In the US, DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to 15.9 billion, the first annual drop in history, with experts projecting another decline this year, to 15.4 billion, and a similar dip next year, Instead of celebrating the Blu-ray format studios are scrambling to introduce an array of initiatives aimed at propping up the broader market.
Sales are sagging for various reasons, including a flooded marketplace and competition for leisure time, but the Internet is perhaps the biggest enemy. Tech companies have watered down the DVD market by aggressively pushing Internet downloads. Apple's iTunes now offer downloads of 500 movies. Meanwhile, telecommunications providers like Time Warner and Comcast are pushing their faster broadband lines by promoting them as being capable of delivering fast downloads.
Movie studios are fighting back by taking a page from the Internet playbook. Indeed, the centrepiece of the market rejuvenation effort is something 20th Century Fox calls "digital copy". Fox DVDs now come with an additional disc holding a digital file of the title. Consumers can download the file to a computer in about five minutes and then watch the movie there or transfer it to their iPod. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Walt Disney and Warner Bros are also pursuing their own versions of the idea.
Tom Adams, the founder of Adams Media Research, said the packaging of digital files with standard DVDs "has the real potential to steal the thunder from the Internet delivery of movies" while John Freeman, an industry analyst, sees the effort as a stall tactic. Although digital copies are "a step forward", he says, that step is tantamount to Hollywood admitting its lucrative hard-goods business is growing obsolete.
Troubles big and small started buffeting the DVD business in 2005. First, overall sales of television shows on disc started to slip as releases lost their freshness and consumers realised they were devoting a lot of living room space to bulky boxed sets they never watched.
Today, digital files on discs; tomorrow, mass downloading straight from the Internet.
Omar writes: "With the Horizon Festival coming to breathtaking Japan, you’ll need the essential gear to prove you’ve got what it takes to become a Horizon Legend as you cruise, drift and explore an open world full of spectacular driving experiences. That’s why we’re happy to announce the newest Limited Edition Xbox Wireless Controller and Wireless Headset collection, featuring inspired designs from Forza Horizon 6. The bright cyan and lime colorways celebrate the Horizon Festival’s recognition of iconic cars and hit music, with special features that are sure to impress any collector."
You can get Hall effect controllers slightly cheaper, but you'd struggle to find as feature-rich a package without some heavy, heavy sales.
Pascal Gilcher calls DLSS 5 impressive but shares the "AI slop" sentiment, explaining the likely tech behind it and why he dislikes it.
I fail to see how this is AI shhhhlllloooop. Looking at the different games they showed, this has made many of them look far better.
It's AI slop because it ignores the artists intent and changes the details ESPECIALLY when it comes to character faces. The scariest part of it is introducing it as the next stage of DLSS, a feature where the current iteration already has controversy surrounding it and for quite a lot of games cannot be fully disabled. So reasonably the precident is already set for what path this could take, and it's not good
In case you didn't watch the video then let me point just one part. It overrides the lighting. Then the question of what is the point of ray tracing cost and so on. Many of the lighting deletes shadow, including shadow on the face like eyes even chin.
Why stop at art when it comes to human input - why not just have AI play the game for us, remove human input altogether
If you don’t like it, just don’t enable it. Personally I think it looks great from the videos I have seen.
And what about when you can't? Cause there's plenty of games where you cannot fully disable dlss already, i mean we're well into an era where it's a major crutch for developers to cover up their cut corners, why would this be any different?
You are playing with people's money and allow Nvidia to scam you.
In case you didn't watch the video then let me point just one part. It overrides the lighting. Then the question of what is the point of ray tracing cost. This is all lie to raise the cost of the graphic card.
Making characters look more realistic not ok because we want the developer to decide on how the game was intended to look. - Internet
Change entire game through mods thus changing how the developers intended the game to be is ok. - Internet
Something consumers can do to a product after they have purchased it, entirely optional and can always be undone with a fresh install
VS
The leading gaming hardware manufacturer making this the next iteration of the main AA/Upscaling technique that is heavily relied upod by modern devs and is not optional in most games.
Not at all the same but nice try
At the moment you need 2 5090’s just to get an image on the screen so this is all vaporware until proven otherwise.
It's all about choice in the end. But, I would say that calling it 'more realistic' is quite a stretch. It looks like AI art, and that's rarely realistic.
All the comments I see are reminding me of how we got to the current state of gaming when microtransactions were first introduced: "It's completely optional guys, we promise! If you don't like it just don't buy it!"
I think we all know how that ended up.
I had the same exact thought the first time this was brought up in a separate article about a week ago. Took me straight back to the conversations surrounding “horse armor.” Just don’t buy it they said. Years later, many IPs I previously enjoyed are so infected with monetization schemes that I don’t even consider purchasing them anymore.
DLSS 5 and the like are the same thing wrapped in a different package. History rhymes but many of us never learn from it.
Biggest Scam. Overrides lighting and shadow. So why keep Ray tracing? It's all a scam to raise graphic card. We now see Nvidia with Microsoft downturn anything against them. Sony is next!
