StrickenBiged

@naruball @themightyant Doesn't the comparison to Roblox make my point though? That had the advantages (compared to Dreams) of being on PC and allowing users to monetise their creations.

Playing the latest Hitman trilogy made me realise that what I really want AC to be is Hitman in a historic setting. I'd love the freedom to investigate targets and locations, and figuring out how to get in and out without anyone ever knowing I was there.

If any game devs are reading, do it, and steal AC's lunch.

Frankly, I'm surprised it wasn't Media Molecule that was shuttered, but then I had forgotten that London Studio existed at all...
Dreams was a very odd thing for MM to spend so much time on; one look should have told you that, while apparently powerful and innovative, its appeal was only ever going to be very niche. This was obvious to me and everyone I spoke to about Dreams from the very first reveal.
That being said, I think PlayStation and MM missed some obvious opportunities to give Dreams a decent shot once it launched. For instance, why wasn't it released on PC, where people are much more likely to dabble with creation engines? Second, would it really have been so hard to allow games/experiences made in Dreams to launch on PSN as standalone products, with a revenue share between PlayStation, MM, and the individual creator?
Good luck to MM going forward though. I really enjoyed Tearaway and would love to see them make a triumphant return soon.

Embrace Gen AI, particularly for the back-of-house and executive functions and low-level creative work. Huge efficiency savings to be made there.

Looks like Sony is slowly realising that games like Fortnight and Roblox cannot be unseated. They're more like platforms in their own right now anyway, offering different experiences depending on what you want to do, even if it is just hang out with friends. If I was a customer who had spent £00s or £000s in one of these games, why on earth would I switch to a different game and mothball that 'investment'?

Seems sensible to me.
Sony wants to make something the size of Fortnight - while Helldivers is no doubt impressing the execs with how much it is exceeding expectations, it is not the sort of thing they wanted with their push into live services. If you can tell at an earlier stage that something isn't going to do Fortnight levels of success (and that's what you're chasing) then no sense in sending good money after bad.
We know from the Insomniac hack that Sony was looking to shutter a studio - hopefully London was it and we won't soon be reading about Bend going that way.

According to the video it's only sales in the USA which will go to charity. It might be worth pointing that out in the article for those not on a USA PSN account who would change their purchase decision with all the information available to them, one way or another.

Pentiment and Hi Fi for me. I want to do my part to tell MS that their good single player games will be warmly received by PS players.

I'm surprised that searching for "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" returns any hits at all at this point.

@Northern_munkey I have noticed the PS Studios and Arrowhead logos only load on your first time booting the app after a patch. Every other time I've gone straight to the intro message from Super Earth.

I'm still getting lucky and getting into the game after 5-10 minutes of waiting whenever I try to play. But my buddy on PC didn't manage to get in despite waiting 40 minutes.

@ATaco I dunno... looking around, Games Workshop seems to be pretty free and easy with its IP when it comes to video games. There's some diamonds, but a lot more rough. The impression I get is that Games Workshop licences are pretty easy to get if you ask and are happy to pay whatever their fees are.

I must be getting lucky. I had the "servers full" message last night twice (had an app-crash shortly after getting into a mission the first time) but on both occasions I had under a 10 minute wait. It's annoying when you've got limited gaming time in the evenings, sure, but the game is worth the short wait IMO.

Deliberately staying logged in to 'save your spot on the server' is ***** though. There should be an AFK kick after 10-15 minutes or so, at least until the server situation is resolved.

@Johnnycide It's very good. Bummer that you've been having problems. I had that screen twice on the weekends but I managed to get into the game after waiting on it for under 5 minutes each time.

Well deserved. I am very much enjoying myself, and it seems lots of others are too. I hit the "servers at capacity" screen on both Saturday and Sunday nights, but in both cases I made it in within 5 minutes.

@themightyant True, and a very good point. I did some back-of-the-fag packet maths:

There were 46.4m PS+ Subscribers in Dec '22, and 47.4m in Mar '23. H:FW joined the Extra Games Catalogue in Feb '23. Let's be generous in our assumptions and say that the additional million, only joined PS+ Extra rather than the cheaper Essential, and they all joined to play H:FW. Let's also assume that they all bought a year's worth of extra from scratch, rather than taking advantage of one of the upgrade-your-subscription deals. PS+ revenue would have increased by just under (because of the pennies) $135m. Putting H:ZD on Extra lost them a projected $85, so they netted just under $50m.

Like I say, that's being very generous in our assumptions though, and just small tweaks to the assumptions (like if some of the new 1m subscribers were only on Essential) make millions of $ of difference to the outcome. PlayStation will have better stats and know better whether putting H:FW on Extra was a good idea overall.

The rest of us will find out by observing what they do with their other tentpole exclusives over time.

