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Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

theguardian.com

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Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#571

Post by aleph_minus_one »

nebula8804 wrote: post #542
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that time (before GPGPU become big for such purposes) scientists used PS3s to build cheap (much cheaper than IBM's server offerings containing a Cell processors) computing cluster for HPC. These PS3 computation clusters are were hard to program, but if you managed it, they were really fast (for their time).

Yeah I hear ya. Think the air force also used it. Lets put aside the fact that Sony was probably unhappy that their loss leader console was being used in this manner(they did release the feature so maybe they could justify the PR bonus of supporting our troops or something). All these researchers probably had no need to upgrade their firmware once they got set up since (correct me if im wrong) no firmware update actu…

> no firmware update actually improved the OtherOS functionality in any way so they lost nothing when a new firmware took it away.

At that time the respective scientists were quite concerned not to accidentally install this firmware update, and whether Sony would invent more draconian measures to disable consoles with old firmware.

This lead to a huge distrust in Sony, and accelerated the switch from the Cell to the emerging GPGPU technology for respective scientific calculation. Thus, this was some PR disaster for Sony.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#572

Post by w0m »

Hamuko wrote: post #235
babypuncher wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!” The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.

> Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk. I wish it was the next Cyberpunk. I've gone back and forth between Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 / Phantom Liberty and Starfield, and I like Cyberpunk 2077 so much better. It looks better, it has a way more captivating story, it has so much more interesting characters and it just plays much nicer.

You forget that Cyberpunk was absolutely lambasted at launch. The blow back was aggressive enough that Sony/MS/Valve allowed no-questions-asked refunds well after the normal period. The game was even pulled from PSN after launch completely until it was in a betters state. It was a shitshow.

Starfield launch has been bug-free and majestic in comparison.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#573

Post by w0m »

nebula8804 wrote: post #361
w0m wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

still pissed me off when i had the option of losing online gaming or losing console access to my ps3.

What were you going to do on that thing anyway? Run a Mandelbrot set? The thing has like no ram! Its just an embedded device to run games.

Been a decade+ now, but I recall using it as an irssi client and ssh devbox fairly often before i lost lost ability to.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#574

Post by infinitezest »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #359
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meaning we get these for essentially free. There is no such thing as "free". We will pay for it later.

I'm paying now. Like $15/mo or so. And I download $300/mo worth of titles. So what's the concern?

My guess is that they'll introduce tiers where your current price gets much less access. Presumably this will be done when customers have no where else to go for the titles that they want. Customers will get angry, many tweets will be sent, many articles will be written, maybe MSFT will even issue a statement saying they will pause the plan until they can "better communicate the value to our customers". Then, they will jam the plan thru anyways and their customers will deal with it. This movie is a remake.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#575

Post by hydrok9 »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #550
chongli wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case but other genres, such as shooters (first and third person), have found ways to get around it. Fortnite, for example, has nowhere near this issue whereas Quake 3 is plagued by it. The 100-player battle royale structure of Fortnite is one mechanism I think helps to mitigate the problem of overwhelming skill gap. This kind of thing hasn't really been tested in RTS games, which usually focus on 1v1s…

Fortnite's solution has been bots, which is not very popular because plenty of people think they're above bots. Or think that bots cheat (which is true in Starcraft). Or in fighting games, they don't play like humans so you end up learning bad habits.

The big issue with bots is that they are almost never good enough to beat a moderately skilled and muscle-memoried human player. People who try to use them to learn don't end up being any better than a n00b, as it were.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#577

Post by Hamuko »

w0m wrote: post #572
Hamuko wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk. I wish it was the next Cyberpunk. I've gone back and forth between Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 / Phantom Liberty and Starfield, and I like Cyberpunk 2077 so much better. It looks better, it has a way more captivating story, it has so much more interesting characters and it just plays much nicer.

