It’s for sure not a legitimate process.

DMCA doesn’t entitle you to force a service that complies with DMCA requests down.

There’s a big difference between “not correlated” and “inversely related” though. The latter is very deliberately saying that good scores are a bad thing.

A 5% refund?

That’s almost more disrespectful than nothing.

It’s not the ratio.

Gamepass’s entire library of “not dogshit”, cumulatively, isn’t worth a year of the subscription to actually own. They don’t publish a meaningful number of games worth playing if they were free, and you can count the indie games (which are cheap to actually own anyways) that are actually good on your hands.

every single new game

Their catalogue is dogshit and has a very small selection of games that are even worth considering on a steep discount.

It’s an incredibly far cry from the “all” he mentioned, and it isn’t close to the best or most desirable.

I’m well aware of what it has available, and it’s genuinely not good enough to get me to install Windows if they provided it for free. But the entire reason Gamepass exists is because they know it makes them more long term than buying your games.

You can’t.

Age verification is not compatible with any remotely acceptable version of the internet. It’s an obscene privacy violation in all cases by definition.

Any implementation short of a webcam watching you while you use the site is less than trivial to bypass with someone else’s ID while opening numerous massive tracking/security holes for no reason.

That means stuff they publish. Which, despite all their acquisitions, is consistently very mediocre. And because of the day one “free” status, almost always has bad extra monetization on top of it.

But you don’t get every single new game with GamePass, either. You get a mediocre set of stuff published by Microsoft with some occasional AA games and a random selection of indies, some of which are actually good, but also aren’t that expensive to just buy and own instead.

The thing with market cap is that if it’s not tied to actual revenue, it can go down just as easily as up.

Customers need to be willing to spend enough money on it to pay off the massive infrastructure costs or the bubble is going to burst.

The actual difference is that you can add it after the fact. The original digital edition never promised you’d ever be able to add a drive.

They still listed it as starting at $399

It’s not really new though. They launched with a digital only PS5, too, for the same reason (to create a lower price to entry for the same hardware). If they’d just priced it at $800 with the disk drive included, would people be happier?

The reality is that their margins aren’t high. The PS4 Pro might not have had the same premium, but it was using very old tech that they were able to get prices down over time on. Their chip costs haven’t gone down this generation because of the world around them. The Pro is still a high end chip on a manufacturing process with lots of demand. It wasn’t going to cost less. It couldn’t.

It’s also only actually parody if you are using the material to make a commentary on the original work.

Someone like Weird Al gets explicit permission for all his works. (Though the extent that that’s respect for the artists vs legal necessity may be debatable because he does tend to comment on the work he’s imitating.)

Money the imitator makes is not a particularly meaningful factor in any of the relevant laws, outside of poisoning the explicit exceptions for fair use that fan fiction isn’t.

Fan fiction isn’t legal (excluding scenarios where an author explicitly blesses it, which has happened). It’s identical copyright infringement to use someone else’s character in your own work whether you get paid for it or not. It’s just generally not worth pursuing and alienating your most enthusiastic fans for most creators/companies, especially when there’s no money involved.

The games won’t work. Games that are PS5 and not PS4 will not work correctly with hardware that is inferior, because they’re built and tuned to one specific hardware profile. You can’t just “render at lower resolution and settings” without active dev involvement. Hyper optimization literally to the point of very specific clock cycles of very specific sequences of instruction calls is the entire value proposition of a console. The build will not function properly on hardware that can’t match it exactly.

Low end games that don’t need the hardware will already work on a handheld PS4 because they already have PS4 versions. It is not a PS5 if there is one single PS5 game that doesn’t work exactly identically to an actual PS5.

Xbox series S plays the exact same games as the series X because Microsoft refused to allow games that didn’t work on the shitbox, leading demanding games to skip the entire system instead. There’s a reason Sony completely dominated this generation in sales volume, even for multiple years of supply chain disruption when Xboxes were freely available and PlayStations required months of wait time. It’s because the entire premise of the series S is a deranged idea with no redeeming factors.

It can’t offer downscaled graphics without developers actively making changes to support it. That’s not how console builds work, even if we pretend the GPU is all the power draw you need to eliminate. If there’s one single PS5 title it doesn’t support, it is not and cannot be described as a PS5.

At some future point, it will be, for sure. But it draws 200 watts, so you’re going to need to improve the efficiency by a factor of ~10, costs haven’t decreased like normal due to a bunch of global factors, and it’s looking like we’re getting closer to the point of needing new techniques to continue shrinking. If you wait long enough it will be an option, but you could very reasonably match the PS4 and scale up production in the next year or so if you wanted to.

The PS5 Pro runs everything made for PS5 without compromise. It takes absolutely nothing from the developer to work with any game that is available for PS5. This is not some optional trait. It’s mandatory for calling it a PS5 not to be overt fraud. Every PS5 game in someone’s library must work, without exception, for a new device to be a PS5. If it literally requires a checkbox from the developer, it is not a PS5.

The Xbox series S is the entire reason the entire console family is a shitheap no one will even consider buying. A cut down version destroys the entire ecosystem.

It does have to be.

The entire point of consoles is standardized hardware. If it requires a single line of code from the developers anywhere in the process, it doesn’t play PS5 games and you don’t have the library you’re advertising.

The second there’s a single instruction you can’t replicate the same/better clock for clock performance in, it is not a handheld PS5. Especially when anything that doesn’t need the power has a PS4 version.

There’s no chance.

Steam Deck isn’t remotely comparable in performance to a PS5.

PS5 isn’t practical.

Just do a handheld PS4. That’s achievable and opens a huge library.