't need that much power to have a fun time playing games with your friends.

It's become increasingly clear that not many people actually care about all of the graphical bells and whistles that the new consoles enable. Only a small minority of PC gamers play in 4K, and on consoles most people would be more than content with upscaled 1080p or 1440p rather than native 4K if it meant consoles and games were cheaper (that's ignoring that the extreme majority of people couldn't tell the difference between native 4k and upscaled 1080p in the first place). The lion's share of popular games are available on the older consoles still. As Gerstmann said on his podcast yesterday, if you are a mainstream game player who only plays games a few hours a week, why would you buy a PS5 when you can keep playing COD or Fortnite with your buddies on your old PS4? Sure the games look a bit better on the PS5, but outside of that the experience is largely the same. On the PC side of things, cheaper GPUs are massively more common as well. Unless you have specific needs or are a nerd, it's extremely hard to justify buying anything more powerful than a 3060/4060 when cards like those will competently run pretty much every popular game under the sun right now. Most of the current drive for faster and shinier consoles and PC GPUs comes from an extremely loud but ultimately small minority of gamers who increasingly don't represent the average person who plays games anymore.

The DS4 is almost the perfect controller so I went Playstation even though I haven't used the DualSense (I also liked the DS1 and DS2. They were fine. I never used a DS3 or Sixaxis). The DS4 is light, comfortable, and quiet. It loses points by not having a replaceable battery along with weak battery life but if you mostly use it with PC like I do, the trick is to go into the custom lighting menu in Steam or on DS4Windows and disable the controller's glowy light altogether. I swear it triples the battery life to have that big bright LED turned off. I only have to charge my main DS4 like once a week because of this.

Prior to this generation of controllers I would have said Xbox. The 360 and Xbox One controllers are both extremely comfortable and I still use both regularly. The Xbox One controller is in my view one of the best controllers ever made.

The problem is that the new revision of the Xbox controller that came with the Series consoles is a massive step backwards. It's not only much cheaper feeling, but worse in many other ways than the Xbox One version. Firstly, it's way too noisy. The face buttons are extremely clicky and loud to the point of being distracting. Then there's the D-pad. I could deal with the face buttons being how they are but the D-pad makes this thing unusable. It's somehow even louder than the face buttons (Gerstmann complained about this too. He said it's so loud that he can't use Xbox controllers anymore because the clicks wake up his kids if they're napping in his office). Not only is the new D-pad extremely noisy, but it's also far too stiff. There's no play to the D-pad so you have to use a bit of extra force to do inputs, which over time adds up. I tried playing Tony Hawk 1 + 2 with it and ended up with a sore thumb within about 20 minutes. It's like they looked at the 360 D-pad and went "How can we make this worse in every way possible" and did it. It was clearly designed by people who think of games as shooters where the D-pad is only occasionally used, not people who play fighting games, indies, retro games, or RPGs that rely upon using the D-pad extensively.

My actual hot take answer is that if the Switch Pro controller had analog triggers it would be my favourite. It's extremely light, quiet, and has a battery that lasts weeks. The D-pad isn't as good as the DS4 but it's still good enough for most games. I use my spare Pro Controller with my Steam Deck a lot and it's great.

This has big "jangle keys in front of shareholders to distract them" energy. We already know most shareholder-types already completely lack object permanence and anything resembling foresight so this might do just enough to make them forget about the complete disaster of a week Xbox had last week.

But seriously, this makes no sense. I'm glad these developers have jobs and all, but it doesn't make up for Microsoft closing multiple studios or any of the other stupid things they've done the last 2... err... 5 uhhh... 10 years or so. They've entirely destroyed any trust left in them to have a realistic plan for the future beyond hoping their sacred cows they bought for $70 billion keep providing for them. Phil's a smooth talker but it's increasingly hard to look at his tenure at Xbox as anything other than a massive failure. The only thing they have going for them now is that they've been able to use their parent company's largess to bail them out when needed. They had Game Pass but apparently that wasn't good enough so they destroyed their content pipeline for it instead of investing more in it.

