It is more like half that, and then that's only for small retailers who can't negotiate better rates. If you are turning over a million a year, and $1000 transactions suggest you would, I would be amazed if you didn't have credit card processors banging on your door offering 1.4% and lower. So I'm with angel'o'sphere, the ggp doesn't pass the sniff test.
Sony moved headquarters to California and by their own admission it's them that calls the shots now. So it's an American decision. Europe was referenced as speculation that they will turn one company's business decision into a legal requirement.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of games, though they are the AAA stuff, actually REQUIRES a download. The Xbox is worse than the PS4 in this regard. For those, yes, the disc is just a physical access token. But the overwhelming majority of single player games will install and run from the disc on any retail console without patches. And while all games bar a few have patches, they are usually for multiplayer content and some minor bugs that in days past would have just gone unpatched.
There's loads of reasons why physical media still rules the roost on console. It's just a different demographic really. Parents like to buy physical things for their kids, kids like to trade in old stuff for new stuff, they loan and swap stuff. Not to mention if you don't have credit cards, physical stores take cash.
PC users have a skewed perspective because they are generally speaking older and prefer convenience.
Regarding the blu-ray drive specifically, one of the primary drivers for the sale of the XBox One S in the beginning was that it was by far the cheapest UHD blu ray player on the market. If they hadn't done that, they wouldn't have sold nearly as many as they did. Now, of course you can get cheaper standalone units so the advantage is gone.
I think this all-digital console is a mis-step. I think they'll find out that the kind of customer who buys the bottom tier isn't the kind who buys digital games. It seems like Microsoft are having a C64GS moment.
I suspect it's more like the base model is one that meets or exceeds every mandated safety feature required by every aviation authority they sell to. R&D also made a bunch of extra safety features that run up the cost considerably. Sales know that trying to sell an expensive safe plane to poorer airlines is a non-starter, they'd just try and get cheaper end-of-life models from other companies, so they ask that these non-mandated safety features become optional. And it's all good because these features aren't mandated, right?
Well now Boeing have a PR nightmare on their hands and they are about to get an additional list of features that are now mandated and air travel will be safer globally as a result even if prices have to rise and a few airlines go out of business. It's a shame that progress tends to come after lives lost.
1. This was tried 10 years ago and it didn't succeed
So what? It's not 10 years ago any more.
But what's changed though? Have connections got faster? We've certainly got more throughput, but that's not the issue. I have the same ping time between me and LINX as I did in 2001. The only thing they can do differently from Onlive is 1) offer a netflix model and 2) use the might of the google advertising machine. From a technical standpoint nothing has changed.
And rumour has it that they aren't using a netflix model so all they've got is advertising.
Microsoft are working on a way to reduce perceived lag by rollback. This relies on the game having enough input lag by design that you can "hide" the network lag in this by running ahead, then rolling back and rerunning the game logic when you find out that your prediction was wrong. But that's not a magic bullet as it only cuts out one half of the latency and it increases costs at the datacentre as it needs to render ahead and re-render.
I bought that card specifically to try out PhysX code as it was the cheapest way to see what the "real" version was. Sure, maybe it was 2x faster... over running it in software. You weren't getting a playable experience with PhysX dialed up and the graphics set to reasonable.
In the UK you could have old fluorescent lighting that was flickering at 50Hz while you stared at a cheap CRT set to 60Hz. The interference of those two for 8+ hours solid in an already stressful environment would send anyone looking for magical solutions to the "cancer radiation." I used to show people the magic of 100Hz and make them immediately happier. Though some people are more comfortable knowing that the world is out to give them eye tumours and would demand it be set back.
Some people refer to Steam's model as rental to hammer home the idea that you don't really own what you're buying so long as there's a gatekeeper controlling access to what you paid for.
Then inevitably Steam's fans will defend it by saying that you don't own the game you buy physically on consoles with the argument 1) It's just a license anyway, or 2) You need the Day 1 patch to make it playable.
