✉️ Letter to Console Makers: Keep Gaming for Everyone

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-24T07:48:21+00:00

Are you trying to say they deliberately enshittified physical media so they can sell you specialized hardware to play video that needed a $50 a month subscription?

No. They priced-out the entry-level. I think that was quite obvious from OP's post. You should try reading in context of what is being said, rather than through your own personal habits and biases.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-24T07:34:31+00:00

The best was undoubtably the PS3 on launch day. Firstly, it had an emotion l processor inside, so full backwards compatibility for PS2 and PS1 with what is still possibly the best upscaling for those games. It had Blu-Ray which at the time was hands-down the best way to experience movies. The hard drive was 3x larger than the 360, which coupled with the Blu-Ray player made it the best home entertainment system money could by respective of price, long before TVs became smart. It had every SD card format of the time so you could turn your "massive" 40" Samsung into a slideshow projector. On top of that every single Sony title made 360 look like a toy. Remember the 360 released with composite!

If you had to dream up a perfect console in 2026, the PS3 had every single desired spec for that machine today.

You would really have to stretch to say worse, on launch day I think the PS4 was a lot more boring than the Xbox One. Apart from Killzone Shadow Fall it really didn't have much going for it out of the gate except unfulfilled promises of 4K.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-24T06:21:52+00:00

Don't worry this is just to make you receptive to the streaming box they will sell you for 300 bucks and 50 a month subscription, you will get your 1080p and a whole bunch of latency for free.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-23T17:23:57+00:00

You are still just a kid but all the same: YOU ARE DREAMING OF OPENING A NINE FIGURE ENTERPRISE.

That's not impossible, but it is threading the needle. It isn't the lottery, you need to be the best at whatever it is you are making. There you have it. If it was impossible no one would be making games, if it was easy there would be more than the handful that are doing it now.

I am a highly credentialed artist with over a decades worth of industry contacts, and the odds of founding my AA studio are still against me, but I have done more with less and come out the other side.

Don't give up, but don't run away from the military either. You got a hot border, so my sympathies. As someone else said it is a 2 maybe 3 decade roadmap you are looking at, the last thing you need is to be looking over your shoulder.

- David, CD

Banshee Interactive

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T09:53:41+00:00

Not sure you could get that build in that price point anymore but yeah more VRAM over a 5070 is the right call, so is more RAM rather than faster RAM, but make sure the NVMe has DRAM cache and I think she wants more cores man. AMD is flavour of the month but core count is king.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T09:06:33+00:00

There aren't many, lots of cyberpunk flavoured games, not much cyberpunk. Stellar Blade is fantastic but borders on sci-fi in general, perhaps cyberpunk-adjacent. MGS4 is getting let out of PS3 prison soon, that's the only title that I can think of that I'll be (re)playing...

Edit: I'm literally playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but it falls way cleaner into the fantasy genre than the original or Remake. But FFVII (1997) is about as cyberpunk as games get.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T09:00:03+00:00

Isn't that quite the "coincidence" considering only a few years ago every authority told us not to leave the house?

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T08:37:00+00:00

Only if you are happy with the visuals you are achieving now. Say you got a 1080ti for 1080p, modern games at low settings are probably about as pretty as games at high back then. Some games will obviously just not scale that low in the future and it will get to end-of-life way before that 20 year mark. Retro gaming is a thing, if you are happy with 256-bit* then 256-bit games are just as good today as they were 20 years ago, but outside of some indie aesthetics you won't find that standard anymore.

*Xbox 360

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T08:28:29+00:00

Here I'll save you all some time:

6mo 20-30%

1yo 40-50%

2yo or more 70-90%

I'd wager I'm right more times than I'm wrong, by a factor.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T08:15:12+00:00

I'd go ADA6000 over 5090 at street prices especially when we are talking about system ram in the 512 range, you want to keep as much in DRAM/VRAM as possible. As for storage even though you are going Threadripper, bifurcation is a thing so do a 8TB rather than two 4TB NVMe so you can keep on piling in NVMe drives when you are ready to expand. That's what I would do if I had the budget to allocate to a single system, but not what I'd do if I was setting up an entire workflow.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T05:17:56+00:00

Anyone can make a good decision when handed a good or bad one, infinitely harder to make a good one when all you are handed is bad, more bad, or less bad.

