Cylinsier

It’s honestly insanely impressive that these things are still working so long after being built and so far from us. One of mankind’s greatest achievements and even after they die they’ll still be out there somewhere floating around. Maybe long after we’re gone and the Earth is swallowed up by the sun. The last piece of proof that we even existed at all.

By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode

If this nematode could read I bet it would be offended at being called “new.”

I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.

Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.

Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.

Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.

And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.

How does it’s performance compare to a PS5? Because at least where I live, I would have to spend about twice as much on a PC to get the same performance as a PS5.

The issue is the consumer who is most likely to consider buying a console doesn’t want to have to worry about waiting months for a port and then another several months for performance to be fixed, nor do they want to pay for a very expensive gaming PC and then regular hardware upgrades to play new games. As I was saying to someone else, Sony isn’t really competing for PC gamers. They’re two different markets and Sony knows this which is why they do release a lot of their games to PC eventually. But for people who want to play Sony games when they are relatively new and active, either to experience the story with others and avoid eventual spoilers, or to play in an active online community that may not last, waiting for a functional PC release isn’t worth it, especially at the higher cost it brings to have a decent one compared to a console.

The thing is I don’t think Sony cares about peeling PC gamers away anymore for exactly the reasons you said; they just release most of their games to PC eventually anyway. But PC gamers and console gamers are not the same market. There are certainly people who play both, but I rarely play PC games anymore because my whole gaming setup is centered around the couch with family now. I simply don’t have time to also park myself in front of a PC and game that way as well, and as far as purpose built PCs that connect to a TV go, well, none of those bring the same features for the same cost the way the PS5 does. Pretty much the only PC gaming I do now is on Steam Deck and those games are chosen for playability on the go. So you’re not really comparing Sony exclusivity to PC at that point, you’re comparing it to Xbox. And between the two Sony wins on exclusives so far this generation.

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

Obviously it varies from person to person but Sony exclusives would be the main reason most people want to be in the PlayStation ecosystem. As others have said even when those exclusives do eventually reach PC, the ports are usually lackluster at best and unplayable at worst. So why upgrade to the 5 if you have a 4? For me the difference in load times alone justified early adoption. Probably not everyone can justify the cost and hassle just for faster loading of their PS4 library, but as someone whose time is at a premium and who still tries to play a lot of games often, I have probably saved countless precious hours of time and therefore played far more of my gaming library in the same time frame just be being on the 5.

High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.

Except with a lot of features removed.

The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.