ThomasHL

I don't think this means much either way. He's not going to say 'Yes Horizon was held back by being developed for the PS4'. It's like when football managers get asked if they're happy with the new transfers - they always say yes, even when they go on to bench the new guy for a year.

This sucks. It absolutely will hold God of War back, even if it's as simple as 'Can we put 12 enemies in this arena? No the PS4 CPU can't handle it, let's do 10'

And it's not because people can't buy a PS5. The PS5 has sold more than any Sony console. More people have a PS5 than any past launch console of theirs and it never stopped them before.

Sony seem to be transitioning into not selling their consoles based on exclusives, and that's going to backfire for them. Especially as Microsoft are going to have a deluge of exclusives in a couple of years

I tried not renewing my PS+ this month, but Star Wars: Squadrons might be enough to get me to reup

Another Dominus hitbox! I shouldn't have chosen a Breakout as my car, there's barely any skins for it.

@Flaming_Kaiser The size of the patch has nothing to do with the amount of bugs it fixes. Mass Effect has pre-rendered cut scenes, if you fix one tiny error in those, you have to re-upload massive files.

I'm guessing the bulk of this patch is the terrain textyres

I've been waiting for this

Is this consciously taking cues from the Persona games, or was the first game styled like this too?

Either way I like it

I reckon they'll hold out a bit longer. There still aren't many PS5 titles available and demand is high, and you guys pointed out the attach rate and play rate is high as well.

I won't be shocked if I'm wrong though, with Sackboy in particular

This is a good data - sad that Nier Replicant is so low though.

I'm a little surprised that Rocket League is only one step lower in US/Canada than in Europe.

Do they give out this data for Japan on the Japanese blog? I'm curious if there are any gems people elsewhere are playing for me to find

We'll have to see how this pans out. I'm worried that language and cultural barriers will keep the output mainly focused in Europe and North America. Collaboration leans a lot on personal connections.

I always buy digital if I can. I don't want a disc taking up space in the house, I like being able to switch between multiple games without faffing about with a disc and it's quieter. And I'd never sell a game on, because I like to replay them.

I want something new

On the one hand the Funimation trial has introduced me to a bunch of dubbed (I'm basic) anime that I now love. My Hero Academia, and Love is War are just as good as people said.

On the other hand, the Funimation app has barely functioned on any decide I use, console, phone or PC. There have been multiple days where I've just had to give up because nothing will play.

Only 25 hours is a feature for me, not a flaw

JRPGs are just about the worst kind of game for co-op. Long and story driven. Battle systems that are more about strategy than the moment to moment game feel. And a big part of the engagement is the long term growth and levelling up.

Lord of the Rings The Third Age had a co-op mode when the second player couldn't even do anything until the battle started. It was probably more fun to just sit next to someone and suggest what they say should do next than actually play the co-op mode.

@Buckychop_Fandom I hope you get the opportunity to pay a reasonable price. I don't think it's not a good thing that they're ending up with people who are willing to pay above RRP.

It's just some people suggest they're not ending up in real peoples homes at all, which isn't the case.

@ShogunRok It would definitely still sell out if there weren't scalpers! The only reason scalpers exist is plenty of people are prepared to pay $800 for a PS5. That's how much demand outstrips production

Those same people would happily buy a PS5 for $500 if it was in stock at a shop.

When people are sayings they're in the hands of scalpers, are they imagining scalpers with hundreds of PS5s just sitting on their living room floor somewhere? No, scalpers sell them on almost immediately

That change to the Citadel in ME1 is amazing

@viktorcode yes, it's retail sales only, which is an increasingly small part of overall sales. It's a shame but I doubt we'll ever get proper digital numbers

The SSD is probably the best part of a PS5 so far. It's not something you really notice, but being able to start a game quickly and have less loading screens is really nice. I can't wait to get more games designed with the SSD in mind.

I wouldn't play another Uncharted game with Drake. His story ended with Uncharted 4. I'm not interested in a reboot either. I'd probably play an Uncharted game with Chloe and Nadine, or a new character, but the developer needs to be on their A game. Uncharted is all about the details.

