End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It’s just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.
I don’t understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this. The only draws of consoles was the turnkey hardware, which you can generally get with Proton now, and access to physical games, which won’t be a thing soon. Now it’s just a locked-down PC with a DRM storefront that makes you pay a subscription to pay online games and which may or may not have backwards compatibility from system to system.
Maybe that’s just the PC gamer in me talking. Are there any advantages to console anymore? Like, a single benefit?
Can anyone come up with a single example of an industry that’s not getting simultaneously worse (and/or smaller), and more expensive?
Not really end of an era, you’re just witnessing a monopoly forming since Xbox is pretty much dead in the water. I guess it’s technically a duopoly since Nintendo is fine, but Nintendo kinda does its own thing without regard to what others do. Basically, with Xbox out of the picture, Sony is free to do whatever it wants.
They’re also shutting down PS3 and PSVita store access, to add insult to injury.
They can do all this because people keep giving them money.
Too many people make it about brand identity than simply playing games.
This is what happens when their only competitor is a mindless Microslop.
Nintendo carved out their niche and Sony has no chance against them in that market after abandoning AAA and AA single player games in favor of trash service games.
They’re betting on consumers being too impulsive and stupid to care, and… they’re probably right. Nothing’s stopped them before, this likely isn’t a new line in the sand for them.
No, this is just playstation continuing to hate their customer base.
They’ve always hated their customers. Between Sony, and Nintendo, I dont know who hates their customers the most… but they both certainly try.
and it doesnt matter, because they both have enough fanboys that strip off their clothes and gleefully dance naked and joyous in the rain of shit both companies sputter out of their assholes and down onto their customers.
Just the second great video game crash, not quite a secret landfill of E. T. Games but this is just as bad imo
I’m an Xbox fangirl (a resentingly disappointed one, of course), and the recent industry shenanigans made me get apprehensive about whatever is going to come out next from Microsoft’s direction. They could turn the direction around. Not sure if they can.
I liked Nintendo Switch, but Switch 2 was pretty much “yeah, I’ll probably get a Steam Deck at some point, sorry”.
This PlayStation stuff basically switched my opinion of them from “Nnno” to “Oh hell no”.
I will be back to PC gaming! And will be building a new PC once the industry quits being stupid for a moment. Until then, my 2020 laptop will have to do.
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn’t really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there’s Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they’re the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the “Sony Rootkit” scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn’t at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.
Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.
Closing bluepoint is madness. That studio was really good at remastering games
Bad notice…. I like phisical disc, not is good for ever this system, and one question: you pay the game, but not is you own, not?
There is no point to consoles anymore. It used to be that consoles were easy to use and cheaper while PCs were more expensive and complex. That is no longer the case. Computers are stupid easy now and consoles have become too expensive. Nintendo excluded they are the only ones doing old console case where it is for children.
