It's like corporations don't know how to do anything but enshittify anymore
It's the ultimate push to turn everything into the perfect Capitalist (not market-oriented) business solution: Getting paid for nothing
If your goal is to accumulate capital, and there are not outside forces regulating your worst impulses, you ultimately will create a class of legal-protected thieves, since the absolutely best and most risk free way to accumulate capital is to be given it in exchange for quite literally nothing.
Gambling is about as close to the platonic ideal as you can, but conquest by military force of political capture is also a very, viable route. Use the law to force people to buy your nothing and be protected for it, rather than being lynched when you steal someone's products.
Mandated insurance that isn't a crown corporation beholden to ratepayers is a perfect example. If you have mandated insurance for something, and that private insurance has a shareholder requirement to see growth every quarter, and the same amount of things are being insured, only one thing can happen:
Rates go up with denials
Payouts go down
Eventually you're paying for insurance you know is worthless but it's mandated by law.
any company born after 1993 can’t make good products… all they know is exploitation, fire their workers, enshittify, be pink capitalist, eat hot cash & lie
(yes i know sony was founded before 1993 thank you)
Ever since fucking Trump came to power, he basically defanged the agencies that were supposed to curb corporate abuses and enforce laws and regulations, and allowed corporations to do a lot more anything they want to make more profit.
Its like they saw how much Xbox has been sucking and thought "hold on, instead of building on this market lead, I bet we could beat Xbox in enshittifying!"
Ever since the PS3 and Xbox 360, it's like the console wars have just been about them trading whose turn it was for the next PR disaster. Racing to the top was too expensive so they race to the bottom instead.
Don't forget they also paid $3.6 Billion for Bungie just to shut down their most popular game and put all their hope in their new extraction shooter that's been struggling. No new games in dev or even green lit. Also they just laid off a bunch of people.
This one is more on the Bungie side of things. Bungie got a few lifelines and STILL fumbled.
Imagine if Bungie never "vaulted" (read: deleted) any part of Destiny 2 and we were still able to play the original campaign it shipped with? More people would still be playing Destiny 2 and you'd get plenty more new players without them having to use a guide or YouTube lore videos to get caught up on the story.
Instead of mArathon they'd probably be making a Destiny 3
Oh yeah don't get me started on Bungie. The are a shell of their former selves. When they split from Activison and it all came out that the mircotransactions was all Bungie's idea that was my first WTF moment with these guys. They let us believe it was the Corp overlords ruining our game but they did it themselves. Then they did everything they could do to make themselves look profitable for Sony's acquisition. Just horrible decision after horrible decision.
I can’t speak to market trends, but I can say this 100% makes my PS5 my last Sony console. I’ve bought every one, and the only reason I continue to buy them is so I can collect exclusives on disc for my collection.
A digital only console is just a bad, expensive gaming PC. I already have a good expensive gaming PC, so I’ll just buy games digitally there.
They are also lobbying to make hosting your own videogame server illegal: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/esa-bafflingly-declares-private-minecraft-servers-illegal-in-stop-killing-games-hearing-we-consider-it-piracy-we-have-lawsuits/
Sony is part of ESA.
So is Microsoft who owns Minecraft who definitely presents private servers as dangerous (which for children may very well be true).
Having the possibility to setup a server allowed me to setup one for my sons and I. I’d rather have that then them going online…
Don't forget that they've halted PC ports for their games, including shitcanning nearly-complete work on Ghost of Yōtei.
definitely end of an era.
I'm not buying a console without physical media.
Sony can kill the second hand market if they want, but that was the last thing that differentiated them from Steam. Good bye Playstation, i'll remember you fondly.
To reduce costs on printing and to reflect Sony's vision, they are dropping the L from the name of the console.
A funny anecdote from outside gaming land:
Sony mirrorless cameras, even MEGA expensive ones, have this quirk where they can’t film 30P HEVC video.
The A6700 for instance, can record 24, 30, 60 h.264, but only 24 or 60 h.265. The A7C II is particularly handicapped, with only 24 h.265.
The $7000 A1 flagship is the same. It doesn’t make any sense; all their hardware supports it.
Why?
Well, people kept asking Sony, and someone finally got a response:
Hello, Sony's commitment to customer satisfaction is our top priority. The reason for that is that we determined the current product specifications from our analyses of target users and available technologies. For XAVC HS, we envision users enjoying HLG movies by connecting the camera to an HDR (HLG) compatible BRAVIA TV over HDMI, and 60p is what we view as the default setting for playback with it. To record movies in higher quality in 4K/30p, we would recommend selecting XAVC S and XAVC S-I, 10-bit 4:2:2 sampling, either Long GoP and All-I codec. Could you tell us how creators such as yourself want to use HEVC at 30p so we can provide feedback to our design team?
I found that oddly enlightening.
