I would disagree with the last sentence.

Astrobot was actually a game. It was more like any other game that taught you how to play the game with the implemented features. This could have been any other game doing the same thing but it came directly from Sony.

Looking at the “Welcome Tour gameplay” video, this isn’t even close to what Astrobot did. It is a Hub in which you get told what those features are with minigames for that specific feature.

My point is: If the only point is to advertise the functionality of the console, charging any sort of money for it is not productive for what it should be achieving. You want people to learn how to use your console and then charge money for it will do the exact opposite. People won’t buy it because there is no benefit to actually buying it.

Any other game would teach you how to play it anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJoAaOClzrY

I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.

Well, I can only speak from my own experience.

When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn’t get it because it wasn’t in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this “Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website” which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn’t buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn’t hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same “invitation link” didn’t work. I reported this to the support, but they didn’t really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn’t know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.

And now, there isn’t really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.