This is a case where the price is what matters. If this weren't a $10 upgrade a texture pack and reshade would have been outrageous given that the original already looks great. But for a $10 upgrade as a graphics mod, it seems fair.
@OldGamer999 Honestly I think the biggest problem is that REEngine is just bad. It worked for closed corridors and simple switch games but every big world they try to build with it makes Bethesda games look polished. I don't know why people roll with the whole "capgod" thing.
@HonestHick To be fair, Sony used to have SOCOM that did well in the online space. Then they bought the studio, then closed it ... 🙄
Oh and they had Sony Online Entertainment with Everquest, one of the biggest MMOs ever and even advertised it in movie theaters. And then they sold it... 🙄 😂
@ChrisDeku Infinite cost a lot but it also generated a lot of hardware buzz and sales early on as it and Forza horizon 5 were the main (delayed) launch games. It may not have made its money back but it did shift platform and sub sales making it fulfill a purpose, including PC subs. Concord, not so much, and the game still has an ok player base and cosmetics store generating some revenue. With an 87 on metacritic it's still a successful game even if it cost too much, and will continue to have some sales/sub interest for a long time for the campaign.
It wasn't the hit they wanted but Concord can't stand in the same room with it.
@TrickyDicky99 PSVR2 is Wii levels of success next to Concord.
Maybe if the industry focused less on "evolving revenue streams" and focused more on "making products for which there is market demand, at a price the market is willing to pay to sufficiently ROI" they'd be in a better place?
These executives have stopped thinking about meeting the market and generating customer loyalty, they're only looking for "revenue streams".
Sony is in a rough spot though. Their old model doesn't work anymore with the current market. But their only solution seems to be trading their brand cache for lottery tickets.
@nomither6 Yeah, I'd say FH4 qualifies as live service. You have the drivatars, you have drop in multiplayer, they have events throughout the year etc. GT, iRacing, Automobilista2, Asetto Corsa, Forza.... All of them have elements of live service but nobody thinks of them as live service. iRacing even has a monthly subscription but people don't really talk about "live service"
@nomither6 The whole "live service" name is a business suit buzzword with monetization implications. Look at most racing games, nobody called them "live service" it was just a racing game with online play and new maps sold periodically. Now it's a "live service."
@nomither6 The thing is when you think of "live service" there's a lot of games that are "live service" that work that aren't what executives think of as "live service" (aka recurring revenue cash cows.)
MOST racing games are "live services" but aren't monetized beyond selling new cars and tracks to add for a long time. The base game is the engine, and some core content, and more content is sold for the same game rather than "sequels" forever and ever. Elite Dangerous is an MMO with no recurring subs, it does sell in-game currency, if you want to buy particular ships or gear outright without playing and grinding, but otherwise it's a base game with free online forever.
The problem is a game that lives as a service and the engineered corporate cash cow of "live service genere $$$" aren't the same thing.
@HonestHick TBF I think remakes of all the Destiny expansions people bought and then got stripped of by Bungie is a more in-demand product than Marathon....
I did not expect this outcome at all. Shocked, truly.
This game did so badly it was too undetectable to even harm Sony's image lol.
Jim and Herman are the ones to truly blame. Yes, the studio failed to make a game that had a market, but Jim and Herman are the ones that threw good money after bad on it, and declared it the "Future of PS".
@themightyant I keep reading that Skillup condemned it, so out of curiosity I checked for the video. The one I saw was the one after the press preview in LA, but in that he was praising it. Weird if he has a new video condemning it.
Got to say I'm shocked at the result. Absolutely EVERYTHING leading up to launch looked absolutely disastrous, and I couldn't understand how people were excited about it. The excessive marketing made it seem even more like they were trying to "buy" acceptance for it. I did not think it was actually going to turn out good! Though I liked Andromeda...so there's that...
In my head, I will forever hear Luke Skywalker calling me "Duster" over and over again
Great games, still have that huge box it came in lol.
Still, we've never had anything like MW2 ever again. How is it possible we've had no true simulator mech games in all these years? It's so old it's back when Myst made CD drives new!
I still stand by the idea that replacing iconic video game characters with voice actors behind that game with different actors just doesn't really work. Kiryu isn't kiryu without Kuroda. He's a huge part of the characters feel. Even in the games the English va breaks the character because the characters development evolves around the actors emotional range and manner.
@Blargh Yeah I enjoyed 3. Everyone was disappointed compared to mw2 at the time, but on its own it was a good game anyway, though badly buggy. Still doesn't compare to the unique sims. That was made by Zipper, later of SOCOM fame and briefly owned by Sony before they closed it.
I don't know how this installment plays, but one thing that wasn't addressed here is how HOTAS support is. This is not to be compared to Gundam style games, MW games are SUPPOSED to be slow and heavy. They're not walking get fighters, they're ginormous tanks. But traditionally MW games were meant to be piloted on a HOTAS, like a study sim.