Both sides feel like arguing over how best to get screwed.
Amazon got slapped down for doing customer specific pricing a long time ago. I don't remember it well, but I think they went the other way. They were advertising an item at $10, but if you were someone they thought *might* be interested with an incentive they'd show you $9.50 to try and make the sale whereas if you were more likely to buy it normally you still saw $10.
That opens the door to a new game. Consumers deliberately crashing the market. A consumer can open up a new store and advertise items at a steep discount, never intending to actually ship anything. Such a store could even take orders and refund them "later".
I assume that's why Amazon has tiers of marketplace sellers. Anyone can open a seller account and start listing products subject to a cursory review of your listings, but you are just an "also sold by" that you have to click through. It's not until you've provably sent items using real shipping companies and collected real money that eventually you get promoted to a real seller. It's only then that you get to have your prices matter to Amazon's algorithm.
And by the time you've achieved that, well now you are a real business with skin in the game so why would you tank your company to save £100 on some purchases?
Reminds me of the printing industry, had to have win98 boxes with Publisher or Works on them because a client would send these abominations through because it was the only thing that had and knew how to work. Trying to get them to make PDFs wasn't worth the headache, relying on import filters in better software was dangerous, so paying for multiple versions of shitty proprietary software made us more money in the long run.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I have no evidence, but I'm just reminded of the counterfeit Cisco hardware. It was made in the same factory by the same workers, but they used whatever they had, not what went into the real thing. The cheap knockoff simply wasn't as good as the real thing.
I'm just thinking it's far easier for slashdotters to spot different capacitors and such than identifying poor quality leather or stitching.
The game manufactures DO NOT WANT anyone to resell used games, it cuts into their profit margins!
True for the most part. It also cuts into sony/nintendo/microsoft's profits too but Sony made fun of Microsoft's used game policy implying that they understand just how important it is to ongoing business and Nintendo hasn't been trying to stop it either even though they probably have big publishers trying to twist their arm too.
It's things like that that make me think this "everything is going digital" narrative is WAY overblown. The only significant switch to digital I see is buying online and getting it shipped to your door, not downloading ethereal bits from an online store front.
Cheap USB sticks are slow though. The last patch I installed was 4gig. It downloaded pretty quick because I have decent 200mbit/s, however if I had to copy that to a flash drive cheap enough to distribute en masse I'd expect it to be SLOWER than the download. I've had some god awful flash drives come across my desk and 1 hour to do 4 gig is far from the worst.
Gamestop are failing because they did not work to compete with steam, just sort of hoped for the best.
Gamestop and GAME and EB Games and all the like are crap and make the experience of shopping in their store a painful one and they deserve a rude awakening, but I just can't abide people bringing up Steam as if it somehow took the legs out from under them. It's entirely a secondary market of a smaller niche compared to the Playstation/Switch/Xbox customers that buy/sell/resell physical goods and if it went away tomorrow Gamestop wouldn't suddenly jump back into the black. The PC master race has to demand better from their publishers instead of supporting shitty DRM and games-as-a-service practices and then maybe their platform will compete with the dominant consoles. Gamestop isn't really in a position where they can or even want to do that.
I think a large part of it is people just want physical things. They've had nearly 2 decades of digital delivery and they realise they've got nothing tangible. They aren't giving up on digital entirely, they just want to "feel" the thing, put it into a player, move a stylus, clunk a big mechanical play button... And for all the poor sound quality of cassette tapes, is it really worse than spotify?
Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. This has been true for years, even when they were new and refreshed - they were not machines that sold particularly well. In fact, if Steve Jobs was around, he'd have axed both of them for being really bad sellers.
The problem as I see it is that despite being bad sellers, they are the Macs that are *needed*. The mac mini gets developers a cheaper way into developing for the ecosystem and the mac pro lets professionals have a powerful workstation that is officially supported by apple. If you took those away and focused on the high selling iphones, imacs and macbooks you'll have a few great quarters but then the complaints about lack of software will start as software attrition sets in and people who once could use macs now can't.
