Th3solution

@Nekomichu I agree that part of what SM2 accomplishes is that you do have the option to spend more time with Peter if you like him better or with Miles if you like him better. Obviously you have to push each protagonist’s story forward eventually, but if you like the style of one over another you have the freedom to choose.

Personally I split my time fairly evenly but I leaned a little more toward Peter because of his new moves and powers, even though I liked the Mile Morales ‘expandalone’ game more than SM1. But I think that was mainly because the MM game felt tighter with fewer annoying puzzles and fetching activities than SM1. I think SM2 balanced the puzzle and stealth sections and Mary Jane stuff a lot better than the first game. It flowed better and the new set pieces (like the Coney Island sequence for example) also added some flavor to the experience. The characters were good, imo, and I especially liked Peter and Harry’s relationship.

@Fiendish-Beaver Sure, a genre and a theme will inherently be consistent and similar. I think my issue with the annualized retreads of COD, Madden, FIFA, NBA2K, etc is that they drop every year for $70 for what is often very little change from the year prior. It would make more sense to be a $20 roster update instead of a full priced release. This is probably a lot less true of COD, but like I said above, every FPS I’ve played feels very samey, no matter which game it is. 😅

I’m not a fair judge of any of these popular annual franchises and obviously don’t buy them, so I fully admit to my own ignorance there. But I’m going off of reviews, videos, and secondary impressions. Perhaps many of the complainers of SM2 are also not connoisseurs of the superhero third person action genre. I suspect a lot of the SM2 hate also comes from those who never played the game and just watched gameplay (like me with COD).

But anyways, my point is that I don’t think SM2 wasn’t any more samey than Black Ops 3 vs. Black Ops 4, but I could be wrong.

@Specky Like I said, there’s some truth to the ‘more of the same’ complaints, I just think it’s a little overstated. There were nice wrinkles with the different set pieces and modified powers. But yeah, it is similar to the other games.

By no means does it deserve the technical admiration of what innovation BG3 brought, and perhaps even TotK (although I even heard some complaints it was too iterative from BotW). But I think the SM2 complaints were a smidge exaggerated. But I also think every FPS I’ve played feels the same and can’t understand why people keep playing them, so maybe the problem is with me. 😂

@UnlimitedSevens Yeah, but were Michelangelo (or Da Vinci) limited by 40 hrs/week anti-crunch labor laws? 😜
I’m kidding of course. Because we all know these studios don’t adhere to those rules anyways. 😅

But I love your post. Made me laugh. Mostly because I’ve been wondering the same thing. COVID notwithstanding it seems like game development progress is walking is quicksand lately.

Those numbers are impressive and higher than I thought they’d be. Personally I loved the game, but it got buried in the hype last year of Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, etc. The online narrative that the game was just ‘more of the same’ is really only partially true and I thought it expanded just enough and yet kept the solid fun gameplay elements from the first two games. It was third person action gaming comfort food and certainly not any worse than the recycled releases of other franchises we see all the time. [cough]COD[cough]Madden[cough]

I hate hearing these nightmares about stick drift. I’ve been lucky that all 3 of my DualSense’s work perfect still and have a fair amount of mileage, especially the 2 originals I got with the PS5 over 3 years ago. My Portal is only a couple months old and so I’m crossing my fingers that it doesn’t become my first casualty! Has anyone actually had stick drift with their Portal yet? The sticks feel slightly different (I think they’re a bit smaller anyways and seem to have a longer stem) so maybe the issue is fixed for the Portal?

I did have stick drift on one of my DualShock 4 pads, but man, that was after many years of heavy use on the OG controller that came with my launch PS4. So that controller didn’t owe me anything. I even still use it because the drift is pretty minor and can be managed for a lot of games with adjusting sensitivity settings and dead zone, if I feel the urge.

