Once again: mobile space vs console space. There are plenty of revenue streams and opportunities for profitable ventures here.

The article itself points out one of the reasons that Microsoft might be interested is to maximize the utilization of King, a studio they got as part of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, makers of Candy Crush and Bejeweled. That’s just one example- off the top of my head I remember Ratchet and Clank had “Going Mobile”, Knack had a tie-in mobile game where you could earn extra currency and transfer it to the PS4 games. Nintendo has done tons of stuff like Pokemon Go, Sleep, TCG, Cafe, Mario Runner, Fire Emblem, and more. And Microsoft owns more than just King.- Bethesda has done a handful of Slder Scrolls mobile games, and Fallout Shelter was an incredible award-winning game that was so good it goy ported to PC. It wasn’t long ago people were speculating that AAA single-player experiences might be getting killed off in favor of these smaller, cheaper, much more profitable mobile games.

The article also mentions cloud gaming- the Portal and Logitech G-cloud are already exploring this space a little bit and I expect that to continue (personally I love using my Deck to stream from my PC or PS4 to save battery, reduce heat and noise, and have better graphics settings, albeit only when I’m on my home network). These companies absolutely love subscription services, so I could see that even subsidizing the hardware. Xbox is trying to push gamepass onto every device it can- what if they could subsidize a low-powered handheld with excellent battery life that could be another avenue for that? I know things like NVIDIA GeForce Now and Stadia have failed, but I think it’s only a matter of time before global Internet bandwidth and latency gets good enough for that to make sense. I hate the idea of cloud gaming personally, but it seems like what the market is trending towards.

But that’s still a janky workaround compared to the elegance of design.

What about if you don’t get to resume play for a while? Hours, days, weeks, months? If you stopped in the middle of a cutscene, a battle, a puzzle… Just because it’s mechanically possible doesn’t mean it’s a good experience. Games typically require the player to temporarily store information in their own minds to be used later. One of my own personal rules I have learned from experience is to never quit Skyrim in the middle of a dungeon. Because inevitably a month later I’ll get the itch to go and organize my house, only to get disheartened and change my mind when I see i left myself halfway through a draugr crypt.

There are also hardware considerations. I love a big, high-res screen. One of my biggest problems with the Deck is that it’s not 1080p. But big screens, more pixels, better refresh rates, more brightness, and better graphics settings has tradeoffs. More weight, more volume, more heat, more fan noise, worse battery life. Around the house I usually don’t care because I have decent chargers in key locations.

But if I’m out and about traveling, or if I had to go somewhere for work where I only got 15 minutes in the break room, I would just use a different device. Something small, light and power efficient. Like the 3DS or my Powkiddy RGB10Max. Typically just 2D or very lightweight 3D games, and if I’m emulating I can settle for lower resolutions and framerates. It’s an entirely different experience and use case.

And that’s why I said that it’s really two different markets- those smaller devices are more directly competing with smartphones than consoles, while the big boys like the Deck are competing with laptops, desktops, and console setups. The Switch is probably closer to the deck, although the Lite version really toes that line.

What doesn’t get talked about enough in this conversation is how these devices are expected to be used and how that influences game design. Most crucially- exit points.

I remember taking my Gameboy, GBA, and DS everywhere. The school bus, recess, boy scout meetings. Always in my backpack as I walked around campus in college. In my locker when I worked retail and got 15 minute breaks. It was part of my every day carry, and most of the games were designed with that in mind. Really short load times, plenty of check points or opportunities to save. Very rare to get into a battle or dungeon that would take more than 10 minutes to get to a spot where you can leave without losing progress. Very rare to have to hold ton of information in your brain’s working memory for long periods of time to really enjoy it.

Console games can have long build-ups. More complicated plots. Bigger dungeons. Long cutscenes. A wider range of pacing available. There are some truly great experiences that are possible if you can make the assumption that you have most of the player’s attention for a solid 60 minutes or more.

Imagine trying to play Death Stranding or Metal Gear Solid 4 on a 15 minute break at work and entering a cutscenes that is 25-30 minutes long, for example.

