Fuck off, bigot.

Wat.

Sony’s white-knuckle grip on their platform is an exciting hint of things to come.

They’ve been cosplaying the PS2 era since about 2005. That’s when it became evident to everyone that games can just exist, and be for every platform, so long as the studio has a bit more money and time. Previously your game was for one gizmo, and you might hire some third party to follow up and coerce it onto another gizmo. Nowadays everything’s a computer and all computers work basically the same way. There’s details. There’s exceptions. But anything that doesn’t work the normal way becomes irrelevant.

This nonsense is the only thing Sony can do to pretend Playstation is anything more than a brand name. Microsoft has stopped pretending and it’s weirding people out. Nintendo had a unique feature for their gizmo, as they do, but now they’re competing with Valve - on hardware - and their follow-up is probably a merely numeric upgrade.

There are no platforms anymore. To consumers, there is nothing but software and obstacles.

Or you can get a different kind of weird.

1 + 1 = “11”.

Debatable.

Perl is a write-only language.

Some people are still waiting on a text editor that never lags.

HTML5 applications goddamn well ought to be first-class programs, as a totally platform-agnostic realization of Turing completeness.

Instead you get every application bundled with its own whole-ass operating system and virtual machine. For a fucking webpage. Yep! No other way to run that on a modern computer!

It is always better to do that shit with a separate gizmo. Ideally, something computery enough that it will not betray you, or cheap enough that you can take a hammer to it when it does.

Never give your TV the wifi password.

Sony’s been fucked since 2005. The console war is over and nobody told them. Developers want to sell games to customers - and platforms are an obstacle.

Nintendo doesn’t care because they want “blue ocean” gimmicks with no competition. So: motion, tablet, handheld. Microsoft actively encourages the shift because they expect they’ll be The Only Platform, despite Steam selling so many Windows games that Windows is optional. Meanwhile - Sony has clung to exclusives because that’s what made the PSX and PS2 super duper successful and they do not have a Plan B.

They keep winning each generation, as if the blue AMD laptop is meaningfully different from the green one. The libraries are 90% identical. They keep having “no games” in the sense they have no games to lord over the other kids on the playground, when their core demographic is 30. This is how disruption always works: fantastic margins on dwindling control. Whatever you have is more profitable than what you don’t! Until suddenly you have nothing.

The economic case for bribing studios into a single platform is doomed. Has been ever since GTA 3. Really, ever since RenderWare made a generation of PC / PS2 / Xbox / GameCube titles look identical, until EA bought that company and destroyed them. Now every machine is powerful enough, to the point the last-gen PS4 is still relevant alongside the endgame PS5 Pro. Crossplay is the default, because fuck you, of course everyone who bought the same game can play each other. The writing is so clearly on the wall that Microsoft may not bother with another proper Xbox. Does anything think that’s because they’re losing money? Even the studios they delete are profitable. They are fucking around on a level above the 1990s cosplay that Sony desperately wants to maintain.

James Mickens does good work.

Because pointers are real.

Right? Every C++ feature needs to be lightly cursed.

“Can you mount the /media/user/Backup drive on startup?”

“Sure.”

“… where is it?”

“Somewhere else.”

Hey look, a business model that should be illegal.

I look forward to slapping random assholes who insist it’s somehow better than selling a product or service in exchange for money.

What a bag of kneejerk hot takes this thread is.

This tech allows games to render like it’s 2003, and get a one-step filter to look like a goddamn Pixar film.

All you need is CHIM.

They didn’t even fuck it up in a fun way. Super Mario Bros (the first one) was batshit crazy, but still invoked a shocking variety of details from the games, back when there really was not much to those games. All of the Uwe Boll dreck is at least camp as hell. Resident Evil knows it’s stupid, and refuses to break eye contact.

Borderlands arrives years late, pleases nobody, and takes no risks. It is of low quality. It’s not even fun to talk about.