@Littlejack You absolutely got your money’s worth, and then some. By my estimates, if I play 5-6 games from PS+ per year then I at least break even from what the games would usually cost. That assumes the average game would have cost me around $20 a piece, and I think that’s being conservative. And that’s not taking into account picking up your subscription on sale or through discount loopholes, as others have pointed out.

And people forget that if you have Extra, that part of that subscription fee is also getting you the online access, cloud saves, and occasional extra sale discounts on games.

But yeah, my list is a little shorter than yours, but over the last 12 months I’ve enjoyed multiple PS+ games (about 11 if I am counting correctly). Some I played and never finished though, but most of them I did complete and thoroughly enjoy, such as Tchia, Life is Strange 2, Inscryption, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Disco Elysium, The Quarry, and Stray. Currently enjoying Midnight Suns as my side game and it’s been good too.

I do have a hybrid approach because I also buy games too, so the PS+ Extra catalog is merely a supplement to playing other games that don’t go on the service, like the FromSoft games, big new releases, and niche titles. Like you say, there’s no wrong way to do this, but I do think people are sleeping on the value PS+ can have. For $100 a year (what I paid to stack a couple years on sale) I get a lot less value from my stupid Netflix account. I really need to just cancel that. 😅

For me it’s a ‘meh’ month, but I might try Streets of Rage 4 and Dredge.

Is this everything being added to Extra or are they having another mid-month refresh too?

@twitchtvpat I agree with that. When the floodgates open and we find out what Bend, Naughty Dog, Bluepoint, Housemarque, Santa Monica, Sucker Punch, and Guerilla are working on, it will certainly be exciting.

@twitchtvpat “…they never stopped making single player games and have plenty of studios making single player games.” Of course. I don’t think anyone has felt they stopped making single player games. But outside of Wolverine, none have been confirmed (unless I’m forgetting something). Everything else is rumors, speculation, non-committal vague quotes from developers, or leaks. And Wolverine is 2025. Sony was able to rely on second and third party to do all the heavy lifting for the first half of 2024 (and most of 2023 also, outside of SM2). We’ve had a grand total of 1 new AAA single-player game from Sony since Nov. 2022. That’s a year and a half with only one new single player game. It would be something if that year-and-a-half had some announcements of new single player games, but we’ve had… zero?

18 months with 1 AAA first party single player release and 0 AAA single player game announcements. I’d call that a desert.

Personally I’ve not been too concerned as there’s plenty to play, especially with Square-Enix and Team Ninja towing the rope. But if Sony remain silent whilst Xbox and Nintendo have big reveal events to create hype, then they are definitely conceding some ground, especially when Xbox already has the better release line-up for the rest of 2024.

I do think Sony will have a Showcase type of event to let us have a peek into at least something coming out. But if they don’t, it also won’t surprise me, the way they’ve been going lately. Either way, I’m not ready to buy an Xbox and I trust Sony, but the players are getting restless.

@twitchtvpat As someone who doesn’t own an Xbox, I hope you’re right, buddy. If not for Death Stranding 2 and Wolverine (both probably 2025) I’d be even more concerned. I know Sony has games coming out, but it appears there’s going to be a small desert of single player games because of the live service push.

@twitchtvpat [see comment #61]
And as an aside, the huge lead Sony has means it won’t take much to gain some ground, especially in just hype for first party output. There’s nowhere to go but up for Xbox 😄

@Bez87 “I wouldn't say the dualsense was a novelty? I'm still in the mind set that the game is still the greatest use of the controller we have had to date…“
When I say ‘novelty’, what you’re saying there is what I meant — Astro’s Playroom was the greatest, most ‘novel’ use of the controller to date. As in ‘new, unusual, and interesting’ and has yet to be replicated with other games that use the DualSense. I’m still waiting for a game that will match its use of it.

I love the DualSense’s features. I find it strange when people shut off the adaptive triggers for games that utilize them. The haptic feedback can really enhance a game. And although the Astro’s Playroom base gameplay was good, if it didn’t have the DualSense features it would have been a 7/10 instead of a 9/10.

