NEStalgia

Sounds like every large corporation ever. 1000 workers, most of them with high turn over, 899 managers, most of which are just there to climb the ladder, 100 executives each with a conflicting agenda, 0 strategies.

Xbox HQ needs to move to the post office. So much synergy.

@Banjo-Good idea, not sure what thread for it. though.

@gollumb82 No problem! Yeah that's a sensible plan. Z2 should be beastly though I worry about price after Ally X 5 Pro lol. Personally the legion fan hype seems overblown to me. It produces sound but it's not loud. I've not played in a dead silent room but I don't really notice it over the game, personally. It's no PS4 lol. It's quieter than my laptop

@CallMeDuraSouka maybe they've dramatically improved their streaming app since I saw it? But the official Sony streaming app has always been shades of awful and portal was no exception with brutal compression and questionable frame pacing. Third party apps, psplay, chiaki etc have long had much better streaming performance even on platforms Sony has an official client. Give chiaki a try on your deck if you haven't. Or PC. During my nms fetish I was living on PSPlay on my G Cloud for doing dailies lol.

Yeah the dongles... It's ok, tried that with switch and it's such a pita to me. And then Nintendo enabled actual bt like 5 years later lol

Edit: I don't think portal is bad per se and it's not a horrible value unlike, well, most Sony offerings, it's actually cheaper than most alternatives, so for Sony only players it isn't a bad cost effective option at all. But for multiplat players you can get so much more and even better ps streaming with slightly more expensive devices.

@gollumb82 That's a good question that I think comes down to ergonomic preferences above all. The z1 extreme Ally and legion are more or less the same rig with a lot of form factor differences. More, the allyX definitely has some advantages internally but it's still the same soc and is a whole other price class. We'll call it the Ally 5 Pro... Still a better value than that blue company model though lol

I'n my case I got the non extreme cheap Ally to compliment my legion go as a Super Switch. I definitely tend to like the Legion more as my "power" handheld. It's less dense, but it's not really heavier, the screen is just incredible, I like having the option to detach the controllers and play tabletop mode switch style, I don't use it a lot but I like using it sometimes, and also means you can replace the controllers if they fail which seems important on $600+ devices. But you're less likely to need to because it uses hall effect and Ally does not. Also has the little track pad, semi hard case, and the controller has an attachment you can use as a mouse mostly meant for shooters but I haven't used that.

The size can be ungainly for some and it's harder to one-hand than the ally with its wide center of mass. And some might not like that it's more hollow and less dense feeling though similar total weight.

One thing some don't like is the louder single fan. Hasn't bothered me at all. Ally kind of whines, legion kind of whooshes, doesn't seem that different really but some take issue with it.

One perk on the ally is the fingerprint scanner though. Legion you have to enter windows pin every time. Minor things but they can matter.

@endlessleep I like the plan but the egpu dock for a 4k60 output would have to be way more expensive. Egpu doesn't come cheap, and they don't need to subsidize the performance dock. I think the bundled price can work though.

@HonestHick if you luuuuuuuuuuuuv the Dual Sense, and I know you do, and need an 8" screen, portal is nearly fine. As long as you also love wired headphones or didn't mind buying Sony proprietary wireless ones because no BT. And don't mind short battery. and also don't mind substandard steam quality. It's ducky.

If you're not the Dual Senses BFF, like having a battery you don't need plugged into a 10lb sack of potatoes for more power, and have any wireless headphones on planet Earth other than magic Sony Specials, and like a quality stream I'd recommend the Logitech G cloud over it. A little more expensive and a bit worse display, but Xbox format controller, battery that runs for days, 3rd party PS Play app (must purchase on app store) streams better and Bluetooth, because standards are so hard.

It cost a little more than portal but..... Also works for Xbox, PC moonlight, and every other streaming service and is also a full android tablet for video and all too.

