NetEase to Fully Acquire Detroit: Become Human Studio Quantic Dream

Don't particularly like Quantic Dream but China buying up more of the gaming industry will always piss me off

This is worse than Microsoft buying up everything. These Chinese companies are unlikely to make games platform exclusive, which is a good thing, but more things owned by China is a big negative.

Surprised Sony didn't want this one. Especially with Eclipse lined up, and Star Wars being one of the hottest properties right now with streaming and gaming. I suppose maybe the price was massively overvalued with this being the case, when you'd expect Quantic will probably revert to making sci-fi/drama games that a much smaller group of gamers (like me) will buy

All power to them for what is probably a massive sale

@Ravix There were Reports a few years ago about how Sony wanted to cut ties with QD because they always went way over Budget, Time and the Games were barely profitable

@Ravix Can you imagine if it was announced Sony had bought them, that mobile studio, and once again paid exclusive content for multiplatform games,... All less than a week after raising the price of the console? Be the cherry.

Too late to protect cultural industries from being bought out by evil regimes, never mind. If people think Russia is doing awful things just wait until China decides to turn the screw and they own all your stuff.

@IonMagi yeah, that's probably fair. I don't follow the game industry closely for behind the scenes stuff. But I can imagine it being the case. Like I said, I like their games, but usually they don't make one's everyone wants.

Going over budget and time and being stubborn for art's sake, I'm fine with 😅 but it doesn't make for good corporate.

It's a weird fit for Star Wars too, so I'm really looking forward to Eclipse to see an art-house mentality applied to Star Wars 😁

I thought those guys made free mmos

All these companies that are bought by Chinese companies say that they will keep creative freedom, but I bet they wouldn't be allowed to say Taiwan is a country.

Well this seems like a great fit. A petty empire run by a megalomaniac with little respect for anybody else… and China.

I think I'd prefer MS to have bought them. For starters it would keep China out of it and MS could do with some really good single player games. Don't mean it as in they don't have any, just haven't seen any on Xbox that is of interest to me like Sony and Nintendo have. It would have also meant more competition pushing Sony do better and acquire a better studio of their own

It’s a real shame watching all your favorite developers being bought by either Microsoft or China while PlayStation counters with a mobile studio

I bet you wrote this on a smartphone or PC that was made in china @Victor_Meldrew

@Bleachedsmiles oh I'm sure it would've caused 'outrage' on Twitter, but out in the real world life would just go on as normal.

I like the Quantic Dream games, but, yeah… there’s something amiss over there and Sony obviously wasn’t comfortable with the relationship, and vice versa. Still, did it have to be NetEase?

The gaming arms race continues. Maybe Embracer will buy NetEase, then Microsoft will buy Embracer, and then Tencent will Microsoft…
I guess I should get a head start and begin learning Mandarin now.

Great a country that can’t be trusted with digital information buying up a company run by a pretentious psychopath. What could go wrong.

I don't like QD games, but I would play them if they were like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw1O6jpASTI

That's too bad. I respect what Quantic Dream makes even if it's not always great in execution. Loved Heavy Rain back in the day...Beyond Two Souls not so much but had some cool parts. I never got around to trying Detroit but have it through PS+.

But yup just another questionable economic connection unfortunately to contend with.

It's fitting because of how similar the NetEase logo and Detroit Red Wings logo are.

I don't think I've ever seen a frenzy of buyouts like what we've witnessed over the last couple years. I'm wondering if it correlates back to Covid shutting everything down and this is the aftermath where many companies were hurting bad enough that their CEOs said f - it.

In the long term, I don't think this will bode well for the industry.

I'm mixed on this. Nothing good comes of NetEase buying anything, and yet QD didn't really make that much of anything. Detroid hyped me like crazy, but the actual game is so meh I could never get into it. @Th3solution got me to give it another go, and I did, and I got farther than before, and I kind of like some things about it now, it's kind of interesting. But then I got the "graveyard" thing and Soul Hackers 2 came out, and...well...there it sits again. I'll finish it someday. It's better than I thought but still too deeply flawed.

I won't really miss QD that much, and yet they had some really cool concepts. I'm assuming they mostly go mobile after these last 2 titles.

@SplooshDmg I think that's temporary and continuously changing, though, once the games situation improves in China then they happen to own the whole world of games. As for QD as a mega-publisher....Netease needs things worth publishing that the public will buy other than mobile tripe first But that's the thing, they have no interest in the expensive console world of games. They're interested in where the mobile money is. So when they buy a company, it's not about making the next Half-Life, it's a tool for the next Crossy Road.

