45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC • Hacker News Board

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#21

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #14

nottorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part where Sony is going download only, which means any attempt to collect playstation games in the long run becomes impossible.

So they switch to Steam, a digital-only platform? In what world does that make sense?

Steam, at least in theory, has Gabe's long ago pledge that they'd un-DRM purchased games if Valve ever went out of business. Whether Gabe or his successor actually would honor that pledge today if it happened or even could contractually is a different question.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#22

Post by tayo42 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #5

Gaming is getting too expensive. This feels like sort of an accident of complex systems. Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing. But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago. From a pure "can we have good entertainment?" standpoint there's no reason for this cost creep. In practice, companies are pushing it, and although it probably does not apply to the HN crowd,…

>But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago.

This is true for every entertainment medium. Time filters out all the crap made so your left with a few timeless hits. Especially 30 years ago and in gaming?

Though to pick on 1996 , I just looked it up, that was a pretty crazy year of games in hindsight.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#23

Post by mediaman » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

CodingJeebus wrote: post #18

parineum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TVs need to continuously improve to keep selling All while getting cheaper in the process. Thanks capitalism!

Getting cheaper due to mandatory spyware that requires networking knowledge to properly isolate and disable. Thanks capitalism!

That's annoying, but it's not why scaled manufacturing is lowering unit costs of panel production. Look at bare panel prices, they've followed the same cost curve down.

The same problem exists in the airline market. Airline ticket prices are historically very low, but people complain about seats, fees, and so on. But then they keep buying the absolute cheapest ticket.

What consumers say they care about, and what they actually care about, are not the same. Otherwise they'd pay more for the less irritating product.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#24

Post by haunter » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #19

I for one recommend building an i7 box and really anything from that generation are still really good CPUs if youre making a gaming box. Otherwise you may run into RAM costs or some other high hardware costs.

>an i7 box and really anything from that generation

That doesn't mean anything at all. The i7 is a family of CPUs which can be anything from a 2009 i7-860 (with DDR3 support only) to a 2023 i7-14700k (with DDR5 support). Insane performance difference.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#25

Post by dashmeet » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #8

everdrive wrote: post #5

Gaming is getting too expensive. This feels like sort of an accident of complex systems. Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing. But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago. From a pure "can we have good entertainment?" standpoint there's no reason for this cost creep. In practice, companies are pushing it, and although it probably does not apply to the HN crowd,…

I do wonder if a studio that made a lot of smaller games with less technical specs but spent all the money in fun gameplay design and character design and stories would outcompete major AAA game studios. I think I'm just describing mobile game studios pre-gachafication

Isn’t this Nintendo? Pretty sure they’ve proven that you don’t need the latest in graphics (always a generation behind) to make engaging games.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#26

Post by haunter » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

I think it's driven more about piracy than anything else. Steam is not an alternative if you hate digital only games. PC as a platform (and that can mean anything from Windows to Linux to Mac) is an alternative as cheaper gaming becasue 1, you can pirate games easier 2, you can emulate older games.

It really comes down to the next PS6 exclusive, would people buy a console just to play Dark Souls 4? That's the billion dollar question

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#27

Post by mhurron » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #5

Gaming is getting too expensive. This feels like sort of an accident of complex systems. Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing. But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago. From a pure "can we have good entertainment?" standpoint there's no reason for this cost creep. In practice, companies are pushing it, and although it probably does not apply to the HN crowd,…

Gaming was always an expensive hobby. But this -

> Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing

Is unrelated. AAA Gaming companies relied so heavily on technical improvements when things were new and genuine leaps in ability that when we hit the graphics are good enough instead of just making great games that are fun, they had to do stupid graphics tricks.

Did every strand of hair need to be individually rendered to act as real as possible so the one guy who is dissecting ever frame would be happy? Did that horses scrotum need to be animated at all, let alone react to the environment? Did that thing that basically no one will ever see need to be created over the course of 9 months?

These stupid, pointless things to try and chase the same technical breakthrough selling points they had 25+ years ago are one of the major things driving the development costs.

Then of course there's the, 'ya whatever, you'll still pay for it, fuck you'[1] that publishers are latching on to.

[1]https://youtu.be/vBG3OYSa3YQ?t=50

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#28

Post by nazgulsenpai » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #5

Gaming is getting too expensive. This feels like sort of an accident of complex systems. Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing. But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago. From a pure "can we have good entertainment?" standpoint there's no reason for this cost creep. In practice, companies are pushing it, and although it probably does not apply to the HN crowd,…

I hear people complaining nonstop about the state of gaming but man, I stopped playing AAA years ago organically and started playing AA and indie and it's been wonderful. Between Steam & GoG sales and using Epic Game Store only for all of their free stuff, my backlog grows and grows.

Obviously this is subjective, but try some of that $5-10 stuff on Steam or GoG and you might be surprised how much there is to play out there. I'm playing Dread Delusion right now and it is amazing (estimate I'm 50% done but playing blind), Wicked Seed before that, Deformed before that, etc.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#29

Post by everdrive » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #8

everdrive wrote: post #5

Gaming is getting too expensive. This feels like sort of an accident of complex systems. Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing. But, some of the most fun games in the world were made 30 ago. From a pure "can we have good entertainment?" standpoint there's no reason for this cost creep. In practice, companies are pushing it, and although it probably does not apply to the HN crowd,…

I do wonder if a studio that made a lot of smaller games with less technical specs but spent all the money in fun gameplay design and character design and stories would outcompete major AAA game studios. I think I'm just describing mobile game studios pre-gachafication

It's very interesting. I played that new-ish Marvel: Cosmic Invasion game and recently played Fight 'N Rage. I believe both are built in the exact same game engine. Fight 'N Rage, which is undoubtedly the better of the two games (although both are quite fun) had a tiny roster. I think there was a single primary developer, and then one guy did the music and maybe 1-2 other people helped with things. The Marvel game was made by a "real" studio and had tens (hundreds?) of staff to build what was effectively a slightly lower quality game. (although the Marvel game had a much smaller staff than anything like a modern AAA release.) Famously, Doom and Quake were made by quite small teams.

I don't know what the answer is, but there just seems to be unavoidable bloat all around. Staff, cost, complexity, system requirements, etc.

Re: 45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC

#30

Post by chowells » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #14

nottorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part where Sony is going download only, which means any attempt to collect playstation games in the long run becomes impossible.

So they switch to Steam, a digital-only platform? In what world does that make sense?

You can not-quite-trivially download all versions of a game that have been uploaded to steam, as long as you own the game. And that's a download like as an installers you can run, not just overwriting your current active steam install.

I actually rely on this quite a lot, indirectly. Beat Saber is a fun game, but it doesn't support a lot of fun features, like walls with boundaries that aren't aligned to the coordinate system. There are mods to add those features, but they haven't all been ported over to the new line of the game since it upgraded the version of unity it's using. So I use one of the mod managers that supports, among other things, maintaining multiple versions of the game in parallel so you can choose what you want to do when you start a game. This feature very explicitly relies on downloading older versions from Steam. Because that's a thing you can do with Steam.

In the same week that Sony announced they'd be ending production of optical media, they also removed hundreds of movies from user libraries that they'd lost the right to sell. I don't really care if they have yet to do the same with games - they've demonstrated they're willing to remove access from paying customers for their own reasons. And there's nothing the owner of a locked-down console can do about it.

Steam exists in a different universe than digital-only games from PSN. Conflating the two because they use the same method of delivery is ridiculous.