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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • The chances get significantly higher when the console player base is smaller and trending down. Investors want to see the biggest entertainment launch in history every time, which is doable when you’re reaching a larger addressable market. The other headwind they’re facing right now is that people on the fence for a PS5 are maybe less inclined to buy one just for GTA now that it’s gotten significant price hikes. Someone impatient who may have been willing to double dip is probably less so.

    GTA6 is still going to do gangbusters with exactly this strategy, but the market is changing, and it could affect how things play out in the future.









  • Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper

    No, it doesn’t even get that far.

    Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.

    A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.


  • But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.

    And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.