Sony drops “PC”, adds “AI” to official PlayStation business strategy summary
https://www.gamefile.news/p/sony-annual-report-fine-printOpen linkView original on lemmy.today242
Comments55https://www.gamefile.news/p/sony-annual-report-fine-printOpen linkView original on lemmy.today
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I wish i could not buy, again, the Playstation and Nintendo consoles that i don't own.
I have good news for you! You just did(n't).
I got a switch1 so I could play Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, after putting hundreds of hours into MHGen on the DS. I really wish I could have just played MHXX on the DS instead of having to go to a Switch, but alas. I tried some other games on the Switch, but I just can’t do it. My friend lent me BotW and I got until the part where I led the cave and the framerate dipped to like 15. I snagged it on the computer and played through the whole thing at 1440p/144FPS. Every Switch game is so much better on the computer, and the online capabilities (or lack thereof) are horrid. Since then, Nintendo has quadrupled down on anti-consumer stuff. No good.
Last Sony console I got was a PS3, because the PS4 was horrid with its performance and nightmare load times. I stopped getting consoles after that, even though the PS5 and latest XBox have good performance and much smaller load times. I’m just done with them, and my decisions are reinforced every time news like this comes out!
I still fuck with old consoles, though. I need to invest in an upscaler or any device that’ll let me play them on my modern screens, since I don’t have room in most of our comfy places for my CRT at the moment.
Good news, it's not just the switch. Pretty much every other console game is also better on PC, even just because of the existence of pause/save state functionality. That's not even getting into romhacks or retro achievements or any of the other major benefits to emulation.
Good luck with that.
Customers: we want Bloodborne on PC!
Sony: people don't want PC games. They want AI!
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I sell honey at a local garden market. My sales went up 460% once I started labelling it "A.I. Honey". /s
Apiary Intelligence?
This may be the first time AI has made me smile
I think that this 2 letters swap is gonna cost them a pretty penny.
If it? What's the market for new games on PC?
Steam, Epic, GoG, and some other markets.
Steam's records show that an overwhelming majority of playing time is going to older games. The market may not be large enough for Sony to care.
Ah. I was wondering exactly what you meant. Yup. There definitely is a market for good games, new or old. I wouldn't make the mistake of trying to correlate that to any trend in taste for indie or corporate, other than who is giving better value and a more fun experience.. try not to think like corporate execs who don't have a fucking clue what fun is and seeing gamers as consumers.
Corporate execs may not know what fun is, but they know what makes money. Right now, everything in the computer gaming market points to new games being more expensive than what the market will bear.
They probably see the PC market as too competitive to compete in and want to invest in technology which makes new games cheaper to make. So, Sony will abandon a market it can't make money in and will invest in a technology which can hopefully churn out assets for their new games, which will lower development costs.
So then we are back to where we started, and people need to stop buying into advertising and garbage. Line doesn't need to keep going up.
And don't be surprised when corporations stop producing for a platform when it no longer makes them money.
If the new games were any good, people would play new games. Enshittification + survivorship bias = people play old games.
There's good news though. Sony has PLENTY of old good games that aren't on steam. They could just release them. Making a PC port of a great game is much easier and cheaper than making a great game
The real problems are that games aren't finished when they come out. Even small games that aren't broken generally get patches to make them somewhat better in the first year. And games tend to go on sale after around that long. So I just wait and pay less for a better game.
The combination of getting burned by Anthem straight up crashing on my hardware until after my friends were already done with it making it a complete waste of money and the horror of getting my witcher-superfan friend cyberpunk 2077 on launch as a gift and it being complete garbage made me never want to buy a newly released game again.
The thing is, they could release on Steam, and continue doing so for years, and they'd continuously build up a catalogue of older games that still sell. Sure, the first year probably isn't going to do as well on PC as they expect from consoles. Later years will probably do better though.
Oh well though. Sony doesn't really make anything I want to play anyway. I'm not that bothered by them making bad decisions. I'd rather them be smart about it, but honestly I don't really care.
This could be them being smart about it. Compared to various Xbox models, the PlayStation models were generally custom designed to a specific set of hardware and software criteria that aren't fully mirrored on Windows PC. It is a non-zero cost to convert and support.
There may be some individual success, but the aggregate may be a money losing proposition. At that point, why support a market that is only costing them money?
You're talking about the devices that can fully be turned into a PC. Sure, the hardware set is a specific thing (just like Xbox, though I guess they have two versions). However, the only thing that makes it not work like a PC is the software.
