Th3solution

@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.

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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. 😂

@OnlyGaming Lol, very true, the not being perfect part, that is. Not having good taste, well, also possibly true. 😅
If it’s any consolation, Skyrim is one of my favorite games of all time. Why I have a mental block on Fallout I can’t explain. I think I’m put off by what I saw of the VATS or VAMS or whatever that system is. The description and small amount of gameplay footage I saw seemed gimmicky, I don’t know. Also, as with many long running series, I feel a little strange jumping in at the midway point. Even if the games are each standalone, there’s a sense that as a newcomer you’re missing out on some inside knowledge or existing momentum. But that’s where the TV show may help. If it is a good entry point for the uninitiated, it might segue more easily into playing these latter entires like FO4 and 76. I refuse to turn on my PS3 unless my PS4 and PS5 both die, so I don’t reckon I’ll play FO3 or New Vegas anytime soon.

@rusty82 Blast, I had been trying to not buy any games until I whittled down my backlog but that RE4 price is really good for just being out a year. I don’t think it’ll drop lower than that for a while.

@thefourfoldroot1 I would love a more sophisticated way to display and organize trophies. I’m not a VR adopter, but if they could also have just a standard virtual trophy room that one could enter to see/display trophies, that would be sweet. I’d even just take just a simple filter and organizing function for the list. Like let me see all my platinums at a glance, or all my PS3 trophies together, or maybe have a search function so I can go straight to a specific game’s list. I guess PSN Profiles and other third party sites can do some of this, but I would rather it be native on my console and in the app.

@OnlyGaming Indeed. They literally gave me Fallout 4 and I couldn’t be bothered to play it. 😂

Hmmm… a native PS5 version might be enough to get me interested enough to play my first Fallout game ever. I have FO4 in my library from that PS+ Collection that Sony just gave away like 20 awesome games to anyone who bought a PS5 that first year. FO4 has been one of the few from that collection that I’ve never played and has been gathering dust in my library

Well, I did once tape the joystick on my controller to run my car in circles for the last mileage trophy in Dirt 5. Other than that, I feel like the grind in most games is not a huge problem. …or maybe I avoid those games altogether, who knows.

I really enjoyed this game, and it’s even more impressive as the studio’s first effort in the space. Much better than the gaming output of more seasoned developers who’ve been making games for decades

Well these poll results are a bit surprising to me. I guess now I know why publishers embrace the DLC strategy so much. Personally, I just can’t get behind the whole concept. First of all, it’s partially because some DLC does feel like cut content that’s been held back to sell later (notice I said some, so everyone hold your horses) which feels a little scummy, and then secondly (and more importantly) because there’s a complete loss of momentum after completing a game that makes it difficult to go back to a game you shelved many months ago.

But hey, you do you. I personally can’t recall a single DLC I’ve ever purchased separately, and only engage with post release content if it’s my first playthrough and the game has been out for a while and already has a complete edition.

@DaniPooo Yeah, that’s fair. Maybe it’s not the length per se, but the pacing. Although I think I logged 80 hrs and that’s about the limit for me on almost any game before I start to get restless to move on.

I think my main issue with the pacing was how the final chapters tried to tie everything together on all the side characters all at once. So there’s this big crescendo toward the climax that then gets stalled by doing 10 different side quest wrap ups on on the NPCs. They specific storylines were nice to see and get closure on a lot of the characters, but I wish they wouldn’t have dumped them all in that one chapter because it made it feel like it was dragging. I would have like to have that content spaced out over a couple earlier chapters that had less side quests in them. By the time I wrapped up everyone’s stories and got to the last final boss and closing main story points, I felt like it had lost a little momentum.

Still loved the game though!

I think CD Projekt started off with an attempt at Baldur’s Gate, which turned into the Witcher. Perhaps it’s time to come full circle and give them a try again. Although they’re probably too busy now with Witcher 4.

Wow, I’m surprised about the buffs. I felt like the difficulty was just about right. Although many of the enemy encounters did feel quite “spongy”, perhaps they are responding to those complaints. But the hunt board encounters and boss battles were the right level of intensity and satisfaction when you finally prevailed. Those will probably be quite a bit easier now.

Overall, with the side quest completion warping and the buffs it looks like they are trying to streamline the game and improve the flow, which I think is good. I loved the game but it was probably too long.

Yeah this is the disadvantage to a sub service. But honestly, I can’t really complain. Most of the time they cycle out games that are of lesser popularity and so the net result is usually that there’s more on the service to play than I have time for.

This time around, it’s not the Final Fantasy games that bother me (I’ve played them all except FFXV and they gave that out with that PS+ collection for early PS5 adopters, so I’ll still have access to it) but more so I’ve been meaning to play Artful Escape and Last Stop. @Widey85 Thanks for the recommendation, and I can probably find time to at least play one, if not both, of these before they leave.

That is surprising. It didn’t seem like a game that lit the world on fire at the time. I think I even have it in my library from PS+ and have never even considered downloading it.

I don’t need to play the Rebirth demo, I’m getting that game eventually regardless. (Gotta clear the backlog a little first. Mostly Crisis Core) But for Stellar Blade, having the demo was definitely a plus. After playing it I’ve decided to hold off until later and only pick it up if it reviews well. It was good, just a little more difficult than I was expecting. Not a fan of timing based parry in my combat, so I’m glad I got to try it first.

Another day, another failing live service game.