I fear we'll never, ever see an MW game as good and deep as the classic Activision FASA MW2 series. It was a true mech SIM as much as DCS is a combat flight sim. Maybe we could beg for a legit remake of the classics.
@naruball yeah, see that's the thing, and the main problem with the industry today. They don't want their games to "make a profit". Studios that "make a profit" get closed weekly. They want their games to "meet expectations and projections", and the goal of any game in the live service initiative is that perpetual revenue/sales curve. Especially in live service because the ongoing costs of servers and content need to be justified by continuous revenue, in hd2s case, continued sales. The initial boom for the game looked great, but while it's still populated, I've no doubt corporate is shaking their heads with disapproval that their service didn't cut the mustard for the long term success goals. obviously it's not a failure in the Concord sense, but it's still another failed attempt on the live service success dart board.
Yeah the game is a success by traditional metrics, but the goal posts for the live service titles aren't in the same places.
@McTwist Layden has generally been more coherent than the rest of Sony corp, but he's way out there on this one. I think being a life-long Sony staffer does something to people's minds. The company has always been a nasty one. Playstation was good because it wasn't like the rest of Sony until recently, but Sony itself was always nasty, long before PS existed. Much as I love most things Japan, being a company that thrived mostly on export, Sony has always run perfectly inverse the normal norms for Japanese companies - always. Layden's a core Sony guy, from long before PS existed.
Still he's generally been a positive in the industry, and even though he was part of the problem of the endless budget movie games blockbuster industry, he also recognized the problem he created and also tried to avoid it, until Jim threw him overboard and ran the engines at ramming speed to break through the iceberg. Even with that, though, he's quite wrong on this one.
@TrickyDicky99 I think the big problem remains that with the boom in mobile the "executives" in the industry all thought gaming was about to hit it big and become as mainstream as TV. The investors looked at the "gaming" numbers, which includes mobile, and saw nothing but infinite growth, and then demanded to see that growth. Then started pumping investment like crazy to realize that growth. Meanwhile the actual market for games is a small and stagnant niche and always has been. "Video games aren't popular" may be an exaggeration, but it's farily true. 300-350M consoles sold worldwide per generation on a world with how many BILLION people? That's barely the total population of the US alone. "Video games aren't popular" is the unfortunate reality despite the appearance of Fortnite.
@AhmadSumadi "So when a studio like Japan Studio shuts down, even after having "fan favorite" games. You have to realize that "fan favorite" doesn't mean commercial success."
I think that's the inverse though. The problem is the gaming market isn't one big market that all likes one thing. It's a market of many many niches that all makes different things. The industry used to have many products that cater to many niche's and as a whole keep everyone entertained and engaged. Japan Studio highlights this. Sony used to have tremendous variety for all types of gamers. Nintendo still does that (ring fit, labo, etc.)
Once the main industry focused on "big commercial hit or gtfo", the industry focused on the current state of the industry which is that all games feel like the same game. Without all those niches being served, lots of people just got out. So now every game is a "hit" proportionate to the market size, while more and more of the market just stops buying consoles at all. Their niches aren't appealed to if they don't like the same thing everybody else is supposed to like.
Homogenization is what's killing the industry not an abundance of fan favorite games that aren't "hits". The problem is the businesses aren't willing to be profitable, they need to be quadrupling the money quarterly.
I think "seeking hits" is exactly what went wrong with the entire games industry. It should never be about "seeking hits." If that's the goal they lost sight of the destination. It should be making about making content for which there's a market, big or small, and budgeting accordingly.
Japan Studio made games people loved. They may not have been "hits", but making a "hit" requires making a very specific generic mass market product, in which all products are the same. Once all games are trying to be hits, they all need to appeal to everyone, and then they all become flavors of the same game which is what we have.
Japan Studio made games people loved, still love, and critics didn't disapprove. They simply weren't generic games made to appeal to everyone, everywhere, all at once, and didn't become "hits." That should never have been a point of failure.
Personally Japan Studio was the main attraction to Playstation for me. Never really cared much at all about the popcorn moviegames. I'll play them. I'll enjoy them. I'd never buy hardware just to play them.
"You must agree to the terms to keep your enrollment in our rewards program that gives you: $0 rewards for most of the things you actually buy, $0 rewards redemption options, and Low, low rewards for some other things. The new minimum redemption quota requires buying more full-priced games than we actually publish ourselves in a year, and you lose them all if you don't accumulate the total and redeem them in one year. Make sure to keep your rewards rolling by bending over agreeing to these new terms today!
@naruball But "selling a lot of copies" is still considered a failure on the business angle of live service. The long term perpetual sales of the game is the measure of success in live service. If HD2 sputtered out after a moment in the sun, the business perspective would still be that it didn't work. I'm not denying it was successful, for a time or that it sold well for a time, but I'm saying as a live-service business initiative if that staying power didn't last, it's not going to be seen as a successful initiative.
