I actually think it’s worse for Meta to take a loss on hardware. That tells me that they are expecting to make that money back and then some elsewhere. It’s possible that they are just hoping to make that money back through software sales (similar to Sony), but I just have a hard time trusting the company. The “Meta” name is such a turnoff that I don’t want a piece of their hardware in my house, let alone on my network, so I haven’t even looked at their offerings.

Also, I disagree with the notion that “for a budget rig somethings got to give”. The answers for a “budget” rig are… Nintendo Labo. The AR games with the 3DS. The various ways of strapping a smart phone to one’s face. Things that the VR community scoffs at, but the average consumer is much more likely to purchase.

I think the “budget” option is to just… Not use VR. For me, the adapter isn’t a huge deal. They just cut the price by $100 earlier this year. The Horizon bundle, plus an adapter, comes out to $560. The Valve Index can vary based on the setup, but I figure that’ll be at least $1k. The HTC Vive products seems way more focused on business than gaming, and all of their headsets are >$1k anyways.

So for me I have 3 options: wait for Valve or HTC to make more value-oriented products, get the PSVR2, or just not do VR. And I’m perfectly at peace with just abstaining from VR- I certainly don’t regret that I didn’t buy a 3DTV for example. But this PC adapter has suddenly made the PSVR2 an option where it previously was not one.

In this entire article, not even a single attempt to quantity the number of complaints.

This sounds to me like an extremely small minority. It appears as though Fallout 4 has sold over 25 million copies, and there’s… Maybe a couple dozen people on the Internet complaining?

There’s just no pleasing some people I suppose

For me personally, I dislike Meta strongly enough that the Quest was never an option.

I already had a PS5 and have a couple of digital VR games Sony have away a while back, plus there’s a few more I have been interested in. But until now the library was so restrictive that I could not justify the price tag for a PSVR2.

The only other option I considered was the Valve Index. I like Valve a lot and I’m sure it’s great, but at this point it’s 5 years old and would be 2x the price of the PSVR2. Not being comparable with the PS5 for those couple of free games plus exclusives in interested in like Horizon is a minor setback as well, although it’s not a huge deal and Horizon might come to Steam anyways. Also I would have to upgrade my PC a couple years earlier than I would otherwise- my RX580 is mostly fine now, but I don’t think it could handle VR.

Couch gaming.

I’m a technical person and I’ve tried a lot of different methods to do couch gaming with a PC. From having some sort of lap tray to various wireless mice and keyboard solutions. I’ve currently landed on having my gaming desktop just stream with Steam Link to my living room. As long as I’m selective about which games I want to play, I can usually get a good experience. But I still have at least 60% of my steam library that isn’t a good experience doing that.

Having a dedicated piece of hardware with a custom OS that is designed around a controller is a huge difference maker. Plus you add in how ridiculously expensive it is to get either a USB external optical drive or internal SATA drive to watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. Heck, even just watching Netflix or YouTube in the living room is easier on PS5 than a media PC for the average user.

There’s a reason Valve tried to make the Steam Machine.

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

It’s not in that source, but other sources like this one cite Tsainama Marubo (the main tribal elder who gave all the quotes) as being 73 years old.

Seems to me like the Times found some old guy to complain about the younger generation, which I imagine helps to sell a lot of physical copies of the Times.

What makes you think the PS5 isn’t growing how they need it to? It’s outselling the Xbox and it isn’t close. In a less direct comparison, it’s outselling the Switch. It’s outselling what the PS4 did, and that was successful. I don’t understand where this sentiment that the PS5 is struggling is coming from. The second half of your first sentence even mentions that they’re really dominant right now.

I also don’t understand “PC overtaking any one console”… Like, how is that even a comparison? When was the last time there were more consoles than consumer PC’s… The SNES era? I’m not even sure about that, you might need to go further back.

Even if you want to talk about just gaming, that’s tricky to even start to compare. The closest I can think of is that according to this Steam averaged 120 million monthly users last year. According to this, PSN averaged 118 million monthly users in Q4 2023. That’s pretty much dead even. I don’t think it makes sense to add other platforms to the PC side without adding in Nintendo and Xbox to the console side, in which case… Consoles have more users and it’s not close. And they both are just a fraction of the mobile gaming market anyways.

Sony has absolutely proven that they can generate the unique exclusives that sell consoles. That’s… Why they have the best-selling console right now. Their strategy is working. You could say this about plenty of other consoles at points in the past (PS3, WiiU, 3DS, GameCube, N64, Xbox One). If you even said this a couple years ago about Sony struggling to manufacture PS5’s fast enough that might make sense. But they’re currently dominating the home console market. So I don’t understand why you think they’re struggling or need to drastically change the way they do things?