@UltimateOtaku91 I like the sound of that — having Astrobot run through different levels based on famous PlayStation IP. Could be cool to see what they could come with for that. Horizon, GoW, TLoU, Spider-Man, Bloodborne, GT, Ratchet & Clank, GoT, etc, etc.

I loved Astro’s Playroom but part of the allure was the creatively woven in nostalgia though the PlayStation generations. It was a love letter to players like myself who’ve been with PlayStation all these years. The new DualSense features was the additional draw for the game. So if you take the novelty of those two things away I’m not sure how a new Astrobot game will land with me. I hope the game comes up with new hooks to keep it fresh.

@sentiententity I mean gaining ground in the hype department. The inertia of market leadership will carry Sony for quite a while, but the chip damage of Xbox having some hype for games coming out while Sony has none may catch up to them eventually.

Sony has shot its wad with all the big second party and console exclusives now being released except for Death Stranding 2 (Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, Helldivers 2, FF16 and Rebirth). Hype for new games does lead to console sales which leads to game and subscription sales, so Sony is a risk for conceding some of the hype, but I think they’ll make up for it later this year.

Edit: New article about an Astrobot game just posted. So maybe Astrobot and Concord can counter Indiana Jones, Avowed, Hellblade II, and Flight Simulator… ? Maybe.

At this point I think the silence is deafening. We won’t have anything until late summer, early fall when they announce the PS5 Pro. Xbox and Nintendo will gain some ground over the summer.

Although not a system seller, this is the main game that Xbox has that I’m jealous of. I’ll not buy an Xbox for it, but I will buy it right away if it comes to PlayStation. I loved the first game.

The real problem here is that Ubisoft is about 5 games late to getting to a Japanese / Samurai setting. It is nearly saturated at this point.

@somnambulance There is definitely a psychology to the whole “own vs. rent” situation with consuming media. I think that when one invests in buying something, there’s a higher chance that you’ll stick with it, and potentially enjoy it. Whereas consuming something via a service makes it easier to fall off if the early moments of the game (or movie, etc) doesn’t click. Theres are a few games that I probably didn’t give an adequate chance to like maybe Death’s Door for example because I didn’t invest money into it. And the opposite is true for a game I bought on release like Returnal where I wonder if I played it through a service if I might have given up on it early and missed out on what is one of my favorite experiences this gen.

And totally with you on the passion projects and smaller experimental titles. Unfortunately no one buys them. So they would be great for PS+, and I agree with you that it would be a great place for games like Bound, Concrete Genie, Astrobot, Erica, Flower, or the Team Ico games of yore. Stuff like that. I wonder how the trajectory of Dreams would have differed if it was given out from Day 1 on PS+. It’s easy to say in hindsight because we know the game sold very poorly, but it could have had longer legs if it was in more people’s hands. But unfortunately the sting of that game’s commercial failure is likely to give Sony cold feet about investing in any passion projects in the future.

@somnambulance That’s fair. And I can tell you are actually thinking of it analytically rather than knee-jerk reacting to a bad month as so often happens with players in the comments and aftermath of an announcement.

And I can definitely agree with you that there’s sometimes value in avoiding a cost as well, by having a chance to play a game and then just drop it if your not enjoying it without concern for having spent extra money on it. For me that happened to an extent with Avengers and Death’s Door, for example — Games I might have bought but got to try on PS+ and find out that I didn’t really like them. Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with Tchia — I most certainly would have never bought the game as it didn’t look like my usual cup o’ tea. But I went anhead and tried it and thoroughly enjoyed it as a charming and unique cultural experience unlike anything I’ve played, so PS+ helped to expose me to something I would have missed.

So for every ‘meh’ game I’ve played through PS+ (Power Wash Sim, Humanity, Slay the Spire, etc), I’ve discovered some real gems I love (Midnight Suns, Stray, The Quarry, Disco Elysium, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Inscryption, etc), some of which I hold as favorites of the generation.