I'm playing the DS version of this game right now in my quest to play all the old Final Fantasy games. They did the black mage so dirty in this DS version. They're kind of useless for the first few hours. I've tried switching between with the black mage and the red mage to compare, and for this early bit of the game the red mage is massively better in every way.

I came to this game just after finishing FF1, so I was used to the black mage absolutely wrecking everything all the time. Suddenly now the black mage has a basically unusable physical attack so your ability to progress in dungeons and grinding is limited by the black mage's MP since if they run out you're down an entire person. At least in FF1, if you needed, if you used physical attacks with the black and white mages they could combine to roughly equal the damage output of one of the dedicated physical attack classes for most of the game.

As an aside, this DS version of FF3 does not play around. I was not expecting this big of a change in difficulty between these games (I cruised through FF1 and FF7, which both felt like they had a similar level of combat difficulty). The boss in the intro section of the game is harder than any boss in FF1 barring the final boss. I thought I had overlevelled my team for that intro boss and still struggled to beat it. I died in the intro section multiple times, including once where I went into a cave, walked about two steps, then got one-shotted by a few skeleton dudes who could hit for an entire lifebar of health. I'm starting to get a hang of the game now though so I'm enjoying the difficulty a bit more.

So basically Microsoft want to be the Netflix of games but are being too cheap to adequately support the people and studios that provide the content that is vital to their service actually working. Cool. Skimping out on hiring the extra staff necessary to keep Zenimax and the studios functioning properly was definitely worth tanking Xbox's entire reputation for. In a backwards way, they probably would have provided a lot more value to shareholders by just hiring the people Tango, Arkane, and others were asking for. Instead, Microsoft's reputation as a games publisher and service provider is in the dumps.

Every third party that Microsoft is approaching for Game Pass licensing deals should be demanding more money now for future deals. If things are as dire as it seems with Microsoft's game development and publishing pipeline, they are now going to have to rely more than ever on others signing content deals for Game Pass. They'll either have to pay up or Game Pass will lose subscribers.

It's like they've completely ignored how Netflix has grown and changed over the last 15ish years. Netflix built their gigantic content pipeline because licensing content from others was far too expensive to rely upon heavily. Microsoft looked like they were in the process of setting up a similar pipeline but now it seems like they're backing out and getting rid of everyone but those that work on the biggest things. Netflix, Amazon, and all the other streaming services crank out tons of shows and movies they know probably aren't going to be huge hits because the steady stream of new content, even if it isn't all gangbusters huge, is vital to the service continuing since it shows subscribers that there's new things to watch whenever they open the app.

Every bit of new information that comes out about this thing paints a worse and worse picture of the people in charge at both Xbox and Microsoft itself.

OK sure, but that gets back to my point of what does Microsoft actually want from their games? I wouldn't be shocked if this game sold poorly because it was one of the main games they used in marketing for Game Pass last year. I would bet far more people played it on Game Pass than bought it outright. But at the same time, it makes one wonder what Microsoft expects of games like this from a sales perspective. Do they expect it to sell just as well as if it was not a Game Pass game or do they factor in that Game Pass is probably going to heavily slow the sales of many of their self-published games?

Gerstmann brought up the exact same point on his podcast today (though he was, let's say, a bit more animated about it than me). He was completely puzzled by what Microsoft was doing and now has an extremely pessimistic view of them. Like me, he couldn't figure out what Xbox's current direction is or what they expect from the games they publish. He was concerned that if their sales expectations are as out of whack as it's looking, then Ninja Theory's probably doomed too since Hellblade 2 is unlikely to be a blockbuster hit. That Indiana Jones game has big flop potential too given how few younger people care about that franchise.

Xbox has no direction and no matter how many charm offensives their leadership team go on they never actually seem to do anything to clear up the misgivings people have of them.

Microsoft and Embracer are in a boxing match to see who can be the shittiest. This bout could go the distance. We still have many months left in the year. Microsoft is up in score but Embracer could land the knockout punch at any time.