MudMan

Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you’re receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so… sure, that’s 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you’d have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).

So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.

Plus the “only play offline” scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.

“I wouldn’t recommend one ever” is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don’t know if I’d say you can build a PC that “demolishes a PS5” for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won’t cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.

It’s not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you’ll play some games, they’ll look fine with some tinkering, but that’s barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that’s assuming you’re plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you’re gonna need a monitor to go with it.

Again, not saying it’s not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.

But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I’m not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I’m asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.

Right.

But right now, to play Fortnite tomorrow for 500 bucks that PC will give you worse looks and performance than a PS5.

I don’t mind the notion that it’s still a better purchase and you get a computer to work and study out of that deal and you have an easier upgrade path and no need to pay subscriptions. All that as it may be.

But it’s not a no-brainer at all and it’s more expensive in the vast majority of scenarios.

I’d be less nitpicky about this, but it actually was true for a couple of years in the Xbox 360/PS3 generations, when consoles were very limited by several parts of their hardware and PC GPUs were amazing value for money. Think 970-1080Ti range.

But that has changed a lot and it’s important to acknowledge that while consoles have become less value by having fewer exclusives and more upkeep costs through online subscriptions, PCs have become less value by an absolutely bonkers bananas insane reduction in GPU availability and value for money. Thanks, cryptobros and AIbros.

It unfortunately takes some thinking and checking options to see what makes sense for a gamer on a budget these days. It’s a lot harder than it used to be across the board, and that sucks.

You can build yourself a PC for less.

You can’t build yourself a more powerful PC for less. Especially since the PS5 Pro isn’t getting a price bump in Europe.

You can barely find a dedicated GPU for less money than a base PS5 at all these days. I guess if you go dumpster diving or are very patient in a used parts website you could technically get there, but it’d be a bit of a project.

Just quoting the source blog. I’m guessing the phat non-digital SKU is either still in production or still in stock.

OK, so this is weird and that headline doesn’t tell the full story.

So in Europe the only price going up is the non-Pro base PS5 Digital Edition (by 10%, not 25%).

The PS5 SKUs with a disk drive are staying the same. The PS5 Pro price is staying the same. The standalone disk drive price is actually going down.

So… WTF is happening here?

I’m guessing that the fact the US dollar is collapsing thanks to tangerine man and the Euro is quickly becoming a reserve currency and the exchange rate is going up is messing with things in strange ways? Gonna guess that some manufacturing from some regions is currently more expensive to import but maybe optical drives are still being made in the EU so they can eat some of the costs that way but Australia gets hit by both? I don’t know.

Man, what a mess. It’s the dominoes meme but with the US having a shit public education system on one end and Australian PS5s getting more expensive in the other.

Didn’t stop them when the EU prices were the higher ones due to taxes.

The headline here is confusing and not covering all the changes. Some prices are staying the same and some are actually going down. There’s something else going on here and I don’t get it.

I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because… well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)”, which proved to be just as incorrect.

That’s a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn’t even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn’t even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn’t even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.

No, it is not equivalent. A full build in a cartridge is playable beginning to end. It may be missing bug fixes, tuning changes or expansions, but it is a full game.

The Switch in particular has games that look physical but aren’t, and nobody should consider those physical releases, but physical games that actually are physical games aren’t equivalent to digital releases just because there is additional content that is digital-only. You lose me there, that premise is just incorrect. And even if it wasn’t, preserving the 1.0 vanilla version of a game is as relevant as preserving the all-bells-and-whistles last patch with all DLC. Ultimately for full archival purposes both are relevant, so I’d rather have one of those frozen in carbonite than neither.

Now, I agree that DRM-free releases are a better way to handle this than DRMd releases, and I do agree that jailbreaking and backing up digital copies of DRMd releases is crucial for preservation.

But that is neither here nor there. For practical usage, as a sustainable artefact and as a preservable snapshot of a media release a physical version is absolutely crucial.

I am very confused now.

So you’re okay with DRMd digital purchases as long as they keep the servers up? But you’re angry that indefinitely working cartridges don’t include patches and DLC in the cart? Even though ultimately the content not included in the cart is literally delivered the same way as the digital purchases?

What?

I mean, what?

