Joshu Zyber writes, "A couple of months ago, I wrote a column called Blu-ray and HD DVD Audio Explained that spelled out the basic functions, features, and differences among the various audio formats available on both High-Def disc types. In it, I explained that uncompressed PCM audio (as found on many Blu-rays) is an exact replication of the studio master, encoded on disc without compression, and that the lossless audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are also bit-for-bit identical to the studio master once decoded. Doing the math, that should mean that a lossless track is also identical to an uncompressed track. Indeed, that is the case. However, some confusion remains as to whether an uncompressed track is actually better than a lossless one."
"The number of new audio formats on Blu-ray and HD DVD have caused a great deal of consumer confusion, especially with three separate formats (PCM, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio) all designed to accomplish the exact same goal -- a perfect replication of the movie's audio master. Apprehensions about lossless compression being inferior to an uncompressed version of the same soundtrack are not borne out by the facts. One methodology may have technical advantages over the other in terms of space savings, but the end result is the same whether the disc you buy has an uncompressed soundtrack or a lossless one. They're both equally good, so sit back and enjoy."
Nintendo Switch 2 stick drift is already an issue, but accessory makers are already working on magnetic joysticks.
I've never had stick drift in any controller I've ever owned. All my joycons (3 sets) from my Switch are perfectly fine. My Switch 2 ones are good. Never had a dualshock / dualsense have it (did have a dualshock get a stuck trigger once). Even my Valve Index controllers which were notorious for drift were fine for me.
Varies. Just because you've never had one doesn't mean others won't. I've had PS, Xbox, and Nintendo controllers indeed drift on me. Remember the drift lawsuits that Nintendo has had.
Please stop trying to say that traditional potentiometers are absolutely fine when hall effect/tmr sticks are beyond superior lol, not sure why so many people keep trying to defend potentiometers when hall effects are so pro consumer.
Companies like nintendo, sony, and mcsft don't want to implement them simply because they want you the consumer to keep buying them. Most casuals will just buy a new controller if theirs difts, easy money for the big 3.
I've gone hall effects and have never gone back, can leave my controllers out absolutely fine without worry of dust ruining the sticks.
when did I say that traditional joysticks are absolutely fine? I'm sharing my own experience here. I never said that others don't experience issues, nor that this is somehow acceptable. Strange leapfrog from A to B on that one.
People love to say it's a huge widespread issue, yet you only hear about it because the minority is vocal whereas the majority don't report anything because they are fine.
I'm happy you switched to hall effect sticks, if that's what works for you, then awesome.
Cool? Pretty sure this is for those who are having it happen. Not sure how your anecdote addresses other peoples' problems.
people around here act like everyone will get drift. I'm willing to wager more people won't get drift than will.
lucky you. I've only had minor drift once in my L Joycon which I fixed with some card stock, but drift is an undeniable problem as a whole.
My 2 sets of Joy-Cons from my OG Switch started to drift with just a month of use. That is why I bought Dobe Joy-Cons with just $25, and until now they are still fine. I hope this will never happen again on my Switch 2.
My left joy con for the OG Switch got stick drift right away as well. I never had issues with my PS5 controllers since launch until I got my kids PS5’s and they had stick drift with 2 controllers. They drop them because they are kids and although I have them wash their hands before gaming they still get gunk under them somehow. I got their controllers modded because they would have issues no matter what I have them do.
"people around here act like everyone will get drift. I'm willing to wager more people won't get drift than will."
no, nobody is acting like that, you're jsut exaggerating it and lying to downplay a problem
you know, i said the same thing not too long ago and then BOOM both controllers ha.
one on the moving stick and one on the look around stick.
both suck arse. ha
The tech is already there. I had a couple of my PS5 controllers modded with Hall Effect modules and they work great. They should come standard with them these days but they don’t.
Nyxi already made some fantastic Hall Effect controllers for Switch 1. I don't know why Nintendo couldn't have it by now if Nyxi has had for years.
Cheap, frictionless sensors ALREADY exist. Why are they "working hard to combat stick drift"? Stick drift should be a thing of the past at this point. The technology is here...NOW. It has been...for YEARS! Why is stick drift even still spoken about? It shouldn't exist!
Because its a scam for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft to sell more overpriced controllers.
