This update will also include a beta version of a new feature that many fans have been asking for – support for cloud streaming on PS Portal. When the update is live, PlayStation Plus Premium members will be able to participate in a beta for cloud streaming on PS Portal, allowing select PS5 games in the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog* to be streamed directly from our servers, even without a PS5 console.
It does not. Currently, all it does is replace the "PS Remote Play" app you can put on your phone, which is basically just remote desktop for your PS5. Without a PS5, all you have with the Portal is a screen that doesn't do anything.
This update will allow it to stream games from Sony's servers, instead of from your own PS5. But it is still limited just to Sony's platform.
Wait. It didn’t support the PSN cloud from the start?
Like, I thought it was questionable that it couldn’t play ANY games locally (PS1 games run on a potato at this point) but sure. But I assumed it at least supported the cloud streaming Sony occasionally remembers they try to sell.
This thing was SOLELY for playing people’s own PS5s? What the fuck?
Concord will be back as a F2P, guarantee it. They’ve got Amazon churning out an episode of their Secret Level series for the game, they’re not going to fully kill it here and now.
The feedback that I heard everywhere was that the game should have been F2P, so they’ll make that happen.
I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.
Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.
I think it’s too late for Amazon to be willing to take a bath on an episode of one of their new headline IPs. The show is coming December 10th. I’d be shocked if Amazon is going to be willing to just drop a whole episode of their show because the attached game launched flaccid. They’re doing a New World episode for goodness sake, so it’s clear that they’re very willing to push this vehicle for promotion all the way to the finish line even if the engine has dropped out and the wheels have ground down to nothing.
All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.
They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.
The servers will be shut down in a few days.
There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.
Why would you promote a product that does not exist?
Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.
I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).
It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.
It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.
They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.
All the more reason for Amazon to not give a fuck and release the episode anyway. They already expended the effort and money, they’ve probably already sold the ads to run against it, they’ve got streaming hour benchmarks to hit if they want to claim the show is a success, so everything is running in favor of Amazon taking a look at the shitshow the game is in and saying, “SHIP IT” for their Secret Level episode. Normies who aren’t super into gaming aren’t going to know that the game it represents is dead, and there’s a fair chance that Sony will pursue F2P explicitly so that it can not be when the episode airs so they can attempt to get some money from those people who will see the episode and want to play the game. The people behind “Love Death + Robots” are behind this series, they’re probably going to ship a good Concord episode that will make that bland mess of Live Service nonsense seem interesting whether or not the game is good or even alive.
There are no announced plans to take it F2P
The fact that the announcement says they’re taking the servers offline and looking at options to connect with “their players”, while Sony have also not just shut down Firewalk Studios (A wholly owned subsidiary of Sony) is more or less a full endorsement of the idea that they think they can make a go of this by going F2P. Studios that flat out fail don’t stick around in this day and age and the director of the game is saying that they’re looking at options to connect with “their players”, how is that not saying that they’re going to remove the one barrier to entry that everyone is talking about by taking the game free to play?
Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.
I think you may have misunderstood, I didn’t mean to suggest that Concord was a headline IP, I was saying that Amazon considers Secret Level to be a headline IP for Prime Video and they’ve got zero fucks to give about what good (or bad) business the game their episode is based on is doing, they need butts in seats to watch their prestige video games anthology series from the makers of “Love Death + Robots” and I don’t think they give a single shit if Sony feels bad because their game didn’t make it and Amazon still launched an episode set in the same universe as the game.
It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.
Not if ad sales has already written contracts for ads against a set number of episodes. Not if you have streamed hour targets that you need to hit for the show if you want to keep making future seasons of the thing. Not if you are not a gamer and don’t give any fucks about the stupid decisions that Sony made with the IP they probably paid you to make an episode about. There’s absolutely zero reason for Amazon to shitcan an episode of this show just because the game it’s based on was nonsense and everyone knew it years before the game ever launched, it’s an extra 30-40 minutes of space to stick ads and pump “hours watched” even if the episode is as bland as the game. Ads and hours are the only things that video platforms care about, they’re going to keep that episode unless there’s a contractual obligation to cancel it. I doubt that Sony had the foresight to put something in their contract that allowed them to shut things down if the game flopped, and even if they did, such a provision would usually mean that they’d have to pay Amazon some penalty to exercise that option which probably makes it cheaper for Sony to just allow it to move ahead.
I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.
I would not take that bet. I also think the brand is dead. It’s got a year or two tops of being a shambling zombie, but you’re thinking too much like a rational person and businesses don’t think like that, they’re going to try to squeeze blood from this stone, it’s the only thing they know how to do.
Well, I’m not above admitting that I was wrong. Kudos to you. I legit figured they’d let that corpse shamble along for at least a year as a F2P endeavor, but they seem to have reached a correct conclusion earlier than I would have credited them.
I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…
I still doubt it.
I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.
But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.
The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.
When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.
From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.
That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.
But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?
You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.
But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The Secret Level episode is confirmed to be on, so I guess we’ll get at least a peek at what they felt was there for us to enjoy in Concord.
I’d have probably posted it more broadly, but I honestly suspect that most of the people who give a shit are probably working at Amazon and likely could be counted on a single set of human digits. 😆
It makes zero sense trying to save it here and now, but that’s how C-Suite idiots think, so I won’t be surprised. The show launches in just over 90 days, chances are pretty good that episode is already in the can and it’s far too late to steer resources into another franchise for a different episode to fill the spot. Ad sales against that content have already closed big contracts, marketing has already laid campaigns that mention Concord all over the place, and for the content industry 3 months is too late to try to steer the ship away from a disaster.
