u/Effective-Priority62

Apologies in advance for the ramblings, I just need to get it out. Feel free to skip or skim this, as I didn't intend the text to get this huge.

I'm not sure anyone else talked about this, but imagine gaming is indeed a luxury hobby with PS6 and Xbox Helix for the long term foreseeable future. Like its whole 7 years cycle starting November 2027 or at least like the first 5 years until the prices finally drop and normal people who aren't enthusiasts or rich are able to get them. All this time, and Sony and Xbox have to keep supporting PS5 and Xbox Series. Both because they have to in order to sell the games to its larger install base, and because we've hit the graphics ceiling and it'll be a long time before someone makes a PS6 game that can't be ported to PS5.

I wonder how the trailers for every new game will be. Assuming most everything you see will be cross gen and only a few niche first party games will be next-gen exclusive on each console in their early years.

And I can't begin to imagine how awkward the next year State of Play that has the official PS6 announcement presentation will be. Like one straight hour of "Here is our brand new game, experience it even more immersion and all the new gimmicks in in PS6." Fine print at the end of the trailer says it's also coming for PS5, or they just announce it as cross-gen later in PS Blog. Not all that different for how the original PS5 announcement presentation went. But at least that one had actual impressive next-gen console exclusives.

Returnal. Rift Apart. Demon's Souls. A bunch of cool third parties like Pragmata (which we didn't know but was comedically still so far away it took the whole generation to release, though it has been worth the wait), Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo, as well as a bunch of next gen exclusive live services that were doomed to fail like Destruction Allstars and Godfall.

That presentation had substance. It had had disappointments, sure, cause back then people were still very against cross-gens and Sony was dancing around it, making sure barely any game trailers disclosed their games were cross gen. But it still held a lot of wonder and promise for the next generation, with the few games that were truly next gen exclusive and even the ones that weren't.

I have no idea what the hell they're gonna be able to show next year that will possibly get anyone excited for the PS6 as an exclusive premium next-gen experience. Or if they're gonna show more than one such game. The one studio they had that could make a tech demo so incredible that their game would undoubtedly be next-gen exclusive, was fucking shut down after Sony intentionally sabotaged and set it up to fail by sending them to the live service mines and rejecting their remake and remaster pitches this whole generation, instead of just giving them something real to do. That's right, Bluepoint Games. Worst moment of this PlayStation generation by far.

Then there's Team Asobi. It might very well be that they're cooking up a next-gen Astro Bot as we speak, even if it's not really a full fledged experience and more a short free pre-installed game like Astro's Playroom was. But Astrobot's graphics are heavily stilized and relatively simple. Specially if it's a full fledged game like Astro Bot 2024, what level of mechanic and map complexity are they even gonna show to justify the game being a PS6 exclusive and not being ported to PS5 while locking out the millions of potential buyers that loved and showed up for the previous game? Even if it's a PS6 exclusive meant to show off all the new gimmicks and how it can run now at like 4K 120 fps with AI upscaling and framegen or some bullshit, there's gonna be a lot of controversy and discourse about why this couldn't just come to PS5 as well, where more than just a few thousand people would play it.

Media Molecule's been silent this whole decade. Maybe they're cooking up a triumphant return for Dreams or even LittleBigPlanet 4? But that would still leave a heavily sour taste on everyone's mouths if it can't run on PS5, unless they show something like the PS2 to PS3 level of evolution and complexity we had with things like the first LittleBigPlanet. It's very unlikely, but we'll have to wait and see.

To make things worse, if Sony doesn't quit their plans for PS6 Portable and instead goes ahead and mandates developers to work on parity for every PS6 game to run on the portable device using lower power settings, then pretty much EVERY PS6 game ever made is guaranteed to be back-porteable to PS5, adding to the controversy when the number of next gen exclusives starts rising and people keep complaining about being left out. Or it'd be another big point of discussions in case we barely see next gen exclusives at all and most of the PS6 library indeed gets released to PS5 as well.

And that's just the beginning. Imagine for 5 years in most State of Plays they try their hardest to hype up new game announcements without disclosing they're also coming to PS5, because they want that massive install base's money from all the millions of users in the ecosystem that will stay priced out of PS6 for the long-term. I wonder if at some point they'll just give up pretenses and announce the games for both consoles up-front, with no shame or stigma, perhaps even showing parts of the gameplay on PS5 and parts on the next-gen edition. Would like to see that normalized some day. But until then, I think it's gonna be a rough bunch of years. And more than rough, its gonna be very awkward if most of the install base indeed just skips next gen.

Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one worried about this, so I figured I might as well ask somewhere.

It feels as if this massive AI ramp-up, the massive amount of data centers built in the last few years and all the other ones still on the process of being made, along with production of like the next 5 years of most of the worlds RAM already being committed towards said unbuilt datacenters, has simply made us already burn through DECADES of our resources that would normally be used towards making normal consumer electronics, like PCs, phones, consoles, tablets, etc. I've looked it up, there's gold, silver, palladium, tungsten, cobalt and gallium all used for RAM chips alone. When talking about the wider scope of data centers, there's also things like lithium, yttrium, gadolinium and many other even scarcer materials.

