Ryuku_Ryosake

@bigsocrates: My argument it's it's still a platform war. Game Pass is a platform where users pay money to play games. Playstation Network is a platform where a user pays money to play games. Just because one thinks of itself differently and has more accessibility doesn't make them competition any less than when it was Atari vs Intellivision.

Game Pass is music streaming and Sony and Nintendo are digital music sales. Digital music sales have cratered with the rise of music streaming because they are direct competitors. Netflix is a direct competitor with rental stores, physical media sales, movie theaters, and TV subscription services. One of those markets was killed by Netflix and two others have lost significant ground.

The Steam stuff I feel is not really that material overall. It's MS being very careful with the PC space. The PC audience is very specifically a fickle crowd. Plus Gabe was out there immediately beating the drum monopoly and antitrust when MS introduced the Windows store. They need to be incredibly careful with appearances here as MS has a past with losing antitrust lawsuits on the PC. Plus I believe they are still using the game for windows file format for Game Pass which atrocious and if the next Bethesda game only came out in that format it would an incredible headache to mod it like people expect. But still every game you play on Game Pass is money in MS pocket and not Steam's or Epic's so still direct competition.

I feel like this is just an argument over a slight semantic shift. The 'console' war has just become the 'platform' wars. None of these companies have ever been out here trying to make money on console sales. They've been trying to be the middle man you need give money to access the software. Different name, functionally the same.

In the platform wars Microsoft is fighting it harder than any company ever has the console war. The acquisitions are still 100% about removing that software from the competition to get people on your platform. Gamepass on PC is about siphoning money away from Steam and the Epic Store and getting it into MS pockets. They want to take as much of it as they can get. They would take all of it if they could and put both services out of business.

They same would apply if Sony or Nintendo allowed Gamepass on their consoles it would take money from them that would hurt if not outright kill their business to the benefit of MS. It would benefit the consumer in the short run.

But to date none of these massive loss leading living on venture capital models have ever turned the corner and found that theoretical value. Until that happens it is only a matter of time until investors run fleeing from the model and we will see what kind of aftermath that leaves. MS has made it so games will be a part of that fall as well.

For my observation fighting games are doing just fine. Maybe even great actually. I feel like streaming has gone a long way to find the genre a sustainable and steadily growing audience. Not to mention fighting games are pretty huge in minority spaces.

I'm pretty sure Ed Boon said on one of the podcasts on the site said that MK's sales have pretty much never dropped since its remembered heyday and that's why they've consistently kept making them.

Then even on the not main stream household name side. Arc System Works has been able to keep like 3-4 titles with continued support and often at industry leading technical and artistic visuals with your Guilty Gear, Dragonball Fighterz, and Granblue Fantasy Versus.

They Just started up a new season pass for Skull Girls a 360/PS3 era indie fighter.

These are not the signs you would expect from an unhealthy dying genre.

Well while we are reviving this thread I'll post my 2 cents in.

I had just finally played through Odyssey it solidified why I still like 64 so much. The captures of that game and FLUDD in Sunshine both ending up taking those games away from 3d platforming I feel and into finding the right ability to do or collect the thing. While 64 does have it's power ups. I feel in those other to cases it turn Mario from a platforming game into more of an adventure game like the Banjo mold.

64 you solve just about every of the 120 stars with the basic platforming tool set you have as the start of the game and makes that fun and entertaining. Also Peach's castle is still the best hub world and it is baffling how everything does not steal it always.

I have yet to play any Galaxy so I don't know how that holds up. 3D Land would probably beat out 64 for me but I definitely consider it in a third category of game from the 2D and console 3D games.

Funnily enough me and my friends had a discussion some years back of attempting to name one major budget game with a black male playable main character. They were disqualified if they had a criminal background or if the game was about doing crime.

That left us with Sazh from FFXIII as the best black male representation in the non indie space.

In theory I see the problem with them. But I had to vote yes because the 2 consoles I bought this generation happened to be the PS4 Pro and the second revision Switch.

That was mainly a consequence of just waiting so long to buy into this generation. Knowing that I was getting the most out of every game I was playing has been a great. There is a bit of a chicken or the egg thing going on with the poor performance for certain games on the base models. Do those game perform poorly because they targeted the higher spec. Or is it is the normal late gen where everything plays like garbage because all that matters is getting pretty visuals to hold up for advertisement. So on the upgraded models we are getting better performance than usual late gen and the base models are getting the usual late gen performance.

The Switch revision is a bit different. Having a longer and more reasonable battery life feels more like you are getting the actual vision of the console as it should be rather than a compromised to ship version. Which there is probably some truth to that and they cut to battery life targets to bury the WiiU as fast as possible. Also oddly enough with DP2 I seem to get at least solid double digit frames unlike the single digit I had seen elsewhere but I could be imagining things.

Thank you for your kind sacrifice sir. FFXIV is probably the largest usage time I use on my TV by a country mile.

I'll keep and eye out for when Sony gets a model with full HDMI 2.1 support. As I am still using my Sony from like 07. Outside of some bard across the screen that have appeared across the screen from dead back lights in last 2 years. It always remained the best looking LCD/LED screen I had seen through the 1080 era and this baby is only 720p. The colors are so good on it and blacks are about the best I had seen.

@regularassmilk: I lost my GBA SP some years back. So I'm in the market for a replacement. Better screen. Sleep mode functionality. The dock beats my dragging out my Gamecube Gameboy player which is currently my best way to play GB and GBC games.

Personally I think the business practices of Analogue are bad and not great for the fpga community.

But it is exactly the right product for a specific need I have. So I picked one up.

One thing I forgot to bring up in my earlier post. Is I do worry what happens if the Game Pass model does really take off. I would worry what sort of schemes the publishers would get up to try an monetize on the situation.

Will microtransactions and such somehow get even worse than we currently stand? Will the $70 dollar released copy of game merely become small vertical slice advertisements to go on game pass to sell you $80 worth of live content?

Will publishers wait until the get a mega hit on game pass to then remove it early to splinter it off as the flagship title to build their own streaming service with? Thus we see the same splintering we have currently on video streaming.

Something would have to happen. A truly successful game pass that remains a good deal would ultimately mean a large base spending less games than they did before and the big publishers are legally obligated to pull in more money. Game Pass would need to bring in a large amount of people that are not paying for games. Which is way less than the base of people that were pirating music, movies, and tv for those services to bring in. Or the service remain separate from everyone normal spending habits and they just turn on the subscription still directly purchase most of the games they would have because they are not on game pass.

Yeah I have been in and cautious of the TV market myself recently. I know I am about as rough on a TV as possible. I use my TV as my computer monitor so lot's of fairly static objects. Outside of that I watch a lot of subtitled anime or play games with subtitles on so basically constant white might as well be static bars at the bottom of the screen.

I would love to hear if anyone with similar use pattern have been fairing.

Also where are we at standard wise? I thought the holy trinity standard of 4k, HDR, and Freesync-like implementation at once was close to coming but not out yet. Which was the biggest thing holding me back from jumping in.