Fantastic game. I went for a 9. I rarely play anything online, and haven't played a game with battlepasses, MTX, loot boxes, etc, since Overwatch 1. But I broke my rules for Helldivers 2 and I'm glad I did. I love the fact that it's PvE and how the gameplay systems encourage co-operation - even playing with random people we're constantly apologising for killing one another, thanking one another for respawning you when you die, calling out what's going on, etc. The MTX are really unobtrusive and it's completely optional to spend actual money - I have acquired enough of the premium currency either in the game or through the free battlepass to buy a few things from the rotating paid store, and am saving up to unlock the premium battle pass. I don't even care that some of the items in the premium battle pass appear to be more powerful; if other people want to spend money to unlock it quicker that's only going to benefit me if we team up together. And all that is before I get on to how crazy and chaotic the game can be in full swing. And the comedy baked into the game's satire is brilliant - I always laugh when a character starts laughing maniacally when they've racked up a decent kill streak while expending an entire mag of their machine gun, or when one of the character's scripted expressions was cut off mid sentence by a resupply pod dropping on their heads.

I'll be all over Hi Fi Rush and Pentiment on day 1. I'll do my part to signal to Xbox that their good, single player games, can do well on PS.

"without damaging the full-price sales of its first-party games"
This is not true. PlayStation's projections are that it lost $85m in retail revenue by putting Horizon: Forbidden West on PS+ Extra last year.

The weird thing about what he said was that the logic of releasing the 4 games that they confirmed applies just as much, if not more so, to larger games that take more resources to develop. I don’t know how many people I speak for, but I’m very unlikely to ever buy an Xbox now that I have a hefty library of games on PSN. But I would buy Xbox games on PS. I doubt I’m alone, and the MS Eye of Sauron will one day turn towards me and gamers like me and wonder why we are not giving them money. It’s just a matter of time.

Thank god for that. Especially with weapons and gear appearing in the item shop. I don't care if there are such minor "pay to win" elements in a PvE game because if other people want to spend money to get items that can help me out when we squad together, that's great for me. (I can also 'accidentally' blow them up and loot the items from their corpse...)

The servers certainly seemed more stable last night. Matchmaking actually worked and I got a few missions in with some random people.

I've only just started Doing My Part for Democracy, but had a blast last night playing solo (due to the matchmaking issues). Hopefully will find some friends online tonight that aren't already all squadded up.

Oooh, yes, I’ll be there for Pentiment too if it comes across.

Whatever happens, I've just enjoyed the ride this last week. The memes have been wonderful, and all the business discussion/speculation has been really interesting.

Congrats to Arrowhead and PlayStation. I noted that even Amazon UK was sold out of physical copies and would be for two weeks. I had to pop into town and visit GAME of all places for the first time in a long time.

I’m looking forward to a few things like Hi Fi Rush and the chance to play Gears again.
I have to say though, if I was someone who was impressed by the recent developer direct and just bought an Xbox off the back of it, I’d be so pissed right now. I get the feeling out there.

@Angelus3K They'd make money, what more needs to be said? Hopefully they'll be free PS5 apps for those of us that bought them on PS4. I'd happily run through them again for some more trophies and the nostalgia.

When a piece of media is consumed by so many people, some tiny minority of them are going to be complete sh*tcakes, it's just a matter of statistics. The game sold over 10m copies, so even if we are being conservative and say that it was only some of the people who actually bought the game and that only 0.001% of those people are this sort of stalker psychopath (actual psychopathy has an estimated prevalence nearer ~0.1%), that's still 10,000 people.
I'm glad the authorities were able to provide some reassurance to the actress that those making the threats weren't nearby, but it must have been truly awful at what is supposed to be a happy time.

Win-win-win. Xbox basically becomes a publisher with a huge roster of top-tier developers in its portfolio. Sony gets a 30% rip on the games sold on its platform. PlayStation owners (and Switch where possible) get more games.
My only concern is if XBox ceased to make consoles altogether then Sony would have no real competition in the space of higher-powered home consoles, which might make it lazy and complacent of its customers.

That dummy has "Collector's Edition" written all over it.

I think it should be typed with capitals, "PHYSINT", as Kojima has done. In the world of espionage and intelligence, there is already HUMINT, SIGINT, OSINT, etc, to categorise intelligence according to the source, and they are always capitalised. So PHYSINT would make sense as an espionage-esque title, but "Physint" would not.

I doubt there will be a paid upgrade path on this one as the PS4 version was part of the PS+ collection and so a lot of people will have redeemed it as part of their subscription.

Interesting. I suspect that "INT" is a suffix. In intelligence work, HUMINT is intelligence gathered from human sources, SIGINT is intelligence gathered from signals, etc. I'm not aware that the intelligence services refer to PHYSINT at all, so maybe it's some sort of sci-fi thing, like referring to "intelligence gathered from physics" or something like that.

Looks like a decent month. Just what I want to see from PS+ Essential - games that I wouldn't buy but may get round to try.