Just to clarify- what strategy are you predicting that they will change?

ITT: a bunch of people saying “I won’t”.

You’re probably in the minority. There’s 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that’s over 3,000 PS5’s for every subscribed account here.

A lot of users here have PC’s that approach or exceed the PS5’s capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don’t. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.

Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It’s still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC’s less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.

Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It’s great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony’s PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it’s been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.

Sony absolutely did sell consoles directly to consumers. That’s how I got mine lol.

Sony has absolutely no interest in enabling scalpers. They gain nothing, and in fact lose out on revenue because of it themselves. The PS5 initially sold at a loss, with the assumption that buying games, accessories, and subscriptions will turn the whole ecosystem profitable for Sony. Scalpers arent buying subscriptions. They probably aren’t buying games because the digital market makes the supply close to infinite. They probably aren’t buying accessories because the supply was similarly not restricted. So the only thing scalpers are doing is giving Sony a loss, delay the consumer’s ability to buy anything that’s profitable from Sony, then taking more cash out of the hands of consumers that, arguably, might have been used to buy more games/subscriptions/accessories. Sony has absolutely nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose from scalping.

Scalping affects all kinds of industries. It’s only even possible when demand exceeds supply at a given price point. I have no reason whatsoever to believe Sony was purposefully restricting supply (it was in their best interests to produce as many units as possible).

Any further action restricting scalpers would be the responsibility of retailers. Sony can’t just force Target or Wal-Mart to incur additional expenses to start tracking who is buying PS5’s and restricting those. Even when retailers do it, it’s usually a joke to work around. Heck, the minimum-wage employees tasked with enforcing such rules might be the ones doing some scalping to try to supplement their income.

The only way to eliminate scalping is to make it unprofitable. One way of doing that is… Just don’t buy from scalpers. But consumers cannot organize and behave rationally like thaf- the free market is often a downward spiral of bad decisions, and a lot of casual consumers just don’t care about spending a couple hundred dollars more.

The other way is to raise prices. If Sony and Wal-Mart are selling something for $500 and a scalper can flip it on eBay for $900, getting $400… That means that consumers are willing to pay $900 for that item. Perhaps it should have originally sold at retail for closer to $900? But then the narrative would be that Sony was overcharging- that the PS5 was a luxury item for rich people only. Even if it sold out, the stigma would stick for the whole generation (like the PS3).

Sony made a product everyone really wanted and charged less than they could, and you want to blame Sony for actions of all the people between you and them?

You said the experience of building a PC was great (it can be- I’ve built several myself), but aren’t you forgetting about all the shortages, supply machines issues, and scalping that happen within that industry as well? I never saw pictures of cryptofarms with tens or hundreds of PS5’s hooked up. NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have all received criticism for not doing enough to prevent scalping for various product launches over the past few years- are you bringing the same energy to them?

Nintendo arguably has restricted supply artificially with things like Amibo and there were allegations they did so with the Wii as well. Are you boycotting them?

It’s perfectly fine to just… Not want a PS5. PC’s are good too, and a lot of people have both.

I think there are populations of both patient and impatient gamers on both.

The absolute worst platform is Nintendo. You might as well buy the game on launch because it’s still going to be the same price 10 years later. Or even more expensive in some cases.

Consoles have been moving to digital, but they still have physical games. I can’t go to a local store or eBay and buy used Steam games. At the same time, Steam has great sales that do a lot to offset that.

In general I think media hypes up new releases, and there’s blame to go around omamong publishers, media outlets, and media consumers for that. But most online discussions on games are going to default to new releases unless it’s a specific “patient” or “retro” community. So it’s easy to underestimate how many people are fine waiting a couple of years. Or how many kids are waiting until their birthday or Christmas to play a game.

Sony has been paying that toll and, per the article, plans to continue to do so.

Am I missing something here?

What do you mean by “shifted to”. Was there ever a time when these were more common on consoles?

The game widely attributed to starting “micro transactions” was MapleStory, a windows MMORPG. PC games adapted online features like digital-only delivery, DLC’s, and micro transactions before consoles even had the capability to do so figures out. Even before online capabilities, I remember going to game stores in the 90’s and seeing “expansions” for PC games, which is what we used to call DLC back when it was physical.