@IamJT I lot of the slump a generation after a success in the industry isn't about cycles and is exclusively about mismanagement though, for all 3 of them. This time it's different because it's universal. And I wouldn't say hardware is healthy, it only looks healthy if you take the generational total and ignore the very steep downward trajectory after the pandemic era sales boom for unusual reasons. More interesting the downward slump since then is a similar curve in rate if decrease between Xbox and PlayStation.
I'm not sure "spending" is really up. I think that's a false echo of the shift to digital where retail transactions weren't wholly counted and the loss of second hand, which was still industry money, and and the mtx whales in a handful of games. Numbers that look good in shareholder meetings but hide big problems in the market
@GreatAuk Eww, ok yeah that sucks. I can get them not wanting to give free digital licenses because people would just pass the disc around to buy the game for $10, but otoh, that's $10 for used copies, voluntarily, which is that Don Matrick was flogged for
Yeah that's a big downside.
Reminds me of when vita was supposed to get a converter to change PSP umd to download for VC and then the cancelled it, after they sold the device saying you'd get bc.
@IamJT the problem is that sales are struggling. Hardware sales, software sales, everything is slumped. Yes PS is the go to brand, but it doesn't matter if the market for every brand including to go to brand is contracting.
Yeah you're right about incomes but that's the problem with the bifurcated economy. The people make $100k now make $250k. The people making $40k are now making 42k. The lawyers that can afford a pro can afford 50 pros. But they don't have 50x the time to buy 50x more games. The industry still stagnates. It's the blue collar, not the lawyers, that have the time to play games to begin with. The average income in the US is something like $45k. And gaming primarily sold to the average. Great for chest beating of who sells the most plastic boxes. Not great for a thriving games industry.
Xboxs problems are.... Complicated. The shift to cheap should have thrived especially at the right timing in the market, and they entered the generation with serious momentum that way. Then incompetence took over and they set their pants on fire at a gas station.
@IamJT Yes, but wages have NOT. So if everyone's making roughly the same money and double for food and housing, then the idea they'd also be able to pay more for entertainment goes right out the door. The smart company recognizes the shift. Heck, even Meta discintinued their $1000 headset, and released a new $300 headset. Not saying Meta is winning the console war but they at least recognized where the market is as shifted to meet it while traditional gaming is just digging its heels in and plugging it's ears.
@OldGamer999 yeah, that's extreme. Granted, Xbox is flailing, Nintendo is down because they announced they're announcing new hardware so who would buy a new switch? But Sony being down is telling.
I'd like to couple that number with any growth or loss on PC games sales, as well as any growth in Mobile gaming, to see if they're pushing businesses away to cheaper alternatives and changing tastes, or if gaming itself has just lost public appeal.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, something really broke in consoles since 2019. "It's the economy, stupid." If you think, in 2019, a console cost, what $350 to get into? Less on sale? Games were $60 at most. Acessories were like $60 at most.
Now they want $550 for a console $70 (soon $80) for games with addon's and cost bundles, accessories are $70+. Meanwhile consumers have LESS money to spend. And the product itself isn't even all that interesting compared to the old product many already have. And meanwhile there's other alternatives to get similar experiences between subscriptions and general purpose hardware. Console has a market and a niche, but if they price the experience such that the market endlessly shrinks, and make only "safe" entertainment for it, where safe entertainment is available elswhere for far less or free....what do they think will happen?
Maybe every console needs a booze dispenser. Maybe that's not the worst idea.
@JohnKarnes I love love love NMS in VR, one of the best games ever. I JUST started Elite Dangerous. I remember trying ED years and years ago and I couldn't even dock my ship in the tutorial without blowing up and gave up. I figured I'd try in VR. Just tried it yesterday, and instead of the ship docking tutorial I get a ground first person shooter, and find out the ground parts aren't in VR at all. WTF? It's now this weird NMS experience but only half in VR.
@Ravix Interesting thing with BG3, I'm actually wondering if "Bear Sex(TM)" was the source of most of its success after all. I still haven't played it yet despite being a massive BG1 and 2 fan. Something never clicked for me. But I've been getting tempted from all the rave reviews. But I was reading through the reviews, especially early access reviews on GoG, and most were actually negative (despite an overall 4.5/5 rating), saying that it was BG in name only and it was obvious the game is just Divinity 3 with a Forgotten Realms skin slapped on top and it has no similarity to BG 1 and 2. Which mirrors how I'd felt about it from originally seeing it. Not that Divinity 3 would be a bad game, but it seems that it's not quite as rosy as it seems either. It might be why Larian didn't want to do a sequel, they really didn't know what to do with the BG world if they'd really made a Divinity game at the heart.
But yeah, I think if it's an exceptional game sales will thrive, if it's not....I'm not sure even mega marketing could save it, and then they'd lose another 35% of the revenue. Their games don't seem to be blockbuster material TBH, but that's not a bad thing, and they seem to attract a decent following.
