It did. You can’t sell a PS5 for $1200 right now. You used to be able to sell one for $1000. Now, they seem to go for $850. Less if you buy locally. Give it another month of restocks and maybe they’ll be down to $750. At a certain point, it’s not worth the risk and resellers will look for opportunities elsewhere. But…

Exactly. Which is partly why I have a hard time calling any of them scalpers at all. Folks who scalp concert tickets or sneakers are buying a product of limited quantity. They’re only selling so many. Those folks can corner the market and charge exorbitant prices for that stuff (x2 or x3 mark-up). Whereas they’re…

1) No one is desperate for a PS5. It’s a toy. You either get lucky, you pay extra or you wait until they restock. Their customer base is the affluent, not the desperate.

2) Take a real look at eBay (or whatever platform). The VAST majority are the individual flippers you’re talking about. The professional scalpers are…

Nah, they’re fine. They’re small volume and they help the folks buy who don’t mind spending an extra $150 get a console instead of waiting 6 months. Plus, most of the people reselling on eBay aren’t professional scalpers. They don’t have a pile of 30 PS5's they’re dumping. They got one console when Walmart restocked…

The primary impediment to buying a new console is demand. One of the easiest ways to reduce demand is to raise the price, which retailers can’t do (except with bundles). The only reason I can get a PS5 right now is because there’s someone selling one over MSRP and not keeping the console for themselves. I’m not…

Lemme play devil’s advocate for a sec. In a perfect distribution system (a lottery) where the only people getting PS5's are enthusiastic end-users, supply would still be hopelessly insufficient and the product unavailable for sale.

Scalpers/Resellers are adding value by setting prices that reduce demand. I can’t go to…

I can definitely see wanting to make sure you have the time to commit to Hollow Knight. I wouldn’t call it super long (took me <40 hours for good ending + DLC #1), but like any Souls-like game, you don’t wanna have to come back after an absence and try to figure out what you supposed to be doing.

That said, if it gets…

In 2019, I bought a PS4 Pro for the EXPRESS purpose of playing Bloodborne. I still haven’t done that (let alone boot the console up to play *any* game, woops), so 2021 is the year of Bloodborne for me. I did make some decent backlog headway this year, playing every Wii U game for which I had interest. In 2021, I’d…

Not quite. They’re all successors to Demon’s Souls. DS2 and DS3 have a common heritage with Demon’s Souls that skipped Dark Souls 1. They feel like actual sequels.

For my money, Dark Souls 2 and DS3 are actually sequels to Demon’s Souls. The original Dark Souls is an outlier in the franchise. The other 3 games (Demon’s, DS2, DS3) feature hub and spoke level design. Warp to that hub area and it’s replete with vendors and a lady who levels you up. DS2 & DS3 allow one to teleport…

*Spoilers follow*
I haven’t played Bloodborne or Sekiro, so they’re omitted. Sue me

Dark Souls: It wasn’t the game that started it all, but it was the one that got the most right. Its labyrinthine, interconnected level design and honest geometry are features not present in either direct Souls sequel. It’s judicious use…

It’s just like the Oscars where comedies just never take Best Picture. GOTY feels like it’s available to one type of game

There’s no small amount of games criticism out there (some on this very site) that took TLOU:2 to task for a narrative that loses sight it’s own characters and betrays their story arcs in ways that don’t service the overall narrative. It wasn’t just people whining about inclusivity, though there was some of that too

And how. He wasn’t alone either. I think I saw more “Actually TLOU:2 is kind of a mess” type headlines than praise. Some of these AAA games feel like a dark, gritty race to the bottom

The only people who should surprised are people who still give The Game Awards an ounce of credibility. Now, I’m admittedly not well informed on how category entries are chosen and how the voting works, but historically, it feels like the Oscars. For an awards show honoring interactive entertainment, the same kinds of…

It’s still bad press! And lots of retailers have made significant improvements recently. The bots and scalpers don’t help, but lots of people seem to take issue that a secondary market exists *at all*.

Even if retailers completely eliminate bot-buying and limit hot-item purchases to 1 unit per household for a launch…

I exclusively play with inverted controls but I also rarely play 1st person games with a controller. I think the reason I invert both X and Y in FPS games is because of how natural that feels in 3rd person games and I’m simply leveraging that muscle memory.

As soon as I was done with Goldeneye, I put console FPS games…

I think it’s more about not being locked out of the “King of Rings” trophy. You can at least get more Swords of Searching if you’re going for NG+

Ok, compromise time: Change it Internationally so Circle = Confirm, X = Cancel

But also swap the button locations. Now everyone is unhappy!

Between Apple’s consistently anti-consumer practices with regard to independent repair shops/right-to-repair and their exorbitant part pricing, it’s hardly a surprise it’s cheaper to buy a new one. If they’re not failing to make parts for new systems available through in-store Apple repairs (let alone independent…