Then if course Ally and the like are full PCs, can do all the above, play all the PC store games, game pass natively, not streamed, and can even stream ps plus premium while portal can't 😆

@gollumb82 Yeah, the suspend/resume is a big deal for me, so I can definitely appreciate the appeal of that. For me it depends on game of course. MOST of the ones I've tried suspend fails horribly on (Elden, Armored Core 5, FF13, Live a Live, a few others fail horribly.) Windows suspend does seem to work fine on Little Kitty big City, P3R, Octopath 2, Rune Factory 5. So it's not a total fail. But yeah, suspend is actually important to me, so I don't like how bad it is on Windows. Maybe that'll improve with the Xbox handheld sounding windows based, Win11 may get some boosts from that (like it got AutoHDR from Xbox etc.)

Heh, Windows update...don't start me on that. At all.

Yeah Ally people seem to love Crate, Asus mobo buyers seem to hate Crate as awful bloatware and nix it instantly. There's a few other loaders out there to replace it, including Steam's Big Picture. I keep it on my Ally, launch from it, mostly prefer to use the native launchers though, or just the desktop icons for steam games even on Ally lol. Guess I'm old skool too much. I haven't used the content store tbh, I do all my shopping on my phone, really. I just have the Steam and CDKeys app, use thos most of the time, GoG when I feel like it, and use the Windows popups from Epic to remind me to grab my freebies weekly, lol.

I haven't actually messed with fancurves so much, since it's a closed box system I just kind of leave them at factory. Custom builds? Yeah I do the curves in BIOS like the ubernerd I am, but not in this. DEFINITELY believable about better battery life. Only semi-surprised about fps. Windows bloat, and shoddy AMD drivers are the culprits there.

I think I still prefer the Windows interface (after all that's the reason I bought it instead of a Deck to begin with), but it definitely sounds like there's some nice benefits without it.

@gollumb82 Really? What didn't you find user friendly about the default Windows OS (with or without Crate or Big Picture?)

Personally, I never find it gets in the way, especially with the hardware button to get to those important shortcut buttons, and I like being able to swipe up while in-game to get the taskbar up for anything else. Nothing wrong with SteamOS, I just haven't found Windows to get in the way, and of course value having the Play Anywhere games I already own and GOG available.

The only thing I really miss is a working suspend state. Is that any better on SteamOS (probably?)

Got to admit, I've been doing 90% of my gaming on Legion and Ally recently. Funny to see it get more attention from Xbox than the consoles.

@Balaam_ I think between Switch and phones we get a pretty clear picture that the overwhelming majority of people who play video games prefer playing on handheld devices. Switch proved that they ALSO like playing on the TV when possible, but it's not the main driver, and that ultra extreme graphics do not matter to them. Considering the costs of ultra extreme graphics and most devs trying to provide them going bankrupt....a rollback to a handheld focus might be good for everyone, including devs keeping the doors open. We're rapidly getting to the point in tech that "dockable handhelds" won't really have any negatives vs a "dedicated" console, other than super duper gfx and >$1k price tags to get it.

As for tiny and cramped controls, lol, you should hold a Legion Go. It feels like The Duke in your hand, only bigger, lol. Too big tbh, those bumpers are massive and I have to shift my hand to the dpad. Ally is more Xbox XS controller proportions (and Xbox assisted in the development.)

Yeah, big screen and "small" screen isn't the same experience, but you can dock these things to the big screen, just BYO HDMI adapter like any PC. FWIW, while it's no 4070, the Z1 Extreme chip sports the same integrated GPU that the Ryzen 7 7800x3D comes with. It's no slouch. Starfield doesn't even function without mods, but it's kinda broken. But games like Armored Core 5 run 40-60fps with RSR doing the heavy upscaling from 720p up. Elden Ring runs similarly. That's on the NON-EXTREME Z1 Ally I have. Runs even better on the Extreme Z1 legion. These ain't Nintendo.

@InterceptorAlpha in context they seem to be publishing and corporate roles more than development. Mostly. Or so it seems.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner @EvenStephen7 "In a statement from Herman Hulst regarding the unexpected announcement of the closure of Santa Monica Studio he had this to say: 'I know they gave us God of War and Ragnarok, but, like, what have they done for us lately?'"

@Fiendish-Beaver "you don't need two PR departments when one will do the job perfectly well"

Bwahahahaha 🤣🤣. You do know you're talking about Xbox right.