When I was using 10.1 on a G4 the future looked bright. Here was this OS that was going places and every developer was tripping over themselves to provide a mac os x build on stuff that was previously.exe only. Open source was being ported at a phenomenal speed and it looked like this might be the unix-alike of the future. Fast forward to 10.8ish and the dream died. Mac builds are thin on the ground and professionals are gradually leaving the platform. And I place this blame squarely on the lack of support for the mini and the pro. Also software quality took a nosedive.
but from what I can tell Microsoft put some hacks in place to post better in benchmarks.
Probably not. It's a common thing for hardware accelerated video playback to be a problem if you need to overlay stuff on top of the video. This basically comes down to: if the video is obscured in any way, neither Google nor Microsoft can use the super optimised hardware path and have to use the hardware decode and compositor rendering path. The difference is Google's browser appears to optimise away empty elements resulting in a non-obscured video where Microsoft's doesn't.
It happens that optimisations occur purely because of someone noticing and saying "that's weird." So someone notices an obscure edge case and puts in a fix, and the relationship between both halves of the business make it look like collusion.
I think it's the specific behaviour that changed. I've been using OS X since 10.1 and my hazy memory does recall a time when cmd-tab was different. Not completely different, it always switched applications with cmd-` cycling windows within the active application, but rather today when I switch to an app with loads of open windows they all come to the top, obscuring the other program(s) that I'm using. This is very annoying and I'm reasonably sure it used to ONLY bring the most recently used window to the front. But I feel like I've been complaining about diminishing OS X usability since 10.7's release so every additional annoyance is just same-old-same-old.
PC games stop working. You can place the blame anywhere you want, but the upshot is every console game ever released still works on its respective hardware. With PCs it's a total crapshoot what will fail when and whether the "community" cares enough to fix the problem. Just yesterday I found out that "Typing of the Dead" doesn't display the zombies or parts of zombies. The "fix" is to install a version of your graphics card drivers from back when the game released. Great, providing you have a card that was out back then, if you don't you can't install older drivers now can you?
I could go on forever with the huge number of games I own but can't run; but I won't bore you. The OP's suggestion could actually fix the problem. "This game requires a PC meeting X certification". It wouldn't necessarily fix the backwards compatibility issue, but if I know I just need to build a PC with THIS hardware then that's something. Right now it's more a case of triple booting 3 different OS revisions with different drivers in each on multiple machines with some overlap which makes you think something works but it has spotty compatibility.
I find the people who think "PC gaming is great!" are the type who only actively play a handful of games, and maybe a bit of nostalgia off gog. They don't have a full Ikea bookshelf of CD jewel cases and the crushing disappointment that they'll have to ebay a voodoo2 because those Glide wrappers just don't cut it.
In the bad old days an "unlocked" phone would lock itself to the carrier that the SIM was linked to after a certain amount of time. You could swap carriers for a certain amount of time, but then it would stay put, requiring an esoteric unlock process that was a jealously guarded secret. Then the courts ruled you HAD to let people unlock in an easy way. I figured that meant that they'd just stop auto-locking phones. I guess the practice still exists for some lucky consumers.
With the added wrinkle that it's an encrypted file that requires a gatekeeper to allow you to play it. The itunes decryption is mostly offline so while your installation is working and you've done nothing to make it think it should be rearming itself your "purchase" is the same as a DVD. But it's easier to hold onto a physical item that works in any DVD player than it is to manage both the digital files and the DRM system that's designed to stop you from restoring the decryption arbitrarily. If you have the file and your itunes account details I'd be confident it could all be restored to a playable state, so apple aren't that bad at this, but the whole setup gives me the yips.