WD 40 if it's shagg.d anyway why not ? I ordered a new ps5 pad after Helldivers 2 and POE 2 became unplayable due to drift but in the meantime I fired a bit of WD on my balls just below my stick rotated in a clockwise fashion massaging it in so to speak and also did the pin reset thingy and all clean no drift and hit that cancel purchase button like I meant it
Honestly I’ve used my original Switch JoyCons and Pro Controller since launch and only in the last year did I see drift start to show up on one of my JoyCons. I’m sure it happens depending on how much and how firm the joystick is used, but it seems like a minor issue that goes with wear and tear after thousands of hours of play. I wish there had been Hall Effect sticks on Switch 2 just so there’s one less thing to worry about, but I’m not really concerned about it.
From Horse Armor to Mass Layoffs: The Price of Greed in Gaming. Inside the decades-long war on game workers and the players who defend them.
maybe a real enemy is people who use terms like "the real enemy"
there can be more than 1 bad thing, t's not like a kids show with 1 big bad
This is very much a “dummy who volunteers themselves to the middle” comment.
The real enemy is a common phrase, people use it all the time.
Calm down.
You don't seem calm at all. Don't take this so seriously, you seem desperate responding to others defending your opinion that lacks any value or critical thought.
stop projecting
i'm not desperately dong anything, i'm tapping at keys on my keyboard bud
DEI was never the problem and it was an ignorant take to begin with.
DEI is why games like Kena Bridge of Spirits, South of Midnight, and Ghost of Tsushima exist.
DEI is why we have a huge resurgence in Japanese, Chineses, and Korean developers producing games like Stellar Blade, Black Myth, and why Nintendo & Sony exist.
DEI is why more and more games have HUGE accessibility options with both Sony and MS fully behind this.
DEI was never a bad thing, the entire purpose of DEI is representation of all people, genders, disabilities, etc…
The problem was people used DEI as a default derogatory term to describe what they believed was forced representation, which allowed colorist, racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic fools to run away with the negative DEI narrative.
Executives seem to often have an obsession with perpetual revenue growth. There is always a finite amount of consumers for a product regardless of growth. Additionally, over investment is another serious issue in gaming.
The fact that they also rarely have any real expertise in game development compounds things. They'll look at what's been successful elsewhere, lack the knowledge to properly understand why they have been successful and then force a team to 'reproduce' their badly interpreted idea of that success.
We see it so often with sequels to games that were successful too. The team are left well alone, they have a break through hit and all of sudden the money men descend on the IP and completely railroad the dev team's ideas. Usually winds up being 'make the same game but MORE'
This is true throughout all of the corporate and public sector organisations to be honest. CEO's generally move amongst the corporate world without any need to have experience of a particular industry, they simply need to rely on their senior leadership credentials. A CEO of a retail giant will just as easily transition to a CEO role in the energy sector for example.
Not defending CEOs here to be clear, I think it's a huge part of the reason the western world is so fucked up. CEOs don't need to care about the sector they work in, in fact it's better if they don't care if they want to screw everyone to make profits.
Companies don’t hire executives to break even. If the goal is breaking even then why start the company in the first place.
That's understood; it's getting record profits and expecting to always beat those record profits, and seeing anything less as a total failure. Then they lay people off and raise prices to reach those record profit levels again, just to sate shareholders. It's setting expectations way too high just to spike share prices, then inevitably falling short. It's feeling entitled to being more successful than everyone else. It's the CEOs doing all this to boost their own bonuses.
Growth benefits the company’s profits and therefore the company’s stock if publicly traded, which pleases the shareholders making them more and more rich, which is why Growth is always at the forefront of the vast majority of any publicly traded company.
More growth = More Money and the people at the top want all the money they can get. I can’t really blame them anyone would love to see their profits go from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, to multi-millions it’s almost like a gambling addiction.
But it also goes to show someone how morals can go out the window for a lot of these people, and how amazing some CEOs are when they catch this early and provide a balance solution that takes complete care of their employees across the board while keeping the business sustainable IE: Insomniac Games ALWAYS on the best places to work list. The rest of the industry could learn.
honestly, the "real" enemy of gaming, is ourselves
if nobody bought horse armor, shitty dlc would have died almost overnight
if we stood firm and nobody bought games from companies that were bad with layoffs, it would be solved
we're the idiots supporting awful business practices, we are the ones enouraging it
I think the reality that we don't want to convince ourselves of is that without the rise of "horse armor" and DLC, game budgets would have essentially stagnated (smaller teams/smaller games), or game prices would have risen much more dramatically than they have. There was an incessant drive for bigger worlds, infinite detail, and hundreds of hours of "gameplay" over the last two decades, that while perhaps a natural evolution of things, needed a suitable funding stream to accomplish.
