Prove_your_argument

FWIW the only metric that really matters is 4k random io without queue depth. If it’s anywhere near what the modern drives offer it’ll be fine regardless of pcie generation.

Doesn’t matter one bit if you’re running a 14000MB/s drive vs a 500MB/s drive. The 4k io is sitting under 200MB/s for all nvme options I know of in the consumer world.

You won’t see it in any official announcement as they want to make sure their retailer partners have the opportunity to liquidate this holiday season before announcements next year. There are also a multitude of other reasons. You do not simply announce you are closing down a console while the businesses you still rely on to distribute products beyond just xbox consoles are holding onto stock.

This guy has had many insider information in the past, going back to 2023 when many microsoft titles started releasing on all consoles including the switch. Console wars are dead and software rent seeking and digital sales are the future: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/microsoft-revamps-xbox-game-pass-plans-and-hikes-ultimate-to-29-99-a-month-ultimate-gets-ubisoft-classics-and-more.1688694/page-29#post-270866538

Console exclusives are dying because there’s more money to be made by selling on all platforms than isolating to just one. It’s not like first party peripherals are superior to 3rd party ones anymore.

It’s just a matter of time until Nintendo breaks and starts releasing on PC. Money is their #1, and their consoles don’t traditionally make money, the software licenses sold do. Just a matter of time until their ownership demands it in the pursuit of more profits.

I mean, yeah. Sega completely got out of the hardware market. They never removed their hardware from shelves before announcing a replacement hardware solution, they simply let it run out and pivoted as a business to software, retaining the brand.

Imagine the potential liability a company would have by announcing they are exiting the market when they are beholden to shareholders. Announcing they are shutting down something would immediately cause a drop in share price. I would cause sales to plummet- possibly triggering lawsuits from retailers.

They’d never announce they were shutting down. There’s too much value there in the brand, even if it’s not what it used to be.

You point the finger at retail and on some level it makes sense to want to funnel users towards your digital distribution platform to completely cut out the middle men and take the entire cut for yourself. So maybe it’s a lot of this…

…but i’m looking at that 50% subscription increase as a sign of what they want. Rent forever, own nothing.

Hardware has costs and overhead associated. They need support people and to have depot services. The cost to sell a console today is getting to be on par with a gaming laptop or desktop (not high end, but something that can play games.) The margin after retailer share has to be lower than ever, and sales tax tariffs are coming hard and fast.

You can develop your games with studios all over the world though and sell them through your US publisher for no import sales tax… especially if it’s on your subscription platform that is effectively impossible to tariff. They have the infrastructure readily available and totally paid for by business customers. Bandwidth costs next to nothing. Digital distribution has next to no overhead costs, unlike selling consumer hardware.

Ultimately Microsoft has a vested interest in Windows gaming, since it helps keep their market share and recurring subscription revenue. Few are linux gamers like I, and games are still being made that have 0 possibility of linux support, bf6 being the newest.

There’s a momumental challenge of escaping the microsoft ecosystem, and they’re pushing hard into the always online track everything you do on your computer and phone home to the mothership and sell your data to whoever is willing to buy it. Subscriptions will likely remove ads from future versions of windows… and the holy grail of total control DRM is not far behind between forcing tpm/secureboot that ONLY works on windows 11.

I don’t think there’s much of a history of consoles being removed from shelves before a successor is announced.

Yeah, remember how microsoft said this wasn’t their last console and they aren’t getting out of it?

Yeah… they lied.

FSR2 looks like trash all around. I don’t understand why it’s so common and why FSR 3.1 isn’t included, given how so many workarounds exist when you tinker with 3rd party apps to enable the functionality work so well.

Proton mail didn’t ask me for a phone or email. But I’ve had it for years so maybe that changed.

It changed. I made one in the past week. You can create an account, you cannot get any account verification emails from ANY other provider, they block them and then restrict your account until you verify with someone else.

