Ralizah

@hugoadan They have. Remember them backtracking on shutting down the PSP/PS3 shops?

Sony is very responsive to public pressure.

Problem is, and you can see it demonstrated beautifully in this comment section, a gigantic chunk of their fanbase deeply enjoys the taste of corporate boot. When that's the case, nothing changes. At least not in a positive direction.

@NEStalgia "We REALLY need to step hardware back 3 generations while making people feel like they're going forward."

If there's a heaven, I sincerely hope Satoru Iwata and Gunpei Yokoi are watching this all unfold and laughing hysterically.

@Max_the_German Sony's audience would revolt. They've been trained to expect and only want to play technically ambitious blockbusters, so Sony's trapped in this cycle where they need to create increasingly expensive AAA titles for their ecosystem. Apparently they have some games in the works that are even more expensive than Concord was.

Had a feeling it'd turn out this way when they announced a bunch of stuff in a short time frame. Layton, Fantasy Life, Decapolice, etc. It's why I reined in my excitement.

This was always going to happen after Sony removed the PSN requirement for Helldivers 2. There's blood in the water. Once your audience knows you can be pressured, it's over.

I will never understand why Sony is so intent on fighting a losing battle over this when they know how much it alienates Steam gamers, though. Just make it optional and tether some little bonus cosmetic thing to it.

Eh.

I want to like it.

SRPGs are one of my favorite genres. Valkyria Chronicles, Triangle Strategy, Fire Emblem, Devil Survivor, etc. count among my favorite series. But I really struggled to get into this one.

It is a well-made game, though, so I'm glad it's doing well. It'd probably do even better if Vanillaware decided to put it on PC.

@Nei Looking at that artwork, I think everyone realizes it'll have legs.

@Ravix There's so many games now.

And, frankly, so many decent to great ones. More than people could play in a lifetime.

You really have to stand out. It's hard to do that if you're not a major developer.

Nods

Actually, I don't know that I've even heard of either of these releases, and I'm online all the time. The marketing must not have been great.

@Lizuka LOL I stopped at Ch. 1. I was dying of boredom. I keep telling myself I'm going to go back to the game, and then remember I have some comparatively fun chores to do.

@Dadou Starting to think the PS4 will survive the PS5!

@rjejr "Maybe Switch 2 can get a $60 2-pack before the final 3rd game in the trilogy?"

You're very cute that you think companies aren't gonna milk the heck out of Switch 2 early adopters with $60 ports of very old games.

I tried playing through it on Switch. The image quality sucks, yeah, but even if it wasn't fuzzy, it's just not... very interesting to me. Which sucks, because there's a lot of Danganronpa DNA in there. The visual style/characters/etc. just don't really appeal to me.

😂 This comment section is depressing.

I could see Death Stranding 2 showing up. No interest whatsoever for me, personally, but I'm guessing that's going to be a little more interesting for people here than the remasters that are supposedly on the way.

@Korgon Falcom played favorites with Sony for a long time. The fact that their games are releasing on Nintendo consoles is a miracle in itself. No way is the TitS remake going to be exclusive!

@NEStalgia I definitely think Switch 2 sales will be conservative compared to Switch overall, but still strong. Maybe more comparable to PS4 if Nintendo does their job and launches it with exciting software.

I doubt it has escaped them that 2017 went so well that it propelled the Switch to practically unstoppable levels of momentum through its life-cycle. And I believe it has been mentioned that the release of the hardware was delayed to co-incide with a string of new first-party software development.

The concept isn't as new and exciting as it was back then, but launching at a fair price point alongside a new mainline Mario, new Pokemon games, etc. should still give it a fair bit of lift. Especially when nobody buys Xboxes and Sony is starting to see how much they can nickel-and-dime the public.

Whatever the original purpose of Xbox was, their height as a brand was when they went all in on the console thing. Now their console line is practically dead and they've awkwardly become a third-party developer.

Based on what I've read, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and a ton of people working at Microsoft don't understand where the brand is going in the future. That's bad.

I'm not saying Spencer is responsible entirely for their downfall, but I think it's almost inescapably true that he was a bad choice to manage the Xbox brand, and his mismanagement, combined with potential internal conflicts with corpos higher up in the company, has damaged the brand to the point where recovery is hard to even imagine.