Sony hasn't gotten a lot right this generation in terms of respecting their customers even slightly, if not openly flipping us off, but I have to say they got it right on this one. The remaster didn't need to exist, and there's a lot of reasons why it maybe shouldn't have, but, if they're going to sell it as basically a $10 mod pack for the base game, that's perfectly fair and reasonable, and makes them actually seem like they have a clue. They may not have got much else right in years, but this one, they actually got right.
@Ravix Yeah, though TBH, I think even the publishers are struggling to figure out how making a game popular in the casual space happens, these days. The market changed so much, and the companies keep flaming out trying to figure out what it changed to. To a large extent I don't think any of this "big" games are capable of being popular in the casual space, that's not what the casual market is interested in. Seems they either want quick pick-up-and-play experiences (mobile, Nintendo, sports games, Vampire Survivor), or they want social engagement spaces with activities. These "big" games keep struggling because they don't budget to recognize that their market isn't a very big one, and overlaps the same customers for every single other big game. In that sense, I'm not sure the marketing matters (cue Xbox jokes), so much as just getting people to talk about your game on the socials (Bear Sex(TM)) so that the non-casual in-the-know gamers feel like they need to participate. But even then, the games are a flash in the pan and then everyone moves on. Nintendo gets that more right with those long tail sales, where a game is made to be desirable for years and years rather than hyped.
Probably the best comparison for Pearl Abyss might be Frontier. The PC-focused, long standing MMO, the smaller games that never hit trend, but always sell in modest numbers, etc. In a lot of ways I think the PC market is a lot more stable than the console market. Console is about sell everything in a weekend, then everyone forgets about the game. PC seems to generate those long tail sales. Lower margin per unit, but even old games keep selling forever and ever.
The "Sony sales formula" seems dated. It used to work, but it now seems like they spend more on advertising than it can possibly generate. It makes a thing seem big, but they get no real return to speak of as a result, because the market doesn't respond like it did in the pre-internet 90's when a big marketing campaign was the only thing you saw and heard about. They can put XVI posters on as many busses as they want, but everyone will still play Vampire Survivor instead because that's what they heard everyone else talking about.
IMO what it comes down to is expectations. If they budgeted the game appropriately for sales expectations, don't overspend on advertising (lets face it $100-150M of the 300M Sony spent on Spiderman2 wasn't development, it was marketing expense), and let natural sales, press, and conversation sell the game, AND don't rely on "blockbuster launch" sales and expect to make their sales over a period of years (like Nintendo), I think they could easily end up ahead rather than chasing "launch weekend" sales.
But these days, who knows. Devs seem like they get it right, then fire the whole team for "disappointing sales'.
Comments 6,961
Re: PS5 Pro Not Compatible with PS5 Slim Face Plates, Sony to Release New Covers for More Powerful Console
@rjejr Yeah they don't get a party, they just become a component manufacturer. They are in the party-free zone.
Re: PS5 Pro Not Compatible with PS5 Slim Face Plates, Sony to Release New Covers for More Powerful Console
I, myself, am waiting for PS5 Pro(TM) color plates in the Concord Grape color way. I hear all proceeds will benefit The Hulst Foundation.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered (PS5) - A Sublime Remaster of a Modern PlayStation Classic
This is a case where the price is what matters. If this weren't a $10 upgrade a texture pack and reshade would have been outrageous given that the original already looks great. But for a $10 upgrade as a graphics mod, it seems fair.
Re: Monster Hunter Wilds' Beta Is Prompting Fans to Reconsider PS5 Pro
@OldGamer999 Honestly I think the biggest problem is that REEngine is just bad. It worked for closed corridors and simple switch games but every big world they try to build with it makes Bethesda games look polished. I don't know why people roll with the whole "capgod" thing.
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@HonestHick lol the fake CGI trailer is peak!
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@HonestHick To be fair, Sony used to have SOCOM that did well in the online space. Then they bought the studio, then closed it ... 🙄
Oh and they had Sony Online Entertainment with Everquest, one of the biggest MMOs ever and even advertised it in movie theaters. And then they sold it... 🙄 😂
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@Banjo- this must be Herman's version of a pump and dump scam 😂
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@Banjo- I'm pretty sure they sold through all printed physical copies as collectors were snapping them up while it burned 😂
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@TrickyDicky99 Even that's a triumph next to Concord....
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@ChrisDeku Infinite cost a lot but it also generated a lot of hardware buzz and sales early on as it and Forza horizon 5 were the main (delayed) launch games. It may not have made its money back but it did shift platform and sub sales making it fulfill a purpose, including PC subs. Concord, not so much, and the game still has an ok player base and cosmetics store generating some revenue. With an 87 on metacritic it's still a successful game even if it cost too much, and will continue to have some sales/sub interest for a long time for the campaign.
It wasn't the hit they wanted but Concord can't stand in the same room with it.
@TrickyDicky99 PSVR2 is Wii levels of success next to Concord.
