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Cake day: July 1st, 2025

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  • I was more thinking about modern internet solutions that enable things like viewing a camera remotely that produce alerts for things like movement, and can even show a little clip of what was seen.

    Having a camera on site in a rural area is only relevant if you’re aware of the happenings, no? because if you’re away for a long time, say an 8 hour shift at work… absolutely anybody can come in and tear down your cameras, ransack your house, and light the remainder on fire destroying all video evidence.

    A friend I know had her rural home robbed of all christmas gifts under a tree in the 90s. She lived in the US in a fairly rural area (pop ~100.) Houses are all set back from the road. They even tried pulling an extremely large TV out through the front door, but it wouldn’t fit.

    Cameras wouldn’t help… because they stole their computers, all the gifts obviously, and even a small gun safe. This was a former veteran and IT worker’s family home and they had for the time fairly bleeding edge hardware. Sure, if the family returned home and caught them red handed perhaps it would have went differently, but disabling camera infrastructure back then in a rural residential setting is trivial if no one is home.





  • I mean, yeah. Sega completely got out of the hardware market. They never removed their hardware from shelves before announcing a replacement hardware solution, they simply let it run out and pivoted as a business to software, retaining the brand.

    Imagine the potential liability a company would have by announcing they are exiting the market when they are beholden to shareholders. Announcing they are shutting down something would immediately cause a drop in share price. I would cause sales to plummet- possibly triggering lawsuits from retailers.

    They’d never announce they were shutting down. There’s too much value there in the brand, even if it’s not what it used to be.


  • You point the finger at retail and on some level it makes sense to want to funnel users towards your digital distribution platform to completely cut out the middle men and take the entire cut for yourself. So maybe it’s a lot of this…

    …but i’m looking at that 50% subscription increase as a sign of what they want. Rent forever, own nothing.

    Hardware has costs and overhead associated. They need support people and to have depot services. The cost to sell a console today is getting to be on par with a gaming laptop or desktop (not high end, but something that can play games.) The margin after retailer share has to be lower than ever, and sales tax tariffs are coming hard and fast.

    You can develop your games with studios all over the world though and sell them through your US publisher for no import sales tax… especially if it’s on your subscription platform that is effectively impossible to tariff. They have the infrastructure readily available and totally paid for by business customers. Bandwidth costs next to nothing. Digital distribution has next to no overhead costs, unlike selling consumer hardware.

    Ultimately Microsoft has a vested interest in Windows gaming, since it helps keep their market share and recurring subscription revenue. Few are linux gamers like I, and games are still being made that have 0 possibility of linux support, bf6 being the newest.

    There’s a momumental challenge of escaping the microsoft ecosystem, and they’re pushing hard into the always online track everything you do on your computer and phone home to the mothership and sell your data to whoever is willing to buy it. Subscriptions will likely remove ads from future versions of windows… and the holy grail of total control DRM is not far behind between forcing tpm/secureboot that ONLY works on windows 11.