Gotta love people who don’t want to take a vaccine that was designed by the absolute top experts in the field and extensively tested, but have no problem popping pills some grifter on the interweb sold them.

Exactly. That’s why I personally don’t mind buying digital games on PC, because the PC is an open platform. If Valve decides to drop the ball and sell every game for double the price or something, I can still get and copy games via other means on my Steam Deck

That’s not how it works at all. Valve doesn’t set the prices in their store, the publishers do. Valve just takes a cut of whatever the publisher decides to charge. If a publisher for a game decides to double the price for a game, why would they do so only on Steam and not on every other store that game is sold?

Why would Sony care about GameStop’s share price?

They don’t. They care about their games being on the shelves because that’s where grandma is going to pick up a game for Billy’s birthday.

PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers.

PSN has sales just like the stores for PC games, there’s no difference there. The difference is that the non-sale price on PC is lower.

You also seem to be under the impression that digital stores work like physical ones, where the store buys their wares from a distributer and then decides at what price to sell it to the consumer, maybe even at a loss when they want to clear inventory. This is not how digital sales work.

Digital stores operate according to what’s known as the ‘agency model’. They don’t set the price of the products, they just take a cut of the sale. The prices are set by the publishers. Even sales work that way, the stores don’t determine the sales price, instead they go to the publishers and say “we’re going to do a sales event, want to join in?”.

For each individual game, the publisher of that game has a monopoly. There is absolutely zero competition between stores on individual games because they do not have any control over the pricing of games in the first place. The publisher set the price for each store.

You don’t have to believe me, just look at the price for PC games which are already digital-only.

PC games don’t have an open market in the way you think.

The reason digital console games are more expensive than physical is precisely because physical console games are still a thing. Digital prices are kept high to not piss off the physical stores. If digital was cheaper then the brick and mortar stores would sell way less games. Shelf space in stores is limited and if they don’t sell enough games they rather use that space for something more profitable. As such, lowering digital prices would effectively end physical game sales.

Once you take physical sales out of the equation digital prices will drop. The fact digital PC games are so much cheaper proves this.

I bought a digital-only PS5 because I know I will never buy a physical game. I bought a handful of physical games for my PS4 and I still regret it.

I gladly trade time and convenience for a little extra money.

It’s so absurdly big. Our galaxy (the Milky Way) is estimated to have between 100 and 400 billion stars in it. For a long time we thought our galaxy was all there was, it wasn’t until 1925 when Edwin Hubble was able to prove that M31 was not a nebula or cluster of stars in our galaxy, but in fact an entirely different galaxy altogether that we realized there are more galaxies out there.

Look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field picture

This was a taken by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a basically empty bit of space 2.4 by 2.4 arcminutes in size (for comparison, the moon has an apparent size of about 30 arcminutes, or half a degree). So an absolutely tiny part of the sky. It contains about 10.000 galaxies.

The observable universe is estimated to have between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in it, with on average about 100 billion stars per galaxy. It’s absolutely mind blowing.

These are enterprise drives, they aren’t going to contain anything pirated. They are probably going to one of those cloud providers you don’t want to upload your data to.

I’d want to be able to lose two drives in an array before I lose all my shit. So RAID 6 for me.

Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup solution, RAID is a high-availability solution.

The point of RAID is not to safeguard your data, you need proper backups for that (3-2-1 rule of backups: 3 copies of the data on 2 different storage media, with 1 copy off-site). RAID will not protect your data from deletion from user error, malware, OS bugs, or anything like that.

The point of RAID is so everyone can keep working if there is a hardware failure. It’s there to prevent downtime.

Which is how fast?

And what is the memory bandwidth on these APUs?

you’d definitely be able to do it cheaper with PC hardware.

You can get a GPU with 192GB VRAM for less than a Mac? Sign me up please.

Why even bother with things like strings for a salt? I would expect it to just take a byte array. Just create some random bytes and provide that.

they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.

That way you get an app that’s crap on every platform.

So buy land, dump trash on it. Got it.

That’s not a solution at all. First of all, depending country, you will need a gambling license. This is a PITA as gambling laws will differ per country. In my country gambling is heavily regulated and you would need to check ID and keep track of how much a person gambles. You have a duty of care and if you notice a person’s gambling habits are becoming problematic you have to refuse them.

That doesn’t really work if people from other instances do get to downvote.

I’m on lemmy.one which has disabled downvoting. If I had known in advance I would have picked another instance. Unfortunately, Lemmy doesn’t have a mechanism to transfer your account to another instance yet.

You can put money and source code in escrow for this exact eventuality.

I don’t think it’s a token gesture. Microsoft is a software company; they want to sell software, not hardware. They don’t really care about xbox other than as a means to sell more software and gamepass subscriptions. Selling their games on as many platforms as possible is a logical move for them.