And does the iphone's automatic storage management know not to delete it because it's not available for download anymore? "But you should have turned that off!" No, the whole thing is sold as one big system and telling people to micromanage to deal with the edge cases makes the whole system worthless and apple should be held to task for it.
My kids ask me to buy a game online cause the want I stant gratification. But I say no let's buy an actual copy.
Arent' they nothing more than tokens that allow you to download the most recent patched game that is larger than what is stored on the optical media and user serial numbers and stimilar things to bind the optical copy to your account so that you can't resell your copy? In the end, that's the same as a game bought online.
Everything you said is true but in varying degrees. Depends on the game and the publisher. There are plenty of games out there where the 1.0 ver. on the disc is perfectly playable and there's no bundled "resale unfriendly" one time use codes in the box, nor do they require activation or such. But information on this is poor.
Makes me want to start a blog called the "Offline Gamer" or something where you take a retail model PS4, Switch, Xbox One and try and operate them offline as much as possible. I think only the PS4 would work as a pure offline console as the XBox and Switch both require setup online first. But even, let's say you start with an activated console, how many games can you reasonably play without ever having an internet connection? A question I would like answered...
But isn't the problem that while we assign nice comfortable numbers like 100% and 95% to things, batteries don't work that way. The charger firmware detects certain characteristics of the cell voltage and determines the mAh remaining based on an ongoing calibrated voltage drop curve. And I'm sure they give themselves plenty of headroom to play with so that it can "overcharge" a little bit safely when the battery is losing capacity but the firmware hasn't got a good enough reading to tell. But if you never run the battery down this curve gets further and further away from reality.
It stands to reason that eventually the charger starts to overcharge the cells without knowing that there's vastly reduced headroom.
Plus there's all sorts of problems with the way the cells are connected. Some will fail ahead of others, but the loss of performance from them is masked by the others and the charger merrily pumps current through the bad cells on the way to the good cells.
tl;dr I think a proper battery engineer would have their head in their hands at most of the comments in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
It is more like half that, and then that's only for small retailers who can't negotiate better rates. If you are turning over a million a year, and $1000 transactions suggest you would, I would be amazed if you didn't have credit card processors banging on your door offering 1.4% and lower. So I'm with angel'o'sphere, the ggp doesn't pass the sniff test.
Sony moved headquarters to California and by their own admission it's them that calls the shots now. So it's an American decision. Europe was referenced as speculation that they will turn one company's business decision into a legal requirement.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of games, though they are the AAA stuff, actually REQUIRES a download. The Xbox is worse than the PS4 in this regard. For those, yes, the disc is just a physical access token. But the overwhelming majority of single player games will install and run from the disc on any retail console without patches. And while all games bar a few have patches, they are usually for multiplayer content and some minor bugs that in days past would have just gone unpatched.
There's loads of reasons why physical media still rules the roost on console. It's just a different demographic really. Parents like to buy physical things for their kids, kids like to trade in old stuff for new stuff, they loan and swap stuff. Not to mention if you don't have credit cards, physical stores take cash.
PC users have a skewed perspective because they are generally speaking older and prefer convenience.
Regarding the blu-ray drive specifically, one of the primary drivers for the sale of the XBox One S in the beginning was that it was by far the cheapest UHD blu ray player on the market. If they hadn't done that, they wouldn't have sold nearly as many as they did. Now, of course you can get cheaper standalone units so the advantage is gone.
I think this all-digital console is a mis-step. I think they'll find out that the kind of customer who buys the bottom tier isn't the kind who buys digital games. It seems like Microsoft are having a C64GS moment.
I suspect it's more like the base model is one that meets or exceeds every mandated safety feature required by every aviation authority they sell to. R&D also made a bunch of extra safety features that run up the cost considerably. Sales know that trying to sell an expensive safe plane to poorer airlines is a non-starter, they'd just try and get cheaper end-of-life models from other companies, so they ask that these non-mandated safety features become optional. And it's all good because these features aren't mandated, right?