What...CEOs make tens of millions and that doesnt include SLT etc etc...we now have multiple editions of games, in game currency, MT's, battle passes.....and what do we get..worse game than what was coming out 20 years ago....dont drink the cool aid, its this nickel and dime crap that is absolutely leading us to gaming destruction.
This is the worst possible answer to this conundrum. Blaming the masses is blaming the only people who are constantly “told” to buy.
Consumers are the only ones not to blame here. People make their own choices all the time. Disney movies are bombing and DEInis being blamed. Has that been enough to put Disney out of business? No and it never will.
Disagree. Businesses are able to do what they do because people are bad consumers and don't think critically about purchases. Disney got away with doing shit stuff for years and it's just the last year where people got tired of it. It's not like it didn't work for 5 years or so for Disney to do the things they've done. They'll just move onto another way to get people to see movies and it will be just as bad but more profitable until people wake up and realize it.
Consumerism drives business behavior. It's not so much "blaming" as it is observing behavior. The point I'm making is that the direction that games have gone are driven by the spending. Consumers are spending on DLC and they are driving the expectation of more glitz and padded out (lengthier) games. If they continue to pay, they will continue to drive that direction until a threshold is reached that forces a change in behavior.
Corporate advertising is the most powerful force on the planet.
This is N4G for god sake, every day there are arguments between people who are Team Xbox and Team PlayStation because they’ve been convinced that having an identity built on paying money to Sony and Microsoft matters more than having one as individual gamers who can play whatever they want.
And THEN we get to the corporate advertising part: to play whatever you want is to sink MORE into the advertising pits, making it so that you can more than one specific product.
ah you're right
they were told to buy it, it's clearly impossible to avoid that
if enough people stopped supporting, it would stop
disney not stopping would only be because enough people didn't stop
Agreed. I’ve been saying for years, announce you won’t be buying the upcoming game because of the practices of the previous game, then you only have to stick to your guns once, see how quickly things change for the better.
We have to unite in what we shouldn’t purchase.
just imagine a world, fifa came out worse, nobody buys the next one until they see proof it's better and stick to it
or games being forced online for single player and nobody buys it
things would change so fast
Greed and greedy people have and always will be the main issue for everything wrong in the world. Everything is a product to be exploited for monetary gain. Even when there are things that could help progress us along for the sake of making our lives easier that thing must be exploited for monetary gains. Anything that tells you otherwise is propaganda to make you complicit.
I've never thought "DEI" (although the way most people use it doesn't match it's real definition) is the problem with games. Good games have continued to be good when they have a diverse cast, and likewise, bad games have continued to be bad. There isn't a credible example I've seen where a diverse cast has been the direct cause of a game being bad.
Play as Polly, a silent girl on the run from her dark past in this neon-soaked psychological horror shooter.
what a waste of time reading absolutely nothing but a person going in circles to justify D true-HD. Uncompressed carries the true track while the others drop what they call white noise to reduce the size of the track.
Who cares really... Sold my HD-A2 because I found out I'm getting a HD-A35 for Xmas. I have a Yamaha HTR-5940 AV Recever with an BIC Venturi DV62CLR-S 6.5” 2-Way Center Channel Speaker with two sets of
Bose Acoustimass 5 Series III Speakers for surround sound.
My system's hardly a sound setup that has me worried about the content of this post as if I know what it all means. All I no is I do not have $10,000 tower speakers etc as my set up is average.
same here.i will just get the HD-DVD add on for the 360.HD-DVD is cheep and i don't have the financial power yet to buy a PS3 because i want to watch HD movies.Its just storage space that is the difference.And i like hd-dvd feature of making dvd on one side and hd-dvd on the other so even if hd-dvd fails i wouldn't have lost much because my movies will still play on a regular DVD.
AND I CAN TELL YOU WITHOUT ANY HESITATION: BLU-RAY HAS BETTER AUDIO QUALITY.
PERIOD.
Interesting read. I already learn most of that this semester when we studied compression techniques, but still very Interesting.
Now will this stop the "loss less is worse than..." crap that goes on in the HD vs BR threads?