No, listen, get with the program. You’re supposed to be very, very mad that a brand is losing its exclusives. You’re also supposed to be very, very mad if any PC storefronts ever fund a game to sell as an exclusive, unless they’re Steam. You’re also never supposed to acknowledge the contradiction.
You’re being a gamer wrong.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I’d be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies’ look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so… make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Nah, I’m mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized “hidden gem” lists of game collectors in thirty years, it’s that.
Well, then you’re my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it’s a fantastic compation piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they’re both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn’t sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what’s realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn’t played it personally.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I’d make that trade.
Man, these guys really can’t catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren’t that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
I don’t know what the business plan was meant to be, and it’s kinda killing me that I don’t fully grasp it.
The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the “I can’t believe it’s not Deus Ex” franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.
I’m curious now that we’ve talked so much about it. Is it any good, locked bootloader aside?
Yeah, and it can get stuck in customs. It’s a good thing to do if you’re there for a bit, even for a layover, but it’s harder to buy. Still, man, for that price gap even if you get taxed you’d probably be at worst flat with the official release. That’s a 30% hike, plus 10% you’re losing in the currency exchange. It’s a lot.
I’d maybe shop around. That can’t last forever, and a cursory search right now already shows some offers with 50 euros cut off that sticker price (in Amazon.de, for one). Of course that’s also for the worst model, so… you know, modern phone pricing.
They specifically said “sub 6 inch display”, this is 5.9 inches. I’m meeting the brief here.
I mean, the other answer to that is that he could go for the vanilla iPhone, but they also said they want an Android phone, so this is the smallest thing with fairly high specs you can find right now and it’s stil a couple fractions of an inch smaller than the small iPhone.
Woof. Depending on what bucks those bucks are that’s… a weirdly large, unjustified difference. I didn’t know that was the case. I don’t get it, for that money you could just order one from the US and have it shipped. Even with customs fees you’d break even.
Still, that’s a lot and the region differences suck, but given the lack of options it’s still ticking boxes. Plus flagships are like 1.5k these days, somehow, so… that’s midrange pricing? I don’t know how we got to that being midrange pricing, but apparently that’s where we are.
Asus makes the ZenPhone 10. That’s 6 inches. I don’t know how it stacks up to the other requirements, I’ve never used one.
I’m a bit confused about what the OP means with “premium”, but at least the price band fits.
They still have the Xperia I and V series, which is taller but not necessarily much wider. I have one. I like it.
Is the idea to go back to having a SD card slot, dual sim and a headphone jack? No? Because that’s why my last Samsung was a S10.
Oh, well, back to my Xperia. Hang in there Sony, all seven of us left still need you even if your software all comes from one intern you keep tied to a broken PS5 in the basement.
That’s not “coming”, it’s an ongoing process that has been going on for a couple hundred years, and it absolutely does not require ChatGPT.
People genuinely underestimate how many of these things have been an ongoing concern. A lot like crypto isn’t that different to what you can do with a server, “AI” isn’t a magic key that unlocks automation. I don’t even know how this mental model works. Is the idea that companies who are currently hiring millions of copywriters will just rely on automated tools? I get that yeah, a bunch of call center people may get removed (again, a process that has been ongoing for decades), but how is compensating Facebook for scrubbing their social media posts for text data going to make that happen less?
Again, I think people don’t understand the parameters of the problem, which is different from saying that there is no problem here. If anything the conversation is a net positive in that we should have been having it in 2010 when Amazon and Facebook and Google were all-in on this process already through both ML tools and other forms of data analysis.
I’m gonna say those circumstances changed when digital copies and the Internet became a thing, but at least we’re having the conversation now, I suppose.
I agree that ML image and text generation can create something that breaks copyright. You for sure can duplicate images or use copyrighted characterrs. This is also true of Youtube videos and Tiktoks and a lot of human-created art. I think it’s a fascinated question to ponder whether the infraction is in what the tool generates (i.e. did it make a picture of Spider-Man and sell it to you for money, whcih is under copyright and thus can’t be used that way) or is the infraction in the ingest that enables it to do that (i.e. it learned on pictures of Spider-Man available on the Internet, and thus all output is tainted because the images are copyrighted).
The first option makes more sense to me than the second, but if I’m being honest I don’t know if the entire framework makes sense at this point at all.
A lot of this can be traced back to the invention of photography, which is a fun point of reference, if one goes to dig up the debate at the time.
In any case, the idea that humans can only produce so fast for so long and somehow that cleans the channel just doesn’t track. We are flooded by low quality content enabled by social media. There’s seven billion of us two or three billion of those are on social platforms and a whole bunch of the content being shared in channels is created by using corporate tools to make stuff by pointing phones at it. I guarantee that people will still go to museums to look at art regardless of how much cookie cutter AI stuff gets shared.
However, I absolutely wouldn’t want a handful of corporations to have the ability to empower their employed artists with tools to run 10x faster than freelance artists. That is a horrifying proposition. Art is art. The difficulty isn’t in making the thing technically (say hello, Marcel Duchamp, I bet you thought you had already litgated this). Artists are gonna art, but it’s important that nobody has a monopoly on the tools to make art.
It’s not right to say that ML output isn’t good at practical tasks. It is and it’s already in use and has been for ages. The conversation about these is guided by the relatively anecdotal fact that chatbots and image generation got good so this stuff went viral, but ML models are being used for a bunch of practical uses, from speeding up repetitive, time consuming tasks (e.g. cleaning up motion capture, facial modelling or lip animation in games and movies) or specialized tasks (so much science research is using ML tools these days).
Now, a lot of those are done using fully owned datasets, but not all, and the ramifications there are also important. People dramatically overestimate the impact of trash product flooding channels (which is already the case, as you say) and dramatically underestimate the applications of the underlying tech beyond the couple of viral apps they only got access to recently.
Ah, welcome time traveller. Can you take me back to 2008 with you? It was so much nicer there.
Seriously, every multiplayer game I’ve played the last few years has cross-platform play, both them and Sony have been making PC ports for ages and the reason I own a Series X is that it’s quietly the best set-top media player out there, price-to-performance, and a cheap, convenient platform to play games on a TV.
I mean, if this is a prelude to them no longer making hardware I’d be bummed out, but not for those reasons.