So how much did they make?

I wonder if Microsoft’s shopping spree induced FOMO in Sony and they ended up buying shit. Sony already had the best studios but they chased live service for no reason.

Word

Devil’s advocate: they created a new studio with all the lessons and right core employees who understand the space the best.

One that will be succeeded with a next gen update.

Bethesda, makers of Fallout 76, may be interested because to use that mod you’ve to own both Oblivion and Skyrim, making Skyblivion a great scheme to sell you two more games.

It ain’t powerful enough for modern titles sadly. I’m trying to say that there’s a space where Valve made steam machine with niceties of SteamOS and power of say PS5 can really thrive.

There’s some nuance.

• One of the bigger issues about PC gaming these days is the shader compilation stutter. Valve is able to precompile and upload these for SteamDeck, so a fixed hardware “console” from them will solve this problem too.
• SteamDeck is pretty weak but games are still sort of optimised for it. Same would be true for such a console, making devs focus on a target platform directly.
• Assembling PC yourself can have its own issues. You may not get all the ROPs, or a new Windows update may break your games, or you may occasionally update drivers to make a game more playable without black screens, or wouldn’t turn on with a controller when set up as a “console”. I’m not saying it isn’t doable, but there is an audience for consoles who would love whatever SteamDeck has done for handheld but in console form, and may not want to bother with setting everything up. Valve can disrupt that

Steam can’t release a “console” soon enough.

“Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some cash for our console, it’s called xCloud”

I would like to predict the future too but alas I’m quite bad at it

Yeah you’re right. It is quite a lot, especially with this kind of an IP and expectations to deal with

I would say Forza Motorsport reboot had its issues, Flight Simulator 2024 had issues with cloud infra and Red Fall had various bugs and T poses.

They were playable so I agree with you on that, except FS24

Actually there are two studios within Playground Games, I’m sure there’s cross pollination but the other studio is still making Forza supposedly.

“Late is just for a little while, suck is forever”

• Lord Gabe

I mean Skyrim is kinda cool. In similar vain I really really enjoyed Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, waiting for KCD2 to get all its DLCs before I jump into it. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was also pretty good considering its age. I found Control to have a very addictive and unique gameplay. Special mention to The Last of Us part 1 and 2, as they had really seamless integration of gameplay, narrative and atmosphere.

Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn’t waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.

Ubisoft like mechanics:

• Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
• Once you open up a district, you’ve to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it’s quite a lot. There’s some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it’s given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
• A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.

Mafia 3. I’m probably half way through and starting to get burnt out by the grind and the buggy nature of the game. It is infected by Ubisoft formula, but it’s much more notorious and less fluid. Glad they are going a different route for Mafia 4

Pretty cool that AMD stuck the landing, rather exceeding the expectations by beating DLSS CNN. Sure transformer model is better but it is slightly more costly too, and this is effectively v1 of FSR with ML. This is especially great coming off of shimmering woes of PSSR.

Now the competitive edge moves from DLSS and RT to Multi Frame Gen and Path Tracing. I find the newer goal post to be less exciting for sub $500 GPUs as the added latency or lower base frame rate isn’t justified, so in a way AMD is genuinely a better choice this time around for the price range.

Let’s hope the $200-400 segment also sees such competition thanks to Intel.

It is plausible, fair enough. I still think reaching the finish line is still good, as mentioned in the original post.