“Very well regarded in the piracy community” isn’t a phrase I thought I’d see today 🤣

Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong

However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.

Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world’s default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.

No one is saying that it should be free. The issue is that $50 for a straight port of a 13 year-old game is ridiculous when Sony’s competitor offers free backwards compatibility—and 4K upscaling. Microsoft absorbed their expenses for that as the cost of doing business, and it would be a blip on Rockstar’s balance sheet as well, since they make a perpetual avalanche of money from GTA Online. There’s really no credible justification for a price this high.

But the name of the website is “Alternative To,” not “Related To.” For example, if I’m looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I don’t want to see recommended video editors or 3D modeling apps. That is wasting my time with auto-generated page filler.

Unless I’m missing something here, this website does not provide a link to the original source and adds little to the discussion. They don’t even refer to them by their full name.

This is the original source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-nintendo-switch-2-targets-2024-with-next-gen-console/

This is considered to be very scummy behavior not just in games journalism, but in journalism in general. If you can’t do your own coverage, at least have basic respect for the people who can.

Blocking ad blockers has to be the real reason behind this convoluted bullshit. Google gets the lion’s share of its revenue from ads. The whole thing is a Trojan horse destined to make things better for them at our expense. The mere proposal is already accelerating my shift away from their products.

Something like 80% of Google’s revenue is from ads, even with that 30% cut they get from everything on their app store. So their core existence deeply conflicts with a free and open web. And it’s particularly unsettling because their web browser dominates the market, so they have the leverage to force us into their vision of the future. And this domination would be very difficult to counter. It’s the default browser on Android phones, and it is constantly flogged on Google.com, which is one of the most popular web portals in the world.

Fallout 76 is a bit different because it’s a live service game, and it runs on an engine that was wildly contorted to make it usable in that form. That’s presumably why it launched without NPCs and with all kinds of jank. Starfield, meanwhile, is Todd Howard’s own passion project that he’s dreamed about making for decades. I still expect a raft of bugs that will only ever be fixed by community modders, and it looks like the engine’s reputation for poor framerates will continue, based on the Xbox 30 fps cap. But I don’t think total cynicism is warranted. Yet.