I'm pretty sure a couple of commenters haven't realised that this is lifetime sales. Either that or they've got absurdly high expectations for new consoles.

The Vita sold 16 million units worldwide. That's 25% of the PS3's lifetime sales. To beat the Vitas lifetime sales in a country within half a year of launching is an impressive feat.

I don't know whether I'm happy or sad that I no longer need to exit the Mako to last hit every thresher maw and get the full XP

Oddworld is a game I'd never buy myself, but I'll at least give a try, so that's good I guess.

But I've got no interest in the other two.

@everynowandben I'm very skeptical about that article. For example: "When certain people try to call Game Pass the Netflix of, or the Spotify of," Spencer says, "there is a fundamental difference... that these games are all for sale."

That's just wrong. Films that eventually go onto Netflix are for sale. Music used to be for sale until streaming and piracy made that impossible. They're trying to suggest that development budgets won't be impacted by Gamepass by suggesting sales won't be affected by Gamepass - and yet the article thinks that Gamepass is aiming for a scale of 50 million users to be profitable - of course that will impact the number of people buying games.

They also admit that Gamepass isn't profitable at the moment 'It's in an acquisition phrase' - and that once customers are acquired Microsoft believes they'll stay even if the service is no longer as good. They argue that prices wouldn't have to increase because costs go down with scale - and yes development costs go down with scale, but bandwidth costs do not and games are a magnitude bigger than films on that front.

They keep trying to argue that this isn't Netflix - but I don't see how that argument is real. Development costs for Netflix obey the same scale law. Netflix is also trying to widen it's consumer base - and achieved a scale much greater than gamepass will. Netflix has the same infrastructure costs - and what we've seen is that Netflix has continually raised it's price, whilst at the same time offering a smaller fraction of the 'must-see' content.

But more than that - they acting like Microsoft will keep the price down out of the goodness of their heart. And that won't happen. The article essential outlines the idea that Microsoft achieves a subscription monopoly - at which point Microsoft is free to raise prices as it wishes. On the other hand if other subscription services arise (like we're seeing with film streaming), then Microsoft won't have a monopoly, but they'll also find it much harder to license such a rich category of exclusives because they're competing with everyone else. Either way the quality drops.

The article lists a long list of tech services of similar ambition, each one of which started off great and got a little bit more expensive and a little bit worse as they reached closer to profitability. The article claims Gamepass is the Unicorn that will be different from everything else, whilst at the same time listing a huge amount of precedent for why it won't.

I totally agree that is a very feel bad moment for playstation owners, and should have been resisted by Sony.

In the practical sense though, I still agree that Gamepass is unsustainable in it's current form. I'm sure Microsoft know it is too. Netflix has never been profitable, they've always gone into debt for the sake of growth, and Gamepass is in a similar position.

The deal seems too good to be real because it is. Microsoft are losing money to gain subscribers and achieve a dominant position, and when they have enough they will jack up the price and reduce the service.

Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas are some of my all time favourite games - but not on PS3. You need the fan patches

@Max_the_German Spiderman is big in Japan. Spiderman films are some of the only superhero films that do consistently well in the Japanese box office, and there have been a lot of Japanese specific spiderman media.

Spiderman is Hideo Kojima's favourite superhero, and he says it's because Peter Parker has relatable fears and worries, similar to Japanese superheroes.

If you go by CD Projekt's track record, Cyberpunk 2078 or 2079 should be great

I didn't think I can tell the difference, but now FFVII remake feels very laggy on a PS5 (PS4 compatibility)? Is it actually dropping below 30FPS or has my brain rewired itself to expect 60FPS?

Fallout: New Vegas was one of my favourite all time games but Bethesda didn't make that one, and most of the writers behind it at Obsidian have left too, so it doesn't leave me with much to miss.

I've never played an Elder Scrolls game, but I'm open to starting one day. And I've never played an Arkane game but I appreciate how quirky they are - so probably one of those.

@Salt_AU Still heroically not admitting defeat I see!

Platform holders don't make money from selling their own games. Sony is quite happy for it's studios to operate at a loss if they produce great games. Platform holders make money from the 30% commission they get on every game sold on their platform by other publishers.