@Banjo- Yeah, I don't know what it is with modern devs. IDK if it's pure vanity, where, I think a lot of them are in an arms race to "prove their worth" and "keep their skills marketable and up to date" by always being deep into whatver the latest cutting edge is, so their continuing education comes at the consumer's cost, because they're all afraid of being obsolete, which is a deep industry problem if true, or if it's the marketing heads pushing forever on "we want shinier" and nothing else matters because shiny stills and youtube vids sell games. But we have more powerful, more expensive hardware than ever that drives ever shinier looking games than ever with ever worse performance and hollowed out gameplay. Physics just astounds me. We had physics on everything in HL2. We had physics in old PS2 games. For all it's faults, BotW had full physics simulation on every object across the world running on a 2011 tablet. Yet the PS5/Pro and XSX and $3k PCs still don't get games with physics in 2024 and performance is terrible. Something is really really broken in the industry, and it's not the hardware. And buying more hardware to brute force past the problem isn't a good solution.

I think... There's needs to be a line drawn, are games a creative medium or a tech demo? The industry never got this right on the PC side before console became PC. You can design gameplay stories all very well on a phone game or a 4090. Does the game need to push hardware boundaries to do what it's trying to do? And if so, why? Hardware makers need games to do that to justify selling hardware. Do software makers need to do that? Is photorealism to simulate live action actually necessary?

Meanwhile there's a vr app that sells 4 song concerts, mobile processor mind you, only a few artists participating right now, but big artists. It uses 3d capture and a ue4 environment and it seriously looks like you're there with the real artist. Sure there's only a few characters at once but it's a freaking phone chip. That needs to be photo-realistic, is a performance by a real person/band.

It's all vanity projects. They're pushing hardware they know their customers don't even have just because they can because tech demos are fun to create and are marketable. Is it needed? No. She Spiderman need to be 300m for a game that's like a really really pretty PS2 game? With less physics than the actual PS2 Spider-Man game.

The software part of the industry is seriously messed up. What they are spending money on isn't what everyone wants. It's what they want. The ENTIRE industry is now the original FFXIV team. The one that made flower pots with a higher poly count than the player model. Read yoshiPs commentary on what was wrong with og xiv. Everything wrong there is now the whole industry.

@HonestHick I mean, those cheap meta games are a flavor of mobile games which are outperforming their "high end games" 1000:1.

Same for Nintendo games.

I don't see anything wrong with big budgets and stories so long as the budget doesn't exceed likely sales without fleecing customers. What I do see problems with is adding rt path traced reflective water and individual photon particle effects while clobbering CPU without even having physics that Half Life Freaking 2 had in like 2002 while knowing your customers want 60fps and are on PS5 and xss and 3060s and just dgaf. You can tell stories without setting 4090s on fire. Jrpgs do it. The PS3 did it. The PS2 did it. Deus Ex 1 is still one of the best gaming stores ever. In 1999. You don't need 700 dollar consoles and 1000+ video cards to tell stores or have big games. On fact the customers ACTIVELY keep telling them this.

4060s cost less than an OLED switch and run cod at 180fps in 1080p for competitive play. Something is wrong with the software part of the industry if they can't get this to work correctly. But they're too focused on spectacle because??

@HonestHick the problem isn't gamers demanding more. The problem is developers overambitiously making games knowing they have no chance to hit the targets gamers want. they build vanity projects with all the effects they want to flex their skills on without actually designing around the hardware and what the customers want. Quest 3 is a phone inside. Games run 90 and 120fps easily. Why? Because they're designed for the hardware. You can't have devs building for 4070s and above while the common card on steam is 3060, handheld chips are rising, and the consoles aren't close. The devs know what gamers want and they know what hardware gamers have and they ignore it and build whatever they want for high end hardware and then tell gamers to buy expensive hardware if they want it to run right. This isn't a problem with silicon price, this is a problem with software planning.

@Banjo- I'm hoping for it really. I know it's rumored they'll have their own launcher and store on PC which makes sense for price control in Sony style.

Plus if Astro goes to PC it'll get vr mods pretty fast so it'll finally run properly lol

@Banjo- IDK that square privileges had been doing much for them lately anyway. Lackluster sales in general. Activision definitely though.

