my domain is my media server, so id rather not end my domain.

the advtage the steam system has is first the bought game/gifted game situation, as well as the more important factor, the recent opinion score, as at amy given momemt a game can get good because of a major change (e. g payday 2 reverting all the pay 2 win content the original publisher mandated) or gone to shit because of greed or a bad patch.

the problem users have is finding a curator that has a similar taste in games that they do. If I was a fan of JRPGs, im not going to care about the opinion on some person who doesnt really play jrpgs. at the same time, if you like some niche genre, to the general public, that niche is always less popular, so itll get worse ratings thanit should compared to people who enjoy said niche.

itll more likely go into the XeSS route with alternative code path

basically market has always shown convenience often trumps ownership, music streaming, video streaming, games now. ownership is the vocal minority

the problem is the covid supply chain ended a while ago and console sales havent drastically picked up since then. the PS5 has been orderable direct from sony for quite a long while now, and shortly after in stores. physical game sales (something console users champion, has gone way down (according to sony, only 30% of the sales are physical now)

they weren’t completely wrong now. on thier own financials, its mentioned that only 30% of game sales are physical. physical buyers are now the minority.

the PS5 pro uses 60 CU rdna 4, so if you want to match that, buy the supposedly rumored 8800XT that amd is trying to pump more of as they forgoe top end end generation supposedly (basically similar to the RX 480 and RX 5700xt generations)

keep in mind, console and pc sales and cost differ because of where they focus on making money. Sony for example makes money off accessory sales (the ps5 pro is disk driveless and no vertical stand) ontop of never adressing the rampant stick drift problem the dualsense has, ontop of paid online, none of which is any signicant factor on PC, which generally speaking is more front loaded cost heavy but overtime has lower cost in games, services and such.

im not saying consoles have 0 appeal and wont have buyers, its just that their market is in real time, decreasing while on pc has increased, especially post covid. with the advent of streaming, more and more people are shifting over to PC because of it. im not saying consoles are dead as in 0 sales, but the market is forever going to decrease for it, as more people get into pc, and those countries that cant afford to already got into mobile gaming (mobile gaming accounts for more than 50% of the profits of game sales)

the difference is at least you can see it in more real time numbers. Xbox is clearly a dying brand, which leaves Sonys home console sales for now (~60M) and the switch as a handheld device. Devs are already starting to port everything on PC, and 1st party game development rate has gone down a lot. 3rd party devs are also starting to abandon console exclusively/timed exclusively over time (capcom making the next monster hunter simul release on pc instead of a year and a half cadence, square enix backtracking on making final fantasy a timed exclusive due to not enough sales)

Japan is completely flipping its old image of PC being the device for porn addicts of years past and starting to heavily buy into pc too, which is why Valve went to attend Tokyo gameshow to pitch the steamdeck for japanese handheld players(which remain the majority of console purchases in japan)

were basically at the point on the timeline where PC and Mobile basically kills consoles.

insee it as apple is a full vertical stack conpany who doesnt want to share its vertical stack as it cuts into their profit.

its what nvidia is trying to do, and if windows for arm takes off, i bet that nvidia is ready to attempt to remove all competition on windows due to how reliant some sectors of the industry are for nvidia hardware

but youre asking for something thats effectively cosmetic filtering, a feature that google pushing Manifeat V3, for example removed ublock for having as a user feature. while its good to have a choice, you need to understand when you’re effectively fighting against yourself by asking for a feature that was intentionally removed, and you could get back, had you werent deadset with siding with the company that killed the feature.

state of play is sony’s counterpart to “Nintendo Direct”. With the death of E3, all major companies have their own showcase of shows digitally, while some of them will just announce it in the general show (Geoff’s Summer Game fest, the “generic e3 show”)

basically Sony if showing off their own games, has 2 shows:

State of Play is sonys version of, includes 3rd party companies producing content on playstation

Sony also has a different showcase called “Playstation Showcase” thats directed specifically to 1st party stuff

just for completion sake, Microsoft’s game info show is called “Xbox Game Showcase”

they showed it off at the May 30th state of play, and thats about it for advertising. if you were a pc player and didnt watch sonys presentation, you likely would have never known

basically specifically for AAA titles, development cost for them are soo astronomically high that the console platform isnt enough to support them alone (imo) both Sony and Microsoft basically have to decide to either scale back complexity of games (like what Nintendo would do) or release it to more platforms because 1 device platform is no longer enough for some titles.

Sony decides to port to PC, (and so does 3rd party companies like Square Enix and capcom who realize the need), while Microsoft is taking the subscription route which bolters both their cloud infrastructure numbers, and provides a subscriber count which investors like because subscriptions are content quarterly flow of money rather than peaks and drops based on game release.

basically how i see it is it only makes better sense from a consumer standpoint if the decreased developer cost is ALSO decreasing the upfront user cost to buying the game, as the worst policy that Valve has on steam is that the games base price has to be the same on all storefronts.

however in reality, most developers do not pass some of that savings to consumers and just take the cut for themselves. So devs are basically playing againt future benefits on growing a larger consumer base on a different platform for more upfront profit.

basically most of the investment money that epic throws is thrown at development and developers, and basically outside of free games, none of it is thrown back into making the platform better for consumers. Developers can complain however much they want that steam has a “consumer monopoly” (while ignoring the fact that other companies like Riot, and mobile game companies with PC clients like Mihoyo does fine without steam). this will continue to happen until epic reinvests some of that money into their client, or devs actually use the benefits of taking a lower cut and biting the bullet and regularly passing some of it off to consumers.

regardless of the situation, developers are stopping developers ultimately if they want to break the “consumer monopoly”

their advantages are purely for developer tools for games using Unreal. thats about it. the only thing it offers to consumers is their free games.

nintendo and DeNA crates a joint venture team last year, so i highly doubt theyre pulling out of mobile, theyre just relying less on it.

i mean iirc capcom already had done something similar beforehand with megaman x dive

if its on carpet, ots okayish, if its on hard floor its a bad time. speaking from experience