Comments 1,000

Re: Helldivers 2 Devs Met with Instant Killzone Crossover Pricing Backlash

ChrisDeku

Overpriced cosmetics is nothing new and every game that does them will normally have a battle pass style approach where the battle pass offers much better value than the standalone cosmetics to make the season pass appear to be “good value”.

These prices are not even egregious within this model, they’re on the lower-middle ground. Diablo IV for example is a $70 game that has a battle pass, paid yearly expansions and cosmetics are all like $10-30 and you can’t earn the premium currency in game in Diablo IV. The there’s the upper end of the market where games like Marvel Snap hide exclusive cosmetic card variants in bundles that cost $100 and are only available for 5 days.

Re: Xbox Feels It Made a Mistake Skipping PS5 with Hellblade 2, It's Claimed

ChrisDeku

While it’s not a perfect metric by any stretch, the Ninja Theory sequel debuted with less than 4,000 players on Steam, and its inclusion in Game Pass likely kneecapped its full-price sales.

It didn’t even make the top 100 selling games in Europe in its first month, and apparently it wasn’t even in the top 20 most played games on Xbox despite being on gamepass.

I imagine this is one of the moments that really pushed Xbox execs towards the 3rd party publisher route. The game was likely reasonably expensive to make and was received well yet it just disappeared into the abyss.

Re: Sony's Giga Hit Helldivers 2 Blows Up on PS5, PC All Over Again

ChrisDeku

@alienwithin Clown comment alert. It didn’t “lose 50k players” since the update. The day of the update was a peak of 133k, Friday was a peak of 150k and Saturday was a peak of 132k. The number of players changed during the day, because people don’t play 24 hours straight obviously. Path of Exile 2 “lost 250k players” between peak time last evening and this morning for example.

The idea that Marvel rivals is a “Giga hit” and HD2 is not is preposterous. Rivals has a peak user count on steam of 480k players while being 100% free to play. HD2 had a peak of 458k players while being $40 for the standard edition and $60 for the premium edition. It sold around 7M copies in steam alone in it’s first 3 months, around 15m worldwide now.

Helldivers 2 enters the top 10 grossing global games on steam every major update and every Warbond release. Currently it is the 5th highest grossing game on Steam today, compare that to a AAA big release like Indiana Jones thats like a week old and already down to 15th. A title update for HD2 will generate more revenue than an entire AAA game in its launch month, and HD2 will have dozens of major updates over the course of its lifetime.

Co-op games do not sustain massive peak user counts because people playe them much more casually than PVP game. Path of Exile 2 will be the exact same scenario as HD2. Path of Exile hit 229k after its last major update on the 22nd of July and by October its peak daily user counts had dropped to 12k. POE2 will be the same pattern. It’s still a massive hit, just like HD2.

Re: Sony's Giga Hit Helldivers 2 Blows Up on PS5, PC All Over Again

ChrisDeku

People make a big issue out of the peak concurrent numbers but it should be noted that Helldivers has never once left the top 5 most played games on Steam in the USA by Monthly Active Users. In October, the last month with data, it was the 3rd most played games in the US, behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock.

It has an absolutely massive active userbase even if people are only playing once a week or every few weeks etc.Theres a ton of PVP focused games that are populated almost entirely by the 10 hour a day no-lifers that drive up concurrent numbers really high but those games are just getting more hours played by a smaller number of active players. Helldivers 2 respects people’s time and you can skip months and not miss anything at all. Warbonds are all permanent etc.

Re: Intergalactic PS5 Is Naughty Dog's Wildest, Most Creative Story Yet

ChrisDeku

Jesus, people really don't get the "product placement" in these settings. It's there to ground you, by giving you an anchor to the real world, as opposed to the cold clinical clean look of traditional sci-fi. It immediately links my mind to a more "realistic" corporate setting as opposed to the future utopian society of something like Star Trek, that a lot of popular media copies.

They're not doing it to make some extra pennies.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare So you’re done trying to bend reality to your own opinions? That’s good.

I’m 41 btw, a published academic in the field of Environmental Economics. An ACCA chartered Accountant and the owner of a small business that sells tainwanese tea in the UK. Thanks for asking, lad.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare You can go look at the box for Rise of the Ronin too..You’ll see it says Playstation Studios on it, you’ll see it says PlayStations studios when it launches the game. Your opinion can’t overwrite the reality that Sony decides. They classify games that they publish as First Party, that is an fact.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare You’re talking completely nonsense with timed exclusivity. Sony are in control over the entire production, they contract the entire studio to make the games and control every facet of that development as per the contract they signed.