Therefore, if having some of the most popular games in the world makes even 1% more people buy an Xbox, Microsoft will make money on every game that person buys on an Xbox for the course of it's life - that could be 20+ games. Making money from 20 games is a lot more valuable than making money off their own exclusives.

Even more than that, Microsoft are trying to be the Netflix of games. And they see that as a market which could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the long-run. Microsoft bought Bethesda for what is pocket change to Microsoft - they could throw away $10 billion every 3 months and it wouldn't scratch Microsofts accounting book - as an investment towards to that goal of being the Netflix of games.

Now you might not think this makes sense, but this is what I told you earlier this week when I said Microsoft would make their games exclusive, and it turns out they have.

This is the economics. The money isn't in being the guy who sells games, it's being the guy who makes money from everyone else selling games on their platform.

@Salt_AU Yes, they're expecting people who would buy a Playstation to buy an Xbox instead. Is that so surprising? That's why Sony buys studios.

There's a big difference from pulling games already released and available on platforms, with legal agreements that were signed between various platform holders, and pissing off a bunch of fans, and telling people that the new games you are now funding are only going to be available on the platforms that make you money.

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible - Minecraft is one hope, but people are just going to get hurt if they convince themselves that Microsoft wants to help Sony sell consoles. Microsoft has a crazy bank, and buying Bethesda was a power move to help their long term strategic goals - selling subscriptions and selling Xboxes. They will do whatever they think helps them get to those goals, and I imagine telling people 'DOOM is only available on our stuff in the future' is a good way of doing that.

I think it's still best to assume that the next Elder Scrolls and Starfield aren't coming to playstation.

It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility that they will, but because we all want that to happen it's easy to talk ourselves into the idea that it makes good business sense for Microsoft. But the truth of the matter is they didn't buy Bethesda just to make money selling Bethesda games. They bought Bethesda because they want to sell Xboxes and subscription services.

With the PS5 already taking a sales lead it's going to be awfully tempting for Microsoft to put some massive exclusives down on the Xbox side.

I want physical games to exist because they keep the playstation store a bit more honest and help drive down the digital price of old games.

But personally I'd prefer to buy a game digitally than on a disc. It's less of a pain to store and use, and I pay a little more for a digital version than I would for a disc.

I never sell on games, so I don't benefit from that part of physical discs.

This is the pettiest nitpick I could have, but it bothers me that they call it a longbow when it's not a longbow.

Longbows are...long. They're taller than the man drawing it. You could never fire one horizontally.

I was lucky enough to get hold a PS5 last week using a stock alert. The situation in the UK is slowly improving, although I was still in a 30 minute queue despite clicking within a minute of stock going online.

@nicc83 thanks

Wow, I apologise, I totally didn't believe this could be happening.

I'm a little unsure what to do, I only want to play FFVII Remake once, but if the PS5 version has more content, perhaps I should hang on for that?

Actually, my source told me it will be Halo 5

I heard that it was going to be the entire PSN catalog on PS+ next month.

A bad part of me is slightly resentful, but why shouldn't other people get the chance to play the same great games? It does me no harm.

If I switched to PC gaming it would be for the mods, not because of exclusives or lack thereof.

I bought Spiritfarer a couple of days before it went on sale, but the game is so charming and relaxing I'm okay with sending a few extra £'s in the developer's direction.

The funamation subscription is quite cool, I've been on the fence about getting one

@thefourfoldroot it's a big disappointment that no-one is adapting their stats to include digital sales.

I guess they don't have any commercial customers for that information, because the platform owners already have it.

The Metal Gear IP doesn't mean much to me without Kojima. Make another solid stealth game, sure, but if it's not coming with Kojima weirdness then you might as well ditch Metal Gear's convoluted setting and backstory too.

@Voltan Yes, but if I'm going to replay a trilogy of games, I don't want to replay the second-best version of that trilogy.

PS5's seem to be at ~£700 on ebay now. That's a big enough price gap that we're still going to need quite a lot more stock before people can buy it easily in shops.

And Ratchet & Clank is going to push demand up again in June. I was hoping I could get one in time for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, but it's not looking good.

Time-travel + the greatest art style = purchase