When think “microtransaction”, I think of a handful of different games immediately. MMO’s, which are much more common on PC (chat features, complex inputs requiring a keyboard, add-ons or other enhancing programs running in the background). Simulation games (the Sims, Truck Simulator, Farming Simulator, Cities Skylines, Civ, etc) that usually are much easier with a M&KB than controller. Multiplayer battle games like MOBA’s or shooters (Valve has DOTA 2, TF2, CSGO and most others are either PC exclusive or multiplat). When I think of Sony in particular, I think of their cinematic single-player experiences. Which may have some DLC, but I don’t associate with predatory micro transactions like cosmetics or P2W schemes.

Consoles have tons of that too nowadays, but it seems like kind of weird to act like PC users are somehow less interested or susceptible to predatory pricing schemes.

Both pale compared to the mobile market though.

https://www.techspot.com/news/103189-ps5-becomes-sony-biggest-money-maker-crushing-past.html

Seems like almost every business area of PlayStation is doing well. Hardware, subscriptions, DLC, other micro transactions… The PS5 just became officially their most profitable generation.

They’re looking to maximize revenue and profit by expanding into the PC market. It’s great to see because it gives consumers more choice. That absolutely should not be interpreted as any sort of sign of weakness for the PS5. The PS5 seems to be doing better than the PS4 did, and the PS4 did well. They have crushed Xbox to the point where people are speculating Microsoft might want out of hardware. The Switch is harder to compare against because it’s near (really should be past) the end of its life, but the PS5 has been selling at a faster rate.

PC gaming is just starting to get back in track after a few down years for hardware sales (largely related to supply shortages and price gouging, especially GPU’s). But it’s starting to turn around, and it seems like Sony wants a piece of that. The question should not be “why is Sony pushing PC ports”, but “Why is Nintendo not porting to PC”.

Square-Enix has been mismanaged for decades and I don’t think is worth paying attention to.

Is the CEO underestimating patience or is the author overestimating?

It’s not as if PlayStation is struggling right now. The PS5 seems to be selling pretty well.

Not to mention that consoles and PC’s are indirect competitors. A lot of people want to use a controller form their couch without jumping through hoops. Gen Z is trending away from desktops and laptops entirely in favor of mobile devices.

I use Steam Link on the Deck to do this often. Personally I just leave it in 16:9- the Deck just displays horizontal black bars to get from 16:10 to 16:9. For me that’s just part of the Deck experience because even a ton of games I play locally are 16:9 only, or even 4:3.

You can choose to match the resolution as well. On your host PC go to steam -> settings -> remote play -> [advanced host options] and look for something like “Match desktop resolution to client”.

It also depends on what you are doing. I find that more resource-intensive games are often better streaming- better battery life with less heat and fan noise on the Deck. So changing the individual game settings to 1200x800 works well.

I don’t use that just to access files though. I have several folders on my desktop set up as SMB shares and installed another file explorer (Nautilus) to access it. I mostly use it to move around PS2, GameCube, and Wii roms- everything else is either just permanently on my SD card or I’m able to regularly install via Steam.

For non-Steam game saves, I set up SyncThing to synchronize across devices.

I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.

I’ve seen several articles whining about this patch over the past several weeks. They all have the same vague complaints, but the only real tangible and provable one seems to be that some mods break, and Fallout: London was delayed.

I’ve seen claims of crashes and FPS drops, but no actual data or testing to back that up. It seems like a classic case of the Internet circling around and making something into a much bigger deal than reality.

Everyone I’ve seen commenting who has actually tried it themselves seems to have positive feedback. I installed it briefly on the Deck myself to try it out and it seems fine, although I don’t care enough to put in hours of proper testing.

For a long time I’ve argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like “habit forming” or “dependency” instead of addiction.

A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.

The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don’t want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word “addiction” attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything… I’m not saying there are not individuals who don’t have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It’s parents who don’t want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It’s religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It’s large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like “sex addiction” it’s used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It’s notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged “victims”. At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.

With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.

Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that “videogames = bad” when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.

Lemmy simply hasn’t been enough content. I still use Lemmy (obviously, I’m here) but I also supplement with other places.

For example, I used to enjoy the sub for one of my favorite sports teams. A lot of posts tended to be articles from the same handful of news outlets. Now instead of reading through Reddit I just have that website up and routinely check for new articles.

I use the Google News app occasionally. It usually sucks.

I also use Instagram a lot more. I only reluctantly downloaded it and created an account because my wife and a few friends wanted to send me things. Then I used it more when my band released an EP as a way to promote that. For pure entertainment rather than informational purposes, I usually go to Lemmy first and exhaust what is good quickly, then go to Instagram after.

I know it sucks. I don’t like having an app from Meta on my phone. I know it can become an unhealthy habit. But I also drink and eat junk food, so there you go.