“Well, it’s not optimal for a BRAVIA TV over HDMI, so why would users want this? Why is it worth it for us to waste half a kilobyte for this option in the UI?” Sony cannot fathom anything outside that.
It makes that whole list in OP’s post make total sense. It’s not even cynicism on their part; with that mindset, what would they need a disk player for? What value is Bluepoint is a business review?
They literally cannot understand why PlayStation users would want any of those things. It’s outside the domain.
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.
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.
Why are people still buying shit from Sony? It would be less work to just flush your cash directly down the shitter.
Right? I'm still pissed off about the PS3. I owned a PS1 and a PS2. PS3 launched and before I could save up enough money, two awesome features that the PS3 launched with they pulled support for. At launch you could boot to linux and you could play PS2 games. They disabled both before I could buy one. Huge class action lawsuit if I remember correctly. But they keep pulling the same shit.
Time to double down on retro gaming and buying second hand. Industry wants to burn I say let it.
It warms my heart to see that EVERY comment on Sony's blog post about it is negative. Hope the decision ends up biting Sony in the ass, but even if not, at least people weren't silent about it.
EDIT: and they're being yelled at everywhere else on the internet that people can post as well. Good.
Just get a console they said. Console just works they said. Why get a PC when it won't work in a year they said.
This is why I don't buy consoles. I can use a controller on my computer which is upgradable and not subject to one individual company dictating what I can and can't do.
So, this means mandatory proprietary hardware just to play the four or five true permanent exclusives that will be on the PS6 throughout its entire lifetime, given that everything else will eventually come to PC, and you don't actually own any of your digital content, meaning that they can revoke your access to your purchases without notice at any point if they choose to do so.
People will still buy it though, that's the saddest part.
I don't pay $70 for a game I can't even sell after using it.
I’m not one of those people who pretends they will play a physical disc game for the rest of their life
I do however like physical for two reasons. Firstly, the price, how tf can you justify charging more when you are cutting out all of the middlemen and listing on your own online store. Secondly, resale. I can buy a game, play it and resell.
If the tradeoff on going digital was that games were 50% cheaper, then I’d be happy. I wouldn’t have to hoard games and I’d have the convenience of digital.
I feel like defending consoles is a lost cause at this point. We can’t trust any of the big 3 anymore.
The entire reason I've ever bought consoles and games was because I could get used games at a bargain and also sell my old consoles and game collections when I'm done with them. I can't imagine that I'm the only person who looked at it this way.
Now console producers pull shit like this when they can't even claim to be more user friendly than PC because SteamOS is a real competitor.
Well I guess it was good while it lasted, at least until the last few years when greed fully took over. Microsoft is already on it's last leg and Sony and Nintendo are going to follow eventually.
Ahhh, remember this PS4 promo video (YouTube for sharing physical games vs Xbox)? Pepperidge Farm does.
Yea the era of giving the "big 3" any of my money
Yeah, that’s the end of PlayStation for me. Hopefully someone else will come out with something decent.
Meh, I’m done with consoles. The exclusives will come to emulators eventually, and there will be plenty of PC games in the meantime.
I was an XBox guy, and didn't get into Playstation at all. But it was always clear that they were excellent consoles. At a certain income level back in the day, you'd get an XBox or a Playstation, but not both. If you had a smidgen more money to spend, Nintendo had you covered.
I have no emotional fealty to Playstation in any way, but what a shame to see all three formerly awesome systems now competing to see who can enshitify more effectively.
Really scary to see where the industry is headed! I've started purchasing games on GOG whenever possible so as to put my money towards an actually good source in the industry but it doesn't feel like enough.
These companies are constantly pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with and it feels like we just gotta take it at this point.
I especially feel bad for the console gamers as they have very little options to get around this and switching to PC is unfortunately more expensive than ever.
If buying does not equal owning something, piracy can't equal theft. At this rate, what's the point of consoles?
They're also shutting down PS3 and PSVita store access, to add insult to injury.
I've been picking up game consoles for my whole life. I decided before the NS2 was announced that I was done picking up game consoles. Now there is absolutely zero chance of me picking up a ps6, it's just not acceptable to do this.
They all want you to go to digital storefronts because they get a bigger cut of the pie and you cannot use anyone else's copy. Soon we'll see them remove activating two consoles on one account entirely and possibly the offline capability as well. They want to make sure you drink your verification cans to keep playing, they just haven't gotten there yet.
The price increase part is sort of out of their hands. They are a small player in the chip game.
Other parts are all them all shit.
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?
I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.
It's a historic moment to see an almost 6-year old console appreciate and not depreciate in value over time. Never before seen in the ~40 years of gaming. It's insane
This is what happens when their only competitor is a mindless Microslop.
Nintendo carved out their niche and Sony has no chance against them in that market after abandoning AAA and AA single player games in favor of trash service games.
I guess we're never gonna get to see that super futuristic PS9 that was envisioned back in that old PS2 commercial.
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