Because the new ones are great. There has been no shortage of bangers for the last few years.

And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck

I don’t think I’ve ever had more great new game releases, personally.

They tried. They can’t sell movies that the rights holders won’t allow them to, and the studios all kind of unanimously decided not to do this.

We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.

The market was just way smaller back then. Video games weren’t a mainstream hobby yet.

Insider information of what? Increases for memory and GPUs are covered by basically every news outlet that covers tech right now. That $7 to copy a file is exactly why they’d want to get a Switch into your home for cheaper if they could. You get multiple Switches in the same home by making it accessibly priced, and Nintendo knows that. Walled gardens suck, and that’s where their money is made. Right now, Nintendo is absorbing some extra costs above and beyond where they expected (like tariffs) by charging more for accessories rather than raising the price of the base unit, but there’s a good chance they lose their stomach for keeping the Switch 2 price where it is as we run into more of these supply issues.

As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.

Even ignoring the fact that cars and parking them is about the least efficient use of land you can have, the only alternative is that they keep prices low but then there’s a lottery or a waiting list to get in. No secret as to why prices just went up.

The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don’t want to defend them here, is that they’ve found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can’t be produced any faster. The supply can’t increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can’t lose $200 per unit either, or there’s very little chance they make a profit on it ever.

Prices are not going to come down. If they could get a Switch 2 in your home for $300, they would. The component parts are too expensive.

And that’s worth talking about in relation to this article too. But also, you buy those devices at retail, and we’re down 27% from last year.

What do you play the digital media on?

There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.

This is misplacing cause and effect. The shift to digital has been happening for years now. They cut physical production because fewer people were buying it.

There’s an enormous jump in quality of story, presentation, and quest design between D:OS2 and BG3, and the RPG mechanics are very different. It’s worth a shot, seriously.

They do say it sometimes, like Microsoft admitting defeat on this year’s Call of Duty. It’s not, “We’re going to release a mediocre product,” but when they say, “We hear you, and we’re making changes” or “we’ve made the difficult decision to…” or “we’re trying to stay agile”, that’s usually what it means. Beyond just hyping up their next product, there’s substantive information in here, like engine upgrades, expansion of the studio, reduction in production timelines, the damn genre of the video game (because that wasn’t a foregone conclusion given this series), etc.

I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.

Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.

I played through this series for the first time in the past couple of years, and I had no idea about this line, so I got to experience it fresh like everyone did in the early 00s. Absolutely amazing.

From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.

Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.

They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.