Yes, it is a non-zero cost. I'm pretty sure the dollar cost isn't the reason for it though. They care about the opportunity cost of not having exclusives. The PC ports made them profit. It just wasn't as much as they hoped, and it made the console less desirable.
If PC game sales are cannibalizing PS sales, then there is a higher cost to creating and selling a PC port than just porting the game.
While we're kibitzing about it, both the PS4 and PS5 are literally AMD x86 based PCs with AMD integrated GPUs stuffed into a plastic shell and running proprietary software. Said proprietary software is the only tricky bit, but both systems' OS is based on FreeBSD. The OS has its own set of proprietary graphics APIs because Sony is gonna Sony, but they're still talking to a commodity AMD GPU which could just as easily find its home in a PC.
There is nothing new under the sun for the Playstation platform since the PS3, which was arguably the last interesting iteration.
Out of curiosity, do we have access to new vs old game data on other platforms? Probably makes sense to compare these things rather than assume it is different with only one side of the data
This truly is the dumbest timeline.
Nobody's asking for AI, it's being forced upon us. It's only going to get less accurate and helpful as time goes on and all the wasted money and resources to make it run will not be recovered. But it will not go away, people will just deal with it or stop using it.
Thanks, Sony, for reinforcing my decision to leave your products behind.
No one with an intact soul likes AI.
Only the children that can’t separate the fascinating technology from the techbros feel that way. The adults and people who understand nuance can clearly draw the line between what’s harmful to society and a new interesting technology with many applications.
I want to play games on PC not AI
How can you drop something you never had?
Sony has ALWAYS done stupid shit that no one wants.
CD rootkits anyone?
Nobody wants this. No one.
I have immensely enjoyed a handful of the Sony PC releases, like Horizon and Spider-man titles, even bought some of them at full price. But locking them away from me behind a playstation hardware requirement just means you don't get any money from me Sony
Looks like it is time to build a platform for the people. A commoners console if you will. It is clear we have to move beyond these corporations for gaming now. They bought up all the studious and now they are killing them all so they can deliver us AI slop instead.
This close to inventing computers. 🤏
No, honestly in my mind it would me more like investing in a community platform that would use open standards. Think Risc-V Vortex.
Obviously, we are not quite there yet with the hardware. It would be pretty awesome to have a proprietary free setup though.
This is literally just building your own computer and putting Linux on it
It could be as simple as that. But I was thinking a nonprofit with standardized hardware and a team to integrate it with Linux properly. All the games can be open source and community supported.
We could call it the Playtendobox.
/s? https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
You mean Steam... the monopolistic company that is using price fixing on the entire PC game industry?
Not exactly what I was thinking to be honest. It is certainly standard hardware on Linux that is supported by a community though, so it isn't all bad.
Something being popular because it works better than all its competitors is not a monopoly.
Accused of using price fixing, it's an ongoing legal process.
If you're going to criticize Valve do it by going after the incontrovertible stuff like benefiting massively from loot boxes (gambling, skimming off the secondary market) or providing "community tools" with very little support for moderation or protection from malicious reviews. There's plenty to criticize.
Listen, they meet the market definition of a monopoly with 75%. That is higher than Microsoft, another well known monopoly.
I really don't care what the courts say. There are numerous testimonials proving without a doubt they have engaged in price fixing. Specifically, they request that any game that is listed on Steam cannot be listed somewhere else for a lower regular price.
This is classic monopoly behavior and your feelings really don't matter.
Thanks for bringing up their other unbelievably shitty practices though. Did you know they used to not offer refunds? Yeah, a court smacked them down which lead to their stellar return policy.
Stop pretending they are anything but a corporation.
Officially this only applies to Steam Keys. Unofficial there are a couple of allegations that they've done this in other contexts. This is not "numerous testimonials proving" nor is it reflective of actual policy. Part of the legal process is determining if the allegations are factual and if they represent actual policy or if they're the actions of individual managers misunderstanding or overstepping policy.
If the allegations are true, yes it's monopolistic behavior. In the meantime you're free to use Epic, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, GOG, itch.io, whatever Microsoft is calling their store these days, Humble, or wherever else people publish their games.
Valve makes it easy to buy and sell, simple to update, and has integrated social features like a friends list and messaging that simply work. They keep margins low by having a small number of employees. They don't need to engage in anti-competitive price bullying to be embarrassingly profitable. Maybe they are anyway. I'm not going to use a worse store for no gain while I wait for those lawsuits to finish. (I do like to buy through GOG or itch.io when it's an option because I'd rather have the software unreliant on a third-party or internet-connected launcher)
So Kazeta?
https://itsfoss.com/news/kazeta/
There is absolutely nothing worse than marketing.