But yeah, I still buy plenty of games too. And so the issue does become a time management one. I have a large backlog of owned games, and so having a library of 400 PS+ Extra games does complicate things from a time-management standpoint. But in the end, it makes sense to keep my sub for me personally, because it helps diversify me as a gamer and I know I always have something that will resonate for me to play.

@somnambulance I’m not trying to disagree, at the end of the day each person needs to decide if the value is there for them, but I think it sounds like you’re getting enough from the sub to warrant keeping it. A full year of Extra actually costs $135. At 5-6 games played per year you’re pretty close to the break even point (assuming an average of $20 per game or so). The added value of cloud saves, special discounts, and online play would certainly push it over the edge. Not to mention, I’ve yet to pay full price for my sub, usually twice a year you can get it for close to $100-120 for a year (Black Friday, Days of Play), which makes it even more of a value if you play in the neighborhood of 5-6 games from it that year.

I thought I’d keep using my PS4 after getting my PS5, so I left it hooked up in another room. … I haven’t turned the thing on in months. Every time I do I’m annoyed at how slow it is and how poor the games look in comparison.

I started to read the comments here and it didn’t take long until the “ThEre’S NOthInG wOrTh pLaYiNg oN PS5!” rhetoric to surface. I mean, to each their own, but that’s just simply not true at this point. It starts with Control Ultimate Edition and goes on from there. My PS Portal plays better than my PS4.

I heard this game is going to be so realistic and authentic — If you play as the University of Michigan you get an automatic cheat where you can see what play your opponent is going to run.

Finally — that Battleborn sequel we’ve all been waiting for.

The only one from my wishlist that registers is Balatro. It’s already an inexpensive game, but another couple bucks off makes it even more appealing. For $12 you can hardly get a decent meal, much less a game that supposedly can be played for hundreds of hours. Seems a good PS Portal game too.

@lacerz I am actually playing Midnight Suns on mine right now and the print is small, but readable. I did use the game’s accessibility menu options to enlarge the print a little which made it fine. Because Midnight Suns is a great use for the device (or any streaming option).

@LifeGirl I did have a user on here call people who bought a Portal “idiots.” I’m not joking — that was the word he used. He was a semi-regular too and not a clear troll. He went on a tirade about us being shills or whatever and somehow sending the wrong message to Sony and ruining gaming for everyone. 🤷🏻‍♂️

As for this idiot, I enjoy my Portal. 😄

@breakneck Yeah, that makes sense that more consoles sold at MSRP will increase revenue. But the articles says Sony expects “static revenue but growing profits.” So, same amount of money coming in, in total, but better profits. As far as hardware sales go, perhaps that means they are predicting they can produce consoles at a lower cost to them and still sell at the same price?

I’m no businessman, but just because PS+ revenue increased since going to the 3-tier system, did profits from the service increase? I can only imagine the cost/expenses of running the new service went up dramatically in order to get the contracts and payouts for all those Extra and Premium games. Did the new revenue cover the increased costs? Just wondering.

——————

Edit: This doesn’t answer the PS+ profitability question specifically, but in looking at the other article it states “Sony's sales and operating income for FY23 are up 12 percent and five per cent respectively… As it looks ahead to FY24, Sony forecasts a fairly static revenue figure, but expects profits to continue to grow.”

So the sales/revenue has grown more than the profits overall for the company as a whole, which does tell me that the operating costs have increased faster than the revenue. They expect a “static revenue” but growing profits. That can only mean their profit strategy is to have cut costs (layoffs/closures/cheaper contracts with third parties/etc)

@NEStalgia “To those in the desert, everything appears like an oasis.” 😜

But honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to have seen Forspoken sell better on Xbox. Like you say, couldn’t have been much worse. 😅

@LifeGirl For me the value isn’t necessarily in the percentage of the catalogue that I play from the service, rather just finding a few that speak to me and that I actually finish. Playing 5 titles per year is a rough break even point for the subscription price and so far it has met that threshold the last two years.

