HelplmChoking

I actually think the 3-digit system is super intuitive. Bigger first number = higher tier, bigger second number = newer, basically ignore the third. To be fair, it really doesn’t matter what they name them as consumers aren’t exactly speccing out specific SoC packages for their next phone.

Now if they could convince Intel to drop…. whatever it is they’re doing in favour of a naming scheme that makes some sort of sense, we’d be in a better place.

Wii U ain’t really a handheld though, can’t pick it up and leave the house with it

They pay good, you get to work on genuinely cool shit (if you ignore what it’s used for), having Facebook on your CV makes you very desirable for future jobs. All strong reasons to work there if you aren’t too bothered by the company overall.

Sorry, I start with 3 words and the ADHD adds the other 500

Only way to afford PC hardware these days is to buy a laptop, then pay more in the long run ‘cause you gotta replace the whole thing to run new games. Which is the same problem consoles have, can’t upgrade one component for $150 (assuming you sell the old one) and jump into the latest game, gotta buy a whole new console.

Acceptable cost when the new console took you from Spyro to San Andreas, not so much when it just makes Spiderman’s suit a little crisper.

lol yeah, the PC audience has the PS4 Pro problem – permanently stuck right on the edge of new and old games, running older ones with ease and feeling a little left out then struggling to keep up with the newer ones and feeling left out once again

Aight well I’ll go back to playing Forza Horizon 5 at 60fps then. On my laptop. My $1500 USD laptop that costs a similar amount to a PS5 and a good TV.

That’s not the improvement you want from a new console, you want them to offer new experiences. Going from Spyro to Morrowind isn’t just a graphical improvement (I’d say it’s not even that, morrowind is pretty… brown), it’s a entirely new experience.
HZD to Forbidden West isn’t a new kind of game we’ve only dreamed of, it’s the same one with nicer lighting

I totally agree with your 3rd point. PCs are beyond optimised and already allow for any kind of game you could imagine. Consoles these days are also limited only in graphics, not gameplay, so that’s the only place they can improve.

Which means, as you say, they become more PC-like (hello Series X). Which is great for developers as it makes it easier and easier to release your game on all platforms but it means the improvement path becomes the same as a PC too. Except lesser, because console generations are discrete steps not a constant path and new hardware means replacing the whole machine, not a single component. So it could be that consoles really are fading, especially when Microsoft is moving to Gamepass as their earner, which effectively lets you ‘have an xbox’ on any device.

VR is still in the right place. Sure, better visuals are nice on any platform but in VR it does make a difference to the experience (spotting things in the distance, clues from small details, reading virtual books etc. are rough when you’re looking through a screen door) but it has improvements. Imagine going from the current controllers to finger-tracking gloves? Now you can type in games. Imagine real physical feedback? Now you can pick Skyrim locks by feel. Those are generational leaps

Yeah this is really the problem. The PS2 meant GTA went from a top-down arcade game to a fully 3d open world. The PS5 meant Spiderman looked a little sharper. That’s not a generational leap, that’s overclocking your GPU with some better cooling.

The Switch is probably marking the same shift for handhelds. Going from a 3ds to the Switch meant Pokemon Diamond to Skyrim. Suddenly you shift from a top down, isometric experience to exploring expansive open worlds in BotW and the Witcher (albeit a blurry, choppy one in the Witcher’s case).
Where do they go now? They go for better lighting, higher framerates and resolutions just like the other consoles. So why upgrade to its successor? Because it lets you run BotW with ray tracing (which I doubt)? Sure, that’s cool and would look awesome, but it’s still the same experience, just prettier.

Kinda, but remember when the PS3 launched? That thing was a quantum leap over the PS2, the games were barely comparable. We went from San Andreas to Oblivion in 2 years, graphically it looks more like a decade.

Upgrading back in the day was access to entirely different kinds of games, it meant top down, low res, no lighting GTA to full 3d, open world San Andreas. That wasn’t just a graphical leap, that meant entirely new settings, concepts and forms of gameplay being unlocked by new hardware. You couldn’t wait to get the new console because it opened the doors to a variety of games people had only imagined before.

