If Sony just sold PC ports, people would be happier and Sony would be making money.
They did and they were. But the strategy shifted to vendor lock in so that they have more control to experiment with dynamic pricing
Literally. I hate this stupid “closed ecosystem” bullshit every company has a fucking hardon for. Just be happy with making billions of money.
Sony realized that with Helldivers II, and it scared the shit out of them. They glimpsed a future where they’re just another publisher. That’s why they panicked and forced everyone to get a PSN account, even though many countries are excluded from PSN.
If they ever stop pretending it’s the PS2 era forever, they don’t have a platform anymore.
The console war is over. Software has won. Now every game is on this system or that system, instead of being for any particular system. Everything is a whole computer and Sony needs you to believe theirs is different so you’ll keep buying the blue boxes instead of the green ones.
Microsoft is unbothered by all of this because the Xbox project was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They just assumed they’d own PC gaming. Aside from that little hiccup, it’s gone swimmingly.
Nintendo sells plastic. They are a toy company. Video games have proven a profitable niche for them, in this brief slice of their long history. So long as there’s goofy control shit they can slap on, to be the only machine that does [blank], they’re fine trickling out weird spinoff games in the world’s most recognized franchises.
Microsoft is unbothered by all of this because the Xbox project was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They just assumed they’d own PC gaming. Aside from that little hiccup, it’s gone swimmingly.
Side note, but it always baffled me why Microsoft went into consoles. They owned windows, where everyone was playing PC games on. They could’ve made something like Steam, if you ignore that large companies like Microsoft seem incapable of delivering good products. Don’t even both with the hardware expenses.
Blurring the line has been a commonplace corporate desire for decades. Several 8-bit consoles offered computer-y upgrade paths. Atari jumped back and forth. Apple had a disastrous partnership with Bandai. Basically, console companies wanted the expensive feature set of any full computer, and computer companies wanted the massive sales figures for games on low-priced hardware.
Microsoft specifically had a mildly jingoistic desire to dethrone Japanese hardware in general and the explosively successful Sony in particular. The original codename was “Midway.” They put together a low-cost WebTV-based Windows CE machine which was gradually acknowledge as complete garbage. So instead they shipped a Pentium 3 PC. Somehow this worked. They never fixed the slow-ass startup time, but they disguised it with an aura-farming boot animation and menu. They made full use of the hard drive by letting you rip CDs and put your own music into gameplay.
The project fully succeeded in the Xbox 360, which used PowerPC instead of x86… and made the hard drive optional. This was an attack which Sony barely dodged. The PS3 was intended to ship without a video card. They thought the Cell would be powerful enough on its own. And it might’ve been - for games developed specifically around it. Even just as a CPU, there’s a reason Uncharted is butter and Oblivion is molasses.
See, what PC devs had spotted was that console games could now be identical. The Dreamcast supported a weird number of shooter engines in its short lifespan. The PS2 had GTA’s beloved 3D trilogy, which all came to PC verbatim. And between consoles, devs no longer needed The Good Version outsourced as third-party ports; they could just make the game once-ish. This was made unmistakable by RenderWare until EA bought it and killed it.
So Microsoft offered a dead easy time being one of the platforms any game could support, to balloon its potential customer base. But because the hard drive wasn’t standard, games had to be designed around discs and memory cards. This pissed off a lot of PC players by introducing load screens everywhere and forcing a reliance on autosaves, but obviously it was great for Microsoft’s business model of getting one-third of gross revenue on games they didn’t make.
MS didn’t pursue that from an online store because that would mean competing with… stores. Software comes from Wal-Mart. Right? If you saw Age Of Empires II in a magazine, it wasn’t exclusive to anydamnwhere. The big-ass boxes were on the shelf at Target, beside the CDs. If they didn’t have it then you’d check Electronics Boutique. I first bought Half-Life at CostCo.
MS didn’t copy Steam later because Steam exclusively sold Windows games and was exclusively for paying customers. Frankly MS would probably still be the backbone of PC gaming if they hadn’t spent the last decade making Windows overpriced, fat, slow, invasive, inconvenient, persnickety about hardware, and festooned with ads.
MS isn’t fighting Steam now because even they’re not as dumb as Epic.
Please, don’t ever bleach that mind. You chewed through a loredrop like butter, and smooth, too. Very well said. 🙇🏼♂️
For a while that’s exactly what they were doing… https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-ditches-mention-of-pc-releases-from-business-strategy-document-as-playstations-single-player-games-now-expected-to-be-fully-exclusive
I read about that. I can only assume there’s some soulless goons in the middle who gets a bonus from some poorly thought about metric, and they’re going to chase that even if everyone else suffers.
I hate this headline, because it discounts the massive amount of accumulated human work that went into this, too. Just read the attribution part:
https://github.com/FelipePrado0/gow3_pc#how-it-works
It’s not like someone prompted “port this game” into a chatbot.
