• grinning_serpent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36 minutes

    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.

  • meltycat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5 hours

    If buying does not equal owning something, piracy can’t equal theft. At this rate, what’s the point of consoles?

    • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      58 minutes

      You do own it, you own the digital copy. The developer can’t hack your computer and remove it or prevent you from playing it.

      • jerakor@startrek.websiteEnglish
        44 minutes

        This is why all video is streaming now and downloads require regular token checkin. Very few services provide real independent and long term functioning local downloads of media.

      • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
        20 minutes

        The developer can actually remove it remotely. Sony itself is currently doing it: they’re removing all movies bought by users.

  • MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5 hours

    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?

    • kevinsky@feddit.nlEnglish
      4 hours

      I don’t understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this.

      I don’t think people buy consoles for the physical games… I mostly stopped doing that a generation ago.

      In terms of hardware I have basicly everything under the sun you play games on.

      Sony has has a pretty strong list of exclusives still. In my mind at least. And I just don’t always feel like sitting at a desk.

      So unless you build another pc for next to the TV, your other options are a mile long HDMI cable from wherever your pc is to your TV or remote play. Neither of these options are as smooth of an experience as just grabbing a controller and turning the Playstation on. You could somewhat do this on PC with Steam OS or Bazzite, but Linux/Proton is still problematic for a lot of multiplayer games.

  • BandDad@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4 hours

    The loss of physical media in addition to the rest of their terrible decisions solidified that I’m done with Sony. Still on the PS4, but I see no need to give them any future support.

    It really sucks that between this and the death of personal computing at the hands of the AI bubble, my main hobby is becoming unaffordable.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6 hours

    Can anyone come up with a single example of an industry that’s not getting simultaneously worse (and/or smaller), and more expensive?

    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 minutes

      I’d say this could apply to a lot of new cars too. But yeah, it feels pretty unusual to see an industry shit the bed like this.

    • Stefen Auris@pawb.socialEnglish
      1 hour

      Actually open source software just keeps getting better and better. I’m amazed at how much stuff I can run on my own computers for free!

      However with AI flooding open source projects with security vulnerabilities and things, this is subject to change (but hopefully not)

      • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
        28 minutes

        I feel like I got into self hosting at the exact correct time. Immich is amazing, Filebrowser Quantum is incredible, Ghost (Patreon alternative) has been awesome, and there’s so much more. It’s so good.

      • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30 minutes

        Costco in general, actually. When was the last time they increased the membership cost?

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4 hours

        I dunno if my tastes just evolved, but I swear Arizona isn’t as good as it used to be

  • PacketPilgrim@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    5 hours

    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.

    • TheDuke@europe.pubEnglish
      57 minutes

      Besides being expensive, you would think owning a console would get rid of headaches. But noooo - No pass-subscriptions? No online access! No couch co-op! No optimisations! And now - no owning!

      And those greedy CEO’s scratch their heads and are wondering “Why is nobody buying our stuff anymore?!” the day gaming turned corporate is the day it died. It can be still fun today, but the awesome rock’n’roll days of gaming are loooong gone.

      • PacketPilgrim@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        26 minutes

        I have seriously considered just getting a small pc to just run as an emulator with a a few thousand arcade and old school console games and call it done. It would be more fun.

  • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    they make their product and service worse but they’re still trying to fight the console wars in 2026 like that japanese soldier who fought ww2 for 30 years after japan surrendered

  • Phantaloons@piefed.zipEnglish
    8 hours

    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.

    • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8 hours

      It works until it doesn’t. Companies can push prices for a little while, maybe a whole generation, but one day people decide it’s not worth it and it all crashes down suddenly.

      Happens over and over again, could be the new era of PC gaming that Valve is pushing will tip them over, could be a new generation of Nintendo games. Could be a new company from China.

      Big players do this every time, then the CEO says “nobody could have predicted that the 6th price hike was the end of the brand!”

      • bridgeburner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        Nah, people are stupid generally speaking. I mean, just look at Apple, they are releasing basically the same phone every year with an increasing price tag and the sheeple keep mindlessly buying it.

        • stylusmobilus@aussie.zoneEnglish
          27 minutes

          That’s not a good example from my experience

          Both the Apple devices I use are over five years old and I’m only just now thinking of replacing the iPad

        • detren@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5 hours

          Really bad example in 2026. Apple users are probably the least likely to to upgrade every year

        • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          5 hours

          Except history disproves this over and over.

          People get stuck in what they know, but eventually they break out of it, and usually it’s a small thing that takes them over the tipping point.

          Thinking that everyone on the planet is dumb except yourself just proves you’re not looking into the facts.

  • oyzmo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5 hours

    People don’t care. Most just want to feed on SoMe. A bunch even voted Trump as President - impressed that humas has survived this long

    • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27 minutes

      I’m pretty sure Trump said he was going to make things cheaper and we did not have any reason to not believe him

      The largest /s you’ve ever seen.

  • Smaile@lemmy.caEnglish
    9 hours

    Just the second great video game crash, not quite a secret landfill of E. T. Games but this is just as bad imo

  • sorelight@lemmus.orgEnglish
    7 hours

    I’m gonna miss them as they were the only way of playing paid games via Playstation 4 since you couldn’t buy digital games via PS Store if you were living in an unavailable country.

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    13 hours

    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.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7 hours

      At some point Sony bought a Movie Studio in the US and a few years afterwards the company leadership started coming from their Media division instead of their Engineering division.

      This was in the early 00s.

      That was when Sony started enshittifying, with things like locking down their consumer devices (not just to block copying but also to do things like segment markets via region locking) and at one point they even shipped Music CDs with a PC Rootkit (the infamous “Sony Rootkit” scandal).

      IMHO, Sony was maybe one of the first large companies to start enshittifying.

      I’ve actually been boycotting Sony since then, so roughly for 2 decades now.

      • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
        12 hours

        Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enshittification is the inevitable result of shareholders demanding endless growth at all costs.

        • Eheran@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12 hours

          I could just as well point to dumb people giving them their money as the reason. At the end it is more complicated than such a simplistic reductions.

            • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
              8 hours

              You don’t even have to get high-mindedly preachy, it’s a bad take on its own terms, since it hinges on the notion that the population at large are all “dumb” and therefore deserve bad things.

            • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              8 hours

              Growth in this context isn’t measured by physical objects; it’s an increase in subjective value. So we’ve experienced high growth since the stone age, even though we’ve gotten almost no new stones.

            • CriticalThought@lemmy.worldEnglish
              9 hours

              While I agree in practice (and the resultant harm is real), in theory mathematical limits exist. (And this is without appealing to the idea that humans might eventually not be limited to a single planet.)