GameStop Stock Worth $5.13...But Only Worth 7cents In Store Credit

Coleslaw said:

Imagine surviving for more then 20 years when the genius 16 year old Greta says we only have 10 to live lol Checkmate

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HOW DARE YOU

Common sense check: if you haven't pre-ordered games for Spring you may want to do digital over physical and not rely on worldwide shipping in a virus ravaged world.

Vorph said:

Why wouldn't they run games off external? I mean, right now MS doesn't even officially support changing the internal hard drive in the Xbone at all and they try to force you to use an external SSD. But whether you technically can install to external, I think the question is will anyone want to? These 'special' SSDs next gen is using are probably so much faster than even USB 3.1 gen 2 that you'd never want to install anything but indie games on them. I can't see much use for an external drive other than for archival purposes, like if you quit playing a game like Destiny or Division and want to archive it instead of re-downloading 100GB in a few months.

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That really is the big question, whether next gen systems are heavily optimized with the assumption of the internal SSD drive. I think people mistakingly think ps5/xb2 are just using PC like SSD drives as storage. Its a lot more than that. Its NVME (still technically SSD) over probably PCIe 4.0, which only released six months ago and pretty much nobody has or is using on PCs. Its likely extremely optimized to the point where it seems reasonable to assume games will NOT run on external drives since it would make multiplayer games and the like impossible if some people are playing on external and some are on internal and they have different load times, etc.

I'm just hoping they have thought a lot about it and have solutions out the gate, remember the PS4 launched with NO external drive support and that was the situation for YEARS. Xbox supported it out of the box but you can't swap internal drives as you said.

I keep a 8TB drive on each of my consoles and never delete a game anymore, just push it to external. Put it back on internal when I want to play it for a while. I hope next gen works that way too, letting you use external drives as archive points. Its even more interesting when you think about game streaming, with a lot of rumors about being able to start a game immediately over stream while it downloads/installs and then you switch to local play after that. Same with updates. That kinda stuff could be very cool.

spronk said:

Its a lot more than that. Its NVME (still technically SSD) over probably PCIe 4.0, which only released six months ago and pretty much nobody has or is using on PCs.

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My new PC has two NVMe drives in it. Boot drive is PCIe 3, and since I went with a X570 motherboard I decided to try out PCIe 4 for my game drive. The difference between the two is negligible. Hell, the difference between NVMe and normal SSD is negligible for almost everything that isn't a synthetic benchmark. I can move files around faster, and NVMe drives (even gen 3) boot Windows 10 quite a bit quicker, but in terms of game performance and loading times it's pretty much a waste of money still.

So I've been wondering about that since Sony first started talking about how massively faster load times were going to be. Specifically what they're doing that's so different from even bleeding edge PC hardware to get that much performance benefit out of it.

Hardware that won't bottleneck the hard drives is the biggest performance boost. But that's the rub you're not comparing bleeding edge PCs between then and now it's consoles which traditionally are middle of the road. If the PS5 generation leans more towards the high end then you're getting a boost simply from going mid to high instead of mid to mid.


There's at least hope we'll get a USB-C port for externals as well.

So speaking of stores on their way out... Fry's Electronics. I know many of you are in the East Coast and blessed with Microcenter but on the West coast it's Fry's and it's going out! They claim they are switching suppliers but the shelves are bare.

meStevo said:

They've been like this for like a year and a half here in Vegas, at least.

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I never remember to go to them because they advertise like shit. Their deals are never up on slickdeals, or put out anywhere, and the website is ass.

meStevo said:

They've been like this for like a year and a half here in Vegas, at least.

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Yup the one at town square is a ghost town. Probably 1 sales person and 2 cashiers the most working at one time.

Chris said:

Digital can't be resold.

I traded in all my childhood consoles for a Switch (and storage space), a lot of the Nintendo games had kept their value, I got £50 for Pokemon Soul Silver for example. I couldn't trade in my digital games on the 3DS though.

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its really just nintendo that applies to though, you won't get fuck all for any 2+ year old ps4 or xbox game. virtually all ps3/360 games are kinda worthless, although ironically with all the rumors of PS2 and PS3 BC for PS5 the prices of a few select games - the ones that will never get remastered, or the publisher/dev has vanished - has been steadily going up.

It does make sense to go physical for single player games that are not nintendo and 1-2 years old but pretty much any multiplayer game, just go digital. division 2 for example is freaking $3 right now on all the various stores, albeit its that price to get you to pay $40 for their expansion which launches in 2 days.

there are also weird side effects of new pack in codes, for example GTA 5 is still a top seller every month and I suspect some of it has to do with the fact that new premium physical editions (on sale for $15 now) come with a pack in code for like $1m online cash, which I think you can just redeem to an existing account. It all feels slimey and predatory.

and this is why they should be arresting people in corporate

I highky doubt some $13/hour store manager is going to risk going to jail over a Gamestop corporate directive.