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

Seems likely for the era that game will be released in, yeah.

I would argue that by definition if the people shopping there are fewer and fewer every year it is not popular.

The motion sickness issue might be solved, maybe if you are willing to allow it to interfere with your nervous system on a deep level the bit where your body moves while you move in VR but the issue of being cut off from your surroundings will never go away.

At this point the evidence is mounting that the productivity boost through AI for software development is somewhere between negligible and negative.

VR is just not attractive for most people in the way you need lots of space and have to cut yourself off completely from the world and might only find out it gives you motion sickness after you already spent the money.

For that to become useful AI would first need to produce something you can use without a manual inspection round.

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).

A lot of digital games can be sold for a cheaper “full price” than physical ones ever could though because of the inherent costs of the inefficient physical distribution network.

Mainly because only a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage (physical media buyers) of the user base would do that so it is not worth developing a solution for it.

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.

In my experience cranking one aspect (like graphics) up to 11 in terms of realism just makes all the other things that aren’t realistic even more glaringly obvious in an effect sort of similar to the uncanny valley or to the way suspension of disbelief is harder to achieve in a movie that takes itself too seriously.

The assumption that you need amazing graphics for immersion is deeply flawed. We have had decades of people immersed in e.g. RPGs with very minimal graphics or even text only interfaces.

Virtual worlds are affected by similar problems. If you look at e.g. Second Life, a relatively established one you will quickly realize it has all kinds of users with relatively minimal spec systems and use it in all kinds of contexts where they also do other stuff (e.g. work, watching kids,…). But people who try to build new ones tend to try to build them as VR which is completely useless to that entire user base because they can’t afford a system that runs VR and also won’t work in situations where you need to do other stuff at the same time.

Maybe what we need is more analysis and fewer visionaries.

Self-regulation can work for safety but only if the measures needed to make things safer are cheap and pretty much don’t require quality control (e.g. do not install a slippery type of floor in front of your butcher counter) and the consequences are severe even without regulation (bad press, significantly fewer customers, medical bills to pay for the customer who does slip,…).

Self-regulation can work in cases where the incentives are set up just right, but when it works you have no real need to bring up regulation at all so whenever regulation is worth considering at all self-regulation has already failed pretty much by definition.

Among computing hardware companies Nintendo is really second only to Apple in making sure to remind us to never buy their devices on a regular basis. Well, unless you count Sony perhaps but not sure I would count smart TVs in quite the same category.

At the same time Linux is eating their lunch on the server side thanks to containers and immutable systems not really being a thing that is possible for anyone but Microsoft to build on Windows and licensing becomes extremely complicated compared to Linux in those areas.