RBMango

And none of these projects will have anything to do with Bloodborne.

Don't give me hope.

Damn, this makes me sad. Shu was the final guy from the classic old guard at PlayStation. I knew this day would come eventually, but still. Damn....

That's half the budget of a new Ape Escape right there.

An event is not happening. We'll be lucky if we get anything at the Game Awards.

This looks fun. I'm really looking forward to that JRPG Colin has been teasing for years too.

I'd prefer Sony not to acquire anything else and invest more in what they already have. However, if they purchase any big entity, Kadokawa is one of the few that makes sense to me, especially with PlayStation's history with FromSoftware. I don't think this will result in more From exclusives for Sony since they will want those big multiplatform ROIs after Elden Ring's massive success.

Infinite Wealth and Helldivers II losing a potential nomination over DLC is pure nonsense.

I usually don't care about these Game Awards, but if Shadow of the Erdtree wins over Astro Bot or Rebirth I'm going to be pissed.

I have been skeptical of this project even as a lifelong Indiana Jones fan. But, I must admit I'm more sold on the game after this preview.

@MrPeanutbutterz Oh, that's right! Thank you. I completely forgot about that.

@Cikajovazmaj That's a great point. Let me rephrase that: how many people out of the potential 5-10 million players will play the campaign and then opt out until next year? If you know how to game the system, you're paying $12 or $20 (depending on your platform) to play a CoD campaign. Not a bad deal.

@get2sammyb Thank you, that's what I figured. Even if Black Ops 6 gets them 5-10 million new subscribers, what's going to be more interesting is how many of them stick around. If a lot of those 5-10 million subscribers opt in and out of Game Pass just for CoD each year, that doesn't make for meaningful growth at all.

@get2sammyb Did Microsoft ever give a specific number of how many subscribers they got from Starfield (the last time they bragged about something "breaking the number of Game Pass subscriptions in a single day")? Or was it just a vague declaration? I've seen the number 11 million be floated out there but I think that was just Starfield's general lifetime players last fall.

I guess 70,000 people have a much higher tolerance for terrible writing than I do.

@LowDefAl Even by low ass-kissing Variety standards, this interview sucked. They blatantly ignored simple questions like "what do you think of the inevitable Switch 2 launching?" or "what other games besides Ghost of Yotei are you using to convince people to buy a Pro?"

I think Variety did okay in this interview to their minimal credit. These CEOs dodged the softest questions like Neo from The Matrix and it makes them look cowardly and stupid.

That was the most nothingburger, word salad, question-dodging interview I think I've seen modern PlayStation do yet. They flat-out ignored some of the more interesting questions and waxed poetics about corpo nonsense. Awful look for them.

That's a great get for Perfect Dark. The game looks promising and Horton is a talented guy. It's a good fit too since he used to work at Crystal Dynamics, so he understands how Darrell Gallagher operates.

As for Wolverine, I wonder how far along it is now, and I'm curious if Horton's departure will impact it significantly. I also don't know what to make of this change in "creative decisions". That's so vague it could mean a lot of things. I just hope they don't screw with the tone to make it less mature and gory.

With that money, they could have made maybe four Astro Bot-sized games from new or established IPs. Would they have made a crazy amount of money? More than likely not, but they would have generated more profit and goodwill for PlayStation than Concord.

Wow. PlayStation really is willing to strip naked and publicly humiliate themselves to chase the almighty dollar these days. They must have a fetish for pain at this point.

What a giant waste of time and money. Firewalk's erasure is not surprising at all.

I don't want them touching Mass Effect at all after listening to some of Veilguard's abysmal writing. I can't believe functioning adults wrote this childish drivel.

@Enuo I love a hefty dose of sarcasm with my morning coffee.

I strongly disliked the original game, but I'm curious to check this out. I'm willing to give it another chance.

Their handling of this entire rewards program is wrought with incompetency. It has some positives, but it still isn't accessible on the console, and there is no dedicated virtual space to show off those stupid trinkets. This omission is so baffling that it almost entirely defeats the point of Stars. Yay, I can't wait to show my homeboy a useless trinket of Jim Ryan on my phone!

Only modern PlayStation could create a rewards program that is this half-baked and half-assed.

But I heard from some hardcore Xbox people that their dear leader Phil Spencer would remove this kind of summy nonsense from Call of Duty. I wonder what changed,

It would have been even better if all the weapons in the footage were baguettes.

Even if digital sales were included to bump up NBA 2K25 and Zelda, Astro Bot being in the top 10 is great news, especially for an unknown and unproven IP in mainstream terms. It sharing the same chart that includes sports, Zelda, Star Wars, and Harry Potter is awesome to see.

I love the first Wolf Among Us, but I've reached the point where I don't even want to hear about this project anymore until it gets a firm release date. Maybe Telltale would be in a better position if they hadn't wasted time and money on that Expanse game very few people wanted and strictly focused on this instead.

@Medic_alert @get2sammyb @AdamNovice

It's a fascinating multi-faceted situation, especially in cases like PlayStation, which I could passionately discuss for hours. But I think the biggest problem all of these publishers share (aside from Nintendo) is that they have trained their mainstream and casual audiences for multiple generations that the most worthwhile games are the ones that focus on scale and/or graphical fidelity. We see this all the time now. A lot of casual gamers have a hyper-fixation of game length, graphical detail, and sheer volume of content, and these smaller games rarely serve any of those desires.

As good as Lost Crown is, I can't blame a lot of casual audiences for dismissing it for any number of reasons, especially since Prince of Persia hasn't been a big thing for ages now. In Lost Crown's case specifically, I'm curious what their financial expectations were when they released this a week before the start of the constant and popular game releases earlier this year and it was missing from Steam. It's no surprise it financially underperformed under those self-sabotaging circumstances.

