Yup. The Max stories have been the best ones. The character writing remains strong in this one after Double Exposure, but the game loses track of some of its own time travel rules, and the actions that determine your ending could have been telegraphed better.

XBox’s new CEO is on a goodwill-gathering streak right now. Brought down the price of game pass and seems to want to bring people back to the brand proper

Oh, you sweet summer child.

You do you. The Ally is a better value today. Good spot; pass it on until they sell out, because it currently looks like Best Buy is pricing it as a thing that’s in their inventory and not selling. I would recommend that you don’t trust that Xbox is going to right the wrongs of Game Pass price increases just because the removal of Call of Duty brought it down to still-higher-levels-than-it-was-in-the-very-recent-past. And definitely don’t trust lip service to things the new boss is “thinking about” and “treating seriously”. In a world where the next Xbox is definitely for sure just a PC that allows you to buy games from any store you like, and the Ally is that too, they’re not subsidizing hardware. Neither is Valve, hence the price hike.

They will jack up their prices if they sell through their stock and decide that that demand will stick around long enough to justify another batch of them at higher prices. As it stands today, it is doing your fellow Lemming a solid to point out the current price discrepancy in favor of the Ally. When both of those devices are priced for stable market conditions, my recommendation leans heavily toward Steam Deck, but we are not currently in stable market conditions.

Playing on the go is all I do with mine. Beats the hell out of a laptop.

Set your expectations accordingly. ROG Ally is only cheaper until they have to build more with today’s component prices (if they choose to). And it’s not like Microsoft executives don’t have yachts or sell kids gambling boxes.

I mean…how big is that backlog and how much are you playing on the go? There’s been no better device for handheld gaming, IMO, though I can see why it isn’t tempting at that price.

They are, but they’re not beloved for it. The companies still selling to consumers now have less competition for fewer available parts, which is why prices are higher.

Depends on when precisely you’re in the market for a handheld, because if Valve is raising their prices, everyone will be eventually.

Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.

We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.

But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.

I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.

It’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.

As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.

AI might be a problem for this market with or without the US, but tariffs and a war with Iran that drives up oil prices (and therefore plastic and electronics manufacturing) sure is our fault.

Sure, but if the price is going up here, it’s the latest symptom of prices going up everywhere for this hobby.

Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.

If you like AC’s museum mode, you might be into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2. The first game is a bit janky at times, and some of the characters are fictional, but there will be a pop-up video-esque prompt to let you know what the real history is, what they changed, and why.

Also, I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet myself, but I’ve seen people learn a lot about space missions second hand via Kerbal Space Program.

There’s about as much game in Witcher 3 as in all three Mass Effects combined, so it’s still a very good deal.

the creator is notorious for making games that take forever and succumbing to development hell before the studio steps in and finishes it for him

Including this one, it happened like twice. Prior to that, Irrational put out 5 games in 6 years, which was maybe a little faster than the industry cadence at the time.

What they’re doing is ambitious, but they could spend twenty more years trying to make it perfect (which it will never be) even though it was “good enough” a long time ago.