You forget that Cyberpunk was absolutely lambasted at launch. The blow back was aggressive enough that Sony/MS/Valve allowed no-questions-asked refunds well after the normal period. The game was even pulled from PSN after launch completely until it was in a betters state. It was a shitshow. Starfield launch has been bug-free and majestic in comparison.

No, I remember the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 pretty well. Been playing since day one after all. But no matter how bug-free the Starfield launch has been, it still hasn't been a great launch. On Steam, Starfield was only sitting at 84k concurrent players a month after its release. Cyberpunk 2077, despite being lambasted heavily, was sitting at 145k players a month into its release. Starfield is also now the lowest-rated Bethesda game available on Steam [1]. The waning player count and mediocre scores would suggest that no matter how few bugs your game has, if the game isn't interesting, people just aren't going to be interested in it.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/starfield-is-bethesdas-low...

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#578

Post by nebula8804 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #571
nebula8804 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I hear ya. Think the air force also used it. Lets put aside the fact that Sony was probably unhappy that their loss leader console was being used in this manner(they did release the feature so maybe they could justify the PR bonus of supporting our troops or something). All these researchers probably had no need to upgrade their firmware once they got set up since (correct me if im wrong) no firmware update actu…

> no firmware update actually improved the OtherOS functionality in any way so they lost nothing when a new firmware took it away. At that time the respective scientists were quite concerned not to accidentally install this firmware update, and whether Sony would invent more draconian measures to disable consoles with old firmware. This lead to a huge distrust in Sony, and accelerated the switch from the Cell to the…

Those scientists don't have good processes then. There are typically stringent procedures in regards to updating and handling software on laboratory computing equipment.

>This lead to a huge distrust in Sony, and accelerated the switch from the Cell to the emerging GPGPU technology for respective scientific calculation. Thus, this was some PR disaster for Sony.

Any proof of this? As far as I could tell, Cell was a dead end as a lot of the top tier benefits never really materialized irrespective of Sony shenanigans. Serious scientists used the server offerings from IBM. IBM eventually stopped supporting their server offerings for the most part. Why would they do this other than people stopped finding the architecture good for their needs?

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#579

Post by vel0city »

deprecative wrote: post #566
vel0city wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even that I'm traveling often (as in hotel stay or something equivalent), it's that I'm often out of the house for a bit. Gaps of time where it doesn't make sense to go all the way home to play a game, but enough time to get like a half hour or more of gaming in. Kids want to go bounce around at the trampoline park? Cool, I'll hop on the wifi there and game. Had to go into the office and am taking a lunch br…

> Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop. You could stream your gameplay without resorting to Cloud. Steam has (had?) a great service where you could stream your game from one computer to another on the same network. Admittedly, I'm not in the cloud gaming market nor would I ever be. First, data caps prevent me from doing this. Second, let's say I wanted to stream from some pu…

> It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok.

I'm not a child, haven't been one for a long time. I still find time to play games out of the house. You don't need to be a child to play videogames outside of the house.

Just this weekend we went to the park. I drew the straw to watch my infant nap in the stroller while my wife ran off with my older child. An hour of downtime. Turn on the 5G hotspot, whip out the laptop, and I'm on Starfield on my cheap laptop with several hours of battery life.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#580

Post by didibus »

danielbln wrote: post #504
didibus wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not be sensitive to lag or low latencies. Some players have no issue playing a 30fps games with dips into the 10s for example. Others do. For me, it's just simply not up to the quality I can enjoy the game at.

Cyberpunk at 1440p, 75Mbit/s and 120hz/fps feels pretty darn responsive, streaming in from GeForce Now. A local rig will beat it of course, can't cheat lights peed, but if you're close to a datacenter the added lag is negligible, especially if you can get the video stream at 120hz.

Even if it's 120 fps you can still have high latencies, because the time from button press to the next frame acting on that button press can be slow.

The game can stream at 120fps, but take extra like to register a jump for example.

Again, you might just not be sensitive to that.

There's also compression artifacts and bitrate that can make fine details already coarse and all that, even if it's 4k. That's what some won't find to be an issue and others will.

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