probablyaCat

Someone peaking out a door at soldiers with a small black object? Well I dunno. Why would soldiers ever shoot in such a situation…

I mean I was purchasing the expansions and the season pass. And on games that I feel I’ll stick with for a while I even get some cosmetic stuff at times.

I doubt it is even a matter of them measuring the profit. I imagine that a lot of it is they (and many other gaas games that aren’t pay to win) are trying to be the only game a person plays. To make them feel devoted to it. Like they would have wasted so much of they give up (sunk cost fallacy) and that by switching games they’ll get behind in their main game. Because of they aren’t profitable with a repeatedly paid game and season pass off of a person then they have some real bad management. In fact, me paying for a season pass and the expansions and using the server less should make me more profitable than most players except for the whales that buy all the cosmetics too. Especially when Fortnite and Warframe are f2p and profitable.

Honestly if I could play all of the game without having to grind like a fucking mad man, I’d probably regularly buy expansions and pay for a season pass.

I love the coop. I love the gunplay. I love most of the game except the grind.But I have kids and real life shit to do. I tried getting back into it during witch queen, but the amount of time I had to spend daily on it made it damn near impossible to play the dungeons and stuff. I had a little extra free time when I did that too. By the time I managed to hit the cap, I realized I was not having any fun doing it. So I quit. Had a clan I liked chatting and playing with. It was cool. But I’m just not going to keep paying for and playing a game that just feels like a tedious as fuck job.

That’s what escrow is for

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I mean their reasoning was really poor. Cloud gaming? As much as I like it, people aren't really going for it. Stadia worked so well. But it obviously was costing far more than it was making. Xcloud is doing far more poorly than MS expected and apparently just gets used as a glorified demo machine by most. Playstation gives exactly half a shit about their cloud gaming in spite of having it the longest.

Honestly I'm for this because it will increase Xbox market share. The PS4 had so much of a monopoly that making exclusive ps4 games with a bit of incentive from Sony seemed like the right choice. While I ordinarily wouldn't want any sector to get more consolidated, this will probably at least make things more competitive with new IP. Obviously the already existing IP owned by each company will mostly end up walled gardened, but probably less of the new stuff from third parties will. And Microsoft is likely going to be a better handler of that Activision IP than Activision was.

He has one, but it is a child account which a couple of the people he watches aren't available. They are just game streamers and don't say or do anything I take issue with. So he often ends up on mine. I don't have another family spot to make another account for him and I have YouTube premium. So it is what it is. Means I don't end up wasting hours watching videos on YouTube because of a rabbit hole so there is that silver lining I suppose.

Mine are totally fucked, but it is because I let my kid use my account sometimes and now YouTube just doesn't understand me as a person. It suggests stuff that neither of us want. But when I clear history and it just uses my subscriptions it is better.

Meh. A competitive monopoly has a better outcome than the near monopoly PS4 got when it came to exclusives. Yeah a lot of existing IP will be for one or the other. But for third party studios, they will be much less likely to make exclusive games if the console market is more balanced between the two. Nintendo is kind of in a world of its own. And with the steam deck helping push PC into a base level standard, I think we might see some opening up of high quality third party stuff.

I mean, I don’t play pachinko, but I think it’d be more fun if the balls had the birds on them and you knocked some piggies down as you bounced down the machine or at least knocked them down at the bottom depending on where you landed.

Switch has been out a lot longer and has a bigger company behind it. I don’t think anyone ever expected SD to catch up in sales. However, the SD has clearly had an impact on the handheld market. And without tinkering, it functions way more like a console than a full PC.

And I don’t know what setup you used for switch emulation, but I’ve emulated several switch games with perfect success. I certainly mostly play my switch games on switch, but I’ve put a handful on the deck for travel and it’s been great. Along with my 3ds games since my actual 3ds went to electronics heaven.

I love crosscode. Although I’d say it is more of an action rpg than a jrpg. The combat system is real time hack and slash with only a select set of special abilities you unlock as you play.

Still, the other elements are very jrpg-ish. Loads of people, items, and exploration. And lots of talking.

I’d bet money that the next one has backwards compatibility. Afaik Nintendo has never made a handheld that didnt get at least one generation of backwards compatibility. Gameboy had several devices with backwards compatibility. Then the GBA had DS backwards compatibility for it. DS had 3ds. I suppose the 3DS didn’t if you view it as its own thing rather than the upgrade to the DS. Also I’m ignoring the single game devices and the tiny pokemon thing.

I could see them at some point trying to separate handheld and console again just because handheld has been their safety market while they experiment with console. But I doubt now is the moment they do that. And I’m not sure how they do it. Maybe release the switch 2 then after a bit release a console that fits its own niche the way the Wii did (it was great for groups and feeling generally more physically interactive)? But what is that niche that a switch 2 doesn’t also fill? Maybe something like the vita tv device? Budget non portable model. Or maybe a console that does a better version of the GameCube 3ds combo. It has more power and its own games, but also acts as a dock that can play switch and switch 2 games if you dock one in it. I dunno.

That being said, Nintendo has no debt and a ton of cash on hand. They can fuck around and not find out for like 30 years.