Microsoft needs to decide what the future of the brand is and communicate that to everyone very clearly.

@Tecinthebrain I get that. If your collection is already on PSN, why shift?

Problem is that a significant chunk of those libraries are physical and require discs. Also, if there's a requirement for all Playstation games to run on both, it'll risk turning into a Series S/X situation again.

Nintendo solved this by releasing a single hybrid device, but Sony obviously won't do that.

It would obviously sell to PS faithful, but the handheld market is becoming rapidly crowded again. Especially if the rumors of Microsoft also developing a handheld are true.

@NEStalgia This is turning into seventh gen again. Nintendo does a thing. It's wildly popular. Everyone else decides they need to do the thing too, but, unlike Nintendo, they don't commit to it, so it won't work as well.

@TheOldHunter4K LOL

Nothing would surprise me after the Vita.

@Yousef- It's almost certainly happening. The Deck is selling well for a device you could only buy from Steam for the longest, and has been a smash hit, unlike their other hardware.

Sources from Valve essentially said at the time of the OLED's release that it would be another 2 - 3 years before tech advanced enough to make a next-gen Deck viable, so it definitely sounds like it's in the cards. And, frankly, they've committed pretty significant effort to keeping it updated, testing games to confirm compatibility, helping developers get their games working with Proton, etc. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't drop new hardware at some point.

I don't see the point. All their games will probably be playable on PC and PC handhelds by then. What's the Vita 2, or whatever it's called, gonna offer that a Steam Deck 2 wouldn't already?

@NEStalgia Whatever they're doing, it's working. The games are coming heavy and fast and it looks like they're not gonna ruin their momentum with more goofy experimentation next gen.

Good at running the gaming business? His hands-off approach to management led to Microsoft's teams wasting tremendous amounts of time on projects that went nowhere and/or turned out tremendously disappointing. Him pushing for gigantic acquisitions, day one PC ports, and Game Pass has ultimately ruined the brand as they pivot toward being a third-party publisher in order to balance the books a bit.

Xbox would've been better off if Mattrick had never left, lol.

@NEStalgia Furukawa is sort of the anti-Spencer. Phil Spencer seems personable and is a good mascot for the Xbox brand, but can't run a console gaming business worth beans. Meanwhile, Furukawa looks like the most non-descript, middle-management Japanese dude imaginable, but he's done a great job leading Nintendo since 2018.

@naruball That's a big reason I never bought in to PS5. Sure, I have to wait on some games, but not being a huge modern Playstation Studios fan, I can game on my PC knowing pretty much everything I want on the platform) has released or will release on PC in time.

Nintendo is the only one of the big three fully invested in their own ecosystem and console playerbase, so they're the only company whose consoles I'll bother continuing to purchase.

I'm happy for Sony to pursue this course, since it means less hardware cluttering my home, but I do think, as with Microsoft, it'll increasingly dilute the appeal of their console brand.

@Matroska Anecdotally, most Switch owners I know (non-core gamers) have one Switch. Usually just the base model. Several don't own Mario Kart, although, unsurprisingly, all of them own some Nintendo games.

I'm not denying that there's a lot of the same people buying new models. There obviously are. 140 million Switches sold doesn't mean 140 million owners, as is the case with any console, really, but especially the ones with significant revisions.

That said, the base model, which has easily sold the most of the models, I think is predominantly going out to new owners. And even with the revisions, you'll have a more half-and-half split of new and established owners.

Overall, I think the base of Switch owners is still probably north of 100 million. That the same games stay so high in the charts all the time speaks to that as well.

A simultaneous launch across PS5, XSX, PC, and Switch 2, without any Game Pass goofiness included will probably lead to much higher launch numbers. Especially considering how much good will was generated by the first game.

Just grabbed the original myself on Steam. If I like it, I'll make a point of buying the sequel at launch.

@Matroska I don't take your point. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe already has an absolutely insane attach rate for a non-bundled game. Its attach rate is more than double the attach rate of the best-selling game on Playstation 4.

Not everyone likes the same thing.

Switch ports made way more sense.

