They certainly feel they have to spend hundreds of millions. I agree those budgets can come down, but you need something desirable enough to make the console purchase feel worth it, and Astro Bot didn’t do the trick (with a budget in the tens of millions, not to say that budget is the only variable here).

I haven’t really heard anything to corroborate telemetry as the reason for the PSN requirement, though it could be true. I always figured it was just that they wanted to inflate their active user numbers, which are already inflated by people continuing to use PS4s as streaming TV machines.

They started putting games on PC to recoup some of their costs on these enormously expensive games, and now they’re pulling back to exclusivity because they believe it negatively impacts their ability to sell PlayStations. It just seems very damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

They definitely can’t do what they did during the PS2. Their games back then cost a few million dollars each to make. Now they cost several hundred million. The math works out very differently.

I played Remake before OG FF7, and I didn’t have a hard time following the plot. The ending scene definitely foreshadowed things that made no sense to me until I played the original, but that was it.

Thanks. Do you have any sense as to why those linked firewall devices even need to hit that $500+ range when there are $200 options? Is it just for some advanced use case that normies like us are unlikely to need?

The remake of the first Resident Evil is where I started, and it’s where I recommend you start. To me, the series never topped it since. It gets hard to make apples to apples comparisons given all the ways that series changed over the years, but that first game is a really good escape room, where combat measures your ability to manage resources and risk/reward.

If you have the patience for some of the ways that FF7 may have aged, start with the original FF7. FF7 Remake, without spoiling anything, is sort of about the legacy of the original FF7.

It’s all fun until my wife or I can’t connect to the internet for work or leisure! But I’ll definitely run my experiments on a weekend where there can be the least disruption. Thanks for the tips. Do you have links to a handful of devices you’d recommend in place of what I was shopping for based on this guide? Also, I picked one of the ones from that Amazon link at random, and it says it only pulls 6W; dedicated devices can beat that?

There is a section in my advanced settings to bridge the ethernet connection, yes, though both that UI and the manual are a little light on details. Thanks for the heads up.

In that case, if I’ve got some port forwarding set up on the router, it would no longer apply once the firewall is in there, right? And I’d have to port forward from the firewall once it’s in place? Or the firewall is literally just one other hop on the network that the router doesn’t care about, even if the router connects to the firewall’s WAN?

Thanks. Yeah, some of the ones I was targeting were cheap domains like ampersandrew.xyz or whatever. I don’t think I’d be doing anything so fancy as to violate the above. What does the OP’s “1.111b class” mean?

This is definitely one of those things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. What kinds of restrictions are there on domains, generally? I thought I could just get the cheapest domain that somewhat resembles the name I was going for. I’m not in the market for a domain yet, but I suspect I will be in a few months.

FYI, Tyler McVicker said that games media are traveling for this now, including HLX / Half-Life 3. I can confirm several of the outlets I follow have sent people “somewhere”, including the two guys from Giant Bomb who traveled for the last Valve hardware event. They would have seen everything yesterday, and if the embargo lifts sometime next week, it would give everyone time to edit their footage.

I live in NYC, where the median household income is about 40% higher than in Philadelphia. Rent is more expensive in NYC, which drives salaries up for what is otherwise the same job. When video games are sticky at certain price points, like $70 right now, that price feels cheaper to me here than it does just a few hours away in Philly. Money is weird like that, but when you’ve got digital distribution, they’ve got to make some calls about how to price things accordingly. If I buy a 20 oz bottle of Diet Coke in Brooklyn, it might be $2.50, but it could easily be $4.50 or $5 in Manhattan.

Last rumor I heard, and plenty of adjacent insiders think there’s merit to the claim, is that Sony is aiming for a ~$600 handheld SKU of the PS6 that would be the “Series S” to the main PS6’s “Series X”, while retaining the traditional console model. I think both of those things are a mistake, but that’s what they’re allegedly doing.

Mat Piscatella of Circana will frequently state what drove the growth. A lot of times in the past year, it has been higher dollar sales from fewer units sold. In this case, it seemed to be a huge influx of people hoping to get a PS5 before price increases, as well as genuine system sellers for Switch 2 and PS5 by way of Pokemon Pokopia and Crimson Desert, respectively.

Projects, not games, the developer clarified. Some are games, some are DLCs and such.

$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I’m not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you’re allowed to play), which isn’t attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that’s what you’re willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I’d wager the math doesn’t work out to supply it at $4.

Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you’d never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you’d always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it’s expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.

It’s extremely easy to price something for customers when you’re not the one paying for its capital and operating expenses, so I’m not sure how much value there is in this exercise. Cloud gaming is one that I’m just about convinced will never be able to price itself in a way that people will actually want to pay for it, given those who have tried and failed already.

Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.

We can measure inflation. You don’t need collusion on prices when all the way down the supply chain, prices increase for everyone producing the essentials. Minimum wage is the same, but it rarely gets adjusted, and that’s stupid.

Yikes. Could we not?