DocG

2017 is definitely the year of Linux on the desktop^wgaming PC.

I think you should shut up before you make Ridley Scott tie the xenomorph into this sequence via a terrible Prometheus sequel.

I am reminded of the most famous fight scene in the Chronicles of Amber books. Very minor spoiler for the Amber books, if you haven't read them (and you should, they're great):

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition homage.

That's a bit bloody rude. I didn't spend 20 minutes digging through the Windows Store T&Cs, attempting to find the find the root cause of the possibly-inaccurate "UWP doesn't allow modding" meme, so I could be accused of deliberately posting shite.

OK, sure, Steam was lame. But it was lame when there was no alternative; it literally created the digital distribution market around itself. That was 2003. 2016 is very different; we have Steam, Origin, uPlay, and GOG, all of which are perfectly competent. Then along comes Microsoft with a two-pronged attack: UWP and Windows Store. It's confident enough to tie a couple of big exclusive games to this. But even you, Stu, surely admit it's bungled the launch: no multi-GPU support, enforced vsync, etc etc, all on a product aimed specifically at people that care very much about those things. And it comes on the heels of the last lukewarm attempt at Microsoft to own this space (Games for Windows Live), which arrived lame, only got worse, but no-one has forgotten. There was a strong stink about GfWL that it was an example of Microsoft setting high level strategic goals that it hadn't thought very hard about how to implement and hence were implemented poorly; right now, I'd say that (for games) UWP/Windows Store is in the same state. Now, I concede, MS has promised to fix these issues -- and it probably will, although talk is cheap. But here's a cliché for you: you never get another chance to make a first impression. And here's another: you come at the king, you best not miss. Microsoft tried to enter a mature market with an underbaked product, and it's being rightly laughed from the room for it. Sure, but despite the thread title, I think most people in this thread are talking about UWP and Windows Store in combination, rather than either in isolation.

Not UWP per se, no. But the Windows Store policy states: That sounds relevant to me. It is, of course, analogous to Apple's famous iOS developer agreement clause: ...and it seems like a non-controversial point to suggest that at least part of Microsoft's goal with UWP and the Windows Store is to bring an iOS-style ecosystem to Windows.

When the truck disappears into the garage, you hear an air wrench start up. I wonder if they are smuggling drugs inside the tyres.

This graph is wildly misleading. It isn't ARPU - average revenue per player. It's ARPPU - average revenue per paying player. The $550 figure for Game of War is basically meaningless because you have no idea how many players it's averaged over. There could be just one paying player and $550 could be total revenue, even. I've seen the (confidential) revenue reports for games like Game of War or Candy Crush and I'm not giving anything away by saying it's a lot. But these games aren't appealing to anything like the same audiences as console games do. One market doesn't take away from the other. There's close to zero overlap. They just don't compete. I mean, just consider, you started talking about appealing to kids -- freemium games have zerk interest in kids who cannot purchase IAPs. Also, you assume these games are cheap to make. They aren't. Creating a freemium game that can convince whales to shell out thousands is very hard (which is why few have succeeded at it) and requires huge teams of analysts and devs. This entire line of argument is fatuous.

That's the popular thinking, but I don't believe it is the primary goal. My hunch is the Sony businessfolk want two things from this: 4K BluRay support, with all that high dynamic range stuff etc, to sell more 4K TVs (synergy!). A 'premium' PS4 unit to sell at a higher price to those who want the best; that would then support lowering the price on the base PS4 without eroding overall costs. Tiered pricing strategies is straight out of Microeconomics 101. Games consoles have messed around with the second strategy (e.g. Xbox 360 Core vs the one with a hard drive; various limited edition bundles) but as long as 90% of the machine is a fixed spec there's very little room to introduce meaningful pricing tiers. If you can vary the base spec, then it looks more attractive as a strategy. Moving Xbox One and PS4 to nearly standard x86 architectures opens up that possibility. If I'm right, then the difference between PS4k and PS4 will only be large enough to justify a higher price on the hardware to 'core' gamers [1]. Splitting the software market would be a bad idea, for all the reasons discussed above, so full compatibility across the two devices would be critical; Sony would want future games to have two render targets. Buy a PS4k, get better looking games for free (because all your current games work.) Buy a PS4, get the same experiences but with somewhat reduced graphics. The PS4 would hang around at a lower price, I think, which is another reason that the two consoles have to be as similar as possible for games devs to target. One of Digital Foundary's scenarios was something like a 2x bump in GPU power with working backwards compatibility with PS4 titles. This has the intriguing notion that with twice the GPU grunt, you could (presumably?) render VR games at current-PS4-levels, as opposed to the somewhat degraded visuals we seem to be getting with PSVR as it has been shown so far. But, importantly, it's not night and day difference; all existing games (VR and normal) should still work on the older hardware. It's certainly not going to be putting out games at 4K [2]. I wonder if Sony actually see that as a goal; that the difference is a nice-but-not-essential upgrade. Make it too good, make that upgrade too essential, and the cheaper old PS4 becomes too hard a sell; existing customers are annoyed and the two-tier strategy is out of the window. So the gap between the two consoles has to be finely judged. [1] I don't much like this term but there's not a lot better. [2] That's going to be impossible for a games console for several years yet. It's just too many pixels. Citation: behemoth 4k gaming PCs.

That seems likely, although the deal is confidential. This post theorises -- based on what happened with Daredevil -- that it could be "you have the rights until you don't make any films for seven years."

So: start game, accept auto tuned settings, play ten minutes, find a janky bit, pause, take headset off, tweak settings, put headset on, play more, jank, take headset off, tweak, Google for tweak tips, tweak, headset on, play, find jank, ... Put headset on, play game on auto settings knowing autosettings will be reasonably accurately tuned by the dev over hundreds of hours of play testing.

If we're going to start discounting about stuff we already own this tedious conversation is going to get really bad. Like, I own a PS4 but not a PC, so for me PSVR vs Rift is £350 vs £1250. Is this a meaningful thing to say? Doesn't feel like it. Not on my phone I can't.

Are PC games free, then? You seem to have loaded them up on one side of this equation and left them off the other. Yes. No shit it would. Also: can you build a Rift-spec PC for £700? Recommended GPU, which is not going to be a blazingly great experience, is a 970 and that's £275 on its own. Looking at the PC Build Thread suggests it's north of £800 and that stacks up pretty spendy next to a PS4. Stupid rllmuk broken undeleatable quote:

You can definitely assume I am sufficiently down with the kids to know the difference. \