it used to be the case that when you weren’t able to enforce DRM on a piece of software anymore, you would offer it as a free download so people who bought it wouldn’t lose it
they don’t have to keep supporting, just not make it unavailable the best case would be if they made it open source, in that case other people could keep maintaining it, but would be against their profit incentives
Reworded: Think of all the resources spent on making sure people don’t steal the software you paid to make.
I’m all for open source software. But if a company spends money paying employees, they need to not go out of business.
Now, do I think they overcharge? Yes. Do I think their subscription model is offensive? Yes. Are there other alternatives: Affinity Photo, you pay once for the version. Yours forever.
I've been feeling like console generations don't need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view. Rather than making new consoles as tech evolves, since we are facing diminishing returns, they are making them larger and more expensive. Given how the economy is, and how much people can afford, if they expect to keep making future consoles increasingly more expensive, they'll find quickly that there is a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an entertainment device.
Not to mention that the production costs to keep up with the graphics potential of these extremely powerful consoles are also increasingly unsustainable. It's time to focus on game design above anything else.
I don't think that is going to work as well for consoles as it does for phones. People can just keep playing older games. Living in a third-world country I know that too well. And if they try to sabotage the consoles, that might drive people away from console gaming entirely.
Apple doesn’t force you to upgrade. They have the longest support length in mobile. What they are fantastic at is convincing you that you need to upgrade.
Don’t they stop giving updates to slightly older devices. Also, I read reports of them slowing down older models as an incentive to upgrade. Late Stage Capitalism
They of course stop updating old devices. The 5 year old iPhone XR is getting updated to iOS 17 this month, and they are still putting out security updates to the 9 year old iPhone 5S.
They started limiting the CPU clock on older devices that had poor batteries in situations where it would try to draw more power than the battery could maintain. Identical devices with good batteries were not slowed down. Literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, but they failed to communicate what was happening which very likely lead people to buy new phones instead of getting their batteries replaced. At that time I had an iPhone for personal use and a Galaxy S5 for work. The S5 started doing the exact thing that Apple prevented when my battery started wearing out and random apps would crash the phone. However, unlike Apple where I could pay them $99 to fix it, Samsung and Verizon essentially told me to go pound sand and wouldn’t even sell us an official battery. We resorted to buying some sketchy thing off Amazon that never seemed to be as good. Kinda funny how Apple got all the hate, yet Samsung was the one that let me down.
New consoles don't come out in response to new technology, though. They never have. The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
They still need a reason for people to buy them. The usual one being "look how much prettier it is!", but they are getting to a point the leaps of graphical fidelity enabled by technology are smaller and smaller, but the costs of making everything higher definition are skyrocketing.
Well, the USD is worth 15% less today than it was when the consoles launched. As such, keeping the price the same is the same as discounting it with a stable currency. The price today is the same as $425 at launch, so prices have come down we just don’t see it reflected in the dollar price.
In addition to that we’ve passed that era of Moores law. New hardware is coming out with diminishing returns unless it’s big and expensive. We’re long past the era of every 2 years hardware is released with exponential returns in power and efficiency rendering everything that came before obsolete.
Hell even from an aesthetic point of view Red Dead Redemption 2 came out almost 5 years ago and with higher settings on PC still holds up as a pretty game. The biggest factor holding graphics back these days is development time and money.
Also fab production is a fundamental limitation to a greater degree than it was in the past, prices typically fell quickly as a process node gained better yields and could be made on less busy production lines but you have a much higher fixed cost just to convince TSMC or whoever to put you high enough up in priority to get your wafers made at all.
The server stay online for downloading game. I don’t really get it. If you close only the store, but keep the server for downloading online, do they safe like that so much money?
If they have dedicated servers per region that handle payment processing, and they would need to be upgraded in order to be compatible with currently supported OSes, yes. Or if just maintenance costs for keeping them online are high enough.
Or if they have to pay an annual fee to continue selling (but not distributing) the games.
Or if the annual base costs for the payment provider exceed their revenue.
Not a dumb take at all, it’d be awesome if they did. Unfortunately there are likely contracts or business reasons preventing them from doing so, or code shared between the 360 and current gens that they want to keep proprietary. Still, with MS open sourcing more and more projects over time, I’d love to see it.
If the goal is game preservation, the idea would be the community would preserve them for you. We would likely have highly usuable emualtors within a short time.
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