Well now Boeing have a PR nightmare on their hands and they are about to get an additional list of features that are now mandated and air travel will be safer globally as a result even if prices have to rise and a few airlines go out of business. It's a shame that progress tends to come after lives lost.
1. This was tried 10 years ago and it didn't succeed
So what? It's not 10 years ago any more.
But what's changed though? Have connections got faster? We've certainly got more throughput, but that's not the issue. I have the same ping time between me and LINX as I did in 2001. The only thing they can do differently from Onlive is 1) offer a netflix model and 2) use the might of the google advertising machine. From a technical standpoint nothing has changed.
And rumour has it that they aren't using a netflix model so all they've got is advertising.
Microsoft are working on a way to reduce perceived lag by rollback. This relies on the game having enough input lag by design that you can "hide" the network lag in this by running ahead, then rolling back and rerunning the game logic when you find out that your prediction was wrong. But that's not a magic bullet as it only cuts out one half of the latency and it increases costs at the datacentre as it needs to render ahead and re-render.
I bought that card specifically to try out PhysX code as it was the cheapest way to see what the "real" version was. Sure, maybe it was 2x faster... over running it in software. You weren't getting a playable experience with PhysX dialed up and the graphics set to reasonable.
In the UK you could have old fluorescent lighting that was flickering at 50Hz while you stared at a cheap CRT set to 60Hz. The interference of those two for 8+ hours solid in an already stressful environment would send anyone looking for magical solutions to the "cancer radiation." I used to show people the magic of 100Hz and make them immediately happier. Though some people are more comfortable knowing that the world is out to give them eye tumours and would demand it be set back.
Some people refer to Steam's model as rental to hammer home the idea that you don't really own what you're buying so long as there's a gatekeeper controlling access to what you paid for.
Then inevitably Steam's fans will defend it by saying that you don't own the game you buy physically on consoles with the argument 1) It's just a license anyway, or 2) You need the Day 1 patch to make it playable.
Both sides feel like arguing over how best to get screwed.
Amazon got slapped down for doing customer specific pricing a long time ago. I don't remember it well, but I think they went the other way. They were advertising an item at $10, but if you were someone they thought *might* be interested with an incentive they'd show you $9.50 to try and make the sale whereas if you were more likely to buy it normally you still saw $10.
Source
That opens the door to a new game. Consumers deliberately crashing the market. A consumer can open up a new store and advertise items at a steep discount, never intending to actually ship anything. Such a store could even take orders and refund them "later".
I assume that's why Amazon has tiers of marketplace sellers. Anyone can open a seller account and start listing products subject to a cursory review of your listings, but you are just an "also sold by" that you have to click through. It's not until you've provably sent items using real shipping companies and collected real money that eventually you get promoted to a real seller. It's only then that you get to have your prices matter to Amazon's algorithm.
And by the time you've achieved that, well now you are a real business with skin in the game so why would you tank your company to save £100 on some purchases?
Reminds me of the printing industry, had to have win98 boxes with Publisher or Works on them because a client would send these abominations through because it was the only thing that had and knew how to work. Trying to get them to make PDFs wasn't worth the headache, relying on import filters in better software was dangerous, so paying for multiple versions of shitty proprietary software made us more money in the long run.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I have no evidence, but I'm just reminded of the counterfeit Cisco hardware. It was made in the same factory by the same workers, but they used whatever they had, not what went into the real thing. The cheap knockoff simply wasn't as good as the real thing.
I'm just thinking it's far easier for slashdotters to spot different capacitors and such than identifying poor quality leather or stitching.
The game manufactures DO NOT WANT anyone to resell used games, it cuts into their profit margins!
True for the most part. It also cuts into sony/nintendo/microsoft's profits too but Sony made fun of Microsoft's used game policy implying that they understand just how important it is to ongoing business and Nintendo hasn't been trying to stop it either even though they probably have big publishers trying to twist their arm too.
