Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.

There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.

The new Mortal Kombat ones did pretty well, but I prefer the original.

Honestly, video game films have been outperforming super heroes for the past several years, though Spider-Man turned that around.

It's reasonable to expect this to hold for all Berne Convention countries.

All licenses are unenforceable if you don't hold the copyright, since you don't have a copyright to license. And attempting to do so would probably be perjury.

https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

And the next expected major films this year that will pull in audiences are Dune 3 and Avengers: Doomsday.

It's looking like franchises are what are reliably bringing people in. They just want quality stories and not a deluge of committee-designed experiences. The new Spider-Man film was good because it gets Spider-Man and what audiences like about the character.

The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.

Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.

Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...

Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.

This is all data-driven. There's a reason GameStop has more space devoted to Funko Pops and shirts than games, and why Walmart has a half aisle of them: people predominantly buy the games online for that exact reason. Why waste space? So you have to get up to change games, and save downloading half of it? (PSN sales often beat retail pricing as well.)

We're at the point where a lot of games are larger than a triple layer BluRay, and typical home connections are faster than the reader can move data. Baldur's Gate 3 didn't ship on a disc at all, for that reason. It's 122GB, and Gran Turismo is in a similar range.

It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.

Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.

Ghost of Yōtei is 25% off, the bundle of the Final Fantasy XIV MMO and all expansions is 50% off, some things are down 75%.

I find it obnoxious that NyQuil has taken over as the default brand people grab for cough syrup, for that reason. It has acetaminophen, while Robitussin or such have the other active ingredients without that risk.

The typical person doesn't read and understand active ingredients, and it's lucky if they even check dosage instructions.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/06/switch-2s-first-ye...

I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.

We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.

Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.

You know what is? The doings of obnoxious adtech people.

One needn't imagine, because they're already stealing peoples' voices. e.g. the recent HN thread about a professional voice actor that keeps having to prove he's human.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875153

Speaking higher is politer, and noticeably dropping your pitch is threatening. You probably would pitch-up when speaking to your boss, and people working in shops or restaurants nearly sing welcome/thank you for coming type things.