I figured astrobot would be one they keep exclusive. I was surprised to see the producer asking for feedback on interest in a PC port. Yet tlou2 didn't get one yet which you'd think it would have given the TV show and sunken sales on PS5.

@Banjo- absolutely. Though I suspect there's going to go back and forth supporting games on PC. They'll realize they need to lock games to sell hardware, then they'll want the revenue. I think they'll be consistently inconsistent.

@Banjo- yeah it seems like anything newer than classic Yakuza they fully support it.

Square weirdly supports it with most of their smaller games.

@Banjo- cool, thanks, I'm probably going to end the GPU sub, so I'll buy it when it hits a sale but probably buy on Xbox/Windows store since apparently own the dlc there already.

@Banjo- PlayStation is the new Vaio. A premium luxury mid-range PC lol.

Yeah the inflation reasoning continues to get my goat to no end. But the bad price comparisons are also really annoying. Including bad comparisons with PC parts. Like, of course initial in investment is higher out of the gate, nobody denies that, but the point is the TCO over a decade. The prices get a lot closer or lean opposite over the long curve. It may work out better or worse but 500+800 (stand and disc drive) plus pricier games maybe subs. You're already up to the price difference and we're only 4 years in. "But you can just buy a base model then" yeah and you can just buy a series s.... Or a steam deck.

@HonestHick I don't think gamers are asking for more. I think devs want to keep pushing their skill sets and marketers want something shiny and keep pushing hardware beyond its limit and gamers just want games that run right and every time we get that they they try to add more reflections and break it again. And the console makers love it because it keeps there cycle rolling.

Mk8 cod@1080p high fps, Minecraft that looks like Doom 1, Fortnite that runs on phones, and a PS3 GTA game are the best selling games over and over. Gamers aren't the ones asking for this. It's pushed on us and then we're told to pay up.

@Banjo- lol absolutely! I'm so tired of writing how just adding inflation doesn't work for discretionary spend items when inflation means necessities consume most if peoples discretionary income. What these people really mean is "I'm high income and enjoy feeling exclusive".

Sony seems to be just writing off the casual gamer as a lost cause to phones and potato pc and just trying to milk the enthusiast whales they see as their remaining market while still capturing game sales from the customers jumping to PC. I don't see that as a great future for them while even their exclusive stellar blades producer said he expects better sales on PC..........

@Banjo- Yeah, I mean I think the logic is "Jim planned this from the start" and "we need to boost the YoY." It seems to be the apple playbook of "make an expensive thing to give people who like owning expensive things something to spend money on"

It sounds seriously awful for the money. All that rationalization that is supposed to be expensive and it's "sO MuCh ChEaPeR tHAn A PC" is insane. Even Nvidia had to cut the price of 4080 via Super because nobody was buying them. Technically it is cheaper but if you have to rationalize the price of products via trade in and resale of your old worn trash to uninformed buyers paying almost full price apple style, the pricing is wrong. The Sony loyal are looking more and more like the apple loyal. Its not about the product it's about brand identity. The people going on about gaming is "luxury" lol. Even PC people don't go on about all glass cases and luxury and this is a plastic box. It's everything wrong with Apple. Though Nintendo and Sony are both trying to be Apple.

@Banjo- @TheLastHarbinger I'm pretty sure "PS5 Pro Game Boost" is the same thing as "PS5 Game Boost" but with a bit of an overclock and is very misleading. Meaning games that weren't hitting stable framerates or were uncapped on PS5 when running PS4 games will be able to do so with a bit more brute force. You know, exactly like how upgrading PC hardware works, but with Sony magic.

So it doesn't sound like it's anything like FPS boost that was adding 60fps modes to games that didn't have one.

PS5 Pro is the best thing that's happened to Phil Spencer all year.

Sony just declared their price intentions for PS6, launched this thing late in the gen, giving Xbox a head start on the next gen where they can charge a fortune and still look like a value for the performance being way superior to PS5 Pro, while Sony will have to lag behind on launching PS6 while they keep feeding PS5 Pro, giving Xbox a large head start, or they'll have to rush a PS6 to market to compete and abandon their $700 premium console with a 2 year shelf life.

Sony "Did an Xbox" here. Jim and Herman are Xbox's best friend.

