Want to see more of this character? Be sure to join us on Patreon to see more updates. We like to share new information and images as we make progress. We're now developing two games at present, and production is going well. However, resources are limited and completing those titles is becoming more challenging. We really want to bring these adventures to you, so please help us by liking, commenting, and sharing.
No identity politics, no partisanship, no ugly sprites, no gimmicks, and no bad writing. This level of quality and detail is guaranteed in all of our games. We aren't reducing the quality of any asset for any title at all.
Hit the link above to directly to our Patreon page and keep the projects alive. Every little bit helps! If you want to watch a while, follow for free, like, comment, and share. If now isn't a good time to drop dough on it, follow for free, like, comment, and share. Exposure is the most important part of this campaign. We have loads of posts available to everybody, so you won't run into constant pay walls when you're trying to see what's going on. We need to meet our goal of 800 Patrons from the Donations, Donations, Donations tier, or 400 Patrons from the Tree Tiers or higher. That will accelerate development. We can do it together! Uncomfortable with hot links? Here it is typed out: https://www.patreon.com/gamerspointe Thanks for reading. Peace! Your friendly neighborhood analysists and gaming culture reviewers are back. Wow! It's been a long 15 months, hasn't it?! We were pleasantly surprised to see hundreds of readers still returning and giving us thousands of impressions. We love and appreciate every one of you who kept our site alive during our hiatus. First thing's first: We sincerely apologize for our absence. We admittedly haven't been motivated to cover much over the course of the last year and three months. For starters, there hasn't been a whole lot to discuss. We bet on Stadia surviving the whimsy of Google due to its growth, stability, rapidly growing list of titles, and convenience for traveling gamers. Google killed it anyway and it caused quite an uproar for a few months. Those who wanted Google out of gaming got their way, and the millions who actually enjoyed the platform, including us, had to eat crow. As expected of corporations, there were sleights against Nvidia and Microsoft hidden between the lines. The cost for performance with Azure was untenable, and Nvidia's inflated GPU prices didn't help matters. Google apparently wanted to see wider margins during a time when games needed more powerful components, so cloud gaming was handed over to Amazon, Sony, Nvidia, and Microsoft. We briefly addressed this on X [formerly Twitter] in a series of tweets that we've since deleted. You'll understand why we deleted them by the end of this entry. Because Microsoft owns Azure, it doesn't cost them extra to run a cloud gaming platform. It's all in-house. However, Google has to pay their asking price, which is awfully high. Since Microsoft has a cloud gaming service, this is actually a conflict of interest, anticompetitive, and a result of a culture embracing monopolistic practices regardless of the law. It's all about a favorite winning, not about what's actually best for the people and the industry. Listen, folks. We can't let a small group of people buy and control everything just because they have a lot of money. Why? Because that will leave nothing for anyone else, and since the owners get full control of whatever they own, it results in a loss of freedom and options. Take a look at your power bill. It climbs pretty high right? But do you know why? It's because of a lack of competition in your area. These are called local monopolies. Now, 30 - 40 years ago, the companies competed for service area. That means different companies could run power lines in the same territories. Because of that, customers had options and the companies were forced to compete. Nowadays, your provider owns everything in that area and you have no other options. It means they can charge you whatever they want, and you have to pay because you won't have any power otherwise. If you let that happen in gaming, you surrender all mobility in the space. That's true of every industry. These developments are heartbreaking, and we kind of lost our voices. It's not an excuse or even a backhanded apology; it's just an explanation of where our minds have been. What's there to talk about, you know? We can actually answer that question this time...with a segue to our sponsor.
Here's the straight dope: We're creating a multi-entry adult visual novel epic. Yes, an epic. There will be three sagas, each containing four major arcs. So, that character has no missed details.
