Dekutheevilclown

Everyone always assumes the worst, however it’s completely plausible the DLC episode simply wasn’t in a shippable state when the physical game went gold, which is over a month before the release date.

Games with physical releases and Digital only content have very different production timelines.

@OthmaneAD That’s not entirely the whole picture though.

Say the cost of putting a game on gamepass, for Microsoft, is the amount of lost revenue the developer faces + a small premium. Now the very existence of Gamepass itself on a format probably makes most customers less likely to spend money on non-gamepass games, and now that lost revenue calculation is going down.

As the attachment rate of gamepass increases then the amount of money a developer makes from non gamepass games decreases, and therefore cost to purchase for MS decreases. In this example you can see that the developer loses out both ways.

This is the actual long term issue with subscription services, not that gamepass can never be profitable, it most definitely can.

Oh look, the “DLC are bad mmmkay? If you do DLC you’re bad mmmkay?” Crew are out in full force again 😅

Worldwide Release, what a glorious time to be alive

@Jaz007 I think that's true but in the context of Returnal its relevant. Right now in returnal you can create a respawn point in a specific random room, once per run, at the cost of 6 of the rarest in game resources. If there is a save and quit option it's literally less effort to copy your save to USB, outside the boss room, and create your own checkpoint for free.

@Jaz007 You basically just said "no, you can't do that, unless you do it this way"

You can also use a USB stick which is even easier.

A lot of people are overlooking one key thing when they are talking about other games that are roguelike or difficult but still can save anywhere. All those games, and anything with a save function, is abusable. In Dark Souls you can reload every death in you really want, no idea if anyone actually does this but lots of people abuse it to get all ending trophies in one play through.

Having said that I couldn’t care less what other people do in their (mostly) single player games. Housemarque obviously does care though, and they take this very seriously apparently.

Honestly I almost didn’t buy this game because I knew there was no saves mid-run, and it’s probably my most anticipated game of the year. So yes it’s a big deal to some people. (I have a toddler and a baby, and both are likely to go absolutely bananas for no perceivable reason at any given point in time)

@Rob_230 It’s currently £15.99 on PSN (+ you can get another 10-15% off if you buy psn credit from a third party store)

When you consider that there are 115m PS4 owners and 50m Xbox one, it does show a relative higher rate of play on Xbox. That goes with the narrative of Xbox being the more multiplayer console.

Sony are clearly making plans for multiplayer games this gen, will be interesting to see how much they can move the needle.

The biggest news from the financial reports is that Sony has committed 20B Yen(~$183M) increase year on year to aggressively increasing in house development personnel, that doesn’t even include the deals with external studios for published games.

Using the simple industry math of $100k per year per person, that’s around 1800 developer staff increase. The calculation is not perfect, as it likely misses out some additional costs associated with expansion, although the 100k does account for working space, tools etc.

Anyway that’s a lot of extra staff. We’ve already seen huge growth in GG, Santa Monica, insomniac. How much more growth are these core teams going to see? A quick google search shows all major first party studios have 20+ openings advertised right now.

I wonder if there will be completely new studios?

@nessisonett The strange thing is this service actually includes Blade Runner 2049, Arrival and Baby Driver. Actual good movies.

@Jacko11 You are mistaken, there hasn’t been a restock in the uk, in a single store, since the first week of April.

This is because Sony expedited their supply chains in order to get more consoles through before March 31st, which is the end of their financial year, and they waned to be able to say it outsold the PS4 in their financial reports.

So in March there were more consoles available than normal, with weekly restocks, but they still all sold out very quickly, I would guess in a matter of minutes.

That also meant that the consoles that would have made it through the supply chain in the first few weeks in April were already sold and there will now be 3 weeks with basically no consoles in some territories, the UK being one.

@Adge There are unlocks that are persistent and according to the article there is a currency for purchasing things after runs are over.

For people waiting on the price drop, you should note that Demon Souls and MM have never had a single psn sale in 6 months, and even in physical there is very little movement.

It could be Christmas sale at 20% off as the first.

Early console lifecycle will be nothing like late PS4 era where everything went on sale quickly, and went down really low by 1 year. Expect more Nintendo prices for the first 2-3 years where competition is much lower.

@Loftimus The reason for the price disparity is mostly to do with VAT @ 20%.

The USA is low tax, pro capitalism. It’s great for buying things at good prices. Terrible for getting paid a decent wage, not dying because of no health insurance, or getting a good education without paying absurds amount of cash. So swings and roundabouts eh.

I’ve heard this game has a crazy high ps5 attachment rate but that’s still quite a staggering statistic.

72 percent of readers would buy Days Gone 2?? Haha. I believe that’s called participation bias.

Also Days Gone as a franchise is very far from dead, one project getting rejected does not mean it’s irrevocably cancelled.

Virgina is great, but not for everyone. I also greatly enjoy Walking Simulators and Visual Novels though.

I’m following this one closely.