My first week back to Xbox with the 1X after the end of 360 I got AC: Syndicate. Such a far cry from the scheduled trash dumps of the last year.

I redeemed this code way back when it became available. Does anyone happen to know - is the redemption permanent? I.E. if you drop GP entirely after redeeming it, do you still keep the DLC as though purchased?

Debating if I should buy P3R on the XB store because it's cross-buy with PC Play Anywhere and I already "own" the DLC on XB store due to the free perk, or if I should just forget it and get it on Steam down the line if the DLC won't go with me without GP.

@Fiendish-Beaver You were ahead of the curve by being behind.

I'll still never forgive cassette for

...click...

replacing the far superior 8-Track though.

Some insider information there. "All the games are coming, but nobody's actually making them right now." Didn't we already know all of this sans the claim to have knowledge that 7 is coming, someday in the future if someone ever works on it, vs just assuming?

Square already said they're going cross platform aggressively. We already knew this. This information provides nothing. After the failure of Rebirth they really need to get it on other platforms but I'm willing to be it won't happen until a trilogy bundle is released after the next game releases in 4+ years. Rebirth isn't even dated for PC yet.

@Fiendish-Beaver "On vinyl"

What, no 8-Track player? Dweeb.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner @themightyant The traditional model is to cut the artists into royalties. The more the game makes, the more the artist makes. If the game bombs, the artist's sales bomb too. That was the most fair system.

Offering a pittance on a likely blockbuster title for perpetual rights is pure corporate strong-arming on a level even Microsoft hasn't done (imagine if they payed Mercedes and the music artists each $7500 for Forza for perpetual rights and no delistings.) 2k is just gross. It's how they approach everything. They have no problem their lawyers can't solve.

@UndyingInsurgent95 I think the problem with the gaming industry goes beyond "corporate, we need growth" mantras. The problem is the game industry runs entirely on borrowed money. A lot of borrowed money. With 5-10 year dev times these days, they're a generation late to finding out they overestimated sales and borrowed waaay too much money, and then they depend on the market being much bigger than it was previously to justify the amount borrowed and reassure financiers. So they've been spending more and more. There's only two ways to make the money and promised margins to investors back. Charge a lot more, or get a lot more customers. The latter failed. The former is failing and causes the inverse of the latter. Thus industry implosion.

Minecraft's primary platforms are budget phones, potato PCs, and Switch. That will remain Minecraft's primary platforms forever. The rest can come as mods. Console gets what's left. Weird that Xbox has zero priority, but, it's Xbox lol.

@Jaxx420 Yeah, and I'm still not convinced gta6 will match gta5 in the new climate either. I think a "sequel" will struggle to pull players from 5 as much as any competitors. Like how Minecraft 2 wouldn't dethrone Minecraft, which is why they don't make one and keep extending the original I can't help but wonder if gta6 might play seconds to 5 for a good while.

@Jaxx420 I think Astrobot will be a success but I didn't think it'll represent the numbers they want to see. Honestly nothing would these days other than maybe gta6.

@Banjo- That's just concurrent there were at least 1500 players!

Yeah I didn't say it WAS a blockbuster, but it was supposed to be one!

It still seems unlikely. And MS saying this easily could be cute corporate wording to insinuate a connection where there is none. The classic "Do you still beat your wife?"

On the other hand, Sony and Game Science ghosting every media request for comment, combined with MS insinuating they have a deal.....it REALLY makes one wonder.

I get a policy of not commenting on rumors. But Sony has commented on rumors from Forbes multiple times in the past 4 years, and when the media AND your competitor are publicly insinuating you have secret agreements and you continue ignoring media requests for comment....... Either there's truth to it, or Sony's "doing a Microsoft" and creating their own negative PR by ignoring the negative PR.

The premise of this article is wrong. Concord WAS a "blockbuster game" in Sony's mind, not a risk in betting against blockbusters.

@Ralizah I honestly believe that, blindly, without question. The Yamauchi Clan didn't stay in power for over 100 years by being fools....

@themightyant @fbnaulin Much like CBS cancelling Star Trek in season 3.

@armondo36 could be worse. He could have bought Firewalk.