Now you just get the same games but with better fog or higher resolution (which you might not notice if your TV is small/far away). I think maybe introducing actual AI/ML based NPCs could bring back the generational leap but that’s not coming any time soon afaik and VR still has compelling improvements – moving from the little wands to haptic gloves opens a lot of doors – but consoles and PCs are limited only by how realistic the graphics are, not the kinds of games you can make.

This kinda thing is exactly what screwed the Cyberpunk launch so badly. They couldn’t implement some stuff because 7 year old consoles, already offering midrange performance when they were new, was holding them back from going all out AND those consoles struggled like hell to run it.
Wouldn’t have been an issue if 90% of players were on the current gen consoles or a PC, but it turned out that most people were stuck on consoles nearly a decade old.
For the PC audience it was fine, either you had the power to play it fine (and were then disappointed at what got left out) or you could accept your old laptop was never gonna have a chance. But the huge number of console owners, used to a landscape where playability was basically guaranteed, slammed right into the limits of the old-ass hardware.

With new consoles offering so little reason to upgrade that developers can release games on the old generation concurrently, I’d usually blow the ‘get a PC!’ trumpet but not anymore. It used to be that you got better performance per dollar off the bat and upgrading meant replacing one or 2 components, not the whole system, so cheaper AND better in the long run. But hardware prices are so insane now that there’s no point.

So we’re gonna be stuck with a mix of old consoles offering poor experiences and new consoles hamstrung by sharing games with underpowered systems. See PC owners? It’s not just you who has a cry because games don’t take advantage of your 3090, we all suffer

Really? 3 separate stores in my city (which is a small, 400k population city in an isolated country infamous for having high tech prices and often products aren’t available here) have both consoles in stock and have for a while now. Maybe not today as christmas approaches, but they did as of a week ago

True, it’s just the sort of thing that puts a damper on the whole experience for me – but that’s a personal thing, I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to focus on the task at hand and ignore the wider issues.

I could do it or even enjoy it if I had to, but I have the option to not work there (in fact, I can’t, FB doesn’t have offices in my country) so that’s what I do.

Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t love any company, I’m not a ‘fan’ of anyone – although I can be a fan of a specific product (a really good laptop or something) – but I also don’t hate any company. What’s the point?

Either you want something, in which case get it if you can, or you don’t, in which case… don’t get it? That’s all it really comes down to

Well, it’s not a total win and there are a few limitations, as well as some unknowns around which parts, availability, pricing etc. but we should still be happy with this.

Yes this is done to appease shareholders and make money, Apple still doesn’t care about you or want you repairing things. No, Apple isn’t doing this to be nice – these are all parts they’ll have a profit margin on. Worst, this is a great way for them to go even harder on the ‘our genuine parts only or we brick your device’ approach.
BUT regardless of the actual attentions, this is a step in the right direction for tech in general. Sure, providing proper schematics, part numbers and so on would be better, as well as properly allowing non-genuine parts to be used and on and on but this is a good step and one worth being happy about.

There are a few reasons, obviously money is a big factor and, as others have mentioned, FB have always payed fairly well.

Depending on how your moral compass works and if you can get past the issues with FB, the work going on there really is genuinely fascinating and exciting from a technical standpoint, it’s just being built for awful purposes.

Also, career planning is kind of a big deal in tech and having a few years as a Developer at a company like Facebook, Twitter, Google and so on genuinely can open a lot of doors once you move on. Similar reason as to why people work at consultancies like PWC or Deloitte – they treat most of their people like trash and work them to the bone with fuck all pay, but those people come out of it with pretty desirable CVs.