Re: Concord Cost Sony Over $200 Million, And Didn't Make a Single Cent
@get2sammyb Even a 3 for 1 bundle of Knack3, Lair2, and Haze2 for $4.99 would have made more money than this.
Re: After a Tough Few Months, Sony Says It'll Keep Making PS5 Live Service Games
Maybe if the industry focused less on "evolving revenue streams" and focused more on "making products for which there is market demand, at a price the market is willing to pay to sufficiently ROI" they'd be in a better place?
These executives have stopped thinking about meeting the market and generating customer loyalty, they're only looking for "revenue streams".
Sony is in a rough spot though. Their old model doesn't work anymore with the current market. But their only solution seems to be trading their brand cache for lottery tickets.
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
@nomither6 Yeah, I'd say FH4 qualifies as live service. You have the drivatars, you have drop in multiplayer, they have events throughout the year etc. GT, iRacing, Automobilista2, Asetto Corsa, Forza.... All of them have elements of live service but nobody thinks of them as live service. iRacing even has a monthly subscription but people don't really talk about "live service"
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
@nomither6 The whole "live service" name is a business suit buzzword with monetization implications. Look at most racing games, nobody called them "live service" it was just a racing game with online play and new maps sold periodically. Now it's a "live service."
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
@nomither6 The thing is when you think of "live service" there's a lot of games that are "live service" that work that aren't what executives think of as "live service" (aka recurring revenue cash cows.)
MOST racing games are "live services" but aren't monetized beyond selling new cars and tracks to add for a long time. The base game is the engine, and some core content, and more content is sold for the same game rather than "sequels" forever and ever. Elite Dangerous is an MMO with no recurring subs, it does sell in-game currency, if you want to buy particular ships or gear outright without playing and grinding, but otherwise it's a base game with free online forever.
The problem is a game that lives as a service and the engineered corporate cash cow of "live service genere $$$" aren't the same thing.
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
@MinervaX Sorry, the internet irony filters were on I saw it coming since June.
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
@HonestHick TBF I think remakes of all the Destiny expansions people bought and then got stripped of by Bungie is a more in-demand product than Marathon....
Re: PS5, PC Flop Concord Never Returning, Studio Closed Down
I did not expect this outcome at all. Shocked, truly.
This game did so badly it was too undetectable to even harm Sony's image lol.
Jim and Herman are the ones to truly blame. Yes, the studio failed to make a game that had a market, but Jim and Herman are the ones that threw good money after bad on it, and declared it the "Future of PS".
Re: Don't Nod Dev Pushes Back on 'Hateful' Life is Strange: Double Exposure Comments
@khayl " the characters Kock and the original team had created "
Uuuuuuuhhhhmmm.... 😒
Re: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5) - The Best BioWare Game Since Mass Effect 3
@themightyant I keep reading that Skillup condemned it, so out of curiosity I checked for the video. The one I saw was the one after the press preview in LA, but in that he was praising it. Weird if he has a new video condemning it.
Re: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5) - The Best BioWare Game Since Mass Effect 3
Got to say I'm shocked at the result. Absolutely EVERYTHING leading up to launch looked absolutely disastrous, and I couldn't understand how people were excited about it. The excessive marketing made it seem even more like they were trying to "buy" acceptance for it. I did not think it was actually going to turn out good! Though I liked Andromeda...so there's that...
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 552
@Zuljaras lol yep, Gog makes physical look restrictive. I still find it unfathomable that Sony actually put games on gog. I'm sure that's over!
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 552
@Zuljaras I never imagined you, Mr. Physical, would be a digital PC gamer, let alone a PCVR gamer living on the edge 😂!
One of us! One of us!
Re: Mini Review: MechWarrior 5: Clans (PS5) - An Obsolete Model
@The_Wailing_Doom "Starsiege"
In my head, I will forever hear Luke Skywalker calling me "Duster" over and over again
Great games, still have that huge box it came in lol.
Still, we've never had anything like MW2 ever again. How is it possible we've had no true simulator mech games in all these years? It's so old it's back when Myst made CD drives new!
Re: TV Show Review: Like a Dragon: Yakuza - Generic Japanese Crime Caper Doesn't Do SEGA Franchise Justice
I still stand by the idea that replacing iconic video game characters with voice actors behind that game with different actors just doesn't really work. Kiryu isn't kiryu without Kuroda. He's a huge part of the characters feel. Even in the games the English va breaks the character because the characters development evolves around the actors emotional range and manner.
Re: Mini Review: MechWarrior 5: Clans (PS5) - An Obsolete Model
@Blargh Yeah I enjoyed 3. Everyone was disappointed compared to mw2 at the time, but on its own it was a good game anyway, though badly buggy. Still doesn't compare to the unique sims. That was made by Zipper, later of SOCOM fame and briefly owned by Sony before they closed it.
Re: Mini Review: MechWarrior 5: Clans (PS5) - An Obsolete Model
I don't know how this installment plays, but one thing that wasn't addressed here is how HOTAS support is. This is not to be compared to Gundam style games, MW games are SUPPOSED to be slow and heavy. They're not walking get fighters, they're ginormous tanks. But traditionally MW games were meant to be piloted on a HOTAS, like a study sim.