@FatalBubbles TBH I haven't cared enough to follow close enough to have a list but there's been lots of games delayed on Xbox due to technical issues that we assume are true. Like wukong. But if there's monkey business here that Sony won't deny then maybe there's more to that? It's all weird

@FatalBubbles agreed. Is honestly the silence on the matter giving it the most credibility now. It would be easy to say no. Do why won't they? And if it's true now, how often has it been true before?

@FatalBubbles We don't know. That's kind of the point where this would be interesting on their response. One could assume there's no contract like this. But Sony so far seems to have had no response to any press inquiries. The silence is curious. It would be easy to say no it's untrue even accused by Forbes. And in fact they've done so before when Forbes printed they cut PS5 production and again when Forbes claimed they cut psvr2 production. They were quick to refute the false claims. This one? Silence. Curious indeed. If this one is real, it means others are probably real that we didn't know about. And if they don't answer I'm pretty much taking that as confirmation that against the odds this one really is true.

@themightyant @awp69 "25 FPS"

I mean it's still twice the framerate of Dragon's Dogma 2 and Cyberpunk on console...

It is such a great take on media though. One on hand the headline is "25FPS on Series S!" OTOH, that means they're 5 frames away from the 30fps target and still in optimization development meaning it's nearly on target. How many "30fps" games dip well below that often on PS5/XSX? Or PC for that matter....

@themightyant The deal thing still seems unlikely to me as well, however, the "they didn't market it" thing doesn't hold water, depends what the deal is, exclusivity money to take the marketing rights and make it their own vs hush money to delay the competition and keep it off the market and tarnish its image. The latter's probably a much cheaper deal yet gets the same benefits.

Do I think that happened here? PROBABLY not. But, so far neither company confirming or denying is raising my suspicions higher than they were. Silence can be pretty loud. And even if it's not this game, they may be sweating being caught on something they've done elsewhere. MS did pointedly accuse them of exactly that during the ABK trials after all.

Most likely for this game it's not a deal, and it's also not a "memory leak problem" so much as, as one dev commented during gamescom "nobody needs Xbox" - i.e. it's just last place priority and they DGAF. But the silence makes me curious. This game or other games...such deals may well exist.

@Cikajovazmaj XSS is still the top selling Xbox, so I don't think there's a strong argument to say it wasn't worth it. If they didn't have the S, how small would the install base be? MS made a gamble on the low cost to entry market with the S and cloud. And a play at gunning for Switch with a similar price point but with expected "big console" games and features. It's a fair play, whether it ultimately succeeds or fails, the original strategy was a sound one. And without the S and the "second console for Game Pass" market it created, it's possible Xbox would be in even worse shape than they are.

S isn't their mistake. It's a challenge, but not a mistake. Annihilating their own momentum and brand presence was their mistake. If they had kept momentum and made Xbox/GP a must-have both on S and X, devs wouldn't have found the challenge of putting games on the S to be a "problem", it would be an opportunity. Like Switch ports.

@electrolite77 Xbox started the $200 controller with the Elite, and it's boomed from there. Paid online, $200 for premium controllers.... How did we end up liking Xbox again?

@Jenkinss Yeah, but the stated phrase of Square not being the most tone-deaf, detached organization lacking all self awareness was still hilarious

With XVI IMO that's still a game that NEEDED 60fps, and should have been built around 60fps, and it's inexplicable the game ever targeted 30fps at all on a single console full exclusive that didn't even have a PC port actively maintained. I can not comprehend the logic that went into that decision. I think that was less about placating forum warriors and more about realizing "oops" but not knowing how to fix it. I tried to play that in performance...I really did.....and I just can't. It's both fugly and low fps at the same time vs quality mode that's just low fps but not fugly. Should be labeled (Poor) Performance Mode.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Square isn't first party but it was a first party paid full exclusive. Even Obsidian doesn't have that standard as they're doing PC and 2 consoles. XVI was a full exclusive for one single piece of hardware, without a PC port even being actively maintained and still couldn't do it. While making a character action game with the DMC combat director lol.

I hate this generation so much I've started hating consoles like it's 2001 all over again lol

@Jenkinss "Square knows what forum warriors want"

I think you might be confusing Square with another publisher there...