@Medic_alert Oh for sure. I'm not implying the devs at Ubisoft Montpellier are responsible for shipping the game with those issues. They made a cool-ass game even with its problems that a few months in the oven could have fixed. But that's the saddest part, isn't it? The game underwhelms financially and the talented people are the ones that receive the lion's share of the consequences.

@Medic_alert Even Lost Crown didn't release bug-free. It had a big bug at launch that could lock people out of finishing one of the few side quests in the game. It was eventually patched, but people whose save files were affected had to start a new file to avoid the bug. Bugs aren't exclusively a Ubisoft problem, but they have a reputation for them and a general lack of polish at launch that far exceeds many other publishers.

@Medic_alert I think locking a relatively niche game on the PC market behind their Ubisoft launcher had something to do with it. If it was available on Steam on day one, I think it would have seen more day-one sales.

Another problem stated countless times is that many people know Ubisoft games go on sale quickly. Many of Lost Crown's potential customers possibly went "that looks fun, but I'll wait for a discount". They either got it later at a cheaper price or forgot about it entirely because the first quarter of this year was flushed with good games that overshadowed it.

If this is true, this is the second time this decade that Ubisoft has either declined or canceled a sequel to one of the rare games I like from them. Immortals and Lost Crown deserved so much more than this.

Because PlayStation's live service initiative disrupting their pipeline, costing them billions of wasted dollars, and putting a stink on their image hasn't been bad enough this gen...

I wouldn't mind if they got Keith David to voice Sylens. David is awesome and has a long heritage in video games.

If not, I hope they brought on someone with a powerful and magnetic voice like Reddick had. He was the main reason Sylens is my favorite character in the series. I would pick Adetokumboh M'Cormack, who was outstanding as Isaac in Netflix's Castlevania series.

I think it's fine, but this game and Horizon: Forbidden West have come to symbolize modern PlayStation's worst tendencies when it comes to their massively budgeted single-player games: a bland, focus-tested, and very safe vision to appeal to the largest possible audience with no thought for risk, niche appeal, or edginess.

With this game specifically, my biggest issues were the ho-hum story and boring writing. The symbiote storyline did not mix very well with the Kraven stuff, the pacing constantly got in its own way with pointless padding like the stupidly long science institution sequence and those awful MJ missions, and Insomniac continues to write the blandest dialogue in human existence. At this point, I think Insomniac's writers lack any talent for witty and fun dialogue with a slight edge. All of their recent games feel like a children's show with their blatantly stated morals and themes that lack any kind of subtlety or nuance in their delivery. Hell, even old episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine had way more of a rough edge to them than these recent Insomniac games.

The simplest explanation I can think of for why they axed the DLC is that they wanted to use the resources elsewhere. They already spent over $300 million on Spider-Man 2. It makes sense they would want to move on to something cheaper to make (Venom?) or invest more into something creatively different (Wolverine).

I'm fine with this. I wasn't a big fan of this one so I'm happy they're moving on to hopefully a much better game like Venom or Wolverine.

Uhhhhh someone needs to tell RGG that normal, working people can't finish their behemoth games in one week lol

Like Horizon, I'd rather see them return to the drawing board and make it an animated show. A God of War game with the art style of Castlevania or Arcane would be cool.

Seeing the big port city be called "Madlantis" made me laugh out loud.

I won't be playing this remaster. After viewing side-by-side footage of this and the original, I really don't like the change in color palette and much more aggressively bright lighting. Yet another PlayStation remaster that sacrifices art direction for raw detail.

The $50 price isn't a big mystery to me. It's a semi-linear turn-based RPG focusing on art direction over raw graphical detail from an unproven studio and new IP.

However, the existence of physical copies on day one is shocking to me, because Keplar Interactive never does physical copies of their games on day one. This must be a big investment for them.

An option I would have voted for would have been: "clearly there is a creative void in AAA games, but there's plenty of creativity out there if you're willing to dig for it and try new things".

Also, as I said in a different story a few weeks back, Shawn Laydon didn't have a perfect track record with PlayStation. But, the man had excellent instincts for what the casual and hardcore audiences wanted from the company. He had way better creative and business instincts than the muppets currently running the show.

Andy Serkis as one of the villains (I assume) is very exciting. He's got so much natural charisma as an actor.

It's an annoying practice, but I'm part of the problem sometimes and will continue to be depending on the game. I don't usually buy deluxe editions of games, but "early access" is far more compelling to me than extra costumes, a digital "art book", or music tracks I can easily find on YouTube. I know myself too damn well to know I'd fork over extra to play GTA VI or Ghost of Yotei "early".

I wonder if the reason PlayStation hasn't done this sooner is that they want their games to feel like "events", so they don't want spoilers out there even faster than usual. I'm sure they'll do this eventually because the extra revenue is too tempting, but I'm curious if this is the rare time the massive egos at PlayStation unintentionally gave them some restraint.

Sweet. This gives me something small to look forward to every Thursday for a while.

@DonJorginho Yes, the young 19-year-old woman who looks intentionally much older and weary to show the physical effects of life-long abuse isn't attractive. These people are idiots.

@Loamy Again, it isn't "bad", but the remake's version of it lacks the emotional gut punch that the monologue in the OG delivers. It's obvious Monica Taylor Horgan was holding back real tears delivering that monologue in the recording booth and those cracks in her voice make the moment all the more raw. I miss that genuine human touch in the remake's version of it.

Everyone else in the remake is outstanding though, especially whoever they got to play Angela.