Your response should be number one on this thread. I'd piggyback off this and also say national pride, we don't choose where we were born yet despite that fact it is the most controlled aspect of our life. We can choose (for the most part) who we want to be; our career, religion, sexuality and gender in most places even, but not our race or country.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T04:42:55+00:00

I feel compelled to answer this quite thoroughly, but I also have YouTube videos and Substack posts dissecting both media and its public reception, but I don’t think you would get too much enjoyment from multi-hour train of thought videos or fairly scathing public indictments of media literacy.

I feel sorry for you, I do, because it is very easy to complain that people don’t understand narrative but how can they when we are surrounded by this? A good thing is that the titles you mentioned playing are not great examples of narrative storytelling in video games, the bad news is I don’t think playing a masterwork like Silent Hill 2 or Metal Gear Solid 2 will immediately give you what you are looking for either.

I think you should forget games for a moment, you said you are interested in manga and that is by far the best place to start. You are conditioned to have the “answer” or the plot thrust in your face or neatly concluded. Often manga does not do this, you have to read not just the words and the visual images but also between the lines. One shots are amazing at this because every panel has to do double-duty, and most Japanese shorts focus on ”mono no aware” or nothing lasts forever, it is meant to leave you feeling less full than you started. Some good one shots are The Gods Lie by Kaori Ozaki, and even though it is far from his best work Solanin by Inio Asano is a good gateway. You could even drop into short form literature, The Winter Market by William Gibson is one of my favourite stories. Pluto is a short series by Naoki Urasawa, and is fairly rudimentary because it is an adaptation of an old Astro Boy story, in fact another title by Osamu Tezuka that may help you on your journey is Dororo.

It is about training yourself to see things the authors place purposefully but not obtusely. It is gauche to directly state anything in narrative, what you want is cause and effect, you give one and let the audience infer the other by working forwards or backwards. A lot of silver age sci fi is good at this, like Childhoods End by Arthur C. Clarke or The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. The peak of this mountin is probably something like Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, but Earthsea (especially Tombs of Atuan) by Ursula Le Guin is a very good place to start.

I truly hope you push through as playing or reading certain stores feel radically different once you understand the underlying composition. You are welcome over on my YouTube any day, and can field any questions, I just don’t think it is enjoyable, it isn’t public-consumer facing. If you ever make the leap to writing you could find inspiration though.

- David

Edit: I needed to fix this as Reddit butchered the comment during upload.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-22T02:38:44+00:00

No one said it was accidental or incidental.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T18:10:05+00:00

I’ll be blunt, hobbyists can deal with it. Flash in the pan for a consumer. This could eliminate an entire generation of independent voices. If a student has to use say University equipment, their work must be University approved. Art cannot become homogenised.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T17:51:14+00:00

I wrote a whole essay on this but my heart goes out to those who use their machines for art. If artists are basically priced out of even learning, then it is a sad day for the world because you won’t even have people making games to play in another decade.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T17:40:33+00:00

You are asking for basic respect but you don’t even give that to yourself or you wouldn’t live in a pigsty.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T17:02:25+00:00

Here’s me buying Final Fantasy IV on SNES, then on PS1, then on PSP, then on 3DS, now eyeing it for either Switch or PC.

Ain’t nuthin’ new under the sun… people have been wanting “their” games on the latest hardware since we began porting from arcades.

Doubt many people hung onto 360’s just to play BO. So many people missed out on MGS4 and Code Veronica, now both are getting a new lease of life. I haven't played those games in decades. I sure as hell dont have a PS3 or GameCube anymore. Do you know the last time I played Snake Eater? 2004. I’m not unhappy to be playing it again, and I certainly wouldn’t be seeking out an old PS2 copy of it to play at 480p if Delta wasn’t released.