Kojima now has the IP rights because he bought them from Sony, they’re not just given away for free. Anything that happens with the game is because Sony allow it, because they were given economic recompense, that’s how business works.

At teh end of the day this is a fact: Sony and Nintendo classify all games they publish as first party, and all games they don’t publish on their platform as third party.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft only list first party and third party sales on their official accounts. Every game published by them is included as a first party sale. Second Party is a casual term people on the internet like to say that has no official meaning, What part of that is hard to understand?

generally speaking - first party means that it is within your own organisation

No it doesn’t have anything to do with “making”. Apple don’t have people making IPhones, they contract companies that do that for them, companies that makes chips, companies that assemble phones, companies that make displays for them.

Movies and tv series are made by ad-hoc production teams that are not employed directly by the Studio a lot of the time. The fact those production teams aren’t owned by Disney, say, has no bearing on the classification of the product.

It is about economics. If Sony publishes the game then 100% of the revenue does directly to them. Then they pay others based on contracts. Thats the only thing that defines First Party games. Not ownership of the factors of production. Only sweatlords on the internet obsess over those things, and only in the last few years. No one ever came out to say Smash brothers, Pokemon, Metroid, Kirby, Mario RPgs are not Nintendo first party games because the studios developing them aren’t owned by Nintendo. The obsession with ownership of factors of production is pretty ridiculous, in no other industry on the world do people obsess over corporate ownership of assets as they do in the modern video games industry.

At the end of the day it’s completely irrelavent who owns the shares in the company making the games, it’s only important who’s making games. Sony are funding and overseeing the development of Death Stranding 2, it’s because of them the game exists. Obsessing over the fact that they sold the IP rights to Kojima like that somehow changes the nature of the product or how we should view it is nonsense.

It’s officially a first party game. That’s how it will be listed on Sony Accounts. It will have a PlayStation Studios Splash screen on startup. It will say PlayStation Studios on the box. The reveal trailer says PlayStation Studios at the start of the video before anything else. You can feel free to tell the billion dollar corporation that you and some other dudes on Reddit don’t agree with this classification and tell them about your second party casual terminology and who knows, maybe they’ll change all their official accounting from now on. Good luck.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare

dude... trust me... that's exactly what first party means

"Trust me dude, I know more than the official classifications used by every major First party developer in this history of video games"

Alright bro, you do you, you read it on the internet so it definitely has to be correct.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare No it doesn't mean that and it never did. A first party game is a game published by the platform holder. This is modern revisionism in order to cast shade.

All games published by Sony are listed as First Party in their accounts, same as Nintendo and MS. There is no Second party, that doesn't exist in official Video game Accounting language. It's a term someone made up.

First party is published by the platform holder, third party is published by a party that is not the platform holder. That's how it's officially classified. Ownership of assets used to develop products is not a factor.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare Sony is publishing the game, therefore it's first party. The party in this case is Sony. They don't need to dlown every developer who makes the game. Half of Nintendo's first party games are made by external studios. Microsoft flight Sim is made by an external studio.

Re: Sony Highlights Biggest PS5 Games for 2025 in New Trailer

ChrisDeku

@KundaliniRising333 How about you list all the first party games from the first 4 years of the PS4(and any other PlayStation) and we'll see how your nostalgia actually compares to reality when it's laid bare.

The reality is the first 4 years of the PS5 are stronger than the first 4 years of PS4.

Re: Round Up: Indiana Jones Reviews Are Live, Mostly Very Strong

ChrisDeku

And that won't stop there as in reality Sony already knows that offline single player games are only stealing away profits....the shift will happen is just a matter of time.

You’re living in an alternate reality, those games have made sony giant stacks of money. GoW, Spider-man, Last of US, Uncharted 4, Horizon: ZD etc. all 20m+ units sold. GoW: Ragnarok was 15m units in 12 months. Spider-man 2 sold 11m in 6 months. Even a new IP like Ghost of Tsushima sold 14m already.

Some basic maths will show how much money these games make. 15m units of Ragnarok even at a conservative $40 Net Revenue per unit is $600m, at $50 Net per unit it’s $750m.

They then get to make money from these games again by selling them on PC and by putting them on PS+, which generates around $1.1B a quarter(Gamepass is almost $1b a quarter).