Most of the games leaving the service this time around are not of interest to me, but I have had once or twice that I had to rush and play a game earlier than planned because it was going to leave (The Quarry last year, for example). Titles leaving the service are indeed annoying, but usually something is added at the same time so the sheer number of titles I’m interested in stays roughly stable.

Console games having pop-up ads akin to mobile games sounds like a horrible idea. I don’t mind advertising that’s included in the flow of the game though. If it helps keep costs down then I don’t mind having my protagonist casually drinking a Coca-Cola or driving by a billboard with an AT&T ad, or something like that. As long as it’s not intrusive, then I can live with it. I prefer if the product placement isn’t too overt though to pull unwarranted attention to the product. Like the energy drink and the AMC Norman Reedus’s TV show in Death Stranding. Although that was tongue-in-cheek so didn’t bother me as much. 😅

Because a release on Xbox and Switch would have saved Forspoken. 😜

It’s all about Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin this weekend. I’ve yet to meet this alleged “scholar”. And I’m not sure why he studies sin, but I guess I’ll find out.

I have met A LOT of enemy hoards though. 😅

Oh yeah, definitely one I would consider picking up. One of only 2 or 3 of the Xbox studio games that I have interest in. Really loved the first game. Which sounds weird because it’s a fairly miserable narrative and very gloomy, but I guess that’s why we play games — to get the full spectrum of emotional submersion. It’s why I liked the melancholy The Last of Us Part II and the depressing and punishing Souls games. Happy games are nice to have too. We all need a little Ratchet & Clank or Astrobot from time to time also. 😄
But yeah, bring on Hellblade II. Barring poor reviews I’d probably be there day 1 on PS5.

@Kyushutrail I’m wondering the same thing. For $27 it’s still a smidge too high for me to take a chance on it so I hope they include it on one of the PS+ services. I can’t imagine it’s selling very many copies, even at a discount.

Another one on my wishlist that I feel similarly about is Wild Hearts, which I’m curious about but just not quite enough to drop $25 when there’s a real chance it comes to PS+ before I’d even get around to playing it.

I’m not surprised at the lack of growth, for all the reasons stated in the article.

However, I do still strongly believe I get a nice value for my Extra subscription. You don’t have to play dozens of games a year to get back your investment. It’s a smaller margin now that they hiked up the sub prices, but I have been lucky enough to get a year sub on sale for about $100. At the average price of roughly $20 a game, all I need to play is 5 games from the service in a year to break even. I’m not nearly as prolific a gamer as I used to be, but I still manage to do that fairly easily. In the last year and a half I count 11 that I’ve played from the service (counting both Essential and Extra games). That’s on top of 10 that I have played which were games I bought outright, mostly new releases. So I’m still engaged in the purchasing market as well as the subscription market and get value from PS+.

And then cloud saves, online gaming, and occasional sale prices are just icing on the cake from there.

But the cutoff is probably about one game every other month that you need to play from the service to be worth the money, and like has been said, if you play mostly Fortnite and Genshin then you don’t have time to get around to other games that often.

I’m really hungry to hear what the first party studios are working on, but I also am ok with the good third party output we’ve been having, both exclusive and multi-platform.

The truth of the matter is that there’s probably too many game releases now anyways. The industry has overgrown its base of sustainability and so studios are being shut down and layoffs are occurring at breakneck pace. I think high quality games are being lost in the shuffle every month because of the sheer volume out there. Couple this with the way games now tend to be so long, and there’s just not enough time to play them all.

That being said, there’s nothing quite like Sony first party, so I’ll be first in line to see what they have on deck. Meanwhile, we’re eating well from third party.

Blast, I need to play the first one. This gives me proper motivation to knock it out before next year.