I said this in another thread, but Nintendo doesn’t change shit up for no reason. People look at their consoles and go “Oh! Nintendo just tries crazy stuff and sees what hits. Then moves on to the next crazy thing.” But that’s not really what they do. Consoles were not stable at first and didn’t have regular gaming conventions. So many many companies were just trying any idea that popped into their heads. And most failed and disappeared. Nintendo just had a pile of reserve cash for failures and also tended to have a different thing at the time that was succeeding. But if you focus instead on their handhelds rather than consoles, they have been wildly consistent. GB -> GBA was all reverse compatible. That was from 1989 to 2004. So each iteration gave a decent reason to upgrade, but you also were able to continue playing your game collection you built. Then, the DS had GBA support, the 3ds had DS support. And these were all pretty successful devices.

Nintendo didn’t change much from NES to SNES, because NES was successful. Then when they had a bunch of new competition and things were obviously moving into a 3D direction, they took a swing with the N64 to some success, but not enough to keep Sony from becoming a real consistent player. GC failed so they decided to try something different instead of competing on the performance side of things. And the Wii succeeded. And they didn’t change much with the next console. However, they also didn’t change enough… like the fucking name. So people didn’t even realize it was a new console. So it failed. And then they took what succeeded (handhelds) and added it to the other thing that succeeded (Wii ideas – don’t compete on performance, compete with unique games and features). I’ll be honest. I expected the Switch to fail with its huge launch library of 1 game, but I am really glad it didn’t. I also don’t think Nintendo has a big reason to change the system too much. Add power and exclusive games to the new system but have reverse compat. People will have a reason to upgrade without feeling like they will be ditching something that they spent a lot of money on (like literally every handheld iteration they have had outside of the game and watch).

I could see them wishing they had a separate handheld and console again just for security purposes (when GC failed, they had the GBA succeeding, WiiU and 3DS, hell even the DS was moving over a million units a year during the WiiU era). But I don’t see how they justify doing it. Either turn switch into their primary handheld line and make a newer handheld that has reverse compat along with a console, but what does this console offer? I cannot see them getting into the performance game again with PS and Xbox being so far ahead in terms of hardware and games library. Give a system with maybe the power of an XBox One that can be handheld and supports 4K on the TV and 1080 in the hand and can finally run pokemon Violet at a decent fps. Make money.

You skipped a step. We aren’t there yet. It will be the Switch Pocket.

TLDR: I’d bet my pinky toe that they iterate on the switch.

I mean the reason that things didn’t change much from NES to SNES is NES was successful. But in the SNES era, they got a ton of competition and there were no typical conventions for games. Then with the N64, they were jumping into the 3d world and that required some extra changes and Nintendo had some stable competition. Gamecube started having some of the newer conventions but kind of failed (thus why not make big changes?). So the Wii took a different route and made something very different and didn’t get into the tflops race that the other consoles were doing. Wii was successful so why not iterate? Well bad advertising, naming, etc caused the WiiU to flop.

But at the same time, GB -> GBP -> GBC -> GBA all of which were backwards compatible. That is stability from 1989 to 2001. Then GBA -> DS had backwards compat, DS ->3DS same thing. And basically all of those handhelds were successful. So they combined those markets. Something more high end than a 3DS (which for people like me that didn’t have one and didn’t realize the quality of graphics on that thing, it’s kind of huge to see what the switch offered as a handheld), but still portable. Something that can play modern games, but still be mobile.

So given their history, I imagine they have to iterate on the next console. Especially since they basically combined their handheld and console into one thing. And given that they will want to get people off of the switch, they need to give them a reason. They almost certainly aren’t going to make something more powerful than a PS5 or Series X, so why would I get a stationary console that is less good and will have far less games? But give me another handheld console that can play even better games than TOTK and can maybe even play pokemon violet well… no we are talking. And honestly, people look at their console stuff out of context so often and think that Nintendo just tries crazy stuff. But really, they have just tried and failed at times, but had the money to keep on going. And also success in another area when something failed.

This worked out really poorly for them with the WiiU. I doubt they will do it again. So many people (including me) thought the WiiU was either an addon for the Wii or a connected upgrade thing. Personally, I thought it was something like the that genesis 32x thing.

Don’t stress it too much. The companies have incentives to not fuck around with things too much. Especially with email. I think the biggest danger isn’t even them having your email, but the fact that many things can be connected (and suddenly disconnected) that are linked to that account. So if you use an android phone and your google account gets locked for some reason, you can be locked out of your phone, your bank (due to email), your messages, your google photos, your google drive files, your apps that you paid for, anything you logged into using your gmail account, etc. I’ve been migrating some of my stuff into different places just for that reason.

Always has been. Heh. Actually hosting your own email server is a pain in the ass. It is absolutely possible and back when I first started using linux I think it was automatically installed (sendmail – security nightmare, that thing) for a lot of distros. But there are some issues with self-hosted email getting flagged as spam, because some of the big servers like gmail use a whitelist to help fight spam. They basically expect you to be using a server hosted by a big company. And it isn’t just one type of server, last time I looked into it. You have your inbound which can be multiple types but I believe imap is still the most popular, because it has instant update features for your client. Then you got your outbound smtp server. And keeping these things secure it kind of a big thing. I changed careers so haven’t worked in the sysadmin area for a long time, but I do believe it is still an absolute effort to keeping all of this running, not being flagged as spam, keeping it secure, etc. But it is absolutely possible. I think I’ll go read up on it now, because you made me curious.

edit: I forgot. You also have to set up your own spam filter. Which, at least in the past, was also a daunting effort.

edit 2: Yeah reading this makes it seem like it is still a bit of a bitch to do. Especially if you click that blacklist link. But definitely doable.