Honestly though they could charge $800 and I would either buy it or wait. There's no way the Xbox Series holds any interest to me early on. the XB1 had only a few games that I would want to play on it. The PS4 has a ton and the PS5 has already announced a handful that I want to play.
@daidochus: Sorry for the late reply. As is said in my post, PCs aren't the most reliable things out there. When a new game comes out and people complain that their RTX 2070 can't handle the game and are getting long load times and other issues with an SSD, great CPU, and other great components while my GTX 1070 and I7-7700k is having absolutely no issue with the game, it goes to show how a great PC can still have a ton of issues. When you have people with great PCs having to find problems on technical support boards and other random issues like BSODs and such, it shows how many problems PC have.
Consoles are just very sit down and play friendly. Sure a PC is great when it works. It's great if you know how to fix PC problems. I've laughed at how simple the solution to some people's problems are. PC's aren't for everyone though. Most people don't want to have to deal with their game crashed, the game just doesn't seem to work, updating drivers, ect.
If PC vs. Playstation was a losing battle down the road it would have been lost a long time ago. PC's being a lot better than consoles power wise isn't a new thing. Consoles get a ton of sales because of great exclusives and because overall games just work on them. Other than a game being very buggy from the beginning because of bad testing or hardware failure, a console player isn't going to have issues like bad drivers, viruses, incompatible stuff, having to put up with hardware specs, ect.
Well I'd have to agree with Microsoft's stance on the portion they are defending along with Epic's stance overall. For Microsoft's portion screwing over every single app developer who uses unreal on the IOS is going to hit a lot of developers and basically amounts to collateral damage. Let's screw over the smaller people as little as possible while the rich kids fight.
For the overall battle between Apple and Epic, Apple has used it's almost monopolistic powers to a pretty terrible cause. They used to ban plenty of competing apps and have done a lot of shady stance, even recently temporarily stopping wordpress app from being used on the IOS just because there may have been a way to see the paid tiers with a hard to see workaround even thought he paid portions of the program don't really affect the IOS app. When the developer asked how they could fix it, Apple basically said they had to put in app purchases in a app that was meant to be free of additional charges.
Google's Android OS might have a few issues, but atleast if I wanted to release an app on Android without Google's permission or one that Google wouldn't want on their play store, I can do it. It might be hard to get as many users as if I got it on the play store but I can still get users to install the app without a jailbreak.
Game can't run on a GTX 670 even though the requirements state a 870. They'll complain. Game can't run on 4 GB of ram, even though the requirements state 8 gb of ram, they'll complain. Game still can't run on 8 GB of ram because you have your internet browser taking up 1-2 GB and a bunch of other things running in the backround, suddenly you didn't optimize it enough.
You also have to deal with people with strange configurations, bad programs running in the backgrounds, users who disabled a certain part of the windows operating system because they don't know what they are doing, out of date drives, beta drivers, badly built PCs, ect.
There's been very few games that people state have "bad performance" where I've had any issues. I'm not running a super computer, I don't keep the most up to date hardware. My last CPU was a I5- 2500k before I finally decided to upgrade to a I7-7700k. However I do basic troubleshooting when I have an issue and when SSDs became relatively well priced upgraded to one. I've regularly clean my computer and do other basic maintenance. There's a lot of things you can do to improve a PC whereas consoles just generally work.
I will also note that this article mentioned game pass but forgot to note that Playstation Now also works on the PC. Not to mention XBOX is doing what they are doing for 2 reasons. They are badly losing the console wars and they want to move players to the PC for various reasons. Probably the second partially because of the first.
To add to the news article, Google has followed suit and also removed Fortnite from the Google Play Store. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-android-banned-google-play-app-store-rule-violation.
Of course there are other ways to get it because Google isn't as restrictive as Apple.
@evilross: Oh, I'm sure that Epic would rather not use Apple's app store at all. They made Fortnite available through distribution outside of Google's play store completely bypassing it on Android phones. They would probably have no problem doing the same thing with Apple's IOS. The only problem, unlike Google, Apple won't allow people to download software from outside the app store. You could of course Jailbreak the phone if one is available but your average customer doesn't want to risk the consequences that come with that.
A better equivalent would be if Microsoft said that anyone buying a game from any website to play on a Windows PC has to pay Microsoft a 30% fee because they are running Windows or Windows wouldn't allow the software to be downloaded. Or if MS decided to say that their store is the only place a Windows PC will be able to download APPs from and they want a 30% share of all the purchases.
@justthetip: Aye, this is a lady who took the time to email Twitch's CEO and Amazon's legal team. Also took the time to search Reddit for the actual solution to her problem. The amount of time she spent sending letters and worrying over the money and the kid's still allowed to spend time playing games. People wonder why their kids are so bad. Perhaps they are so bad because they see there is no real punishment for their actions.
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/teenager-allegedly-spends-20000-of-parents-money-on-twitch-donations-without-them-knowing There's a better more full story of what happened.
@Barighm: Agreed. I have my debit card setup so that if any purchase made for it exceeds a certain amount, I get a text message. Have it set low enough that I get quite a few messages.
Edit: I will note there is a bit more to this. According to https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/teenager-allegedly-spends-20000-of-parents-money-on-twitch-donations-without-them-knowing the kid was given a debit card by his mother with a low balance to pay for certain things such as school lunches. He apparently found her banking password and used it to transfer money to his account. Might explain why the bank didn't think anything was strange.
The price is kinda decent but still a bit pricy for a family with a couple of kids, especially if they can't convince the kids not to get drinks and popcorn during the movie. The price is terrible for a single person especially one who uses a service like regal unlimited to see multiple new movies a month for a single price and has no issues not buying popcorn or drinks at the movie.
However keep in mind that not most people have a comfortable setup for family viewing with a nice large TV, great sound system, ect. There's reasons people prefer the theater other than they get the new movies first.
@Groudon199: In a lot of cases it does. However that doesn't mean the developer is paying their employees fairly with that money and not just keeping it for their top people/executives.
Microtransactions however suck however you put it.
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