Every object in the games will be rendered; no snapshots or illustrations. This is key because we will have the freedom to repose the characters, move objects around scenes, and get the angles right. Now, you're probably wondering if they'll be more typical visual novels that are loaded with stills. No. As the series progresses, we will use more animations and voice acting to give life to the titles. We would like to get into motion capture at some point, which isn't exactly cheap. More on that later. Over time, we plan to recruit models to cameo as characters in our games. This will allow you all to be more involved with the development process. How so? You'll get to vote for who we extend offers to! We want everyone to be a part of it. Depending on the responses we get, we may even do some spinoffs of your favorites. This is all just the tip of the iceberg. We have fighting games, FPS titles, and a MMORPG planned as well. Every release will be a step towards something even bigger. Back to visual novels. We want these games too be dynamic and immersive. We also want to offer convenience. So, we won't be exchanging text for voice acting. We'll instead do both. This way, you can listen to the story and focus on the scenes in front of you, or continue reading if you prefer. We even found some ways to give players more control of the environments. Naturally, this endeavor will be a bit pricey. That's why we need you. We've finally launched our Patreon, and we'd love for you to join us there. We have multiple tiers, and we post updates for those who want to follow along for free before diving in. We understand; no one wants to invest in something before they're sure it's going to happen. It's going to happen, and we'll be sharing every milestone. If you're not comfortable with hyperlinks, you can copy and paste this one: https://www.patreon.com/gamerspointe That's all for now. Please be sure to share. The more people our project is exposed to, the faster we can get the games to market. Thanks in advance, and happy holidays! Many people analyzing the GPU market are overlooking some important facts about economics.
By focusing on crypto mining, tech enthusiasts are overlooking something critical: lower demand for the crypto mining hardware isn't a big deal. For those who prefer to buy used, their prices naturally drop as miners flood that sub-market with cards. That much is obvious. However, counting it as the main driver behind new prices falling is unreasonable. The demand from other people is still quite high, so there's no real reason to reduce prices there in response to that demand. That's not what's happening. Crypto is only a buzzword, as brands continue to shift the blame onto crypto miners - even though the majority of them are only individuals looking for a little extra money. So, what's actually happening? Being conveniently ignored is the fact that production and GPU shipments reached a high right as prices started to fall. As markets stabilized when tariffs and trade embargoes in response to COVID fell apart, GPU shipments essentially spiked. Manufacturers ramped up production to catch up and flooded the market themselves. They also introduced new products that widened the range of components that are available. Literally more GPU's of various tiers are available. This caused production cuts to bring down the amount of units hitting the market so that it can stabilize. To prevent as many issues as possible and have a better guarantee of longevity, most buyers would still rather purchase new. This is actually what's happening here. To stabilize the market faster, scalpers were dealt critical blows after price gouging. Buying limits were imposed, so a huge chunk of the reseller market was simply dissolved. That makes it significantly more difficult for shops to justify high prices due to shortages. So, the new products being released are much less negatively impacted by scalpers intentionally shorting supply by purchasing as much as they can, holding them until buyers become desperate, then finally selling their stock for hugely inflated prices. To cut their losses, they drop their prices to near MSRP, which benefits them less than it benefits shops. To shut scalpers out of the market, shops hold sales and further reduce prices below MSRP to make it up in sales volume. MSRP is only the suggested retail price, which includes profit margins. When using this method, a shop willfully narrows its profit margin per unit in exchange for an overall larger long-term profit through a greater number of units sold. You can still see some incredibly stubborn scalpers hawking GPU's for prices that are several times the suggested retail price. Those parts don't sell, so they have to bring them down. These are the people who missed the prime scalping window trying to snag a sucker who didn't do his / her research, and using the sunk cost fallacy. They bought late to sell high, and they refuse to cooperate so they can cut their losses. Only this usually doesn't work because the financial damage has already been done. With more new GPU's available for sale, their stock is less valuable. We held these discussions and personally informed buyers since January 2020 that this is the solution. We were right. The very thing that everyone told our team wouldn't work is exactly what's working. Just saturate the market with variety, increase production and shipments, and crackdown on scalpers. Don't keep falling for the scam. The answer was obvious, they're carrying it out right now, and the responsible parties are denying all accountability for this mess. You're welcome. Thanks for reading. Until next time! Coming as a surprise to most, but not to us, the GeForce GTX 1630 causes an uproar in the PC gaming community. We saw this coming and couldn't understand the intense hatred for the Radeon RX 6400. It seems that gamers are struggling to match their expectations with economic realities. Let's get into it.
