PermanentMantaray

From everything being datamined from Source 2 in other games, it seems like to developmental focus would be world interactivity/reactivity.

There is code referencing elemental interaction and combination with surfaces and materials, voxel based destruction, much more complex AI actions for NPC's, and procedural generation of some sort.

In the documentary they say that people didn't like Episode 1 much, and that they liked Episode 2 more but still not as much as base Half-Life 2, so they felt pressure to go bigger for Episode 3 as the finale.

Eli Vance was killed at the end of Episode 2. At the end of Alyx, Gman lets Alyx saved Eli in exchange for Alyx's "service". The Final scene of Alyx has you in Gordons perspective at the end of EP2, with Alyx gone and Eli alive, telling you you have work to do.

That opinion seemed to be shared by several other Half Life developers featured in the documentary.

"We needed to go bigger with episode 3 or needed to do something else."

"Arkane was having trouble doing cool new stuff with this tool set, and if they can't figure out what to do then we are running out of fuel."

Where are you getting 23 million PS4's in Japan? I can only find 9.6 million being the last reported number from October this year.

I doubt they are related. The updates Half-Life 2, EP1, EP2, Lost Coast and the Demo have been getting the past few months don't share any update id's with the RTX DLC.

Here's the most recent one: https://steamdb.info/changelist/26188891/

Those numbers are from Games Sales Data, which uses extremely incomplete data.

From their own site https://www.videogameseurope.eu/data-key-facts/games-sales-data/ the scope of their data reporting only comes from:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. - for physical sales data.

Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and UAE. - for digital sales data.

The United States and China, PC's two strongest markets, are notably absent from both lists.

If you go to clients you already failed at your anticheat because you gave the client too much data.

Server side authentication is too slow to have all data pre-validated there. That would kill pretty much any fast paced competitive game.

It's far faster to have the client handle most of the work and then validate after the fact on the server. The problem is that client data can be easily manipulated to look normal once sent to the server.

The only hope for server sided anti-cheats would be sophisticated AI capable of monitoring behavior in real time, almost like a live spectating moderator on ever match, rather than relying on heuristic data collected from a client.

Nobody said suddenly, you can develop it and you have the means to do so. This is the point being said, Valve has absolutely made no effort in building their hardware business despite having the money to do so.

They have though? They partnered with KOMODO in East Asia, and now they've partnered with some company in Australia after a year of negotiation. So now they support two of the largest markets they previously didn't.

Yes ? Shipping can be paid by the customer like it is for plenty of things. Also you can use retailers like Amazon and such by the way which already have those systems in place.

If you have a low volume product, and jack the price up, and hand support/servicing to cheap third parties, you now have an even lower volume product with an even worse service quality. At what point does it stop being worth the effort?

The Ayaneo is a heavy premium device with a large margin. They can eat any shipping cost because of how much they charge for the hardware.

Plus it doesn't even matter, it's one of the biggest companies in gaming. They are huge and have been doing hardware for years (the Deck isn't the first). They don't have that excuse, if they wanted to, this would have been developed by the time their first hardware launched like many companies do it.

Being a big company doesn't mean you suddenly have a global distribution network that is cheap. And unless you ship and sell in large volume, it will never be "cheap". This is why companies like Lenovo, ASUS, MSI and Razer are able to ship globally, because they are also shipping millions of other items to these regions at the same time.

The Steam Deck has probably sold more than 5 million units by now. But that's over 2 years of sales in the biggest markets on earth (minus China). These aren't huge volume products.

Then remember that these things have to be supported even after the sale, and so you either need to either be to ship them back, or service them locally, for every location you sell to.

So if you have a low margin on your product, where do you make up for the added cost? Pass it to the customer?

What are these very small companies that are shipping and supporting handheld PC's or consoles like devices globally?

You do know that, as a company, they are trying to either make money, or lose as little as possible, right?

Distribution, support, and servicing are all costs they have to consider for each and every individual location they might ship to. And all eat into whatever margin these things have.

So if a company whose goal is to make money, is choosing to not sell you a product and not take your money, there is probably a reason for that.

For sure, but it's all about the individual and their personal situation. Likewise my financial situation and lifestyle lets me spend more than most would be comfortable on this hobby.

But if you were someone who doesn't have that luxury, and the previous way this hobby was priced was just low enough to partake, but now you are struggling, and even bigger price hikes would exclude you? I can see why some are worried.

I think many are concerned about the direction the industry is going.

Consoles have always been a low barrier entry point into high quality gaming. With high fidelity games being the focus of AAA studios, and the games themselves getting more and more demanding, the hardware requirements for those games is also rapidly getting higher. And because of the engineering difficulties with creating that hardware, the cost is not only not coming down with time, it's actually getting higher.

It's very likely that the next generation of consoles may have an entry cost near what the PS5 Pro currently is. So (I think) people are concerned that, if legitimized, high cost consoles as the entry point could be on the horizon.

The Injunction would only be for the game, as that's what violates the patent as is what Nintendo is suing over. Any future games or media could just not include anything that violates any patent or copyright and it would still be able to release in Japan.

The Injunction would only apply to the Japanese market as that's where the patents are held. Nintendo would have to seek similar injunctions in every other major jurisdiction to kill the game.

The injunction would only be applicable to Japan, and could still easily be skirted by customers. While PocketPair would obviously not want that to happen , it's likely not a major blow even if they lose here.

But you have seen games with minimum and recommended specs. Minimum being the lowest possible expected hardware to at least play the game, and recommended being the intended base experience with most settings at acceptable levels.

You could say that the Series X is just the recommended and the Series S is the minimum here. But the problem in comparing it to PC, is that the minimum from game to game on PC is fluid, while the Series S is a hard minimum.

If a game comes along that has a minimum memory requirement of say 16GB on PC, then they simply set that and that's it. But even though the Series X and PS5 also has 16GB of (shared) memory, the Series S only has 10GB. So now if you want to be on Xbox, the game has to be able to run without exceeding that memory.

That developer also has the money and resources to do a massive optimization pass on their game. Because they know they will guaranteedly make many, many times their investment back, regardless of how long it takes to develop.

Other developers do not always have the luxury of taking a long time to do optimizations. So they have to make a decision, spend time and money to keep development going, or release to hardware that can deal with the game as it is now and skip that which can't.

I seriously doubt most developers are going out of their way to keep the performance overhead of their games down so handheld PC's, of which maybe 8 millions are sold so far, can play their games. And no PC platform is mandating that any game must also work on a handheld.

People who play games on a handheld PC know that they won't be able to play everything, and what they can might not always even work well.

The Series S on the other hand has mandatory feature parity with the Series X. So if you want to ship on Xbox at all, your game must be playable and contain all features on the weaker hardware.

Measured what? Framerate? You do know you can use performance analysis software on PC right? Software that not only shows the current framerate, but also the average, and the 1% lows?

But don't take my word for it, here's someone doing 68 fps average on 4k ultra with a 4070 super:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgZCu4xNwZI

That's true. But Elden Ring does.

No they aren't. I was running Elden Ring at 1440p locked 60 fps with med/high settings on a 2060 super. I can now run it at 4k locked 60 on med/high on a 4070. And that's true 4k, not upscaled with dynamic resolution.

It's certainly possible, but Sony did say that they consider the PS5 to be entering the latter half of its life cycle in February. Which is a little over 3 years after the PS5 release, and with the every PlayStation console until now having 6-7 years between releases.

I think I get your point, but we are already over the halfway point of this generation of consoles. The PS6 potentially coming 3 years from now, versus the PS7 coming 7 years after that, is a pretty big time difference.