It's things like that that make me think this "everything is going digital" narrative is WAY overblown. The only significant switch to digital I see is buying online and getting it shipped to your door, not downloading ethereal bits from an online store front.
Cheap USB sticks are slow though. The last patch I installed was 4gig. It downloaded pretty quick because I have decent 200mbit/s, however if I had to copy that to a flash drive cheap enough to distribute en masse I'd expect it to be SLOWER than the download. I've had some god awful flash drives come across my desk and 1 hour to do 4 gig is far from the worst.
Gamestop are failing because they did not work to compete with steam, just sort of hoped for the best.
Gamestop and GAME and EB Games and all the like are crap and make the experience of shopping in their store a painful one and they deserve a rude awakening, but I just can't abide people bringing up Steam as if it somehow took the legs out from under them. It's entirely a secondary market of a smaller niche compared to the Playstation/Switch/Xbox customers that buy/sell/resell physical goods and if it went away tomorrow Gamestop wouldn't suddenly jump back into the black. The PC master race has to demand better from their publishers instead of supporting shitty DRM and games-as-a-service practices and then maybe their platform will compete with the dominant consoles. Gamestop isn't really in a position where they can or even want to do that.
I think a large part of it is people just want physical things. They've had nearly 2 decades of digital delivery and they realise they've got nothing tangible. They aren't giving up on digital entirely, they just want to "feel" the thing, put it into a player, move a stylus, clunk a big mechanical play button... And for all the poor sound quality of cassette tapes, is it really worse than spotify?
Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. This has been true for years, even when they were new and refreshed - they were not machines that sold particularly well. In fact, if Steve Jobs was around, he'd have axed both of them for being really bad sellers.
The problem as I see it is that despite being bad sellers, they are the Macs that are *needed*. The mac mini gets developers a cheaper way into developing for the ecosystem and the mac pro lets professionals have a powerful workstation that is officially supported by apple. If you took those away and focused on the high selling iphones, imacs and macbooks you'll have a few great quarters but then the complaints about lack of software will start as software attrition sets in and people who once could use macs now can't.
When I was using 10.1 on a G4 the future looked bright. Here was this OS that was going places and every developer was tripping over themselves to provide a mac os x build on stuff that was previously .exe only. Open source was being ported at a phenomenal speed and it looked like this might be the unix-alike of the future. Fast forward to 10.8ish and the dream died. Mac builds are thin on the ground and professionals are gradually leaving the platform. And I place this blame squarely on the lack of support for the mini and the pro. Also software quality took a nosedive.
but from what I can tell Microsoft put some hacks in place to post better in benchmarks.
Probably not. It's a common thing for hardware accelerated video playback to be a problem if you need to overlay stuff on top of the video. This basically comes down to: if the video is obscured in any way, neither Google nor Microsoft can use the super optimised hardware path and have to use the hardware decode and compositor rendering path. The difference is Google's browser appears to optimise away empty elements resulting in a non-obscured video where Microsoft's doesn't.
It happens that optimisations occur purely because of someone noticing and saying "that's weird." So someone notices an obscure edge case and puts in a fix, and the relationship between both halves of the business make it look like collusion.
I think it's the specific behaviour that changed. I've been using OS X since 10.1 and my hazy memory does recall a time when cmd-tab was different. Not completely different, it always switched applications with cmd-` cycling windows within the active application, but rather today when I switch to an app with loads of open windows they all come to the top, obscuring the other program(s) that I'm using. This is very annoying and I'm reasonably sure it used to ONLY bring the most recently used window to the front. But I feel like I've been complaining about diminishing OS X usability since 10.7's release so every additional annoyance is just same-old-same-old.