I don’t know why you think I don’t get it though. The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape. Combine that with hours of activity, browser versioning addons etc, resolution and any number of other bits of metadata and suddenly someone has a shadow profile linking you to your proxy IPs or whatever else.

Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.

Protonmail is highly accepted

Sure, requires 3rd party email or cell phone to work though.

tutamail didn’t ask for my number or another email

The last one, run by little over a dozen people as FOSS, and easily quashed by the long arm of the law or a pricey lawsuit. What happens then?

I just stop using those accounts that force me to give up my number. It’s called standards

You still need an email that is completely associated to you for official things like medical interactions, government interactions, and stuff like sports tickets if you care about going to a sports game in a town like Boston. Hell, when you send resumes I assume you have a professional inbox for that too.

So how do you do it? Do you live in two worlds with a burner phone / never checking your ‘private’ stuff outside of some kind of proxy/vpn scenario where you remote into whatever box is handling your actual private online presence?

lol try signing up for an email account today without tying a phone number to it or another established email account. It’s incredibly difficult.

You might be able to create an account, but then all “3rd party services” (e.g. creating accounts on absolutely fucking anything) will be blocked and your account will be either restricted or forced to submit a kind of verification that doxes you to lift said block, probably.

I found a single sketchy provider that would take verifications from proton mail that allowed me to then create more accounts, but I had to try over a dozen mail providers before I found the obscure one that did not require any pre-existing accounts, phone numbers or identification documents to just create an email to simply sign up for any web forum, service or basically do anything most people do with email. Everything ends up linked to each other at some point.

There’s just no privacy anymore. The ones who think there is are probably not as private as they really think they are today.

Yeah, I didn’t do a whole lot of research before moving to Pop but i’m sticking with one distro for a while just so I get fluent in something. I hate the out of the box DE experience but with a little tweaking it’s usable.

Gaming is so easy to figure out. I’ve gotten FSR4 to work and I don’t notice much in the way of a performance delta with windows. Plus if you run into any issues there’s solutions to practically everything with ProtonDB, reddit and the archwiki.

So far my biggest gripe so far is zero HDR support which is hardly a dealbreaker.

Ubuntu is the distro that people hate on the most, which is ironic given how easy it is to use.

Pop_OS hit 12.3% in Feb 2021 and completely fell off the chart in May of this year before coming back for September. I’m one of those users.

Oh, and i’m pretty sure I know where flatpak is from. The instructions to input your system data in ProtonDB relies on steam’s system information. My OS shows as flatpak by default because I installed a flatpak version of steam from the pop shop. If someone doesn’t manipulate it themselves, it shows as “OS: Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime)” - The most recent data shows flatpak as 4.5%. So who knows where those users really are coming from. Cachyos ships with steam, so it won’t ever show up as flatpak for that OS unless someone does something really funky.

Is this just based on protondb user reporting/comment data? because I doubt the sample size tells you anything other than these are the builds most used by users willing to contribute to protondb.

Microsoft is maximizing subscription revenue this year. It’s all about increasing that y/y revenue while burning cash on AI that will explode in their face revenue wise, unless the subscription price hikes land.

My boss showed me the article yesterday, but apparently it’s the old news from earlier this year. It went from 70 to 100 back in Feb.

That’s still a giant increase from whatever you would have paid last year.

They’re also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it’s milk the customer time at microsoft.

Relies on proper leadership that isn’t following current MBA principals.

It’s too easy to go for a cash grab. Broadcom is a great example.

Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.

For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.

I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.

This is just the zeitgeist of 21st century capitalism.

✓ Subscriptions. Make them pay you forever.
✓ Low initial price to saturate market share and stifle competition while you operate at a loss.
✓ Drive all realistic competitors out of the market (stadia et al.)
✓ Slow user growth? Jack up prices!

I’m not surprised they got out of the hardware business. Software license protection publishing fees are way more lucrative than hardware sales. The hardware is just there to lock people into the software.