I fear we'll never, ever see an MW game as good and deep as the classic Activision FASA MW2 series. It was a true mech SIM as much as DCS is a combat flight sim. Maybe we could beg for a legit remake of the classics.
Re: PlayStation, Bungie Still Going Ahead with Internal Live Service Team
@naruball yeah, see that's the thing, and the main problem with the industry today. They don't want their games to "make a profit". Studios that "make a profit" get closed weekly. They want their games to "meet expectations and projections", and the goal of any game in the live service initiative is that perpetual revenue/sales curve. Especially in live service because the ongoing costs of servers and content need to be justified by continuous revenue, in hd2s case, continued sales. The initial boom for the game looked great, but while it's still populated, I've no doubt corporate is shaking their heads with disapproval that their service didn't cut the mustard for the long term success goals. obviously it's not a failure in the Concord sense, but it's still another failed attempt on the live service success dart board.
Yeah the game is a success by traditional metrics, but the goal posts for the live service titles aren't in the same places.
Re: Roblox's Parental Protections Changing in Wake of 'Paedophile Hellscape' Report
Well that's not a headline I expected to read...
Whatever happened to the halcyon days when we just talked about beastiality in video games.
Re: Sony's Japan Studio 'Forgot What It Feels Like to Have a Hit'
@McTwist Layden has generally been more coherent than the rest of Sony corp, but he's way out there on this one. I think being a life-long Sony staffer does something to people's minds. The company has always been a nasty one. Playstation was good because it wasn't like the rest of Sony until recently, but Sony itself was always nasty, long before PS existed. Much as I love most things Japan, being a company that thrived mostly on export, Sony has always run perfectly inverse the normal norms for Japanese companies - always. Layden's a core Sony guy, from long before PS existed.
Still he's generally been a positive in the industry, and even though he was part of the problem of the endless budget movie games blockbuster industry, he also recognized the problem he created and also tried to avoid it, until Jim threw him overboard and ran the engines at ramming speed to break through the iceberg. Even with that, though, he's quite wrong on this one.
Re: Layoffs Reported at Horizon MMO Developer NCSoft
@TrickyDicky99 I think the big problem remains that with the boom in mobile the "executives" in the industry all thought gaming was about to hit it big and become as mainstream as TV. The investors looked at the "gaming" numbers, which includes mobile, and saw nothing but infinite growth, and then demanded to see that growth. Then started pumping investment like crazy to realize that growth. Meanwhile the actual market for games is a small and stagnant niche and always has been. "Video games aren't popular" may be an exaggeration, but it's farily true. 300-350M consoles sold worldwide per generation on a world with how many BILLION people? That's barely the total population of the US alone. "Video games aren't popular" is the unfortunate reality despite the appearance of Fortnite.
Re: Layoffs Reported at Horizon MMO Developer NCSoft
@gipsojo $700 for a PS5 Pro with no new Sony games, or $600 for an old iPhone that gets new Sony games and also runs your life. Hard choice.
Re: The Day Before Dev Cancels Kickstarter Bid, Brazenly Announces Another Game
Maybe it's secretly run by Peter Molyneaux?
Re: Random: Boxing Champ Cosplays as Hitman's Agent 47 for Fury Presser
@MikeOrator "Also, this Usyk guy seems rather chill for a blood sport combatant."
Kinda fits the '47 theme even more....
Agree on the X link, too...
Re: Sony's Japan Studio 'Forgot What It Feels Like to Have a Hit'
@AhmadSumadi "So when a studio like Japan Studio shuts down, even after having "fan favorite" games. You have to realize that "fan favorite" doesn't mean commercial success."
I think that's the inverse though. The problem is the gaming market isn't one big market that all likes one thing. It's a market of many many niches that all makes different things. The industry used to have many products that cater to many niche's and as a whole keep everyone entertained and engaged. Japan Studio highlights this. Sony used to have tremendous variety for all types of gamers. Nintendo still does that (ring fit, labo, etc.)
Once the main industry focused on "big commercial hit or gtfo", the industry focused on the current state of the industry which is that all games feel like the same game. Without all those niches being served, lots of people just got out. So now every game is a "hit" proportionate to the market size, while more and more of the market just stops buying consoles at all. Their niches aren't appealed to if they don't like the same thing everybody else is supposed to like.
Homogenization is what's killing the industry not an abundance of fan favorite games that aren't "hits". The problem is the businesses aren't willing to be profitable, they need to be quadrupling the money quarterly.
Re: Sony's Japan Studio 'Forgot What It Feels Like to Have a Hit'
I think "seeking hits" is exactly what went wrong with the entire games industry. It should never be about "seeking hits." If that's the goal they lost sight of the destination. It should be making about making content for which there's a market, big or small, and budgeting accordingly.
