A base model steam deck is $50 cheaper than this, a base model Xbox series s is $150 dollars cheaper, and it’s the same price as a PS5 slim.

Yea, I mean, why not.

what is your argument, if game prices haven’t increased over time (as your claim alludes) and yet, in spite of that, the games industry has ballooned, creating the largest media industry in the world, I don’t see why prices need to go up.

Video games make money hand over fist, they do it at any price point (vampire survivors sold at least 6 million copies at a dollar, balatro sold at least 3.5 million copies at $15, these games made millions of dollars) what evidence do you have that shows that higher prices are needed to keep the industry afloat?

Maybe the unsustainability lies in the large studios trying to capitalize on brand recognition and loyalty, continuously growing their own costs and spending money on things that don’t actually make fun engaging games. Obviously the video game industry would continue to survive and thrive if Nintendo disappeared off of the face of the earth tomorrow, so it’s not a video game industry issue.

Objectively false.

52 cards make more combinations than there are atoms in the universe, you can have data centers filled with random numbers generators and they wouldn’t draw the same card twice.

That example uses one dimension, just that single set. with music you have multiple dimensions, even if you get extremely specific, and say that you have 10 chords along 12 root notes (this basically forces you into western music, no diminished chords, just the triads and the sevenths) you have 300 million unique sets of 4 ordered chords (a typical chord progression, that’s effectively an entire lifetime of 4 minute songs non stop before you get to something that has been done before.

If you add in time signatures, swing, length, silence, noise, volume, tempo, arrangement, etc, you end up with effectively infinite combinations.

But that doesn’t matter anything, because you seem to be assuming that because a component may exist in some form already it means nothing new can be derived from it.

Music speaks to its time and its culture, it tells stories and reflects the emotions of the world it is created in. That world constantly changes. Sampling a sound from an old song can create something new, the story told by the old sound can be different. A derivative work does not a copy cat make and it actually believes it or not is possible to make new music even if the same chord progression exists.

And that doesn’t even begin to include the variation in production style, effects, or the biological differences in people’s vocal chords.

What makes you think that you are so special that your little 80 year lifetime landed right in the middle of the death of music. And what makes you think new things can’t be done, it’s only been 50ish years since we’ve even had a grasp on stuff like synthesizers.

Economy of scale, the market has grown with the scope of games and also, most games do not require a team of hundreds of people to develop.

I covered it in another comment, but game development is easier now than ever, many of gamings greatest hits in the modern era are made by teams of less than 10 full time workers or even completely solo.

The Atari developers didn’t have unity and Internet forums, they didn’t have managed programming languages, they didn’t have asset libraries, they didn’t have modern art toolchains and 3d modeling software with high level easy to use features.

Additionally, looking back at old games is looking with biased eyes. The tech was just as cutting edge as it is today, and the learning curve was steeper, it was harder to just get a computer, let alone, learn how to program one. The talent pool was smaller and it was harder to get funding for a game, the higher prices reflected that you were paying for niche software. That isn’t the case anymore.

And the argument doesn’t even make sense. Should a Blu-ray copy of avengers cost $500 because it cost hundreds of millions to make?

And things are supposed to get cheaper as technology and processes are improved (and N64 games were large complex cartridges that were expensive to produce).

Yes the quality of games has improved overall, but the market has also grown, meaning things like economy of scale and commodification typically come into play. Additionally the tooling for making games has been dramatically improved, digital art tools are better, game engines are pre packaged with a bow on top and development is (or can be) done in high level memory managed programming languages like c#. It’s easier than ever to make good games right now, every aspect of the process has increased with the scope of the games themselves.

Music has absolutely not stagnated and the only people who say that are people who have a passing interest (or none at all) and no desire to seek out anything beyond a Spotify playlist of tiktok trends.

And just because [insert your favorite genre] isn’t topping charts right now, doesn’t mean that a) it’s gone away, and b) that the music that is popular is bad. And also, just because some of the music that gets popular is less dynamic or complex than others doesn’t mean it has nothing to say or has no value.

Honestly, the ‘modern music bad’ take is just so braindead and it makes me so sad thinking about the people who refuse to allow new music in their life just so they can hold up holier than thou beliefs about the music they grew up with.

Depends on how you define security.

Is win11 more cryptographically secure, absolutely.

Does that matter if you don’t trust the holder of the keys (the Microsoft keys stored in the tpm) not really.

implementing a more secure platform doesn’t mean much if the only way you are doing it is by handing over control to a third party.

Would you trust a better lock on your front door if it meant a proven bad actor was the one who could unlock it?