August 2005 I run over to Gamestop after birthing classes with my wife. The mission: Retrieve a PSP memory card for a decent price.
I wish I could say that story was a happy one. My pregnant wife with swollen feet was wanting to make it fast. It was the first time I opted to buying something online. The prices of memory cards were outragous. You could find a 2 Gig stick online for $80.00 + shipping from newegg.com.
The disdain was overwhelming but the prices quickly dropped as third party cards, and larger sizes were released. Then we had to worry about buying a Pro Duo and it not being the size advertised or they wouldnt work properly or slower due to being knock offs of knock offs i.e. "Fake memory cards".
We ball those factors together and then throw in a little piracy. Now you suddenly have issues you (as a hardware developer) need to address next time around. Money lost is money lost. I been around enough repairing consoles and being ask about modding to tell you there are so many more people out there downloading pirated games than we like to admit. There are sites dedicated to that exact thing.
Now we are upon that next round that Sony had to prepare for. How does one make sure this system wasn't hacked as easily as the last? One would suggest using a hard drive. But that would lead to later revisions with larger sizes at the same cost and alienate our base again. Using the existing formats aside from MS Pro Duo would result in Sony shelling out more money to use the format.
Many people are upset over the choice Sony has made in regards to the Vita. I can somewhat understand the frustrations with the master of BetaMax. You would think a company would learn. It took a missing piece of ear to make Holyfield learn his lesson. I guess it takes more than financial raping to learn for some.
Instead I find people upset over the pricing range. I look at it all together and think "Did these guys forget the PSP? or did that happen to only me?"
I dont know if it's just me, but my irritation was the proprietary format. Not the price. All things considered I dont think there is anything wrong with any of the moves made. I look at it as a company trying to keep the unit secure. Given that Vita memory is a new format I thought the prices would have been higher.
"30XX is one of the best roguelikes out there, combining the tight platforming action of the Mega Man X series with the challenge and randomization that roguelike fans crave. Batterystaple Games has done lots of refinement through updates since 30XX first appeared on Steam Early access a few years ago. The latest such update adds a new character for free, one who combines the best attributes of the two existing characters. Also, the Steam version is on sale, making it a great time to travel to the distant year of 30XX!" says Co-Optimus.
"Hammerwatch II's journey to Xbox has been long and perilous. After first launching on Steam in the fall of 2023, the game finally turned up on PlayStation 5 last December. Since then, Xbox gamers who enjoyed the original Hammerwatch and the sublime Heroes of Hammerwatch have been anxiously awaiting their turn at the long-promised sequel. At last, the wait is nearly over because Hammerwatch II will hit Xbox and PlayStation 4 on April 23," says Co-Optimus.
Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate (Executive Producer): "As I’m sure you can imagine, when it comes to Sea of Thieves my days are full of numbers. Development costs, active servers, days until the next update… Sometimes, though, a truly extraordinary number stands out – a number like 40 million, which I’m incredibly pleased to say is the number of pirates who’ve now set sail in Sea of Thieves!"
Garrr... more people to walk the plank and send to Davey Jones locker.
would have been funny to release this on talk like a pirate day.
40 million have set sail...that's great. How many are sailing now? Monthly active users....when it actually matters. How many people purchased the game is another important number.
You don't get numbers like that from MS mouth pieces, they just like to say stuff like "this game was looked at 129 million time, the biggest amount of people browsing a game of this genre on xbox gamepass ever in the last 3 weeks compared to before gamepass was out (small print only 2 million bothered playing longer than 20 seconds and only 100 people are playing it concurrently)
It's all smoke and mirrors
There are usually around 10,000 concurrent users on Steam not counting Xbox or PS but really it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people on the servers to play which there always were and will be for a long time now with the PS players coming on board. Same goes for how many people bought it and how many are on GP, we aren't the accountants of these console companies so why would we care?
Reporting on MAU stats is very misleading. Other companies publish units sold, MS cannot or will not due to Game Pass. We all know that their prior startegies have not panned out so now they have to actually sell games on other consoles. In any case, SoT is doing impressive preorders on PS5 and will very likely motivate Satya to release more games other than the four indicated games on their competitor's consoles. Take note Phil is radio silent....
40 Mil across Stream, Windows 10, and Xbox. Healthy numbers for sure, but when PC is the biggest platform, I expected more. It’ll be interesting to see how it does on PlayStation. Very well could be double that player count in 6 months with PS too. It’s crazy for developers to skip the most popular platform, not sure why they’d want to, but they must have had their rea$ons.
Yep, I remember the stupid-high prices for the Pro Duo sticks, and it was annoying that you couldn't use a standard SD card. What's even more annoying is that Sony has dropped their own proprietary Pro Duo stick in favor of a NEW proprietary stick. Any word on what the advantages are? Does it make your Vita piss liquid gold? No? So then why do we need a new format?
The complaints about the price...I can sympathize, not just because the prices are high but because it's a NEW FREAKIN' FORMAT. Why, Sony? Looking at Amazon, I can get a Pro Duo 4, 8, and 16 Gig for <$10, $15, and $30 respectively. Care to explain why a 4 Gig Vita stick costs more than three times as much as a 4 Gig PSP stick?
Hell I remember Ps2 memory cards were insanely priced when they first came out and they were only 8mb but people forget. For my psp when I had one I just bought a 3rd party 4gb for fairly cheap (admittedly years after launch) after that I just bought an adapter to use micro-sd cards which were pretty cheap and I already had a few micro-sd cards so it was all good.
I don't like how they're using a proprietary memory format though, I just hope they allow 3rd party companies to make cheaper ones in time.
We still haven't gotten any official word from Sony about the NA price for the cards. So writing about how expensive it is,is pointless. B***h about it when we actually know the right price.
I'm kind of wondering if the reason the Vita itself is only $250 is because the damn cards are so expensive.
I consider myself very anti-piracy, and this... this I am going to have to stop and think about when I get a Vita.
I'm miffed about the price of memory sure. 32gb adds another 100 bucks. But I'm sure after 2 weeks with the thing I'll forget about it, and when good games keep rolling in like I hope they do, it'll seem worth it.
My only question now is to 3G or not 3G?