• Wildly more popular platform than Wii U, so a lot of these games were like new games to a majority of the gaming public.
• First fully portable versions of these games.
• 3DS and Wii U eshops going down would've made way more game inaccessible without ports.
• Switch wasn't backwards-compatible with 3DS/Wii U.

None of these are applicable to Sony's largely pointless PS4 game remakes. Days Gone, Horizon Zero Dawn, Until Dawn, The Last of Us, etc. all looked and played great on PS5.

A new, more traditional Final Fantasy game released day one on PC, PS5, and Switch 2 would probably sell well.

I know Square ports their games to other platforms, but a lot of the excitement has died off once you spend months or years waiting for it to hit your preferred platform.

@NEStalgia This conversation reminds me of one I had with a friend about being a pet (an animal one, not... nevermind). She remarked it must be wonderful to have all your needs attended to and taken care of, and all that's required of you is some basic loyalty and love. And I said, sure, that sounds good, until your owner neglects to provide water for some extended period of time, or he delegates the duty to his kid and the kid forgets, and you realize how utterly dependent you are on another entity for the most basic things.

Sure, it's nice on console for all your needs to be addressed without any real effort on your part, until they're not, for whatever reason, and suddenly you're reminded that you're funneling money into a walled-garden PC environment where you have no control of, influence over, or right to almost anything. And boy, do they make you pay for that privilege!

@naruball @NEStalgia Didn't Skyrim have a memory leak or something on PS3 that made it unplayable after you spent enough time in it? At least on PC, there's very little that isn't addressable somehow. Although, frankly, I've had way more game crashes on consoles than I have on PC in the last decade.

System-wide console firmware issues like this will be fixed by daddy eventually, but for individual games, you just have to hope the developers are competent. Whereas most games on PC will have mods and unofficial fixes to address issues.

@Nepp67 Yeah, I'm not saying an issue doesn't exist, just that the game isn't "f*cked." I'm sure Sony is scrambling to address this.

Hyperbolic headline. It's not good, but it'll surely get resolved sooner than later; especially if other games are being affected. "F*cked" would apply more to something like Concord, lol.

@Yousef- Right after the "Bungie Getting Its Head Pulled Out of Its Ass" headline, too.

It's like when you first allow your kid to swear where appropriate, and then they start trying to muscle fun naughty words into everything.

Still amuses me that Microsoft baited Sony into blowing so much money on this developer, and it's been an almost complete wash.

This is where reactionary business decisions get you.

@Bingoboyop Don't forget about Marathon and Fairgames. They'll sit nicely alongside all of the Chinese gachas coming to PS5.

@UltimateOtaku91 You're linking an article about PS5 Pro dildo attachments and acting offended. Why do you seem butthurt over what's clearly silly satire?

Maybe that article has a point.

Coming in second to an NBA game seems like a pretty good result for any platformer without "Super Mario" in the title.

Glad it seems to have debuted well in NA. Considering the game's Amazon chart position, I'm not surprised.

No Games
Digital Only
$1000 at launch
Final Destination

I'm pretty sure planning on a new console starts almost immediately after a new one comes out. R&D takes time, lol.

But yeah, backwards-compatibility is pretty much an industry standard between XSX and PS5. One of the few really good things about this generation, frankly.

@Bingoboyop Calling it: The Last of Us Part I - Definitive Edition as a timed launch exclusive on PS6 in 2029. The wait will definitely be worth it.

@NEStalgia l337 15 f1n3 1f y0u fully c0mm17 70 17. 17'5 7h3 p4r714l 4ppl1c4710n 0f 7h3 pr1nc1pl3 7h47 dr1v35 m3 nu75. 54m3 r3450n 1 c4n'7 347 47 z4xby'5.

By the way, this exchange has confirmed for me that we're both far too old.

@PuppetMaster Some people will always be unhappy. That doesn't mean Sony can't improve their approach, though.

Oh yeah, there's no lack of games coming that are playable on the console. It's not about that. It's about Sony's communication with their base. Which is more frustrating considering how many potential live service blunders they have in the making, and how few original PS5 games they've released overall this generation.

@NEStalgia That's true. I did. I have to say, whatever executive thought it was cute to replace the 'S' with a dollar sign deserves a good smack in the face.