I would get it as a user preference thing, in terms of what you prefer right now or what’s convenient to you right now, but from the long term preservation angle it is the physical release that takes it every time, patches or no patches, DLC or no DLC. Absolutely every current system is flawed and absolutely jailbreaking and piracy are needed for full preservation as the system currently works, but in what world is a company arbitrarily choosing to keep servers going a better solution than standalone physical versions?

You are extremely opinionated about this in a very inconsistent way and it’s just so confusing.

TAA only looks worse than no AA if you have a super high res image with next to no sub-pixel detail… or a very small screen where you are getting some blending from human eyeballs not being perfectly sharp in the first place.

I don’t know that the line is going to be on things like grainy low-sample path tracing. For one thing you don’t use TAA for that, you need specific denoising (ray reconstruction is sometimes bundled with DLSS, but it’s technically its own thing and DLSS is often used independently from it). The buildup of GI over time isn’t TAA, it’s temporal accumulation, where you add rays from multiple frames over time to flesh out the sample.

I can accept as a matter of personal preference to say you prefer an oversharpened, crinkly image over a more natural, softer image, so I can accept a preference for all the missed edges and fine detail of edge detection-based blur AA, but there’s no reason decent TAA would look blurry and in any case that’s exactly the part where modern upscaling used as AA has an edge because there’s definitely no washed out details when using DLSS when compared to no AA or SMAA at the same native res. You often get additional generated detail and less blur than native with those.

You think this is a more antagonistic conversation than it is. I absolutely agree preservation isn’t about the ten big games that mass audiences (or big speedrunning communities) care about.

But, again, we’re grading on a curve on the user side and for the real silver bullet for full preservation you need publishers and public organizations instead. As a user I want access to physical media that runs offline and stand-alone (or DRM-free digital copies). For actual preservation I want it to be mandatory to deposit a public copy of both client and server code in some public organization and for studios to have at least a best practice to keep fully version historied archives of both code and assets.

But even on the consumer side, if I’m going to be frustrated at someone it’s going to be to the worst offenders, and from what we know of it at launch, and from this angle the Switch 2 is far from that.

Second this. Handhelds are great for adult gaming.

Plus in my case you also tend to gravitate away from more narrative, engaged experiences and towards more mechanics-driven, lighter stuff, which tends to be a good fit for the format, too.

Oh, come on, speedrunners cherrypicking patches is hardly the litmus test for preservation.

The Switch is easily the most preservation-friendly console platform of its generation, even if it is unfortunately by default. It has also turned out to be the most officially preservation-friendly Nintendo platform in a good long while, if only because its unexpected success forced a robust backwards compatibility scheme, which in turn forces server compatibility and likely longer support than anything else since the DSi got.

Am I happy about that state of affairs? Not really. Am I grading on a curve at this point? I sure am. It’s not a black and white thing.

And for the record, that’s not a defense of Nintendo as a company, but there’s a lot of willingness to misrepresent how the actual proposition on the Switch 2 works, and I find that frustrating. I will take a beligerent company putting all its eggs on the basket of a physical-friendly backwards compatible platform over Microsoft’s “your toaster is an Xbox” cloud-driven nonesense any day. Catch me on a good day, I’ll take it over Steam’s “remember you don’t actually own anything” store warning sticker.

I’m not referring to Ulanoff specifically, but come on, let’s not be disingenuous, you (I assume it’s you, correct me if I’m wrong) using him as an avatar of the criticism Masto was getting at the time. He made a maximalist prediction and was wrong, so he’s a convenient target to act as a dismissal of the genuine concerns being raised in general when Masto got into the mainstream’s focus.

Notably, he wasn’t entirely incorrect. Thousands of people did move on. I did. I’m not writing this on Masto. Did Ulanoff miss the fairly obvious point that with no centralized infrastructure Masto is actually more viable when it’s small than when it’s large? Sure. Was he right to claim that it was “less Snapchat than Path”? Sure. Arguably whoever remains at Masto is perfectly fine with that, and that’s cool, but at the time the debate was whether Twitter would be replaced by Masto, and that did not happen and will not happen, in no small part for the reasons more sharp-eyed critics than Ulanoff pointed out at the time.

It’s a bit of a tangent, but to interject my own take I’ll say that Masto isn’t even on my top 3 for AP applications. Twitter is just not the right format for the way AP works, Masto is not a good implementation of Twitter and some of the technical shortcomings Masto users keep insisting don’t matter actually do matter.

Hm. That’s an interesting approach to it, but I think it’s probably too black and white.