PC games stop working. You can place the blame anywhere you want, but the upshot is every console game ever released still works on its respective hardware. With PCs it's a total crapshoot what will fail when and whether the "community" cares enough to fix the problem. Just yesterday I found out that "Typing of the Dead" doesn't display the zombies or parts of zombies. The "fix" is to install a version of your graphics card drivers from back when the game released. Great, providing you have a card that was out back then, if you don't you can't install older drivers now can you?
I could go on forever with the huge number of games I own but can't run; but I won't bore you. The OP's suggestion could actually fix the problem. "This game requires a PC meeting X certification". It wouldn't necessarily fix the backwards compatibility issue, but if I know I just need to build a PC with THIS hardware then that's something. Right now it's more a case of triple booting 3 different OS revisions with different drivers in each on multiple machines with some overlap which makes you think something works but it has spotty compatibility.
I find the people who think "PC gaming is great!" are the type who only actively play a handful of games, and maybe a bit of nostalgia off gog. They don't have a full Ikea bookshelf of CD jewel cases and the crushing disappointment that they'll have to ebay a voodoo2 because those Glide wrappers just don't cut it.
In the bad old days an "unlocked" phone would lock itself to the carrier that the SIM was linked to after a certain amount of time. You could swap carriers for a certain amount of time, but then it would stay put, requiring an esoteric unlock process that was a jealously guarded secret. Then the courts ruled you HAD to let people unlock in an easy way. I figured that meant that they'd just stop auto-locking phones. I guess the practice still exists for some lucky consumers.
With the added wrinkle that it's an encrypted file that requires a gatekeeper to allow you to play it. The itunes decryption is mostly offline so while your installation is working and you've done nothing to make it think it should be rearming itself your "purchase" is the same as a DVD. But it's easier to hold onto a physical item that works in any DVD player than it is to manage both the digital files and the DRM system that's designed to stop you from restoring the decryption arbitrarily. If you have the file and your itunes account details I'd be confident it could all be restored to a playable state, so apple aren't that bad at this, but the whole setup gives me the yips.
And that download is yours to keep forever.
And does the iphone's automatic storage management know not to delete it because it's not available for download anymore? "But you should have turned that off!" No, the whole thing is sold as one big system and telling people to micromanage to deal with the edge cases makes the whole system worthless and apple should be held to task for it.
My kids ask me to buy a game online cause the want I stant gratification. But I say no let's buy an actual copy.
Arent' they nothing more than tokens that allow you to download the most recent patched game that is larger than what is stored on the optical media and user serial numbers and stimilar things to bind the optical copy to your account so that you can't resell your copy? In the end, that's the same as a game bought online.
Everything you said is true but in varying degrees. Depends on the game and the publisher. There are plenty of games out there where the 1.0 ver. on the disc is perfectly playable and there's no bundled "resale unfriendly" one time use codes in the box, nor do they require activation or such. But information on this is poor.
Makes me want to start a blog called the "Offline Gamer" or something where you take a retail model PS4, Switch, Xbox One and try and operate them offline as much as possible. I think only the PS4 would work as a pure offline console as the XBox and Switch both require setup online first. But even, let's say you start with an activated console, how many games can you reasonably play without ever having an internet connection? A question I would like answered...
But isn't the problem that while we assign nice comfortable numbers like 100% and 95% to things, batteries don't work that way. The charger firmware detects certain characteristics of the cell voltage and determines the mAh remaining based on an ongoing calibrated voltage drop curve. And I'm sure they give themselves plenty of headroom to play with so that it can "overcharge" a little bit safely when the battery is losing capacity but the firmware hasn't got a good enough reading to tell. But if you never run the battery down this curve gets further and further away from reality.
It stands to reason that eventually the charger starts to overcharge the cells without knowing that there's vastly reduced headroom.
Plus there's all sorts of problems with the way the cells are connected. Some will fail ahead of others, but the loss of performance from them is masked by the others and the charger merrily pumps current through the bad cells on the way to the good cells.
tl;dr I think a proper battery engineer would have their head in their hands at most of the comments in this thread.