By the way, does anybody have a credible take on the current status/outlook of the war?

I hear nothing about the Kursk offense now, but mainstream news mention recent Russian successes in the East. I understand striking deep into Russia with US weapons would be critical, but I think that is unlikely to happen before the elections.

I am (again) worried for Ukraine, and to our Western politicians f*cking this up.

Don’t forget innovation:

I mean it’s definitely helping, but not in the way I imagined. It is becoming a major driver of CO2 emissions due to the large computational power if needs, which will only increase in the future. The planet is boiling, and they will keep building more server farms for the next LLM upgrade, giving up on stopping/controlling climate change.

A true marvel of engineering, pushing the boundries of business and technology

Behold, the Xbox Series X Ultra for $899*

*Charging cable sold separately

1. Even if they sell at a loss, the number of consoles mean the potential number of buyers for games. More consoles sold means they can sell more games and other profit generating products/services.
2. Sony is barely selling any PS5 Pros as there is a low interest at this high price, which is unlikely to change in the future. The current console is not even fully utilized, lot of recent games are still PS4 cross-gen. 0 chance of the base PS5 being left behind
3. MS will not make COD an exclusive, as they will not give up on the chance to sell a 70 USD/EUR game to 60 million PS5 users, which is double the size of their own market

Time to cut Deutsche Bahn’s investments even more, that will definitely help.

Sony has sold double the consoles this generation (60 vs 30 million I think). And the Series S is very unpopular with devs, increasing the complexity of developing games for Xbox to get just half the PS market.

Game Pass is popular, but it’s just one stream of revenue, and a lot people are only using it on PC. Sony is selling consoles, 70 EUR games, and in addition their own subscriptions.

I understand MS’s strategy, and maybe this was the best they could have done for this gen, but Sony and Nintendo is dominating console gaming, with MS lagging far behind.

This happens when there is a lack of competition. If MS didn’t shit the bed with xbox in this generation, Sony would be trying harder

And let’s not forget R&D costs or other investments (e.g. stores).

I’m no way defending them, they make a shitload of money on each phone, but they are still very expensive to make.

Just want to show of ray tracing. In return, it runs 30 fps (while the original runs 60 on PS5), with worse music and camera.

Absolutely pointless cash grab, they should have just created a graphics upgrade to polish out some texture details, add haptic feedback, and sell it as an add on for 10.

Thank you, sugar in your tea pee!

Need to try again next week, don’t give up so easily

Saudi progress has been just PR, eg. Black Panther in cinema, women driving. Then they chop up a journalist in Turkey, ooops.

MBS is a dictator, and his country is a shithole in the desert.

It’s a bit sad, as Ubisoft made some of my favorite games growing up. I remember playing AC Black Flag and Far Cry 3 10+ years ago, and wanting to move to a tropical island after

Mostly it’s the lack of competition.

On one hand, regulators allowed big companies to become monopolies, so we don’t have a choice. Imagine if instagram and whatsapp were not part of facebook, how different social media would be? Or if bumble and hinge were competing with tinder, not just all being a part of match.com.

And on the other hand, we have examples like the console “war”, where Xbox messed up this generation so hard, that Sony now can do whatever they want.

They are doing this because a rotten corpse doesn’t force them to compete, they can do whatever they want. If MS didn’t shit the bed with the Series X/S, Sony would be trying harder to please customers, or at least not actively screwing them (see also: 800 EUR PS5 Pro without disc drive or vertical stand).

For Europe it’s 800 EUR + disc drive + vertical stand, almost 1k in total. No thanks, Sony 🤡

You are actually right. I tried this game as a friend liked it, and it basically does everything that COD does, but for free, so it’s not the worst way for somebody to spend their time online. Still, I imagine Ubi execs promised to dethrone every other shooter and have 100 million payers to milk for MTX.

Ubisoft’s free version of COD. I tried it as a friend was raving about it, tbh it’s a fine game if somebody likes this style. The character’s from the Ubi universe are just a gimmick, most play the same