Let's hope that the industry which couldn't sustain fewer games being made by more people in fewer studios can instead sustain more games being made by more studios, each with fewer people. Sincerely.

The Hogsmeade shop was a great mission, glad to see that other platforms will be able to get into it.
As for any more DLC, I'll probably jump in. I enjoyed the game a lot, but it lost some of its magic (snarf!) once I'd finished the story and side quests and was just mopping up repetitive activities for the platinum. Short jumps back in for some story DLC would be great, hopefully they don't litter the map with more unnecessary busy-work.

I prefer physical, even if the game is more expensive, but go digital when I have to, e.g. because there is no physical release. (Sometimes I go digital when I'd be stupid not to, like the cheap upgrade to TLoU2 vrs buying a new PS5 disc.) The lack of a physical release will stop me buying a game that I'm on the fence about. I tapped the "I only buy digital" option for now, but more because it was the least inaccurate option.
Digital has too many downsides for me, especially in the way Sony implements it, where your right of return ends once you begin the download, and you have no oversight on the item's listing as to the licensing terms Sony has agreed with the publisher. Will the game be available for download forevermore, or is there an expiry date on that? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the games I love are more than ephemeral to me, and I like that ownership, the ability to lend them to friends who want to try something else out.

Do we know what these jobs are? At the start of the article they are "workers in the gaming division". By the end, they are a portion of the 6k "developers" being laid off since the start of the year. How do we know that all these 1,900 are "developers", and not HR, legal, corporate, miscellaneous admin staff, and so on?

He's not wrong, but I'd counter that interesting means different things to different people, and could even change over the course of a game. In S-M, I don't think I fast-travelled at all except to pop the trophy for taking the subway, swinging was just too much fun. RDR2 started off like that for me, but by the time I felt the story was starting to drag I did use it just to get to the next mission marker sooner.
Good to have fast travel as an option, and let players make up their minds. At least trying to make moving around your game's spaces interesting should be a minimum requirement.

People dunking on AI all the time is getting drole now. He clearly said "AI is something that can help improve **certain processes in game production**". That sounds to me like very boring things that happen behind the scenes. For example, with MS CoPilot, you could have a design meeting on Teams, have the transcription of that meeting generated automatically by AI, and then drop that transcription into Word to have the meeting summarised really quickly, then the summary can be translated efficiently and sent out to the relevant people to read in their respective mother tongues, etc. All stuff that can be done now, turning a few days worth of drudgery for the producer's assistant into a couple hours of clicking and proofreading.

What it does not sound like is "this entire world will be AI generated" or anything like that.

Didn't Bethesda Game Studios used to build their map's topography with AI, before devs would jump in to place dungeons, cities, etc, around the place? Was that so controversial?

"the multiverse"... there's another square on my 'overused superhero tropes' bingo card filled in.

If they did use AI to design their "Pals" then it's very short sighted. AI generated assets don't attract copyright (at least in the US, I don't think it's been tested in the UK courts yet). So presumably their designs could just be copied and used commercially with abandon.

Well deserved, and goes to show what a licence can do when handled well. Hopefully the age of the lazy tie-in licensed game is drawing to a close once and for all.

Good news. I'd hate to see TLoU go the way of The Walking Dead.

@Americansamurai1 You can trademark pretty much anything that is associated with your branding. This is why Disney recently started using the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey in the opening credits of their films; they were trying to get around the fact that the copyright on that version of the mouse was going to expire a few years down the line (as it recently did). I've heard of companies obtaining trademarks on particular colour hexcodes, scents, images, phrases, you name it. As it is an IP without an expiry date, a trademark can be very valuable.

Well, according to a few lawsuits now, you can't copyright an image created by AI, so feel free to steal those "final album covers people will see in the game". The upside of using AI is it is quick and comparatively cheap. The downside is that you own nothing. So I don't think people should be too worried about AI taking on the more interesting work from artists, like animations, character design, etc, as those are the kinds of things that the corpo's are going to want to ensure is a protectable IP.

I'm not surprised they're trying to get more money from TLoU2. It sold less than half the units as TLoU1 (across both PS3 and PS4, not counting the PS5 remaster), and if they can re-release it at a modest additional investment to try and get a few more million units sold, then why not. The upgrade path seems very fair to those who already have it for the new features, and new fans of TLoU coming off the back of the HBO show and the release of Part 1 Remastered will be getting a lot of video game for the full price.

Yep, worth the £10 to get the new mode for me. While I have issues with some parts of the narrative, particularly at the beginning of the story, once that was out of the way I did enjoy the plot. Maybe not Day 1, but Day "whenever I eventually get bored of BG3", for sure. So probably 2025 at this rate.

What's the score on this Remake and expansions? I got P5 but wish I had held off until P5 Royal had released. Is P3 Remake going to launch with all expansions (if it had any?) built in, or is an expansion expected down the line a-la P4 Golden and P5 Royal?
Or should I just wait a year and find out?