That being said, the Switch really started the trend of handheld gaming in the home. Perhaps families where someone is is using the main TV. Dorms or small apartments where it’s hard to get a good couch setup. Personally I love using the Deck to play in bed, or outside on my covered porch, or even just on the couch while my wife is using the main TV. Or sometimes I just don’t want to put my glasses on because my eyes are tires. Those situations can easily lend themselves to longer playing sessions. This is where the PlayStation Portal falls, for example.

So if Sony or Microsoft were to make a new handheld they would have to target one of those two use cases. Essentially, they would either be competing with Consoles/PC’s in that space or the mobile gaming space.

The retro handheld scene is still pretty niche, but most of them are small, cheap, and lightweight which makes them great for the mobile space. They can emulate games that were designed for handhelds, and even adding things like save states is at least a feasible workaround for some other games.

Trick question: none of the stations are worth listening to.

I plead the 5th

Just trying to get the cops to stop harassing innocent and unrelated people is all.

separated from his wife for years

Remember that according to the FBI more than half of murderers know their victims personally, and about a quarter are family relations.

I think the police really need to drop this whole “assassination” false flag and investigate the more probable angles. Could be that he was closeted and killed by a jilted lover, or the husband of the secretary he was banging, or a hitman hired by the estranged wife. No sense in harassing every man with a green jacket over this.

Oh yeah my bad it’s wasaay better for your friends to just say “wow sounds like you’re doomed to be broken, good luck with that”.

This is just a mentally unwell person lashing out at those around them trying to help. Jokes and memes like this are more harmful than helpful.

Yes because I don’t expect every friend of mine to be a licensed psychiatrist capable of diagnosing and prescribing medication. Heck, even a lot of medications use that exact same qualified language in their advertising because the human body and mind are incredibly complicated and inconsistent things.

It’s like when I get a cold and my mom tells me to keep my fluids up. It helps and shows she cares even if it’s nowhere near as good as antibiotics. And yes of course I already know to stay hydrated. Just like I know how the weather has been and I remember the story she tells me 4 times a year of that time my older sister broke the neighbor’s window with a basketball.

Lashing out in anger at those trying to reach out and help you isn’t going to make you feel better even if their advice isn’t perfect.

I can at least understand that line of thinking. He spent a lot of his first term golfing. He didn’t build the border wall or repeal the ACA or do a lot of what he promised his supporters he would.

Still not an excuse. He did incredible damage in his first term and I expect this one to be worse.

And he’s not even saying he’s going to do Project 2025 but I expect him to.

No one said that came first or that those other things didn’t happen. You’re just trying to move goalposts on an internet argument now lol.

Except that these are real, clinically-proven treatments for depression.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/effects-of-hydration-status-on-cognitive-performance-and-mood/1210B6BE585E03C71A299C52B51B22F7

This isn’t saying “it’s just in your head”. This isn’t claiming taking a walk will cure you. But this is suggesting clinically-proven treatments that may ease symptoms.

Are there toxic people out there who think mental disorders are not real? Sure. But jumping to the conclusion that the people trying to offer solutions are downplaying your illness and being “heartless” and “stupid” is a fairly significant jump to make from just “hey maybe you should try these clinically-proven treatments”.

Your friends are sharing your struggles with you? Sounds like a great time to mock them for… Checks notes “caring about you” and “offering solutions that are both available and have scientific evidence suggesting they actually help”.

This isn’t funny it’s just being a dick.

I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

Gonna be weird.

Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?

Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.

What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.

I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.

I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.

It’s neither as simple as the article states nor what I see in the comments here.

It’s not just about staying on Trump’s good size to avoid his wrath, getting lucrative government contracts, or getting personal tax breaks. It’s also about stopping or rolling back regulations that would hurt profits.

Keeping the minimum wage down. Eroding worker’s rights, allowing the union busting tactics that Amazon is famous for. Removing consumer protections. Allowing mergers and acquisitions without all those pesky antitrust lawsuits. Rolling back environmentally regulations, staying on fossil fuels. Foreign policy that allows these companies to exploit cheap global labor and sell to the wealthy. Heck, Musk at least seems rather cozy with Putin- i would not be surprised to see these billionaires try to roll back Russian sanctions.