Last rumor I heard, and plenty of adjacent insiders think there's merit to the claim, is that Sony is aiming for a ~$600 handheld SKU of the PS6 that would be the "Series S" to the main PS6's "Series X", while retaining the traditional console model. I think both of those things are a mistake, but that's what they're allegedly doing.

Mat Piscatella of Circana will frequently state what drove the growth. A lot of times in the past year, it has been higher dollar sales from fewer units sold. In this case, it seemed to be a huge influx of people hoping to get a PS5 before price increases, as well as genuine system sellers for Switch 2 and PS5 by way of Pokemon Pokopia and Crimson Desert, respectively.

Projects, not games, the developer clarified. Some are games, some are DLCs and such.

$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I'm not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you're allowed to play), which isn't attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that's what you're willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I'd wager the math doesn't work out to supply it at $4.

Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you'd never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you'd always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it's expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.

It's extremely easy to price something for customers when you're not the one paying for its capital and operating expenses, so I'm not sure how much value there is in this exercise. Cloud gaming is one that I'm just about convinced will never be able to price itself in a way that people will actually want to pay for it, given those who have tried and failed already.

Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.

We can measure inflation. You don't need collusion on prices when all the way down the supply chain, prices increase for everyone producing the essentials. Minimum wage is the same, but it rarely gets adjusted, and that's stupid.

Yikes. Could we not?

It absolutely does increase latency though. If I've got the option for steady frame rates without frame gen, I'll take it over frame gen. Frame gen was just about mandatory for Borderlands 4 at launch, and it gave me a convincing 80 FPS. After a performance patch, the game can get 60 FPS on my machine for real with a few of the settings knocked down, and it feels so much better.

At that point, it's combining SKUs of what they consider to be the main "game". Non-deluxe Mario Kart 8 is a rounding error. Tetris gets really weird to count.

It is a small indie game. And yes, it sold that much. Every time I see that stat, it blows my mind.

I've crossed that threshold in Dunning-Kruger where I see how much I don't know, and it's simultaneously disheartening and stressful. But hell, what am I going to do now? Quit?

I'm trying to properly learn VLANs and set them up so that I've got "self-hosted services exposed to the internet" and "everything else". So far, the only thing I need to isolate is a NAS with Jellyfin and Komga, but I plan to add more services via a mini PC later. The thing that has made this whole journey frustrating is that every time I try to learn something, even laser targeted, I don't get the full answer from the first thing I find, and the next answer I find introduces more complexity. I think what I need is a managed switch from my local Micro Center like a Netgear GS108Tv3, to replace the switch currently in my office. Then, if I understand correctly, I think I need to put the NAS (and eventually mini PC) on their own subnet and use VLAN rules to allow traffic to that subnet but not from that subnet to the rest of my LAN. But it's hard to determine if I've even got that right.

Also 600W is likely several times more power draw than the Steam Machine is aiming for, however much that might matter to someone.