a doozie to debug

But digital games are cheaper.

Such a huge part of the appeal of digital games has been that older games go on sale for dirt cheap. Everyone wins across the board here - older games sell a lot more copies than they used to because digital prices can go lower than physical can while still turning a profit.

Price increases on games rarely go over well, and game prices creep up much slower than most other products doing. Most games struggle to make a profit as is, so we're not going to see a drop in base prices, but it probably delays further price increases a bit.

We've already seen pretty direct evidence of physical impacting prices with Nintendo's Switch 2 releases. The A tier games went up in price across the board this gen, but the B tier games only went up for physical copies.

The shift toward all digital has been happening for a long time, and happening on Xbox even faster than the other consoles. Most people don't use the disc drive at all anymore. Most stores don't carry Xbox discs.

This is about getting the last holdouts to move on. Stick your discs into your older console you're still hanging on to, get the license, and then you can move on to the new console.

As to the drive compatibility, it's about the copy protection. The discs are all encrypted, and the decryption keys are stored in a region standard drives can't read.

Most Xbox Series systems don't have disc drives.

Later Xbox One models don't have the disc drive.

Until recently, all the rumors for the next Xbox suggested it wouldn't have a disc drive.

One of their biggest selling points on Xbox is they've got way better backwards compatibility than Nintendo or Sony. The #1 factor in what console people buy now is what their last console was. They all have at least one generation of backward compatibility, so everyone buys the same one they had before.

The point of this is to tie your existing disc games to your account so you won't hesitate to buy a new Xbox that doesn't have a disc drive.

What the hell is that? Is that a salesman in PC-speak?

And most people aren't going to send $16 to $20 a month to 5 different streamers. Most people are smarter than that.

Peacock offers deals for $20/year pretty often. Paramount offers $30/year - or no ads for a little more.

HBO usually offers a year for $3/month around black friday.

I'm good with waiting for the deals. I've usually got all the major services and I'm still paying way less than I was for cable.

His podcast Better Offline is squarely targeted at people who are very much online. Indeed his entire gig is the epitome of online living.

If Ed Zitron really felt better offline, he wouldn't be making a living off of a podcast and constant AI bashing.

Not that I necessarily disagree with him though... It's just that the messenger doesn't really befit the message.

The licensing issues you're talking about are with movies, and happen on all digital stores that sell movies. Movie studios are difficult to work with on licensing.

When games are delisted on any of the consoles, you still have the ability to download them if you've purchased them.

Games started installing to hard drives once consoles started including them.

PS4/XB1 started requiring all games to be installed. PS3/X360 had optional installs as not all 360s had hard drives, but the games ran better if you installed.

If even he thinks AI is dubious, you know AI is bad news.

Lol

No matter how you set the time zones, you're going to end up with a significant number of people unhappy with them. How far north/south you are in the time zone, and how far east/west you are influences how you experience it.

At the very least, if you're near a boundary, you're going to have a very different experience than someone just on the other side of it. There's no way to avoid that.

The people complaining are the ones that ended up with the current boundaries not working well for them.

The Netherlands fits within 1 time zone. The 50 US states have 6 time zones. It's a lot harder to make everyone happy over here.

This is the blandest, most watered-down way to say "lost their job" yet. Quite nauseating.

What difference does it make?

PS4 and PS5 games have to be installed to run. And then you download updates. Bigger games often require you download part of the game. The disc is just a license check that saves you part of the download.

PS3 was the last console to play games off the disc, and even then, installing was optional and improved the experience. But even then, some of the bigger games had mandatory installs.

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.