@PuppetMaster There must be a middle-ground between teasing the same 2 - 4 games for half a generation and announcing a game mere months before release, lol. Nintendo does the latter a lot, but that's because they actually publish a ton of games every year.

Sony should find a middle-ground between what they're doing now (total silence on almost everything a year or more out) and teasing games that are practically a generation away. Assuming they actually have stuff coming in the next year or two other than Marathon.

@NEStalgia It is remarkable how quickly a multi-hundred-million dollar game/planned franchise went from the future of Playstation's AAA focus to "burn it with fire!"

@NEStalgia The Concord episode of that Amazon Prime series needs to spinoff into its own series on Netflix first before Concord 2 can canonically take place. Patience. Sony's ten-year-plan for the Concord universe has only just begun to take shape.

@NEStalgia LOL

You're a Sony hipster who idolizes failed live service games like Concord. I'm a Sony hipster who idolizes failed Japan Studio games like Gravity Rush.

We are not the same.

@nessisonett It's a little insane that things look brighter for the Switch's future as it nears EoL than they do for PS5, which, in the middle of the generation now, should be peaking.

Missteps like Concord aside, big home console games just take WAAAAAAAY too long to make nowadays.

I'm amused by the idea that somebody is more likely to cosplay as a Concord fan than as any of the actual characters

Team Asobi carrying on the proud Japan Studio tradition of creating amazing games that people don't want to buy, for whatever reason.

I mean, if it was $599.99 and came with the disc drive included, I'd probably opt for that over the standard one if I was to get one. Why not? Generally paying a small premium for better hardware is preferable in the long run.

@SterlingEyes Do it. The OLED version, specifically, which has a far better battery life and gorgeous display. There's some really demanding AAA titles that won't run well on it (the Final Fantasy XV demo was... rough, let's say), but most games you throw at it run fine. Cyberpunk runs shockingly well.

The thing has almost completely replaced my Switch.

Genuinely makes me wonder what Sony's plan is for next-gen. The PS6 is gonna need to be more powerful, but how are they going to keep costs down? You can only loss lead to a point.

$700 hardware (sans disc drive lol). $70 games. Jacking up prices on controllers worldwide. Expensive paid online. And, really, barely any games to even begin to justify all of this (that isn't available to the competition, anyhow). It really feels like Sony is testing its luck as much as possible.

@UltimateOtaku91 I guess we'll see, but their change in strategy sounded like a broader shift in general away from timed exclusivity. Although didn't they also announce they were going to focus more on core properties and have less of these smaller projects in the pipeline?

We'll see what happens. Hopefully, in the future, their games launch across all platforms capable of hosting them.

@UltimateOtaku91 What recent indication is there that they're going to continue doing exclusivity deals with Nintendo?

The most fascinating aspect of this entire... episode... to me isn't so much the scale of failure that it represents, but more the level of almost universal disdain and vitriol it attracted. People tarred and feathered this thing well before the public execution even commenced.

Makes you wonder how much money Sony wasted overall trying to push this game as some instant classic of the live service genre. Funny stuff.

This tells me enough about the factors involved in selecting games to adapt for this show that I don't really feel the need to ever watch it.

I'd absolutely watch a documentary on the factors leading up to Concord's failure, though. Like a postmortem.

The second best Castlevania collection after Dracula X Chronicles on PSP (Rondo remake with ports of OG rondo and SOTN). The NDS era was the peak of this style of Castlevania game.

While that is a rather cynical take on Astro Bot, I can also see their point: in the context of modern-day, PS5-era Sony, there is a bit of melancholy to Astro Bot's celebration of PS history. Compare their creative output on PS5 to any other generation and the result is rather stark.

It's awesome seeing current-gen tech being directed toward a beautifully stylized, gameplay-centric title that emphasizes fun and probably also didn't cost $300 million to make.

This sounds delightful. I'll wait to see if it's going to enjoy a PC port at some point, though. The fact that they're already talking about it makes me think it's more likely to happen than not.

Concord aside (lol), definitely a pretty decent year for PS5 owners.

Ubisoft shot themselves in the foot by punishing early adopters with subscription options and rapid price drops. Not to mention content/early access locked behind special editions.