I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

Gonna be weird.

Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.

I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.

Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.

So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.

They didn’t create Shadow of the Colossus. They were a support studio for Team Ico.

Same thing for almost all of their games. The Astro series is from Team Asobi. Gravity Rush was from Team Silent/Team Gravity/Project Siren (that studio kept changing its name). Parappa the Rapper was NanaOn-Sha. Death Stranding was Kojima Productions. Patappn was from Pyramid.

LocoRoco was an original, but that series hasn’t been touched since 2008. I doubt many of the original devs were even still there by 2021. Ape Escape and Legend of Dragon are similar.

Japan Studio has too many games to check them all, but all the ones that I recognize as good and memorable games are from other studios.

Out of curiosity, why are you annoyed at them closing their Japan studio? They have a ton of game credits, but were mostly a support studio. Like, technically they have credits on Bloodborne but I think everyone pretty much agrees that’s a FromSoft game.

The only recent original games from them I see is Knack and Knack 2. Personally I thought they were pretty decent and are better than just a meme game, but at the same time they weren’t exactly successful hits either. Is there some hit game or series I’m missing here?

And what was left of them was just merged into Team Asobi. Which I find kind of funny because Asobi was originally a team from Japan Studio that was split off.

For my library of 390 games, only 2 are “Borked”.

One is Magic: Duels, which was discontinued by WOTC back in 2019. It’s still playable on Windows, but seeing as it was kind of a weird experiment they did that ultimately got replaced by Arena I can understand the lack of support there. Also it was free, and I got clean a few years ago, so I’m not salty.

The other of Flatout 3 (the car racing/destruction game, not to be confused with the similarly named Fallout 3). I remembered seeing ads and reviews for Flatout back in PSM when I was a kid. Never got to play it back then, but I grabbed the series bundle on sale at some point. Still haven’t played any of them yet, but it appears the issue with Flatout 3 in particular is… It’s a bad game. Just learned this now, but apparently it was made by a different developer than the first games and is, by review score, one of the worst games of all time. So there’s probably not a whole lot of demand for it on Linux.

Fun stuff. Always neat to find a new way to look at the library.

Even that is a perversion- Victor Gruen is largely cited as one of the pioneers of the shopping mall. He was an Austrian immigrant to the US. He wanted to create a modern, climate-controlled version of the public spaces Europe had for centuries. They were designed to be public parks, housing, schools, etc, with shopping being just a portion of the space.

He famously denounced what the shopping mall became.

This isn’t censoring culture. This is a streaming platform focusing on streaming and giving up on trying to be more than that.

The communities still exist and will find a new platform. Just over a year ago there was a sizeable chunk of Redditors that came to Lemmy. It’s happened time after time when a platform goes down. Communities are much more than just the platform they are on.

And… Why is that?

Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don’t have comments, like Netflix.

Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll’s comments section seems to me like it’s unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.

There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that’s adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll’s business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it’s easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.

Good. Not every website needs to be a social media platform too. There’s already plenty of communities on the Internet to discuss anime.

Neutorypical here (possibly a touch of undiagnosed autism but not a lot)- I don’t get into them.

My wife and I take a very proactive approach to communication. We talk through decisions before either of us gets emotionally attached to an answer. We trust each other to have good decision making processes when that isn’t an option. We have thoroughly established that both of us are putting the interests of the household first. We know both of us are acting in good faith, we both apologize, and we accept each other’s apologies.

In previous, less healthy relationships, I realized what made a “fight” was that her or I wanted it to be. Maybe one of us wanted attention or affirmation or had some inner problems was taking out on the other. Perhaps we just didn’t feel like we were properly heard unless we were angry. Whatever the actual fight about was usually something that could’ve been resolved without emotional energy.

As for how long to recover after… When it happened it always depends on the specific fight. Sometimes hours, sometimes days, eventually the big one was that we broke up permanently. If the issue has been resolved and someone is harboring resentment because the other party disagreed with them, there’s more underlying emotional issues that need to be resolved.

All PS3’s could play PS1 games too

Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:

The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)

If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:

Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

More gameplay focused:

Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)

Do you mean Scarlet and Violet? I largely agree, but the Blueberry Academy DLC was pretty good. It is set in Unova with a lot of Gen V pokemon added and references to those games.

In general, I’d say that the SV main game is one of the worse ones, but the post-game is among the best.

Gen 5 is still the best though.

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

What makes you think the PS5 isn’t growing how they need it to? It’s outselling the Xbox and it isn’t close. In a less direct comparison, it’s outselling the Switch. It’s outselling what the PS4 did, and that was successful. I don’t understand where this sentiment that the PS5 is struggling is coming from. The second half of your first sentence even mentions that they’re really dominant right now.

I also don’t understand “PC overtaking any one console”… Like, how is that even a comparison? When was the last time there were more consoles than consumer PC’s… The SNES era? I’m not even sure about that, you might need to go further back.

Even if you want to talk about just gaming, that’s tricky to even start to compare. The closest I can think of is that according to this Steam averaged 120 million monthly users last year. According to this, PSN averaged 118 million monthly users in Q4 2023. That’s pretty much dead even. I don’t think it makes sense to add other platforms to the PC side without adding in Nintendo and Xbox to the console side, in which case… Consoles have more users and it’s not close. And they both are just a fraction of the mobile gaming market anyways.