Animation (outside of South Park) often takes 7-10 months on the low end to get a single episode from start to finish. Like I said, they’re doing a New World episode and that shit is dead as doornails. I doubt they’ll allow an launched/un-launched game off the hook. Hell, it’s probably now their plan to convert the game to F2P in time to simu-relaunch with the animated series episode so that they can get Amazon promotion synergies.
On one hand, this does sound plausible, but on the other hand, Concord is such a disaster that said C-Suit idiots might legitimately fear that the mere existence of its episode could overshadow the entire rest of the show. It might be cheaper and more sensible to just write one episode off and, if there is any hint of an overarching narrative, fix this with a few edits to other episodes and maybe some quickly recorded voice over to bridge any possible gaps.
C-Suit idiots might legitimately fear that the mere existence of its episode could overshadow the entire rest of the show.
I’ve worked for those idiots. In the streaming video industry. They do not think this or fear this and this is one of those rare cases where they’re not being idiots. People will hate watch the Concord episode of Secret Level. People will be curious about the episode because of the trainwreck that the game is. The social media buzz around Concord being gawdawful will put butts in seats. These guys are not wrong that there is no bad publicity, and they don’t need people to love the Concord episode of Secret Level for the series as a whole to hit their “hours streamed” benchmarks, sell a fuckton of ads, and have them call the whole thing a success so they can do it all again for Secret Level season 2 where they never speak of Concord again.
What’s more, they don’t even care if the Concord episode is good, they care that you watched another 30-40 minutes of content and pumped all their metrics. They know that the average viewer of content on Prime Video doesn’t know what a ‘Sifu’ is, or an ‘Unreal Tournament’, or an ‘Armored Core’… They know that the majority of the viewers for Secret Level are not going to know that ‘Concord’ is dead, nor will they care if they ever find out, so it won’t matter at all for their single episode in an anthology. Hell, for that matter as much as it sucks, Unreal Tournament has been dead for years and you can’t even buy most of the legacy versions of that game anymore thanks to Epic, so I really doubt that Amazon Prime Video cares much at all about the games represented in their anthology being alive. They just need things to fit the framing of the show so that viewers at home will go, “Oh, it’s that thing from the makers of ‘Love Death + Robots’ about video games, think I’ll have a look.” So long as everything under the label looks sufficiently video gamey, the average viewer will enjoy the show and move on whether or not they could ever actually play those games.
I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.
I believe another alternative would be to make it completely clear that you’re getting a temporary license. You shouldn’t be able to try to make it look like you’re buying a game when you don’t then even own.
No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.
If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.
If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.
…
If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…
Who, other than children, do not know this yet?
That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.
It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.
Their parents, new/casual games, charity shops that might want to resell, etc.
It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.
True, but that would make it slightly easier for offline games, games that allow for private hosting, and games with an end of life plan that would allow it. They would be able to compete more easily if they could be easily identified. That could then incentivise companies to add end of life plans.
A step in the right direction would be great. Even if it’s a small step.
I am sure marketing folk have a reason for it but… this really feels like the kind of thing you put alongside the PS5 Pro announcement that the entire planet watched. Rather than leaving everyone wondering “so… why would I buy a ps5 pro?”
I bet they’ll focus hard on the PS5 Pro this showcase to try and win back some people. Excited to see new game announcements though. I wonder if Naughty Dog will have anything new or if they’re still in last of us hell.
Just for fun: this would have worked so much better if they price dropped the PS5 and introduced the PS5 Pro at the old price.
People are anchored into thinking the PS5 is a certain value, and if they did that, it would instantly make the PS5 Pro and the PS5 appear to be a bargain, and so much of the PS5-owning public would have bought another system because it would be “such a good deal,” while PS5 fence-sitters would jump at the core system. I’m not trained to say for sure, but I think while their profit margin would be lower they’d be making much more money.
That announcement stream was so weird. 4 minutes of Mark Cerny talking about the features of the PS5 like it didn’t come out 4 years ago, 3 minutes of explaining the PS5 Pro “Big 3” features of GPU upgrade, advanced ray tracing, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and 2 minutes of trailers that looked too (heh) similar to current PS5 gameplay. It’s like they know that it’s impossible to make a new console look good in trailers anymore, so they just rushed to get it over with because everyone has already decided whether or not they want to pay even more for an upgraded PS5.
At least the price for the base PS5 should come down on the used market?
I guess my thinking was that people will sell their base PS5 after they buy the Pro, and basic supply-and-demand says that more PS5’s on the used market equals lower prices. It might not come down a lot, but I think it will come down.
We are at a point of extreme diminishing returns when it comes to video game visuals. Not saying that games can’t look better than they already do, but the improvements are miniscule.
I was very pissed there was no disk drive, but at least you can get it as an add-on like the Slim version (ended up reading at their blog post, don’t understand how they didn’t mention it during the stream). The 2TB SSD makes it very tempting since we have the digital version and we were looking to get a disk one.
They didn’t mention it, because they want most buyers to use their subscription service and only purchase digital games, which have larger margins, no second-hand market, don’t drop in price as quickly and as often, can be delisted and removed, etc.
I’ve seen disk PS5 go on sale as low as $400USD at big box retailers, presumably to make shelf space for the pros. The used marketplace is there as well.
Honestly, it's pretty far into the PS5's lifecycle at this point. I think a PS5 Pro this late into the current generation would be a bad move, because a PS6 is undoubtedly around the corner in just a few years and will effectively obsolesce a PS5 Pro, anyway.
If they released a Pro version last year, that'd make more sense. But unless Sony's expecting this generation to stretch out longer than normal, this just doesn't seem like a good idea.
blog.playstation.com
Aktywne