So I guess my questions would be: First, what the fuck are we doing? I know things before this decade weren't exactly sustainable with millions of phones and other electronics being made every year because of constant demand and planned obsolescence, but did seriously no one in big tech think of the short term consequences of this AI boom and try to stop it?

And second and most important question, are we gonna experience a dark age of sorts, if we survive everything else but this AI boom depletes most of earths rare resources used in electronics? Will we be back to WW2 levels of technology in like 3 decades if this AI datacenter boom doesn't stop? Or worse than 1940s tech? It doesn't look like it even can stop, even after there's no more data centers to build. These servers and supercomputers need constant maintenance over the years, just like any other enterprise computer. They'll always end up consuming more and requiring more parts, specially as its RAM chips wear out in a decade or two. Are we really getting into a point of no return where we'll need to start Mad Max-ing old tech and mining new materials from space? Or and I blowing this out of proportion and our ability to produce new electronics throughout this century will remain just fine?

I didn't even know the massive trove of great games the PS2 library had, but I didn't care. Back then, getting pirated games in my country was hard. You just bought the ones that were available, and as a kid, you didn't know or research much about them. The ones you did want, like a specific Jak & Daxter, or Ratchet & Clank, or even something niche you found interesting like Okami, were sometimes so extremely rare to come by. And you had no idea how to torrent stuff off the internet, not to mention the extremely slow download speeds my country had. Anyways, I'd always pay like 3 R$ (Brazil currency) per hour to spend some time playing Uncharted 2 or MGS4 at my town's gaming cafe, which had PS3s. It was fucking amazing. It was the future. And so I unfortunately didn't value my PS2 enough. Played and finished like a dozen great games on it in its lifetime, and played or tried and a couple dozen more. But looking back I hardly scratched the surface of its amazing library that I could have scratched if I was a knowledgeable teen or adult back then. All because I was too young to the proper research and the next-gen grass next door looked so much greener.

Then I finally got a PS3 in 2012, and the same thing happened with PS4 lol, albeit the jealousy kicked in much more slowly because there were so fewer games when the eighth gen started, but the ones that PS4 did have already looked like another amazing jump in quality. Similarly, I borrowed a family PS4 on and off starting in 2017, it was quite good but never played it much, only got my own in 2020. The feeling of missing out when the PS5 hit came back, but this time, much more dialed down. I figured I'd just save some money while I enjoyed my PS4 and buy it in 3 to 4 years, which I did in 2024. But anyway, adult life had fully kicked in by then and I didn't mind waiting to play the couple of games I wanted to play on PS5, even tho they also played on PS4 and just performed a little worse.

Now with the 10-th gen approaching, PS6 & Xbox Helix right around the corner, everything indicating that we've hit a graphical ceiling of diminishing returns and consoles becoming an overpriced luxury that's bound to hit 1000 dollars in the next gen (already started today with the Steam Machine price announcement, although that's pretty much a current/9th gen console), I can say pretty confidently: I'm not even slightly interested in getting a next gen console, even if it's 5 years after its 2027 release. I just have a world of games from just PS4 and PS5 alone to try out, and with all the complications of adult life and my penchant to being a completionist when I enjoy a game, I'll be lucky to play 3 or 5 games a year. And the ones that will come out, let's be real, are all gonna be cross gen. I held off from playing cross gen PS5 games on PS4 because performance on PS4 was still pretty lackluster. Nowadays, games scale back across some insane hardware differences, from Switch 2 to PS4, to Xbox Series S, to Xbox Series X, PS5 and PS5 Pro. The extra FPS and pixels a PS6 game will provide will be negligible. The base PS5 is pretty much already good enough, and the new gen will be coming out way too early for any meaningful difference. I'll happily still be playing it for the foreseeable future, probably next 10 years, along with my PS4 if it's still kicking.

Will I never get a PS6? It's not set in stone, but I think I'll just wait until its lifecycle is done and it becomes an old console, maybe 2034 or 3035, to buy it if really feel like playing newer games that are not cross gen. Will probably borrow it beforehand if Horizon 3 or TLOU 3 are exclusives and not cross-gen and if I'm really dying to play them. But yeah, I just wanted to say that this envy or jealousy for people who had the shiniest new thing is now gone for me. Has been gone for some time now, tho it took me a while to realize. But looking at how bleak and overpriced next gen is gearing up to be, it's hard to ignore it and not feel a sense of JOMO. Like I'm glad for all the consoles I have (including a currently dead PS3 without a functioning HDD that I plan to replace with an SSD eventually), as well as their physical backlogs which I also plan to increase.