Japan Studio made games people loved. They may not have been "hits", but making a "hit" requires making a very specific generic mass market product, in which all products are the same. Once all games are trying to be hits, they all need to appeal to everyone, and then they all become flavors of the same game which is what we have.
Japan Studio made games people loved, still love, and critics didn't disapprove. They simply weren't generic games made to appeal to everyone, everywhere, all at once, and didn't become "hits." That should never have been a point of failure.
Personally Japan Studio was the main attraction to Playstation for me. Never really cared much at all about the popcorn moviegames. I'll play them. I'll enjoy them. I'd never buy hardware just to play them.
Re: Reminder: You Must Accept PS Stars Terms of Service to Keep Earning Points
"You must agree to the terms to keep your enrollment in our rewards program that gives you: $0 rewards for most of the things you actually buy, $0 rewards redemption options, and Low, low rewards for some other things. The new minimum redemption quota requires buying more full-priced games than we actually publish ourselves in a year, and you lose them all if you don't accumulate the total and redeem them in one year. Make sure to keep your rewards rolling by
bending overagreeing to these new terms today!Re: PlayStation, Bungie Still Going Ahead with Internal Live Service Team
@naruball But "selling a lot of copies" is still considered a failure on the business angle of live service. The long term perpetual sales of the game is the measure of success in live service. If HD2 sputtered out after a moment in the sun, the business perspective would still be that it didn't work. I'm not denying it was successful, for a time or that it sold well for a time, but I'm saying as a live-service business initiative if that staying power didn't last, it's not going to be seen as a successful initiative.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@IamJT I lot of the slump a generation after a success in the industry isn't about cycles and is exclusively about mismanagement though, for all 3 of them. This time it's different because it's universal. And I wouldn't say hardware is healthy, it only looks healthy if you take the generational total and ignore the very steep downward trajectory after the pandemic era sales boom for unusual reasons. More interesting the downward slump since then is a similar curve in rate if decrease between Xbox and PlayStation.
I'm not sure "spending" is really up. I think that's a false echo of the shift to digital where retail transactions weren't wholly counted and the loss of second hand, which was still industry money, and and the mtx whales in a handful of games. Numbers that look good in shareholder meetings but hide big problems in the market
Re: PS5, PS4 Fans Are Worried Cash Rewards Have Been Removed from PS Stars
@Runex2121 " I have a ps credit card which was also recently nerfed"
🤣🤣🤣 Says it all ...
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@GreatAuk Eww, ok yeah that sucks. I can get them not wanting to give free digital licenses because people would just pass the disc around to buy the game for $10, but otoh, that's $10 for used copies, voluntarily, which is that Don Matrick was flogged for
Yeah that's a big downside.
Reminds me of when vita was supposed to get a converter to change PSP umd to download for VC and then the cancelled it, after they sold the device saying you'd get bc.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@IamJT the problem is that sales are struggling. Hardware sales, software sales, everything is slumped. Yes PS is the go to brand, but it doesn't matter if the market for every brand including to go to brand is contracting.
Yeah you're right about incomes but that's the problem with the bifurcated economy. The people make $100k now make $250k. The people making $40k are now making 42k. The lawyers that can afford a pro can afford 50 pros. But they don't have 50x the time to buy 50x more games. The industry still stagnates. It's the blue collar, not the lawyers, that have the time to play games to begin with. The average income in the US is something like $45k. And gaming primarily sold to the average. Great for chest beating of who sells the most plastic boxes. Not great for a thriving games industry.
Xboxs problems are.... Complicated. The shift to cheap should have thrived especially at the right timing in the market, and they entered the generation with serious momentum that way. Then incompetence took over and they set their pants on fire at a gas station.
Re: PS5, PS4 Fans Are Worried Cash Rewards Have Been Removed from PS Stars
After all these nerds they should just rename is PS Star.
@get2sammyb "free money just for clicking a button"
I knew I should have replied to that Nigerian prince.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@IamJT Yes, but wages have NOT. So if everyone's making roughly the same money and double for food and housing, then the idea they'd also be able to pay more for entertainment goes right out the door. The smart company recognizes the shift. Heck, even Meta discintinued their $1000 headset, and released a new $300 headset. Not saying Meta is winning the console war but they at least recognized where the market is as shifted to meet it while traditional gaming is just digging its heels in and plugging it's ears.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@OldGamer999 yeah, that's extreme. Granted, Xbox is flailing, Nintendo is down because they announced they're announcing new hardware so who would buy a new switch? But Sony being down is telling.
I'd like to couple that number with any growth or loss on PC games sales, as well as any growth in Mobile gaming, to see if they're pushing businesses away to cheaper alternatives and changing tastes, or if gaming itself has just lost public appeal.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
@OldGamer999 Yeah, something really broke in consoles since 2019. "It's the economy, stupid." If you think, in 2019, a console cost, what $350 to get into? Less on sale? Games were $60 at most. Acessories were like $60 at most.