According to reports, the 1630 is as powerful as the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. This isn't actually true. It's a step behind the 1050 Ti, losing half of the gaming tests by a few FPS, winning only four, and tying only in one of those gaming tests. Meanwhile, the RX 6400 beat the favored GTX 1650 in 4/6 gaming tests. It's hilarious, to be honest, as the 6400 remains probably the most hated GPU released this year. Why? It's because TechTubers despise it because it doesn't match their completely unrealistic predictions, demands, and expectations. The RX 6400 lacks hardware encoding vital for capturing gameplay clips. The overwhelming majority of PC gamers don't, and will never, use Xbox Game Bar for this. Though we would use it, we have options. We can use third party software solutions, and we actually fault Microsoft for this because it's really not a necessary restriction. AMD deserves some fault as well, seeing as how there are installation issues with the software. The parts are compatible with the software, but the installer is riddled with bugs. For those who are lucky enough to get Xbox Game Bar to work with their supported APU, there's no actual problem. But for those of us who are unlucky, Xbox Game Bar won't recognize our supported 5600G's. See the real problem? An added insult to injury is that the GTX 1630 launched at a higher price point than the RX 6400. Priced at $199 on launch, the budget card costs $40 more than the RX 6400. What are gamers paying more for? It requires more power than the faster 6400, and it may support mGPU but no one's talking about it - however, Nvidia doesn't exactly have a good reputation with budget options in this area (they blocked the feature on the GT 1030 and other non-RTX / non-GTX cards). It looks like the grass wasn't greener on the other side this time around. If you're a smart budget shopper in the market for a good budget card, swallow your pride and buy the RX 6400. It beats the GTX 1650 and costs $40 less. You can capture clips with third party software, it's an easy set up process, it's a single-slot design by default, and it has easy-enable mGPU support. We're having a blast with our twin 6400's, and we disabled mGPU because we don't even need it yet. All hail the true budget king! Down with the GTX 1630! As a surprise even to us, something quite interesting happened with PC component pricing. Some GPU prices have fallen under MSRP, but we're not out of the woods on that yet. That could just be the calm before the predicted storm. However, what we're really worried about is motherboard pricing. What in the world happened there?!
Motherboard prices are shooting through the roof, even for motherboards using older chipsets. This is a really big deal and something that more people in the tech circuit need to be talking about. Some of the motherboards are retailing for two to four times what they're actually worth, and some newer boards are costing consumers well over $600! This is crazy! Not only is there a lot of scalping going on, prices are being artificially inflated. It's like a huge price fixing scheme between all of the manufacturers, many of which also produce and sell the GPU's that have at least temporarily recovered insofar as pricing. For example, we got our X470 Gaming Plus Max for $100 on Amazon. If you go dig that board up now, you'll see it used for double that. We bought that motherboard as brand new! And the newer X570 is starting at $246 on Amazon. Newegg is no better with pricing these parts. X570 boards are supposed to start at around $150. We're not seeing them. Instead, we're seeing B450 boards starting that high, and even A320 boards are near that mark! This is it. THIS is the [first] landmine! Market analysts predicted dramatic increases to CPU and APU prices, they barely went up, and now you can get deals all over. We bought a new Ryzen 5 5600G for only $164, and it included the Wraith cooler. That's the Zen 3 microarchitecture, and the APU's MSRP is $259. GPU prices went down without bans on crypto or the Ethereum switch to proof-of-stake [pushed back again]. RAM prices are stable. SSD's are already going back down and HDD's are a bargain. There's a pattern here, and this is the next spike. We started with insane RAM prices; then we just closed out brutal GPU prices. Now we're on seriously absurd motherboard prices. Help us spread the word. We need to address motherboard costs. These ARE NOT good deals! |
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