If you have legal insurance through your employer (i.e. ARAG), this is a service they cover. I think I pay about $15/mo for that insurance and that one use alone made it worth it for several years.

Sony themselves did that ahead of the launch although obviously that's just one retailer and supplies couldn't meet demands so there was still lots of unhappy customers (I registered but didn't get selected).

With that said, I actually feel Sony is handling their sales through the Playstation Direct channel pretty well. They require a Playstation account and limit one console per order (possibly per account, I'm not sure). They use some sort of queueing software ("Queue-It") and tell you if they sell out of consoles while you're in the queue. They use a random time each day and once in, the site ran fairly well (didn't fall over or time out). I got my unit at launch through Target (after missing Walmart, Best Buy, etc.) and it was a shit show compared.

Just yesterday I was able to get a PS5 Digital for my nephew through them. Took about two weeks of checking throughout the day but all considered it was a much better experience than Walmart, BB, etc.

There's a quote, but I'm not seeing any links. What's the source?

I think what a lot of people miss is that Apple doesn't really have much incentive to kill Lightning, in fact I'd argue they have more incentive to keep it. Most companies move to standard connections types save on development cost and provide cheaper options, but Apple stays on esoteric and occasionally proprietary connections (see how they're handling wireless charging) as it's an opportunity to charge the customer more as well as create a barrier to exit (i.e. can't directly use those accessories you paid extra for on competitors).

Well considering their previous top speed upgrade was called, "Ludicrous Speed," I'd say an homage is a safe bet.

Yep, just like they did for Halo.... oh wait...

You could do to Amazon what people often do with their smartphones and the Amazon app at physical brick & mortar stores. Go to Amazon, get the info you need about the product, determine if you want to buy it, then head to Powell's site to make the actual purchase.

I'm confused about that being listed as a feature as well as I think it will be standard for all phones that can run the xcloud app and isn't specific to the Note. I am part of the Game Streaming Preview of xCloud, and it works well on my Pixel 3 so I'm not clear what this Note 20 is bringing to the table.

MPD is an option that I've been using for streaming my collection to PDAs and then Smartphones for many many years. There's clients for everything and you can use icecast to stream to them. I don't recall what client I used on iOS, but on Android I was a big user of MPDroid for a time.

In my opinion they took a step back around the T430/T440 era, but are trending better again. My current personal laptop, a T480, seems to have a decently built keyboard (at least by today's standards). It was a step up from my T430s although my older T-series (T21, T400, etc.) had a better feel.

If you truly need a "workstation" class laptop, I'd advocate the Thinkpad P or W series. I've been running Linux on Thinkpads for nearly two decades now and have never had significant problems. I primarily use the T series, although I have owned a few W series for work over the years (unfortunately had to use Windows for work).

The author of this article, Jason Schreier, is one of the few true investigative reports in games journalism. He recently left Kotaku, and I think this is his first big story on Bloomberg. Given Bloomberg's audience, I was curious to see how his reporting would change, and I'm glad to see he's still very involved in the games industry coverage.

Will be interesting to see whether companies not impacted by the shutdown use this as an opportunity to skim the fat without making headlines as that definitely happened during the previous recession.

If that's all you've used your PS4 games for this generation, you're missing out. IMHO, the PS4 didn't really hit it's stride until 2017, but it's been putting out bangers since then. I'm in my mid-thirties and have been a gamer since the Atari generation, and I think you can make a compelling argument that 2017-2018 were some of the best years in the history of gaming.

While it may seem like a lot of PS4 games are just a nicer can of paint on PS1/PS2 games, that's generally not the case. There's been substantial improvements to quality of life (i.e. everything works how you expect/want it to, you aren't fighting controls/camera/etc) to the point where it's very hard to play even great older games now. I was never a huge Sony fan (I went Dreamcast, Xbox, Xbox 360 before eventually grabbing PS3 & PS4), but I have to hand it to them, they've killed it in terms of first party support late in the generation and indie support early (unfortunately that's gone down). The indie scene is now better than ever for consoles, with games like Celeste drawing perfect scores from major publicaitons.

If you want some recommendations that I think any gamer would enjoy, check out Horizon (my favorite game this generation, can easily be found for $10), God of War, Spiderman, and Bloodborne for the first parties. On the indie side check out Celeste, Edith Finch, Dead Cells, Rocket League, Inside, & Shovel Knight.

I agree with your main point about not conflating accessibility & difficulty although I do believe an argument can be made that there's a genre of "hard" games whose value does increase with difficulty (think Veblen goods like a Rolls Royce but instead of value increasing with price, it's increasing with difficulty).

For example, consider From Software's games (i.e. Demon Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, etc.). I believe there's a substantial portion of their audience that they'd lose if they made ways to make their games easier, and I don't know if the amount of new gamers attracted to the now easier game would make up for that loss. This is particularly tough for accessibility as a lot of the changes that may make their game accessible for someone who needs it would also make it easier for those who don't.

Now personally, I wouldn't care if they made it easier or not as long as I have the choice to use it (Celeste did amazing in that regard), but there's definitely others who don't share that perspective and in the community that plays those types of games, I'd be curious what the percentages would be. So I don't think it's accurate to say there's no downside to adding an easy mode from a studio's POV (and clearly From Software agrees).