I will definitely be priced out of playing the PS6 for a long-ass time, and I couldn't be happier about it. I'm just not sure if this is because I'm grown up and look at gaming differently now, or if gaming generations have become so absurdly iterative, quick and overpriced for their diminishing returns that they don't offer a leap in graphical quality and gameplay complexity anymore, or both. In any case, peace out. I'll still be sure to tune in to all the gaming news and consumer reviews to find out how the people who will buy these things at premium pricing are enjoying their investment, and I'll be glad for those of you who manage to afford them as early adopters. I'll still be bitching from the sidelines if this thing doesn't come with a disc drive or just does away with physical media completely, as well as many other things I love to complain about in console trends.

By no one I don't mean us regular people. Me particularly, I thought this generation was gonna be something else with Xbox leveraging the power of the multiple studios and IPs they've acquired to create a really interesting first party lineup instead of mismanaging them to hell and shutting them down left and right all while having to port near everything to PS5 to try and make some of their money back. I thought PlayStation was gonna knock it out of the park too, instead of acquiring Bungie to fucking kill Destiny and lose it all on a niche super expensive extraction shooter, or piss away all the money in Concord and other live service failures that didn't even see the light of day. Shutting down Bluepoint after wasting them for an entire gen was the nail in the coffin.

What I want to know, is how no one on either end of these deals, before being bought by Xbox or Playstation, saw the writings on the wall. That they'd be squeezed out for all their worth while being forced to work on trend chasing GaaS bullshit, and then being shut down. That all their years of hard work on becoming a good enough studio worthy of becoming first-party would be for not much more than meaningless crunch and exploitation for the better part of the 2020s. That those massive first party publishers are delusionally competing with each other and panic-buying these new studios fundamentally on a ego competition, and that they have no actual plan or roadmap other than squeezing them for all their worth then throwing them away. How the fuck did the execs and shareholders at Sony saw this and no one thought to say it was a bad idea and they'd be pissing their money away while making sure a bunch of people's livelihoods are ruined in a few years with the inevitable layoffs. Specially now, with Bungie having half of its staff laid off after finishing D2 and no clear path forward other than maintaining Marathon.

And don't get me started on the Activision & Bethesda acquisitions by Microsoft, which seems so far to have been productive and beneficial to no one other than the execs who pitched that sale.

What the fuck was everyone on around 2020?? It's like a collective delirium of stupidity that we'll still be seeing the outcomes of, for over a decade. I doubt we'll ever see something like this happening again. Small up-and-coming studios will rather die than being bought out by big publishers. There will still be some desperate enough, who will live to regret it, and some who will actually get lucky and properly nurtured and managed into a great studio. I think about Ember Labs a lot, and worry what would happen if they give in to being bought by PS, Xbox, or some other big publisher. How long would they last, with that constant boot of profits on their necks and some demands to chase the latest online game trend instead of focusing on what they do best.

It's been 11 years since I've read these books so forgive my memory, the show is way fresher on my mind thanks to social media. From what I recall, he intended on making Gregor confess publicly that it was Tywin who ordered his sister and her children's deaths, while humiliating Tywin and giving Dorne and Doran an open rallying cry to go to war when the time was right, as well as an excuse to use Myrcella as a hostage. If he won the way he planned to, he would likely have returned to Dorne with Ellaria by his side and Tyrion as a new ally, presumably able to walk away free from KL's court straight into a dornish ship.

That's what I don't understand about his plan. How in the seven hells did he think Tywin, Cersei or the whole Lannister establishment in general would allow that at all? What would stop Tywin from just cheating the rules again and declaring them traitors/manufacturing an incident to imprison all the Martell court as well as Tyrion again, and ruthlessly butcher their soldiers and other serfs like they did to the Starks and their people without repercussions when Ned fell into their trap?

Did Oberyn seriously expect the laws of hospitality to just guarantee he would walk away from the capital free instead of being taken hostage by Tywin, who would realistically immediately make up a story of dornish treason and demand Doran to bend the knee in order to avoid war? Or did he expect just having Myrcella in Dorne would be enough to allow him to walk away with his full court, Ellaria and Tyrion? Even if they could walk away, what's the likelihood Tywin would allow Tyrion to go with them instead of just setting him up again or having an assassin get to him first and then covering it up as just some commoner or Red Keep worker who murdered him in outrage from the trial and revenge for King Joffrey?

Did the book ever explain this, or are we just suppose to believe Oberyn would be able to fully walk away with Tyrion all the way to Dorne unharmed? Or knowing GRRM, would he inevitably pull the rug from us and have Tywin devise another way to arrest them, or ambush their convoy or ships on their way back?

Last FM kept on scrobbling the same song for half an hour, only updating to another song if we opened the app while it was playing. Then it kept scrobbling that same song on repeat instead of whatever was playing. Pano Scrobbler is useless, even with offline scrobbling active, battery and background management disabled, etc. It only scroblles if we open the app during every song. Now Playing only scrobbles Spotify but not other minor music players like MXPlayer, Musicolet or even SoundCloud. Their default options are awful. Which is why I didn't even test it. But yeah, so I got this going for me. Not 3 months go by where LastFM won't give me trouble. Is this happening for everybody else? Or is it just me and my Infinix Phone along with XOS 16?