I wonder how many trillions of floors Diablo 1 had if they had used this weird way of marketing No Man’s Sky uses.

I am honestly surprised about this. I sort of assumed that whole sector had been at zero for at least a decade.

No, that is generally what we refer to as hardware. Arguably the whole point of the term software is to refer to the bits that aren’t physical in the overall system.

Certainly means that large companies didn’t invent digital distribution as some form to eliminate physical distribution as an anti-consumer move. Consumers (via piracy) invented it for convenience.

Valve didn’t invent the idea, piracy did. You could download full games years before any legal distribution channel allowed you to do so.

Well, sure, but there are limits. In e.g. a game like Dwarf Fortress you could probably add hundreds of different production chains and professions without running into too much trouble of individual players keeping track and using all of them. If you added maps each requiring one of dozens of different tactics or strategies to a multiplayer shooter it wouldn’t feel like a single game any more and would probably just splinter the community into groups where each just plays one or a few of those maps.

a toxic player base

Isn’t that basically all competitive games?

I feel there is a fundamental difference between games like Dwarf Fortress or survival games or even open world story-driven games getting new content though that allows players to explore different options when replaying the game and games like this where the game play loop is inherently short and people are somewhat forced to do the ‘optimal strategy’ whatever that happens to be at the time.

It is called “going gold” because it is the gold standard for measuring the tolerance level for embarrassment from releasing the pile of garbage a project produced. Going gold is done at exactly the point when that drops from intolerable to tolerable to the stake holders.

Yeah, to rephrase my post the other way around, buying a console and just a few games is only really possible because it is carried by people who don’t carefully weigh if that is a financially sound decision.

Probably very few among the people who carefully weighed which system gives them the better bang for their buck.

Even if it can’t tell how much load you put on your system because that is a complex interaction of various bottlenecks, it would at least be nice if they labelled which settings are likely to contribute to the CPU, CPU, RAM, VRAM,… bottlenecks.

Those are individual games though, console games are just much more expensive on average. There isn’t as much available on the cheaper end of the market.

People are less likely to own a TV already these days though than they used to be so the price calculation for consoles favors them a lot less if you take that into account. Not to mention that console games tend to be more expensive than PC games, especially indie PC games now that triple A is more of a warning label than an indicator of quality.

I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.

Who knew that they just forgot the “sh” when they made their old “its in the game” slogan.

Or counting how many people are employed in Skyrim.

Because that is what the law and those licenses on the box say (the EULA if you remember the times when physical software came with a “read before opening” license agreements).

Honestly makes sense since you can then produce the boxes much earlier and ship them and go through all that physical distribution nonsense without worrying about patching from whatever is on disk to the actual finished product. Especially since I bet physical gamers want the game on day one too.

It is and always has been only licensing with physical media too.