I’m loving how the tools that are supposed to be used to make the rich richer are being used by the people to cut into profit margins. Maybe we’ll see the day where releasing something closed-source won’t make sense anymore because somebody will point an AI at it and say “make this run on my PC” then upload the code for everybody to use.
Macroslop has been praising AI for a few years now. Let’s see how they’ll thread the needle between praising it and trying to limit it from hurting themselves.
This should make anyone sneering about “democratization” think twice, especially as local models will make the capability ungovernable.
They won’t. But they should.
It’s too early to predict how things will go down and I have hope
It is far too late for any outcome besides small models reasoning better than the biggest models today.
Ah, on the one hand, I really celebrate it for kicking Sony in the shins.
On the other hand, it’ll still be vibe-coded and most probably under-tested as a result. Personally, I don’t even know whether there was much scrutiny of the code, too. Maybe that’s my slop-induced bias against AI stuff speaking, though.
I’d be less worried about bugs and more worried about malware. Pirated software has always been a minefield in that regard, with some warez groups having better reputations than others for not fucking people. With the ease of vibe coded ports and vibe coded malware, I’d expect to start seeing ports like these coming with trojans that turn peoples’ PCs into botnet members.
FWIW, I may’ve been avidly asea the last 40+ years, and in all my time out there, not once did I encounter a single difficulty to assessing group, much less file integrity that didn’t come from impulsiveness, over-confidence, or general ineptitude.
I mean, FFS, even the bare minimum infosec seems beyond most people, even today. 🤦🏼♂️
Could always just try it, not like games ship without bugs already. Assuming it’s meant to just take the existing data and translate it to run on different hardware, there’s less room for hallucination.
So… You’re saying there’s a chance?
And people say AI can’t make the world a better place.
Where 60FPS Bloodborne port?
Will Bloodborne be freed?
Already is.
Any links?
Goddamn hisis the first I’ve actually seen of a PS4 emulator.
Fuck yes.
Also, well aside, the Bloodborne Kart creator pivoted into an original animated comedy. Second episode drops today.
I have to ask: the games are being recomplied for which OS’s?
I’m 99% sure it isn’t Temple OS
If it was, that would be an achievement.
Available for linux too…
Original x86-64 code runs directly on the CPU with a custom runtime;
So, it’s an emulator.
Requires your own game dump. No game files included.
D’oh! I still have to buy a copy. This hurts Sony how?
“The most stable Linux API is Win32.”
Depending on what the folks are getting from the AI models, the answer might be “all of them”. If the AI is slopping out reasonable C or C++, it shouldn’t be a great leap from there to get the AI to slop together a toolchain to compile the code on most common targets. Sure, running the latest AAA game on a Palm Pilot from the early 2000’s may not be a great plan, but it may be possible to get a functional binary to compile.
There is also likely to be a lot of work left to optimize a game for any particular platform. Even with all the hard work by the folks with the WINE project and Valve’s Proton project, some games just run like dogshit on Linux (looking at you, Icarus). Though, the obvious next step is getting the AI models trained up on those optimizations. Though, that likely means OS specific optimization models and maybe even driver specific weights. E.g. You use the Linux OS optimization model with the Nvidia driver weights. Still, we might be reaching a day where we see popular games quickly ported to different OS’s in a playable enough state.
Let me go get some popcorn. The show from the software houses/publishers is going to be wonderful to watch.
Linux neckbeard addition?
And just like that. The facade that G*mers hate AI disappears.
Oh no, are there websites that list these projects so I can avoid them and make sure I don’t go to them? I mean like listing projects, not necessarily the links to download. Just knowing about them is helpf—er, harmful I mean, and I don’t want to know they exist because I already know some websites not to go to to find stuff like that.
edit: OP mentioned a subreddit - here’s a specific thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/decomps/comments/1x6sta3/megathread_list_of_recommended_recomps_and_ports/
And that led here: https://github.com/SubmitGame/awesome-decomp-games
Oh gosh I too would like to remain safe
on reddit r/decomps there’s so many projects and games like this even games that were emulated are now getting a native port
If think there is one girl that should know. She is also fit.
Specifically handling these ports, not just “alternate” means of obtaining games? Because it’s specifically these ports that I’m trying to… uh… avoid.
Yeah, this fit girl has them.
A post on Lemmy showing the use of AI can be good??
Crazy times
So we’re saying “ported” instead of pirated? More advanced pirating? Seems to have fuck all to do with the idea of Sony themselves ditching exclusivity.
Pirates use ports so it’s okay.
Well the porting wouldn’t be required if there was a PC version to pirate.
Maybe a new term. pirorted.
Privateered.
Much better!
when you pirate software but have a mouthful of gummies
It’s still a port even if it’s unsanctioned and spread through torrent/etc.
There’s no PC version of the game, so it’s not pirated. At best you could say counterfeited, but it’s not really that either
