• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle






  • Make a product, make it good

    I hypothesize that if this worked, Xbox would be outselling right now. From a features standpoint, Xbox has been on the ball for years trying to improve their platform. Backwards compatibility, a cheap 1080p console to go along with their 4K flagship, 1440p support from day one of this generation instead of taking nearly two years to put it in, Xbox Adaptive Controller and Copilot for accessibility, Series X|S having Xbox One controller compatibility, replaceable controller batteries so that slow controller death isn’t an issue, Microsoft Rewards exists to get stuff like Xbox giftcards for just playing games and typing shit into Bing, a fully-featured Chromium-based browser (meaning you can do pretty much anything on there that you could do on a normal browser, like GeForce Now or browser games like this (and yes, it works with the Xbox controller on the console), Gamepass (specifically Ultimate, which comes with hundreds of games on its own, EA Play Basic, a bunch of stuff for Riot Games games, game streaming, “perks” like game DLC, movies, and trials for services, and more point-gaining opportunities for MS Rewards), and on top of all of that, you can pay $20 for developer access and install emulators for pretty much any console Xbox 360 or below.

    On the PlayStation end, they also have a lot of great features, like the DualSense controller (built-in controller microphone is a super nice-to-have, the DualSense haptics are sick as fuck when they get used to the fullest, and they’ve got gyro functionality for console users wanting to play with gyro aim in competitive shooters), the fancy PS+ guides feature, the most high-end VR headset on the market, and I really appreciate them not using a proprietary expansion format that completely fucks people all the way from launch until like a couple of weeks ago when Seagate exclusivity runs out finally, but that’s about where my praise of the platform itself ends (Edit: The monthly PS+ games are also way better than the XBLG games, which is excellent for people who don’t want the Netflix-style subscriptions but do pay the online fee).

    The real value to people seems to come pretty much just from what games are on the platform. So,

    and people pick what they need based on WHAT THEY ACTUALLY NEED.

    they actually are. People just wanna be able to play the cool new games, and Xbox hasn’t had any in a long time. Starfield might actually be the first game since the Xbox One where a large amount of people are pissed off that it’s exclusive to Xbox, whereas PlayStation gets game after game that Xbox gamers would really like to have. Hence, exactly why they bought Bethesda and made Starfield exclusive.





  • I dunno, I don’t really see it as “respecting my time.” Historically, games like this have been hit or miss for me, so I never wanted to blow over $20 on it, and I certainly don’t feel like $35. I would much rather just play something else I already own or can get for cheaper until I can buy the game on a whim instead of having to commit and play “check every nook and cranny for deal-breakers during the refund window.”

    I would also far prefer something like what BattleBit Remastered is doing. Game came out for $15, it’s one of the best shooters I’ve played in years, so I bought the $20 supporter pack for some in-game cosmetics. Low entry price and rewards for further support. I fundamentally disagree with raising prices on existing products and hate this idea of price FOMO that has extended past early access.







  • They have a definition, they just won’t tell the users because it’s not a realistic definition and they plan to pull the rug out later on.

    If third-party apps were only 3% of total traffic and reddit was willing to destroy its image and massively increase the viability of its only competitor just before IPO over it, I’m sure they’ll have no problem getting rid of whatever percentage of blind people who can’t see the ads reddit wants to serve anyway.



  • You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.

    Kbin.social doesn’t defederate lemmy.ml, so either way we’re playing by their “don’t say Uyghur genocide because we don’t think it’s real and we will ban you based on that belief” rules if we accidentally stumble into there.

    This is where I would like to see individual-level instance blocking so that it doesn’t show up in the home feed, same as how I can block everything that pops up in a language I don’t speak.

    Edit: Turns out we have that! Just found another thread showing how. On kbin, it’s possible to view entire instances separately, and there’s a “block” button similar to individual magazines/communities/users. To see lemmy.ml, the link would be

    https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.ml

    but replacing the lemmy.ml part with any instance should take people to that instance just the same.


  • You don’t need the latest and greatest in either case. If you were to slap any recent budget GPU into a Dell Optiplex or similar that can be found for cheap, then pick up an Xbox Series S for $300 or less, you’d have a PC for eSports titles, older games, checking out free game giveaways like on Epic and GOG, plenty of Prime Gaming games if a Prime member, and anything with lower system requirements, then a box that’ll get games for the next ~7 years, can do game emulation when in the $20 developer mode, and has a $15/mo gaming Netflix subscription that is regularly updated and hundreds of titles strong.

    That’s a lot of value, and with the prices I’ve seen it’d come out to about $700 or less before any subscriptions come into play, which have also gotten way less necessary recently thanks to the rise of F2P titles.