My biggest problem with Sony and S-E is how much it would REDUCE what S-E does. I mean SE reduces themselves, but they're still pretty varied, and a Sony buyout aligning them just along the Sony method of output would kill off so much of what they did, I'd almost rather a holding behemoth like Tencent take them in that sense. Or Embracer, because why not

im a big fan of quantic dreams i hope this doesn't mess up their development team, their games are class offline campaigns never change that guys.

@SplooshDmg I'd argue that the model and template of a 60 player PVP game isn't much different than a mobile game, no matter how you slice it, it's a similar structure development, distribution, and even audience-wise even if it has an up-front price point.

The one thing facing NetEase and Tencent for an SE buyout would be those Japanese domestication laws that make it pretty hard for foreign companies to buy japanese companies. Same problem with "MS should buy Sega". I mean it CAN happen, MS was set to buy SE once before, but it's not a first choice scenario. Softbank would be more likely than Tencent to be permitted to aquire them. Though tencent may be the less bad option

The way I see it is if Sony buys them the become an AAAA FF (the BAD FF) company with maybe DQ and some new IP series here and there studio and basically stop mattering. If NetEase/Tencent buys them they become a mobile sinkhole and basically stop mattering.

If nobody buys them they become an AAAA FF (the BAD FF) company and a mobile sinkhole and stop mattering. BUT they'll release an HD2D game once every 4 years and it will be amazing.

@SplooshDmg Even as a fan (read: addict) of Splatoon, I still don't get how the PVP MP thing became this replacement for all gaming thing. I get how addictive it is, obviously, and yet.... most of the money on that comes from the mtx, not sales, And I just don't get why anyone pumps money into the games like that. If I had to keep pumping money into Splatoon I doubt I'd play it, and if I could optionally pump money into it, I can't imagine why I actually would. IDK, there's something wired wrong in the modern gamer's brains...

Sharp, I think had more to do with the fact that they were basically not just bankrupt but living on as a government public service to the employees, and there were no domestic buyers that had any interest in buying a bankrupt, debt-laiden electronics company with no remaining patents of particular value, no markets of particular interest or growth and really just a 90's fax machine company that also made some outdated display tech and chips and lost 50 yen on the yen. I mean Sony's a washed up has-been in the electronics sector outside Playstation, and even they have some growth markets of interest and some valuable patents under their belt. Sharp........really had nothing. Their microwaves are popular, I'll give them that (Heck I still use a Sharp microwave from the 1980s complete with woodgrain paneling..... why do modern electronics not still work like that?!)

I'm actually surprised Foxconn wanted them. I can't really figure out why. Probably more for real estate for extra fabs than anything else. And Foxconn is Taiwan which is a bit of a special case for Japan.

Well, now you'll have to pay to see the outcome of each decision you choose. I'm done with Quantic Dream games.

@SplooshDmg Yeah, I don't get it. I feel like most of those "gamers" don't actually like video games, they just like being on the phone with their friends. If you removed voice chat, I wonder how many would still play? To me "voice chat" is a new and bizzarre invention. Multiplayer means typing a lot. I don't intend to ever play a game involving any sort of voice chat. But I suspect a lot of these "MP" gamers wouldn't play games without voice chat, and if games didn't have voice chat, would just talk on the phone instead of playing games. The point of gaming, to me is that it DOESN'T involve humans, because I basically just can't stand any and all humans.

How are you on the final boss already? I'm like 3-4 weeks into XC3 and not near the final area yet. Do you just do nothing but play XC 6 hours a day? But....yeah.....that boss is utterly insane. I honestly have no idea how I managed to cheese through it but I basically almost quit. There were a few difficulty spikes that were just insane in the last quarter of that game in an unforgivable way. 2 and, so far, 3, thankfully don't suffer from that.

2 has one utterly insane difficulty spike mid-game owing to a battle that requires you to use the full overcomplicated battle system without having properly taught you that it even exists. You fight a boss that has a thorns damage (returns the dealt damage back to you) so if you don't do the chain burst to totally annhilate it in one big move for the last half of its health bar you literally can't beat it...but the game never told you how to do that correctly at that point. But that's the only massive spike. (Excluding optional superbosses, and those things are INSANE.)

Another superb studio doomed... What a shame... what a huge shame for QD.

@SplooshDmg Video games has turned everyone into teenage girls. "I'm on the PHONE, mom, jeeeze!"

To me, it doesn't compute. I ignored the introduction of voice chat, and still refuse to acknowledge it exists. Good grief, 6 years old on a phone with friends? I don't think I even touched a telephone when I was 6. And that's when phones were tethered to the wall like they're supposed to be! Heck, I'd pay good money to not have to touch a telephone today

Gaming used to be a niche thing for niche people who are shut ins and want to avoid the world because too much world exposure may or may not lead to building an army and engaging in Earth purification.