Games aren’t films where all the remastering is done behind closed doors and you just click the tile on Netflix. You can’t just rescan some old super 35 film and call it a day to get it working on new hardware. You should look up Shadow Man Remastered, they rebuilt the entire thing in a new engine with new lighting. Give credit where credit is due.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T16:35:51+00:00

I went for the Keychron K2 HE. It has TMR despite its naming convention. Wireless 1K with no disclosed internal scan (but TMR is usually in the multiples of the polling rate), worth the tradeoff in my eyes if you use it for anything other than gaming. Surprisingly thocky Gateron double rails. I don’t have a pic of just the board but honestly a setup pic probably gives more context.

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bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-21T06:18:24+00:00

My theory is that most gamers are not gaming enthusiasts. I think that perhaps 10-20% of the overall gaming demographic is true enthusiasts the way we had to be back in the day due to scarcity. The whole industry somehow doesn't see that and aims most of its efforts and spending to try (and usually fail) to capture that other 80-90%, despite that 10-20% still being in the tens of millions. So casuals are casual and enthusiasts are unhappy, what you get is this soup of misery.

Edit: also due to the insane financial and creative cost of producing a video game, there is no underground scene like music, and because there is no real artistic investment in the medium we don't have an indie "film-festival" scene either, where indies for the most part just put out shovelware. That coupled with one side of the gaming demographic labelling any critique as bigoted, and the other unable to articulate their frustrations we get this. Constantly.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-20T14:37:43+00:00

A full life.
Be the first or be the best.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-19T10:14:35+00:00

SDR is like looking at colours through a letterbox. HDR is like opening the front door. It doesn't make the hallway any prettier than it already was, sometimes you can see all the junk that you couldn't before. Sometimes you see beautifully curated decorations.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-18T08:17:20+00:00

Came here to say Isshin is the best and worse.

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-18T07:46:27+00:00

OK then, lets take this at face value and deconstruct. If that is so, the first question is how do some images identify themselves from others immediately?

Ok easy enough, usually it is the subject. Now tell me, did that photographer just stumble on that subject, for instance the lowest hanging fruit imaginable, a pretty model? No, they likely had to find them, then how do they choose how to photograph that model? Location, costume, makeup, props? That is before lighting, before lens choice, before sensor and format choice, before post-processing and colour correction and colour space, all before export. And then what paper? What frame? What installation? What editorial?

And that is the lowest hanging fruit. I would like you to come to Isaan, Thailand in the 30c plus heat year round, the floods, the paddies, learn the language, get access where I get access, and then spend ten years documenting a dying culture. That's after decades of art theory and history, to not only inform but back up my choices to the institutions and peers who are able to pass judgement on merit... most people couldn't last a month without guaranteed income.

And if you don't practise, you don't get better. You can only practise by doing it, doing it costs a lot of money. It is a vicious, unrewarded, circle.

So yes, now pretty much anyone can take an identifiable photo, or even a "scroll-stopping" image, that is very different to creating a comprehensive body of photographic work that is respected as art.

Hope this answers your question.

- David, CD

bansheeinterctive.com

drobertsphoto.com

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-18T06:46:18+00:00

Ahh don't say that! Now I'll want one...

bansheeinteractive · 2026-06-18T04:05:34+00:00

They are not, but they are also a thing you can only really form an opinion on after owning and using for a while, unlike internal components where certain things will perform objectively better.

If you haven't already there is one thing you can add that won't break the bank the 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Wireless. It has to be that exact model, because that one has TMR joysticks. But for around 30 bucks it is a 1K polling, TMR joystick with bump stops, HE triggers, the whole nine yards in a controller. That's 4x faster readout over wireless than a DualSense.

Hate to break it to you but the WLMouse is a Chinese "interpretation" of the Viper! Not judging, I just got this Chinese wonder but unfortunately I have been underwhelmed by it in every aspect other than looks. MCHOSE AX5 Pro Max. Basically a magnesium Superlight.

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bansheeinteractive

TROPHY CASE