@TranslucentEye Honestly, I don’t think the PS5 will be widely available on store shelves until well in to 2022.

A lot of people think it will be available in the second half of 2021 but Sony’s production figures from their last financial report do not actually make that look like likely.

@Rob_230 This is actually a sequel and not a remake as this article sort of kinda implies.

@wiiware Sony don’t need to make family friendly games just so they look good in weekly charts. PlayStation sells vast amounts of software more than Nintendo consoles.

In the 3 quarters up to dec 31st(the latest we have financial results for) Nintendo sold ~160m units of software and Sony ~260m. The year before was an even larger percentage lead.

Sony also 40m subs for ps plus and a much higher digital percentage(digital games generate more than twice as much revenue for platform holders)

This data is actually out of date now, the latest weekly sales were just reported and PS5 sold another 62k. Basically however many PS5s are available are how many are sold still.

It’s tracking to overtake PS4 in launch adjusted sales very soon. The PS4 was selling under 10k a week at this point.

As for software, remember that PS plus has an 87% attachment rate for PS5 users.

@nhSnork the truth of Japan studio is in the public domain. It was the biggest studio owned by Sony and made very few finished games. There are quotes from management stating that it was a free for all and in 2013 there was something like 30 projects in production. People were literally just doing whatever they wanted, and almost nothing got done.

Japan Studio was just too dysfunctional to maintain. Cutting off resources in one place allows expansion in others.

Guerilla Games moved into a new building and expanded to twice the size, and will be a 2 game studio now. A 100% increase in output.

Santa Monica moved into a new building a few years back, and after GOW finally were able to go onto a major recruitment and expand to twice the size and be a 2 game studio.

An entirely new team was created in San Diego to continue Uncharted Series with support from Naughty Dog.

Media Molecule is recruiting and expanding.

Who knows what studios like Sucker Punch and Insomniac are up to internally.

People comparing Japan studio to Media Molecule are way off base.

Japan Studio was a 500 person studio based in Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

MM is a 50 person studio based in Guildford, not one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Sales of the original LBP were 3.5m, which generated more revenue than the studio costs to run every year since its creation.

@NEStalgia You’re way out there, Japan studio role in the original Demon Souls was akin to a studio exec telling the director(from soft) lots of stupid ***** that they ignored and made a great game anyway.

Sony openly admit they thought demons souls was rubbish and refused to publish it outside of Japan.

Probably no game highlights Japan Studios deficiencies as much as Demon Souls.

For people asking about PlayStation specific data, Sony actually release that data in their quarterly and annual reports.

They only count full games that have both physical and digital release and the data is:

Financial Year 2018(up to March 2019): 43% digital
FY 2019: 55%

In FY 2020 the first three quarters are 79%, 59%, 52%(Q1&Q4 are always significantly higher interestingly), the full year will likely be significantly over 60%.

The really interesting stat, and which illustrates how profitable digital is relative to physical, is that physical software represents only 5.76% of the games division total revenue!

Japan Studio was Sony’s biggest studio with well over 400 staff at its peak. That’s an incredibly expensive studio to run, and there isn’t even a remote chance it was profitable.

If you look at total games sales, and average metacritic score over the last 2 Gens then Japan Studio is by far the worst performer out of Sony’s Major Studios, while being most expensive to maintain. That just doesn’t hold up.

Also “Japanese games” aren’t even popular in Japan anymore. Japan just consumed casual games now. The switch is popular in Japan because it has games with strong casual appeal. Momotaru Dentetsu(it’s a board game where you move around on a train by rolling a dice, honestly I’m not lying) sold more copies in 3 months than Breath of the wild did in 3 years. That sums up the Japanese market. Good JRPG’s and visual novels sell a fraction of those casual games.

@Max2574 Actually HZD was relatively cheap, ~45m Euros.

TLOU2 is definitely more though, maybe over 100m

@dav2612 Your definition of exclusive is certainly creative

@dav2612 You said the top 10 was half switch exclusives, that’s clearly not true.

If the only thing that matters is sales then how about this:

PSN(web store + subscription services)generated more revenue for Sony in 2018, 2019 and 2020 than Nintendo generated as an entire Company(hardware, digital + Physical software, dlc, peripherals, merchandise etc.)in those years!

Don’t let some software chart from one country fool you. Nintendo dominates physical sales charts, but digital is where all the money is.

@dav2612 Are you trying to troll or just stupid? You specifically called Miles Morales not a PS5 exclusive then praise Nintendo’s exclusives like Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World are not low effort wii u ports of years old games.

If you take away the switch games that are on the Wii U then the consoles output is pretty pathetic in 3.5 years.

Eh it’s still cheaper than the UK, £70 = 119 CAD

This isn’t even remotely believable, total garbage.

The new development team is based in the SAN Diego Visual Arts Studio, who are a support team for most first party games. They specialise in things like motion capture.

I do not believe the SAN Diego team that develops the MLB games are based in that same studio or in any way connected.