Sony has absolutely proven that they can generate the unique exclusives that sell consoles. That’s… Why they have the best-selling console right now. Their strategy is working. You could say this about plenty of other consoles at points in the past (PS3, WiiU, 3DS, GameCube, N64, Xbox One). If you even said this a couple years ago about Sony struggling to manufacture PS5’s fast enough that might make sense. But they’re currently dominating the home console market. So I don’t understand why you think they’re struggling or need to drastically change the way they do things?

Just to clarify- what strategy are you predicting that they will change?

ITT: a bunch of people saying “I won’t”.

You’re probably in the minority. There’s 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that’s over 3,000 PS5’s for every subscribed account here.

A lot of users here have PC’s that approach or exceed the PS5’s capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don’t. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.

Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It’s still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC’s less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.

Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It’s great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony’s PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it’s been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.

Sony absolutely did sell consoles directly to consumers. That’s how I got mine lol.

Sony has absolutely no interest in enabling scalpers. They gain nothing, and in fact lose out on revenue because of it themselves. The PS5 initially sold at a loss, with the assumption that buying games, accessories, and subscriptions will turn the whole ecosystem profitable for Sony. Scalpers arent buying subscriptions. They probably aren’t buying games because the digital market makes the supply close to infinite. They probably aren’t buying accessories because the supply was similarly not restricted. So the only thing scalpers are doing is giving Sony a loss, delay the consumer’s ability to buy anything that’s profitable from Sony, then taking more cash out of the hands of consumers that, arguably, might have been used to buy more games/subscriptions/accessories. Sony has absolutely nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose from scalping.

Scalping affects all kinds of industries. It’s only even possible when demand exceeds supply at a given price point. I have no reason whatsoever to believe Sony was purposefully restricting supply (it was in their best interests to produce as many units as possible).

Any further action restricting scalpers would be the responsibility of retailers. Sony can’t just force Target or Wal-Mart to incur additional expenses to start tracking who is buying PS5’s and restricting those. Even when retailers do it, it’s usually a joke to work around. Heck, the minimum-wage employees tasked with enforcing such rules might be the ones doing some scalping to try to supplement their income.

The only way to eliminate scalping is to make it unprofitable. One way of doing that is… Just don’t buy from scalpers. But consumers cannot organize and behave rationally like thaf- the free market is often a downward spiral of bad decisions, and a lot of casual consumers just don’t care about spending a couple hundred dollars more.

The other way is to raise prices. If Sony and Wal-Mart are selling something for $500 and a scalper can flip it on eBay for $900, getting $400… That means that consumers are willing to pay $900 for that item. Perhaps it should have originally sold at retail for closer to $900? But then the narrative would be that Sony was overcharging- that the PS5 was a luxury item for rich people only. Even if it sold out, the stigma would stick for the whole generation (like the PS3).

Sony made a product everyone really wanted and charged less than they could, and you want to blame Sony for actions of all the people between you and them?

You said the experience of building a PC was great (it can be- I’ve built several myself), but aren’t you forgetting about all the shortages, supply machines issues, and scalping that happen within that industry as well? I never saw pictures of cryptofarms with tens or hundreds of PS5’s hooked up. NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have all received criticism for not doing enough to prevent scalping for various product launches over the past few years- are you bringing the same energy to them?

Nintendo arguably has restricted supply artificially with things like Amibo and there were allegations they did so with the Wii as well. Are you boycotting them?

It’s perfectly fine to just… Not want a PS5. PC’s are good too, and a lot of people have both.

I think there are populations of both patient and impatient gamers on both.

The absolute worst platform is Nintendo. You might as well buy the game on launch because it’s still going to be the same price 10 years later. Or even more expensive in some cases.

Consoles have been moving to digital, but they still have physical games. I can’t go to a local store or eBay and buy used Steam games. At the same time, Steam has great sales that do a lot to offset that.

In general I think media hypes up new releases, and there’s blame to go around omamong publishers, media outlets, and media consumers for that. But most online discussions on games are going to default to new releases unless it’s a specific “patient” or “retro” community. So it’s easy to underestimate how many people are fine waiting a couple of years. Or how many kids are waiting until their birthday or Christmas to play a game.

Sony has been paying that toll and, per the article, plans to continue to do so.

Am I missing something here?

What do you mean by “shifted to”. Was there ever a time when these were more common on consoles?

The game widely attributed to starting “micro transactions” was MapleStory, a windows MMORPG. PC games adapted online features like digital-only delivery, DLC’s, and micro transactions before consoles even had the capability to do so figures out. Even before online capabilities, I remember going to game stores in the 90’s and seeing “expansions” for PC games, which is what we used to call DLC back when it was physical.

When think “microtransaction”, I think of a handful of different games immediately. MMO’s, which are much more common on PC (chat features, complex inputs requiring a keyboard, add-ons or other enhancing programs running in the background). Simulation games (the Sims, Truck Simulator, Farming Simulator, Cities Skylines, Civ, etc) that usually are much easier with a M&KB than controller. Multiplayer battle games like MOBA’s or shooters (Valve has DOTA 2, TF2, CSGO and most others are either PC exclusive or multiplat). When I think of Sony in particular, I think of their cinematic single-player experiences. Which may have some DLC, but I don’t associate with predatory micro transactions like cosmetics or P2W schemes.

Consoles have tons of that too nowadays, but it seems like kind of weird to act like PC users are somehow less interested or susceptible to predatory pricing schemes.

Both pale compared to the mobile market though.