They could easily do so on a console or game streaming service, just give you like 2 hours and then switch it off.
I think Sony actually do that as part of one of the PSN tiers.
But I think the main driver behind no longer doing demos is that when they started analysing it, they found it mostly reduced sales. A lot of people were no longer interested enough to buy it after playing, at least not at full price. I gotta admit, back when demos were common on the front of magazines, there were very few that I actually purchased on the basis of the demo. The ones I did buy, I'd have probably got anyway, like Metal Gear Solid 2.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn't as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn't killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the "wait for a sale" people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that's a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
The first few were really good on console. I played the first one on PC as well and there was definitely something missing with mouse and keyboard controls. The vehicles especially.
You have to remember that most FPS on consoles were pretty terrible back then (e.g. Medal of Honor series), and there was a lot of experimentation to try and find a control scheme that didn't completely suck, along with just the right amount of aim assist. Other devs were still wrestling with that into the Xbox 360 era. Sony put so much effort and money into Killzone, and it wasn't anywhere near as good as Halo.
Plus, split screen co-op made it very popular. It's one of the few games to keep that into the modern era as well.
I assume a lot of the top level staff stick about until their contractually obliged period for getting a massive payday is over, and then look very closely at whether they actually want to be told what to do by a bunch of suits all day long.
Realistically they're working to make somebody else richer at that point, and there's only so much enthusiasm anyone can have for that. Certainly not enough for the long hours needed in the games industry.
Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.
It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they're so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.
Same with EA. It's just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they've closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.
I'm not 100% convinced that an emulation layer isn't as heavy as a browser.
We had things like Java and QT, and none of it really took off. Apple is probably to blame here as well, for wanting everything to be native to iOS and ignoring the reality that developers don't want to make five different versions of their software.
I used to have that CPU, but found it absolutely dying on it's arse for VR Chat (which is notoriously badly optimised). I got a i5-8400 instead, which is about twice as fast for single threaded work (which is still the main bottleneck for most games). Your overclock would take it a decent amount of the way there, but most people aren't going to do that, and it was getting a bit iffy even when I replaced it. Runs hot as well, I expect.
Since then they've got about twice as fast again. You don't have to spend a lot on them to get that either. A Ryzen 9600X will have me set for the next 15 years (assuming they don't ditch x86 CPUs altogether). AMD being competitive again has down wonders for performance boosts. Motherboards seem a lot more expensive these days though.
Yeah, those are basically Mini PC prices. The CPU alone used to cost more than that.
The specs look perfectly adequate (I'm still running very similar for daily use), and 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM should keep you going no matter how many tabs you open or how bloated your PC gets.
Personally I'd get a new Ryzen Mini PC for that kind of money just for the form factor, but they're hardly a scam. The main issue is that the crowd this is aimed at have very little use for a PC these days.
Yeah, I can see how it ended up like that, and it would at least be nice if Windows accepted that and had one copy of the browser rather than every app installing it's own just in case of breaking changes.
And it would also be really nice if it only clogged the system for when it needs to show a UI, but I've got a ton of background processes that are also running a browser just in case today is the day that I finally need to see them. Just looking down task manager now at some suspect large processes, I can see a Razer "mouse driver", Epic, Discord, Steam, Nvidia, Oculus, NordVPN, Signal...
None of these things need to be running a browser while I'm not looking at them.
But hey, lets throw another 32GB of RAM in there, and another dozen cores, and maybe we can achieve the dream of running each of them all in their own fucking operating system as well...
My strict diet of bread, cheese and highly processed red meat means I don't need to worry about washing vegetables.
Checkmate, healthy eaters!