hughj

@gundato: By hardware I was talking about their cloud infrastructure, not the consumer-facing streaming boxes. What they've got right now is basically a half-generation behind the new consoles, and it's using the old Vega GCN architecture, which puts them in a bit of a no-mans-land as the consoles and PC have moved to RDNA.

"Centralize the hardware needs and it greatly reduces the need to upgrade regularly on a consumer standpoint."

Also I would think that having centralized hardware may actually exacerbate the chip shortages, because you need to have a critical mass of hardware rolled out all at once in order to provide service for the new content you're selling. A PS5 shortage means that someone without a PS5 simply doesn't buy PS5 games, whereas a Stadia/cloud shortage it would mean having queues or region-dependent availability which is way uglier when the entire selling point of the platform is 'it just works'.

Not to mention whatever 3rd-party studio work that will be needed to port and QA test the existing catalog of games to whatever the new hardware would be.

I was just beginning to wonder how Stadia's looming and inevitable hardware refresh would get impacted by the global chip manufacturing shortages and also whether or not they would try to make the jump from GCN/CDNA to RDNA.

If they're at the state of winding down internal studio efforts then I'm not holding out hope for them bankrolling another iteration of hardware, and that's going to make the prospect of porting future AAA third-party titles to Stadia increasingly annoying as developers transition beyond cross-generation content.

IMO it comes down to the fact that it was released in a poor state on consoles and that GB and Gamespot alumni are/were first and foremost console journalists, so that's the lens they view the industry through. If the situation had been reversed (as it often has been) where the PC version was half-baked and the primary consoles were fine, then it'd never have been a factor in a list like this. Was Mortal Kombat judged by how it played on Switch, or Doom Eternal with Stadia? Obviously not. Yeah, it's a double-standard, but that goes with the territory.

There's a big price gap between the 3080 and 3090 as well as a big gap in vram, so it was inevitable they were going to launch another SKU between them. The fact that AMD's lineup are all 16GB is probably what accelerated that plan. I don't really see the big deal here as the 3080ti is undoubtedly going to be sitting in a different price bracket from the 3080, and it will probably be a worse performance/dollar value as well.

The bigger lingering question for this lineup is how quickly will Nvidia pivot from Samsung back to TSMC.

I've definitely found that as Gamepass's catalog has grown that it's drastically increased the frequency that I'm downloading and shuffling games between SSDs and HDDs. While the SSD bandwidth represents a huge boost to overall user experience this generation of consoles, I feel like once subscription services become the home of most new releases there's going to be a dramatic shift in the manner that people try and play games week to week (probably much closer to how things were with game rentals.)

It's impossible to imagine these consoles being able to function properly in that market without the ability to shuffle games to/from higher capacity external drives. It would pretty much force people with slower connections and/or data caps to create proxy caches for PSN content.

It's not just smartphones, but tablets as well. What legal precedent distinguishes a macbook from an ipad with an attached keyboard? It strikes me that the only technical distinction at the moment is the fact that the operation system and CPU architecture are different, but that's likely to fade away as Apple makes them increasingly similar to their mobile system architecture.

Again -- I do not fucking care what their motivations are. I'm here discussing what the outcome may be. Getting hung up on the PR stunt is vapid. Bigger issues are at stake here.

Thanks for the research :)

A related question: What is the current state of third-party application distribution within Apple's OSX/macOS market? I assume that's not nearly as locked down as iOS is? With Apple moving away from x86 and to their in-house CPU in the coming years, will that be a step towards unifying the terms and conditions across all their products?

How much inertia is there within the Apple macOS world for third-party apps and services? Or does Apple already make a cut from services like Adobe Cloud? Would macOS users care if their computing environment became more like their mobile environment?

It should be noted that Valve's 30% existed since the earliest days when Steam was far more barebones than the current EGS is. Granted, I suspect almost every component of their operation has changed by orders of magnitude (plus and minus) since the early 2000s. In Gabe's GDC talk he mentions a previous patch for HL cost them $500k in bandwidth to distribute. Bandwidth is obviously cheaper now, but a big patch for a game these days isn't ~20MB like HL/TFC/CS was.

The fact that so many disparate major storefronts happened to settle on and stick to that 30% does imply that the price is not subject to market forces. In any other sales context that would probably give people pause? Are there other major industries where rates like that are static across different companies and market segments for over a decade? I honestly don't know.

I suppose the argument could be made that companies like Google and Apple aren't really in a position of having to compete for developers such that their revenue split is used to market their storefronts to developers. Although having a lack of competition is maybe not a good argument to make if you're being accused of being a monopoly.