Now they want $550 for a console $70 (soon $80) for games with addon's and cost bundles, accessories are $70+. Meanwhile consumers have LESS money to spend. And the product itself isn't even all that interesting compared to the old product many already have. And meanwhile there's other alternatives to get similar experiences between subscriptions and general purpose hardware. Console has a market and a niche, but if they price the experience such that the market endlessly shrinks, and make only "safe" entertainment for it, where safe entertainment is available elswhere for far less or free....what do they think will happen?
Maybe every console needs a booze dispenser. Maybe that's not the worst idea.
Re: New No Man's Sky Event Gives You an Alien UFO for Halloween
@JohnKarnes I love love love NMS in VR, one of the best games ever. I JUST started Elite Dangerous. I remember trying ED years and years ago and I couldn't even dock my ship in the tutorial without blowing up and gave up. I figured I'd try in VR. Just tried it yesterday, and instead of the ship docking tutorial I get a ground first person shooter, and find out the ground parts aren't in VR at all. WTF? It's now this weird NMS experience but only half in VR.
Re: Crimson Desert Dev Found PS5 Exclusive Opportunity Appealing
@Ravix Interesting thing with BG3, I'm actually wondering if "Bear Sex(TM)" was the source of most of its success after all. I still haven't played it yet despite being a massive BG1 and 2 fan. Something never clicked for me. But I've been getting tempted from all the rave reviews. But I was reading through the reviews, especially early access reviews on GoG, and most were actually negative (despite an overall 4.5/5 rating), saying that it was BG in name only and it was obvious the game is just Divinity 3 with a Forgotten Realms skin slapped on top and it has no similarity to BG 1 and 2. Which mirrors how I'd felt about it from originally seeing it. Not that Divinity 3 would be a bad game, but it seems that it's not quite as rosy as it seems either. It might be why Larian didn't want to do a sequel, they really didn't know what to do with the BG world if they'd really made a Divinity game at the heart.
But yeah, I think if it's an exceptional game sales will thrive, if it's not....I'm not sure even mega marketing could save it, and then they'd lose another 35% of the revenue. Their games don't seem to be blockbuster material TBH, but that's not a bad thing, and they seem to attract a decent following.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn PS5 Is an Absolutely Insane Upgrade
Sony hasn't gotten a lot right this generation in terms of respecting their customers even slightly, if not openly flipping us off, but I have to say they got it right on this one. The remaster didn't need to exist, and there's a lot of reasons why it maybe shouldn't have, but, if they're going to sell it as basically a $10 mod pack for the base game, that's perfectly fair and reasonable, and makes them actually seem like they have a clue. They may not have got much else right in years, but this one, they actually got right.
Re: Crimson Desert Dev Found PS5 Exclusive Opportunity Appealing
@Ravix Yeah, though TBH, I think even the publishers are struggling to figure out how making a game popular in the casual space happens, these days. The market changed so much, and the companies keep flaming out trying to figure out what it changed to. To a large extent I don't think any of this "big" games are capable of being popular in the casual space, that's not what the casual market is interested in. Seems they either want quick pick-up-and-play experiences (mobile, Nintendo, sports games, Vampire Survivor), or they want social engagement spaces with activities. These "big" games keep struggling because they don't budget to recognize that their market isn't a very big one, and overlaps the same customers for every single other big game. In that sense, I'm not sure the marketing matters (cue Xbox jokes), so much as just getting people to talk about your game on the socials (Bear Sex(TM)) so that the non-casual in-the-know gamers feel like they need to participate. But even then, the games are a flash in the pan and then everyone moves on. Nintendo gets that more right with those long tail sales, where a game is made to be desirable for years and years rather than hyped.
Probably the best comparison for Pearl Abyss might be Frontier. The PC-focused, long standing MMO, the smaller games that never hit trend, but always sell in modest numbers, etc. In a lot of ways I think the PC market is a lot more stable than the console market. Console is about sell everything in a weekend, then everyone forgets about the game. PC seems to generate those long tail sales. Lower margin per unit, but even old games keep selling forever and ever.
The "Sony sales formula" seems dated. It used to work, but it now seems like they spend more on advertising than it can possibly generate. It makes a thing seem big, but they get no real return to speak of as a result, because the market doesn't respond like it did in the pre-internet 90's when a big marketing campaign was the only thing you saw and heard about. They can put XVI posters on as many busses as they want, but everyone will still play Vampire Survivor instead because that's what they heard everyone else talking about.
IMO what it comes down to is expectations. If they budgeted the game appropriately for sales expectations, don't overspend on advertising (lets face it $100-150M of the 300M Sony spent on Spiderman2 wasn't development, it was marketing expense), and let natural sales, press, and conversation sell the game, AND don't rely on "blockbuster launch" sales and expect to make their sales over a period of years (like Nintendo), I think they could easily end up ahead rather than chasing "launch weekend" sales.
But these days, who knows. Devs seem like they get it right, then fire the whole team for "disappointing sales'.