Playstation has never been making more money than now. They are on course to make around $3b in Operating Income(profit) this Financial Year, which I believe is the second highest in the history of Playstation, the record year was also during the PS5 generation. The PS5 generation has already registered $10B in operating income, the highest of any PlayStation generation ever(even after accounting for inflation). Profit went down for a little bit, due to difficult global conditions but that period has already passed, operating Income was up 184% last Quarter compared to the same quarter from 12 months ago.

Sony aren’t putting the games on other devices because they’re struggling for money, it’s because they’re making more money than ever and they want to find an away of making even more. Their first party games have never been as profitibale as they are now, the best selling in their history, and network services is providing high stable revenue all generation around, unlike previous gens where they would lose early on and then hit a profit period later on.

Re: Round Up: Indiana Jones Reviews Are Live, Mostly Very Strong

ChrisDeku

@Major_Player The whole "gamepass is the future" thing had a strong argument when there appeared to be lots of growth left in the market and numbers of subs approaching 100m were possible by the end of the gen. However the market didn't exist and the reality is that Gamepass still generates less revenue than PS Plus(which costs was less to support) and first party software sales have completely catered already because of its existence. Indy's "early access" numbers on steam point to another hellblade2/Forza motorsports like performance(both sold around 100k lifetime on Steam) so the subscriber growth has to be happening right now or MS are just hemorrhaging money in both directions.

Re: Final Fantasy 7 Was Made for PlayStation Thanks to Sony Music and Booze

ChrisDeku

While this is a nice anecdote it’s probably only a tiny part of the real story. Nintendo made the worst choice imaginable in going with a cartridge based N64 which launched with games on 4-12 mb cartridges and only reached 64MB by 1999.

PSOne CD-Roms were around 700MB and FFViI came on 4 Discs. Games like FFVII-IX were literally impossible on the N64.

Re: Black Ops 6 Is the 'Biggest Call of Duty Ever', Player Engagement Through the Roof

ChrisDeku

one of the most successful launches for Bethesda and Xbox in recent years

And now Xbox's vice president of games marketing Aaron Greenberg has denied Grubb's claims in even stronger terms on Twitter, calling Hi-Fi Rush a "break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations", adding, "We couldn't be happier…

The first one is what is Microsoft officially said at launch, second one is a quote from an executive when a podcast revealed MS were disappointed in the game and it didn’t make enough money.

They would close the studio almost immediately afterward.

MS are like the Anti-SquareSoft. They’re absolutely thrilled with everything. Everything is a massive success, couldn’t be happier. All the metrics are through the roof, we’re proud of the studio.

Re: PS5 Handheld Device in the Works at Sony, New Report Claims

ChrisDeku

@Haruki_NLI You seem to be overlooking the fact that a handheld would be like a 720p or 1080p screen. I'm no pixel mathematician but I believe running a game at 1080p requires only about 40% of the power as running at native 4k.

Then there is upscalling, sony already has their own tech that right out of the gates was far superior to FSR and pushing close to the best in class DLSS. Theres no reason that they couldn't be running PS5 games at a really low resolution and upscalling to 1080p.

The biggest problem is that games would probably require a manual patch as doing that from Sonys end and forcing games into the target resolution is extremely unlikely I believe

Re: Analyst Says Dragon Age: The Veilguard Had a Good, But Not a Great Launch

ChrisDeku

@LifeGirl being a fan of something is not toxic positivity. Talking about something you like is a reflection of the happiness and joy that product brings you. I'm happy that the new DA brings a lot of joy to some people.

Obsessing over something you don't like, haven't played, and hoping for it's failure(and the subsequent mass unemployment that would likely follow) is just really weird and not bringing anything positive to the world or any of these discussions.

Matt piscatella has the literal sales data for this game, and almost every other game released for the past 20 years. Whatever he says is as close to fact as you can get, end of story. The game had a good but not great opening. Random people with no data privileges saying otherwise and obsessing over their belief it's a massive bomb is just white noise.

Re: Analyst Says Dragon Age: The Veilguard Had a Good, But Not a Great Launch

ChrisDeku

Imagine hoping a game fails and obsessing over day after day, checking Steamdb daily, every sales chart possible, posting about it in every comment section possible day after day.

Well actually you don't need to imagine, it's the new reality for people with too much hate in their heart and not enough joy. Maybe time for a new hobby eh.