People who tend to “hate politics” from my personal experience are often ignorant to much of the discussion and how these laws affect them personally. Then, in some topic of conversation they will casually voice an opinion which may not be well informed and people tend to jump on them for it.

This is just my opinion, but I think the core issue is that people somehow think their opinions no matter how misinformed or ignorant of the actual topic, should be respected as much as anyone else who bothered to read or research a topic.

And further they should for some reason be completely beyond criticism for having it, simple because it’s their opinion.

What you are looking at are a lot of post processing effects. Rather than forcing everything to 4K 60fps, if you actually want to better looking games development should be invested in those processing effects. Resolution and fps are buzzwords and the easiest to scale with the least effort because just through more hardware prevents the devs from putting more effort into other effects.

I’ll answer the cloud portion because we are seeing parellels to today. Cloud hybridization which is what MS is pitching right now is ALWAYS worse than a pure cloud or a pure local localized solution except in very specific situations.

For gaming specifically it is always best to keep non-gameplay computational as processes which can be offloaded to the cloud. Things I would consider having cloud rendered:

Hair/clothing physics not impacted by gameplay where “floatiness” would be appropriate.

AI routes

Ray tracing for Global illumination

Things you shouldn’t do in cloud:

Physics that impact game play

Graphics

Anything that requires immediate gameplay reaction

The problem with Crackdown 3 is that it was touted as the showcase for “The Cloud” but not only is it coming at the end of the generation that it was supposedly heralding but it’s main selling points from its tech demos are so poorly implemented that it makes people question “cloud” gaming. MS are preparing to release an entire platform based on the same marketing pitch they used for Crackdown 3, they either have to nail it create hype for cloud gaming or save face to prevent damaging perceive of their future xCloud service.

It think it’s crazy that the Vita is beating out everything below it COMBINED. This includes the 2DS and New 3DS, how is that even possible I thought they stopped production of Vitas.

@goldenelementxl:

I always assumed it would be switch unless Sony was finally going to release their fabled “tiered” version of PSNow that includes EA pass

That's how it should work, however everything shown so far appears to show the break points and velocity remain relatively constant which is indicative of a preset value rather than an actual physics calculation being performed. We won't know until the game is released and we can do comparisons, but it appears to be doing far far far few real-time physics calculations than advertised.

Yeah, not sure what the fuss is about. Sony has been offering crazy deals on it's services in the last year. Just this year I renewed my PSNow sub for $80 instead of the typically $100 annually, and they have over 700 games on the service. They can't be making money in the short-term but possible making more in the long term by locking gamers into their ecosystem.

@horgen:

The eMMc drive would be the standard internal drive for all models. It could be as small as 32-64GB. But I would wager 64GB minimum because the prices now are so low.

Well I don’t think Next Gen games will actually release on optical drives anyway. Nintendo delayed their 64GB carts until 2019 and I think that’s the year flash ram becomes viable for single use at 64GB. Current PS4/XBO Blu-rays are only 50GB.

If they went for optical drives which are dying anyway, they would have the cost of that, which have higher breakages due to moving parts, plus lower capacity and load times, makes the system larger,hotter, draws more power, etc. from a cost perspective there’s no reason to include an optical drive except for back compatibility which could be achieved with a separate device and would essentially pay for the back compatibility R&D on its own as a product. PSN games would still work of course.

But realistically, if games shipped on 64GB cards you could realistically have enough room to house any game patches plus game saves on the card without ever touching the internal eMMc drive plus the faster load times and complete removable of the “install” time, all for the cost of putting a card reader in your drive.

@horgen:

Something like octane would be far too expensive than cheap eMMC.

The point of the small eMMc would be so the user could buy a platter based drive while still getting SSD like load times or even run the game off the optical drive with the engine and assets cached to the eMMc.

It essentially makes storage media format a non issue, giving the user choices, and reduces the cost while keeping the performance of solid state drives and cache. It’s a win win for everyone.

@horgen:

No, if I were Sony I would sell it just like the Switch. A bare bones model with a 64 or 128GB eMMC chip, SD card slot. Optional HDD and optional Optical drive. The eMMC serves as standard cache for all devices.

Users get their own storage based on their usage model or buy upgraded models with HDD/Blu-ray etc.

This also would have the added bonus of them being able to make a mobile slim version when the die shrinks in 2.5 years and they do a mid gen console refresh. Without a requirement for large storage they could throw a 5g chip in a slim mid gen refresh and have the ultimate portable.