> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.
The writing's been on the wall about physical games going away for quite some time now.
You can tell the PS5 was designed to be a digital-first system by the disc drive slapped on the side like a tumour hanging off the otherwise symmetrical body.
Slight correction. Last generation was the Xbox One (already a confusing name because some people thought that was referring to the original first Xbox)
A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase.
The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess?
But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.
Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform.
With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.
It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO.
Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.
To me it's mostly unfortunate that this has left PlayStation with no direct competition because they've noticed and leaned into the not-giving-a-shit attitude after they had such a great console generation with the PS4. It's kinda crazy that we're already almost due for a new console generation and there's very little appetite for new consoles after this generation where it feels like it barely got started. And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. The industry is in a very strange state.
I'm preparing to release my first app to the App Store and they're currently requiring me to dox myself if I want to sell in the EU. Which facts am I missing that makes this not very inconvenient for me?
Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services.
You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.
You can verify from my comment history that I love talking shit about Mr Dye as much as the next guy, but no. Car Play limitations are certainly not an Alan Dye decision. Everything in CarPlay is stripped down cause it's not safe to be navigating menus and doing deep interactions while driving.
The passenger can use the phone if you want to be able to scroll through an artist's catalog, rearrange playlists, etc. CarPlay's UI is a quick way to access your current library.
I don't think it's fair to compare development for web, which is supposed to be an open standard, with developing for a proprietary piece of hardware like the Playstation.
If you want to develop a game for the Switch and ignore the Playstation entirely, you can, and then you don't need a Playstation (dev kit).
When you're developing for the web, you're ideally making something that runs regardless of the user's browser. When you start getting bug reports in from Safari users, how else are you supposed to fix them? Cheapest option is detect if they're a Safari user and tell them to use another browser, but that's not really ideal for anyone except Google.
This has been known for quite a while; when I published an Android app ~10 years ago I saw lots of people advising you to create a separate Google account to publish apps under, because a robot can just terminate your entire online identity for the crime of trying to contribute to Google's app ecosystem.
I left behind Android and as many Google services as I could in 2020 and so far I've only been more vindicated with that decision over time.
There needs to be lawsuits over stuff like that. I don't get why people accept blatant false advertising just cause the tech used to do it is new. They may as well be uploading pictures of a real, nicer apartment with a similar layout. What's the difference?
They look fine when zoomed in, and I'm assuming that's all the designers considered as they were redrawing icons, blown up across their 27" monitor. But once you shrink them down to an actual app icon size, the glassy effects on the edges of everything look like a blur.
In iOS 27 they sharpened the edges up and everything looks a lot better.
I think most university graduates from the past ~15 years are more likely to get taken in by trendy new cargo-cult fads than repeat things taught to them by dinosaurs in their boring university classes.
Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.