Social people had a million other things to do. How did they infest gaming? That's really why there's so much conflict. For the "mainstream" and therefore the money, gaming is this social phone activity. That means there's no money for bookworms. Maybe we'll end up just going back to being bookworms as they destroy gaming more and more.

Waaaaait....45 hours of XC to the final boss?! You're definitely doing it wrong! That's a 100+ hour game played properly! All of them are. To be fair the side content in 1 is pure trash and it's really worth seeking it all out in 2 and 3 (albeit, in 2, you need an internet guide otherwise you'll miss most of it. You have to be at a certain location at a certain in-game time with a specific blade character, some of which are gatcha rewards, in your party for the quest to be picked up, it's really terrible design that expects you to just wander the towns with random characters at random times without a guide.)

I still haven't started the last two acts of DQ XI S yet

The more China and the Saudi Public Fund invest in the games industry the more it's looking like I'll be buying used copies of games I really want to play.

Between this purchase, Nagoshi Studio, Jar of Sparks, Jackalope Games... and whatever else they spent millions investing in. NetEase is position themselves to become a major player outside of just Mobile games.

@SplooshDmg LOL, yep, "single player MMO" is pretty much the standard reaction to the XC1 side quests.

The good news is the side quests in 2 and 3 are a LOT less like that. The bad news is you need an internet guide to find them in 2, half of them you can't complete until the end of the game, and 1/3 of them can't be done until you've completed another one (that you couldn't complete until the end of the game) and nothing about the quest tells you this so you try to solve it for days until finding from the internet the objective hasn't spawned yet because you need to complete another quest, that you can't complete until you get to the World Tree, and you didn't get that quest because you didn't have KOS-MOS bound in your party at 9:30PM near the Inn at Fonsa Myma, and you didn't have access to KOS-MOS because you didn't luck out and win her from the egg hatching mini-game yet.

@SplooshDmg Heh, I usually try to do all the side content available at any time before advancing the story. Which is, I think how most games (and XC3 overall) are designed, level-wise. Not so much XC2....

All the games are huge, and sometimes have MMO open world scale, but yeah they definitely improved that aspect after the first one. IT was a Wii game after all, so it comes from a different time and place (and was pretty impressive for Wii.)

The combat in 1 is pretty simple. You're in for some whiplash going to 2. That has what is probably the most complicated RPG battle system of all time. At first it seems like a streamlined version of 1, but, nope...it's a whole other thing (with basically no tutorial of value, or even an introduction it exists.) When you get to the tutorial for a "full chain burst" and something about "orbs"......don't ignore the details....it's critical. The demo amounts to 3 panels of text and "here's a demo: Push "A" to learn!" and that's that....

I started Ys IX twice on Switch and just, couldn't bear it. I now have it on PS4, and I'll stream it to my Kishi for my portable Ys fx at 60fps. After Soul Hackers 2 which may take months. I'm finally trying to finsh Detroit that way, too, but keep interrupting it for other things, because honestly....it's not that engaging....

@SplooshDmg Yeah, I mean a lot of people (and I was one of them for a long long loooong time) just aren't going to have a good streaming experience with the internet how it is, but I'm surprised how little love there is among enthusiasts for streaming. It really opens up a wide range of options (if it works for your internet), more competition, and honestly, it's just freaking convenient. The only reason I don't use it more fully is because of suspend states being important to how I stream. I put like 100 hours into Yakuza 0 purely streamed despite owning the game just out of pure convenience.

I do wonder how much the latency is impacted by the direct connect, and how much of it is convenience, though. Bluetooth controllers are the devil, for sure. But for MS, if you have a physical connection, a console, or, I'm assuming any of those "built-in TV certified jobs" or the upcoming streaming stick things for them, it should be using the MS controller protocol, not BT, and the MS protocol already is a modified WiFi.

When I was doing Y0 on a Surface Pro, and moved from a BT controller to buying the MS controller dongle, the lag just vanished. So as long as the officially supported TV,s streaming sticks ,etc exist they're already set. PCs and phones have the worst of it requiring a dongle/USBC connection to not suck.

@SplooshDmg If you haven't bought Ys IX before now at least once, you're not a real nerd.

@SplooshDmg There's always the waifus...

Lol..... Yeeeaep.... That's Xenoblade.... The second game doesn't have quite as many hard left turns as the first. It has its moments tough and the characters are better developed.

Also Rikki is best character. You'll see soon

@KidBoruto Because they're one of the most vile and evil totalitarian states on the planet so most people don't want them having any form of control over our media

@SplooshDmg I said Riki, but I meant Tora. It's like Riki turbocharged. Like a hamster on a sugar high