I mean, yeah, sure, for complete preservation you need archival and version control. I’ll honestly say that’s only legitimately doable on the dev side. You get into preserving the code and the assets there, too.

But on the user end I’d say that any version that is physically stored and can run offline, be it a DRM-free installable GOG-style or a physical piece of media storing a build of the game is much, much better than a DRMd all-digital release.

Even if it hadn’t been pirateable day one, BotW would live on. Not only are there multiple cart versions with multiple patches of the game, including the Switch 2 upgrade, but all those versions will run on all consoles. It won’t be the most up to date version of the game, but it’ll be playable, and that’s already a lot compared to the baseline we’re setting elsewhere. It’s certainly not a “glorified DRM key”.

But that’s at the top end of sustainability for physical media. The Switch 1 has some carts that don’t include full playable builds and need partial downloads to run properly. That’s a different scenario. If a game needs online auth to unlock the media that’s another scenario. Obviously for online only games the cart IS in fact just an access point. And on Switch 2 there will be carts that act as physical keys only.

But not all of those are created equal. I think acknowledging the differences is important. If nothing else to ensure people are educated about the difference between owning BotW in a cart they will get to play indefinitely versus Street Fighter 6 in a cart that won’t work if the servers are down and they don’t have an installed version stored.

Seems a touch disingenuous to me. I don’t think most of the critics of Masto during the days of looking for Twitter alternatives were forecasting Masto to just poof out into thin air Google+ style.

I think they were mostly saying it wasn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes.

They were arguably right about that. Bluesky became that, not Masto. Masto went back to being… well Masto. Small, self-referential, insular and quietly chugging along.

Patches are not downloadable to carts by the user, but they can be added to carts by the publisher in re-releases, which is what I presume they’ll do here. No official confirmation for Switch 2 versions of Switch 1 games specifically, though.

I’m not surprised the older saves aren’t compatible, and it can be a bummer, but hey, at least the game does work, so even if you have to start a new run that’s still a lot more than what you get from a digital download.

I am not aware of the Switch having a per-game build whitelist in the firmware. That seems weird, since it’d effectively brick all existing carts after end-of-life. I am familiar with game carts requiring specific minimum firmware versions to run (so the other way around) and including the minimum allowed firmware package in the cartridge to force an update to the correct minimum version. This has been standard on all physical games on all platforms since as far back as the PSP. If you have a source for the Switch doing things backwards on that front and thus being actively engineered to make all carts stop functioning when the patch servers go down by all means please share it and I’ll be the first to go alert the press, but I think you may be getting that one backwards.

I’m confused about what you’re mad about here. You seem to either be mad about things that have been going on for multiple generations (and incidentaly done eff all to curb jailbreaking or piracy, so I have to wonder what’s the point of even trying for Nintendo, frankly) or you’re not right about how the Switch 2 version carts are meant to work.

That’s not the definition of parody.

I mean, I could tell you were being snarky, but definitely not that you were being snarky as some sort of performance art accusation thing.

Anyway, now we’re just talking about your shortcomings as a communicator and I think we can both agree that’s not an interesting conversation, so… moving on.

See how confusing it is? I mean, for one thing, BotW is fully playable offline on Switch 1 cart-only and presumably that remains the case in Switch 2. Despite being a launch title, BotW is one of the larger titles in the Switch library, but they still splurged for the bigger cart size, so no mandatory downloads besides DLC and patches.

For another, I’m not clear that the title updates will be downloadable in the Switch 2 cart. Switch 1 carts do have an allowance of storage to build patches into the physical copies (for re-releases, later prints, discount lines, GOTY editions and the like), so I assume the build you get in the Switch 2 cart is a latest-patch build. There’s no confirmation on this beyond knowing that the functionality is built into the original Switch format, though.

So no, I don’t think you’re right. I’m not sure about what happens with your saves if you do own the DLC but you don’t download it, or what happens if you try to load a fully patched save from the old game with a downpatched cart version, but I’m pretty sure you can play through the whole upgraded Switch 2 game (sans DLC) beginning to end entirely offline indefinitely just with the cartridge.

How was that your point? You just rephrased the original comment with some different wording.

In what universe would someone have looked at that and gone “ah, some witty commentary on how unnecessarily sarcastic my post was; furthermore, on the inconsistency between my original retort and the subjects of the previous post”.

Did you just forget to write that part the first time? Do you think I can read your mind? How was this supposed to work?