It’s interesting to see what people genuinely consider to be bad, or maybe they just missed that word? 😅

For me, it would have to be Under The Skin; a solid 6/10 game, in a world where 7/10 is considered average!

It’s not as much a “feel-good” story as comments who haven’t read beyond the headline might make you believe:

The PIF values its total investments at nearly $1 trillion in assets, but a significant percentage of these are hard-to-sell assets with no public valuation; as a result, the NYT reports that the PIF reps have told international investors that it is “unable to allocate” for the near future.

Despite this, a spokesperson for the PIF, Marwan Bakrali, told the newspaper that it had $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”.

ETA: Its not as though they’ve lost a significant chunk of the fund, but rather that a sizeable portion of it is tied up in illiquid assets that can’t be readily sold, or valued and loaned against.

Though there is some mention of some of their investments being in “distress”, so there is at least some good news?

This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.

It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!

Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the Definitive Defective Edition.

It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

Not trying to have a go at you, actually genuinely curious: Do you have a source to confirm this, or is it more of an educated guess on your part?

All I’ve seen so far is that it’s a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6c/12t CPU and RDNA 3 28 CU GPU.

You know, I’ve always thought of Metroidvanias as 2D experiences - but reading your comment and mulling it over, I have to agree: Arkham Asylum is very much a Metroidvania, and a great one at that!

IP/trademarks/copyrights/etc.

This is likely going to be the main reason for the takedown notices, Sony will be exercising their legal rights in order to defend their trademarks & copyrights on Concord assets.

If a company doesn’t defend them vigorously, then any unlicensed works that are allowed to exist are then used as legal precedent moving forward to null/void such copyrights and trademarks.

As an aside, Sony is a global corporation and can likely choose to write down these losses in the most preferred region to maximise the tax offset - so likely either the US, or Ireland.

Sabotaged by the stupid placement of the microphone and earpiece… I still remember the taco phone memes of the day. Shame, it could have been great!

I’m not saying AI will go away, or not continue to improve - but we are very much at the tail end of the current mania phase, and we will see some market pullback as AI startups begin to go out of business when all of those lofty promises of AI fail to materialise.

Diminishing returns on ever increasing investment, circular investments based on speculative returns, these are all signs of the tail-end of a stock market bubble.

The best way to think of them is as cousins; they are similar - but not exactly the same.

They focus more on higher VRAM and CUDA cores compared to GPUs, while forgoing 3d acceleration capabilities.

But they both come out of the same factories; so when the demand for AI cards is as high as it is now - and Nvidia can sell as many as it produces with a higher margin than GPUs, there is little incentive for them to produce more GPUs and sell them at a competitive price.

So when the AI bubble bursts, demand for AI cards will crater - and there will be no financial incentive to mass produce them in such high quantities. This frees up production capacity at the TSMC factories, incentivising production of lower margin products like GPUs.

Economics is largely a game of supply & demand; when supply outstrips demand, prices fall as sellers search for buyers. When demand outstrips supply prices go up as buyers search for sellers.

Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.

Assuming the AI bubble bursts before then, we might actually see somewhat reasonable pricing for next-gen consoles.

A major reason why prices have remained so inflated for so long post-COVID is because data centres have been sucking up every bit of silicon that TSMC has been able to pump out for both Nvidia and AMD.

But that would be honestly a very small upside, compared to what would likely be the Mother of All Stockmarket Crashes. The market cap of the Top 10 AI-related stocks is greater than the current US national debt, they aren’t in a position to be able to reasonably bail out those companies when it all eventually goes to shit, like they do in 2008.

It’s more about the console’s lifecycle, rather than it remaining the ‘current generation’. They’re implying that they will continue to ‘support’ the PS5 for another 5 years, whatever they determine that to mean (likely just keeping the online store open, maybe also multiplayer servers, and whatever PlayStation Plus features ).

Oh, absolutely - but a lot of perpetual/evolving media has similar issues where previous canon ends up being recontextualised, reframed or outright retconned in order to better fit the overarching story currently being told.

Sometimes it’s for the better, others for the worse (cough, Shadowlands, cough).

Still, it doesn’t stop it from being an otherwise great example of world building - evident in part by just how many people actually care about the lore!

World of Warcraft; Azeroth (the planet) lore is quite detailed and fleshed out - building upon the foundations of the original RTS trilogy.

It’s a bit of a shame a lot of it gets swept under the rug every major expansion and patch cycle, so it’s hard for new(er) players to catch up.

Beyond Android phones, it should also be good for the emulation scene on macOS.

There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).

That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.

I don’t want to contribute to the mountains of AI slip on the internet, so instead I’ll just prompt the reader’s brain to imagine a picture of Bugs Bunny in Arabian robes, eating a carrot nonchalantly, with the caption “eh, wahabi ‘doc?”

We don’t even need to imagine, necessarily! The quality of games released towards the tail-end of its life cycle speaks volumes: Uncharted 2&3, The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 etc.

I don’t think there was anything actually wrong with the architecture per se, but rather just the lack of proper documentation and tools set potential developers back significantly.

It was definitely hubris on Sony’s part, thinking that they could do whatever they wanted given the prior success of both the PlayStation and PS2 consoles prior.

Those PS3 launch stumbles definitely were a wake-up call, however I do believe that because it was largely the US/Western arm of SCEI that lead the ‘rescue’ - they ended up wrestling control away from the JP arm, ultimately causing the PS4/5 to end up so risk adverse and largely unremarkable as a result.

Literal dictionary definition of a BIOS:

Note the part regarding enabling a computer to start the OS. But regardless, this point is largely moot as we are just arguing semantics.

No the PS4 doesn’t run a PC-style AMI/Phoenix BIOS, but instead a secure chain of Boot ROM to bootloaders - however, so do Macs, which are PCs.

Dumps of these console boot ROMs and loaders - at least in emulation circles - tend to be colloquially referred to as a BIOS, as it constitutes a System that handles Basic Input and Output.

It even putting this one point aside, it runs an AMD-designed x86-64 APU, that was available to purchase for PCs (AM1 socket) albeit with a reduced power GPU.

It runs GDDR5 unified memory like a modern iMac, or Steam Deck.

It natively runs a UNIX-derived OS, again like an iMac, or Linux on the Steam Deck.

Let’s just face facts, the PS4 & 5 are just iMacs in drag 😉