LetMeEatCake @ LetMeEatCake @lemm.ee

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Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.

For PC: the vast majority of PCs don't have a blu ray drive. So that's a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.

Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It's a huge difference.

I wouldn't be surprised by that at all either. Which is why I recommended waiting!

Bethesda makes well liked games, yes. But they have a track record of their games coming out as complete buggy messes that need 6-12 months to be in a decent state.

Could be in this case that Microsoft has realized how important this game is to their console efforts and the delays have been an effort to avoid a repeat of Bethesda's typical. I wouldn't be too surprised. I'd recommend being wary until the game is out. Waiting won't hurt anyone.

I'm not convinced. I'm also in the habit of not saying "never" all that often, so I won't do so here.

That caveat out of the way, I feel this is just non-expert observations of superficial similarities. People that follow this stuff need things to speculate about, to get excited or despondent (or, paradoxically, both) over.

Unless I'm missing something, Apple's largest acquisition to date was $3b for Beats. That was a purchase that played directly into their core business market: consumer electronics. It tied directly into their history and consumer strength with music and audio. If the purchase went through and ended up being a bad decision, it posed no meaningful danger to Apple's brand or business.

Disney has none of that. They also have a market cap of ~$160b. Apple would need to pay a large premium to do an acquisition. This would cost them well over $200b, maybe even encroaching on $250b. That's a high single digit percentage of Apple's total value, not quite making it to 10%. The risk and the expense would be enormous for them. Not even touching on the unavoidable legal hurdles that they would have to clear, which adds more expense. And to tie it all together, Disney has no serious integration with Apple's core businesses. Disney is a video, toy, and theme park company, with 50% more employees than Apple.

Not going to say never, but this just doesn't add up as anything that makes any sense.

That's the argument they're trying for in court, which is not the same as what they think. The reality is much more mundane. Probably more frustrating too.

Ranked choice voting makes it easier for incumbents to lose. It makes it harder (but still... not actually difficult) for retiring office holder to coronate their hand-picked successor. That's all this comes down to. Especially in a place like DC that votes for a single party by such wide margins. Places that lopsided, in a FPTP primary system, once elected a politician is all but incapable of losing. Even to horrible, horrible scandal.

Ranked choice threatens that. If DC switched to it overnight, >90% of the incumbents would win reelection trivially. In fact I'd be surprised if any of them that ran again lost. But they don't like that it goes from just short of a guarantee, to still really highly certain.

I'm sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how "basic" the fix to their problem really is. I'm sure it'll be news to them and work right away.

The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won't be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.

That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don't know when, because that's a lot of work and not certain.

Like I said, it comes down to if you're doing it once or if you intend to use the soldering iron again in the future. $55 is a lot for a once-off use.

Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.

I think it's a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand... but there hasn't been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.

Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It's got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur's Gate. And it's reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn't get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it's gotten lots of buzz.

I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of "free" (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.

Problem for most people isn't going to be the act of soldering. It's going to be acquiring a soldering station and some solder to work with. If you intend to use it multiple times it's not bad at all. For a one-and-done situation it's best to just pay someone else to do it with their equipment or buy a new SSD entirely.

West is a nothingburger. If you think he'll impact anything other than a 2000-redux, you're spending too much time on online politics. Same deal for the GOP splitting. Manchin, quite simply, won't run for president. He likes attention but he's not dumb. He might be an asshole but dumb is the last thing he is, and if he wanted to sabotage the democratic party he's had far better opportunities to do just that for years.

Trump wasn't Obama either, and his popularity went up. Obama wasn't even "Obama" (as we think of him today) at this stage stage in his presidency. The year three slump is not some historical aberration or oddity. All three of them had near identical polling numbers (~40 up, ~50 down) at this stage in their presidency. Clinton wasn't looking much better at this stage either: mid 40s approve, low 40s disapprove at this stage. He went on to have the largest popular vote win (nine points!) we've had since Reagan's win in 1984.

Polling now is borderline worthless.

This is a common sentiment for people to have, but their preference runs into a major problem. There is no magic "young Biden" candidate out there that can unify the party.

If Biden announced tomorrow that he was going to retire rather than run for reelection, there would be an absolute clusterfuck circus of everyone and their mom's roommate's cousin's dog jumping into the dem primary. Sanders — who is even older than Biden — has even implied that he would run in this scenario. Harris would get a lot of institutional support, but nowhere near enough to clear the field. Newsom would jump in. A solid half dozen house representatives with no real chance would jump in. As would some other has-beens or insufficiently qualified people. A few governors would take the chance too. It would take months for the race to whittle down to the core 5-6 people with any real chance, and by that time >$100m would have been pissed down the drain. Any establishment candidate that won would be met with instant distrust from large parts of the progressive left, and any progressive candidate that won would be met with similar levels of distrust from the rest of the party.

The primary would be acrimonious, expensive, and long. Dems would toss aside one of their biggest advantages going into next year — money — as Trump is more likely than not to tie up the republican primary comparatively early.

"We need a younger, popular person to be our nominee" is a trivial thing to wish for. It's an exceedingly non-trivial thing to make happen. Every person pining for such a person is imagining very different democrats as fitting that description.

The time for new is 2028. We picked Biden in 2020 and picking a candidate one year comes with an implicit outcome of picking them in the next election, if they win the first time.

Polling is volatile and things move quickly in elections, especially when they're over a year apart.

This time in 2011, Obama was polling about the same as Biden is now: low 40s approval, low 50s disapproval. Gallup's Aug 8-14 2011 poll had Obama at 40 approve/52 disapprove. For that matter Trump in 2019 was seeing similar numbers. In early fall 2020 and 2016, Trump was polling in the complete dumps and the polls were predicting landslide dem wins. Early fall 2008 showed McCain slightly more likely to win than not. Fall polling in 2012 showed a bare Obama advantage, but there was enough data there saying that Romney was going to win that without sites like 538, it wasn't at all obvious who was favored.

It could be that Biden will remain weak. But people were predicting that Biden's weak approval numbers were going to hurt in the 2022 midterms, and it was easily the best dem midterm in decades. If not for CA and NY dropping the ball dems would have even held the house! Which is basically insane. There's no reason to be confident that the polling data will stay the same. In fact, it's almost certain that polling numbers will change, and dramatically, in the months ahead. In which direction is far less certain.

The point being... Polling, today, of an election in fifteen months, is borderline worthless. We also have one data point suggesting Biden's weak numbers aren't actually an albatross at the ballot box.

Topic title is "PS5 console exclusive" emphasis on "console". On consoles, it will be a PS5 exclusive for an indeterminate length of time.