Copyright protection and DRM has been around for years on PC. How would it be implemented on the consoles?
Square Enix launches Final Fantasy X 25th anniversary site, revealing new Nomura art, books, music releases, and merchandise.
Look I know VIII has its issues and all that but how on earth can the do big anniversary events with new artwork and merchandise for VII, IX and X yet VIII got sweet f*** all.
They could have given it something during its 25th anniversary yet all it got was a single Happy Anniversary post on their social media.
they should know that we are OG fans of VIII as it sold truckload as well. not as much as VII or X. I personally didn't like IX but X and VI are my personal fav.
Shadow Hearts 2 covenant is another game I love. I hope one day someone can make remake, I would be delighted
Final Fantasy VIII is great and you are always the first to defend it in the comments
Xbox boss Asha Sharma has discussed how component shortages will impact the company's plans for Project Helix.
When does this end? Its killing everyone. Consoles and PC. And for what? AI? The benefits of AI are completely outweighed by the negatives. And the government should have never allowed one company to buy up all the RAM.
This kind of proves this is an after thought product, most products like this are in r&d 5 years before they start mass producing. So they typically have the cost of components and things worked out long before assembly starts.
This is an assumption still, but I wouldn’t be surprised if project helix is similar to Scalebound,perfect dark and sod3. They had an idea but no actual execution other than concept stage. Being impacted by the ram shortage likely would also put this device 3-4 years out.
I’m not even sure MS has that endurance with Xbox yet
I mean.... what?
We're at a point that Samsung wont even provide their own phone department ram because they can sell it at higher prices to 3rd parties (AI). Its more profitable to sell the ram than make their own devices with it.
You think because R&D starts 5 years ago the 3rd party component manufacturers will honour that price? They'll sell it to whomever is paying the most today, not some gentlemens agreement they made years ago. AI farms will buy more volume at higher prices than any console manufacturer will. It'll be the same for Playstation.
Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.
They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.
If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.
It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie
Helix is going to be stupidly expensive
Instead of leaning into smarter upscaling techniques they're brute forcing hardware that will cost them dearly and it remains to be seen if it's genuinely going to provide a meaningful differential
I know in the oc.doace people like to brag about not using frame gen or dlss to get to high on a game but for the majority of players they happily use those technologies without a second thought
That's going to be ps6 vs Helix
While this does seem to be the case, I am encouraged by the statement from Microsoft about wanting to provide affordable options. If this means a Series S style Helix, at least there will be something affordable being offered.
It's called systematic inflationary. Yes we get it Microsoft, keep raising in the name ofall kinds of stuffs
Honestly if there was thing I learned from this generation is that new consoles arnt day one anymore.
I can wait 1-3 years.
Another important lesson from this generation: while Nintendo showed us that prices don't necessarily need to ever drop, we've now learned that waiting 1-3 years does carry some risk that prices increase. This generation is just bizarre in all the wrong ways.
The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.
Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.
Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.
LucasRuinedChildhood,
For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:
1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.
2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".
FuRuy has opened a Twitter account called “Project Alice” teasing a new game announcement on April 25 at 20:30 JST.
on why piracy is not an issue. But I found a comment on a veteran game programmer's message board that sums it up in a couple sentences.
Pretext: The conversation was about game copying during the tape (yes tape) era.
"despite a 30-year assault on the industry by the evil pirates, the industry has grown and grown and grown with every passing year, and now generates billions and billions of dollars. If piracy is killing games, it's doing an incredibly bad job."
Thing is, I personally think we're getting too carried away with what Geohot did (I'm reserving my judgment about his key ordeal until we know why he did it, because I have my theories that are pretty complicated to get into here). It's a lot to do about if someone can separate the pirating and cheating parts from the homebrewing stuff. Some people just want ALL of it completely shut down, and I don't understand why homebrew has to be punished and be put in the same group as pirating and cheating. Sure, you may think it's just an excuse to condone the CFW, but to me, it's not a matter of if there IS any, but the matter of if we should have the ABILITY to have such things! Just me.
But yeah, I've said this time and time again: some of these industries that have gone into "copy protection" mode are using piracy as more of a scapegoat for things that are their own fault.
When album sales slowed down, the RIAA immediately targeted the pirates instead of the declining quality of what are on said records (iTunes isn't suffering any).
Movie tickets are down? Blame the people illegally downloading instead of blaming the high ticket prices (which are blamed on piracy yet the piracy is mostly done in rebuttal of said prices).
A tape reel drops on the floor and rolls into a fire? Blame a pirate!
Thing is, we need to stop blaming piracy for every little thing that ever goes wrong with their industries. Most of the time, piracy happens BECAUSE of something they did that they didn't like (price gouging, low quality, quicker to get what it is you want, etc.). Sure, some people would pirate regardless, but you're talking about something that wouldn't be as widespread if people would just look at the complaints about the industry from those who pirate instead of suing everyone and blaming the pirates when they do something that MOTIVATE the people to pirate in the first place. You don't have to give out free stuff, but understand that you can't just keep screwing people over and expect them to just let you do so.
Trust me, changing how you do business is NOT that hard!
I think that the premise of the article is naive. The notion that DRM hasn't been implemented on consoles because the hardware is proprietary is a fallacy. Every console released since the NES has had some sort of DRM at the hardware level that attempted to keep the console closed to non-licensed developers. The NES lockout chip and Tengen's reverse-engineering of it is a prime example.
What makes DRM on consoles sketchy is the same thing that makes DRM on PC's so sketchy. No matter what the scheme, it always seems to catch innocent people in the trap. Bugs in the number generation or confirmation algorithms often leave legitimate buyers in a lurch. I've spent hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support because I couldn't activate software that I purchased legally due to issues with their systems. It's a pain.
Things like activation codes require the ability to connect to a central repository to verify that the software has been activated and that the console is allowed to play it. You can't require and internet connection for DRM because not everyone can connect their consoles to the internet.
If developers want to make money then they need to create products worth buying, and they need to price them reasonably. There are people who pay for all of their software, and any system that makes it difficult or inconvenient for them to use that software is a poor system.
ok, i'm gonna work on the basis that that article was actually serious and not just a piece of satire, as if anybody could think a system like that wasn't a joke.
firstly, drm simply does not work, not for more than a few days it takes one hacker to break it, it many cases it can and will cause more piracy, and people who would never have pirated before will find themselves drawn to a pirate copy.
that's when the publisher is really losing money, some pirates will never buy games, but when you're pushing people that would otherwise have bought the game to piracy, that's a definite sale lost.
second, anything that makes the experience for the legitimate buyer worse than it is for the pirate is absolutely useless as an anti piracy device.
and you would have to be a moron, or games publisher seemingly, to think that it does.
third, what about when the publisher stops supporting that title? or what about years down the line when that machine is obsolete, something like this would wipe out a whole generation of titles for future gamers, i can go back and play my nes, megadrive, saturn, gamecube, ps1, dreamcast and n64 games, to name a few, gaming would be in a sad state if we could only play games on the current generation machines, that's my opinion anyway.