Personally, I didn’t get into development for the cash (I mean, I did partly, I wouldn’t work if I didn’t need it. But I had a career before this that paid just as well), I got into it to have fun and make things I found exciting. So the salaries aren’t a big lure for me, and I would really struggle to work with the sorts of people that make the decisions Facebook does, build the sorts of tools they do or work in a place with that kind of image. It wouldn’t sit right and tbh I’d lose 10-20% of their pay to be somewhere I could feel good about.

As a developer, in New Zealand, I can confirm this is 100% true and factual

Eh FH3 was the high point for me, FH4 was very pretty but too heavily monetised for my taste and focused too heavily on off-road driving – the cars I want to build and drive aren’t the type to do well on dirt, snow or ice – and the seasons feature, while neat, meant I basically couldn’t play when it was in winter (good luck racing a 911 GT3 on ice) because I’m not interested in rally driving.
Plus, FH4 literally showered you with free cars and money (and cosmetics, because I really care about a new shirt when I literally never see my character) while giving you no way to sell vehicles outside of the stupid auction feature, so I had millions of dollars and a garage full of junk from the second I started the game.

Every video I’ve seen on FH5 so far has been dirt racing, which I have zero interest in but I guess appeals to some people (who would have more fun buying Dirt, lets be real) and nothing else. Fingers crossed its been tightened up this time around, but I’m not hopeful. As soon as they started adding purchasable cars and DLC maps the whole concept started to break down – the only reasons to buy a new game are the new maps and new cars, when you can add them into existing games it makes it hard to justify charging full price for a ‘new’ game.

Honestly… gimme an OLED Switch Lite and I’m good. Not sure why the fancy screen is only on the device that spends a good chunk of its time displaying to a TV or monitor when the Lite, which can ONLY be played on the internal display, is left with an awful, plastic, fuzzy little screen.

OLED Switch Lite, maybe up the storage or battery life, and I’m happy for a long time. No need for entirely new devices, just make my current one nicer to use.

I’ll have it on my Pixel 6… Ya know, when I can sort out ordering it in another country then forwarding the package to New Zealand because Google doesn’t bother selling their phones outside of a handful of countries even when they’re trying to be competitive.

The Google store here is literally only a few Nest products, nothing else. Fuckin’ annoying

Protecting what business? Their replacement sideplate business? Because Sony doesn’t sell those, meaning they lose literally nothing with Dbrand selling these.

As I said, if Sony was selling these black plates or a blacked out console I’d see their point – Dbrand would be taking away Sony’s sales by selling a copy of their product. But they’re not, there is zero competition here in anyway.

This protects nothing for Sony right now, which is why I’m assuming they intend to sell these themselves at some point. Otherwise why would they care? Plus, companies have sold 3rd party controllers for decades with no issue

Are they? Do these plates somehow detract from PS5 sales? Because I doubt it very much. You would only buy them if you already own a PS5.

I would understand if Sony was actually selling black side plates, or a blacked out version of the console but they’re not. Sony loses nothing from this right now, maybe they even sell a couple more because the look of the console was just enough to put a few buyers off (not many, but maybe a couple).

I get what you’re saying, but I’m gonna have a bad time if I jump off a building and try to fly into space or something in real life

They could do with the hidden app sections that lots of Android devices ship with as well, they can be super useful!

Besides the obvious stuff you might want hidden behind biometric authentication, it’s also useful if you have something you don’t want kids accessing if they use your device. My country’s national lottery has an app, wouldn’t want kids getting a hold of that. At least I assume that’d be useful, I have no kids or lottery app but the hidden apps are still a neat feature I’m surprised Apple hasn’t decided to implement.

I’m actually surprised neither Google or Apple have built this already, it feels pretty common sense.

hell most Android phones ship with some sort of similar functionality like this – my OnePlus has a ‘hidden space’ and my Tab s7 has a similar setup, the Samsung one opens totally distinct instances of any apps launched from it, meaning the files added to the files app in there or downloaded from the browser launched from it are only accessible inside that hidden space and aren’t visible to the rest of the system – I guess it’s just surprising neither of the big OS players have thought to add it

No way! Me too! Small world huh?