@DarkTron Good to know.
Hey, @Darude84 - check out comment #19. 😄

@Darude84 I totally agree. It’s more complicated than it needs to be.

If you have a disc drive then yes, you might check for the physical disc. Looks like it’s going for about $27, which is on par with the digital sale price. It then has resale value also, so you could recoup another $10-15 back when you finish the game if you wanted. You also have the option to play the original launch version of the game before they heavily patched it and made it easier, if that’s your thing. 😅

@Darude84 As far as I can tell, once you redeem and “add to library” from the PS+ Extra catalog, you no longer have the option to purchase the game outright, since it’s already in your library. Once your sub lapses then the purchase option should open up again. Sucks for times like this though where you want to take advantage of a sale.

For future reference, you can still purchase a game that’s on the service as long as you don’t add it to your library yet. It’s kind of a messy system, but I can see why the do it this way so that people don’t accidentally buy games that they already have access to for free with their subscription.

Edit: Returnal is a fantastic game, by the way. Well worth the full price I paid for it at launch. I suspect it will be on sale again soon enough, so if you have a little patience then you can still save a few euros.

I have quite enjoyed mine. I have good streaming quality most of the time and my PS5 isn’t even hard wired. But I know there are some variables and some people’s internet setup might not be ideal for streaming. But everything I’ve read online seems to suggest the Portal does as good or better of a job than any other device. The main two competitors being the Steam Deck using Chiaki and the Backbone using your smartphone. Portal streams better and feels better in your hands with legit DualSense features. It’s about $100 more than a Backbone and $3-400 less than a Steam Deck. I’d say that’s perfectly placed in the market.

For me the big advantage is also that I don’t have to buy a single game for it. After my $200 investment, I’m done. My entire existing PlayStation library (over 300 games accumulated over the years, not to mention the other 300 on PS+ Extra that I have access to) is there to use on it. If I got a Steam Deck I’d have to invest in building a library and it would cost hundreds more.

I still think that the huge showcase games are best experienced on the big screen, but that’s nothing against the Portal. It’s like watching Oppenheimer on your phone — its a perfectly viable option, but is it really the way you want to experience that? 😅 However the Portal is a great fit for the games that aren’t the major spectacle pieces or have grinding aspects that you can do while watching sports or laying in bed. I’m playing Midnight Suns right now on it. Would be great for Balatro, Dave the Diver, Unicorn Overlord, etc, etc.

Not much for me here, but I can appreciate the quality of the lineup. I might consider playing Tunic, even though it’s not my usual type of game. Nor are sports games or first person action like Ghostrunner (I think I have the first game still unplayed in my library from PS+). And Destiny…. That ship sailed a long time ago for me.

I should go back and replay Retunal. I played at launch before they nerfed the difficulty and made a save state option. It was tough as nails at the start but I grew to love it.

The exceptional Spider-Man 2. I honestly am surprised at how good this game is. The online reception for it felt relatively tepid, so my expectations were in check. Perhaps that’s helped me not to be overhyped for it but I think it’s clearly better than either of the first two games. And although it feels familiar with those earlier entries, it expands, improves, and creates some really nice surprises in both the narrative and the gameplay.

I haven’t bought any of them yet. I have slight interest in Pentiment, but not enough to buy at this time.

From their back catalogue Gears of War might be worth a try and I’ve always been curious about Fable. But the main Xbox games I’m prone to buy are a couple in development — Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones.

Another one of those many franchises that I always wanted to try but it kept getting pushed aside by higher priority games. I don’t have time to play 6’s and 7’s. I’m lucky to find time to play all the 8-10’s. 😅

And before someone gets all in a wad about my prioritizing my game time based on numerical review scores, I’m kidding. Kind of.

@NEStalgia I fear that if I actually turn on my PS3 that the amount of time and bandwidth it will take to download the firmware update will break the internet. 😂