I remember when this news first leaked, people online were joking about getting into fights over a 200 dollar bet on a kid’s game if skeeball.
While I’m not sure how common that type of phenomenon would be, I have to agree with the author of this article that I would certainly think twice before bringing a child to a location where gambling is encouraged (especially in conjunction with drinking).
Some interesting info in this article. If game pass hasn’t really paid off (in maintaining growth of new or recurring users), this may be an indication that they will make some changes to it.
Mat Piscatella, executive director of analysis firm Circana, said that monthly, non-mobile, video-game subscription spending in the US “has been flat to low single-digit growth” since the middle of 2021.
Good. Now that we’ve established that the subscription-based videogame market is pretty much saturated with very little potential for growth, can we please stop shoveling out all this live service crap? It didn’t work for Bioware, it didn’t work for Rocksteady Studios and it didn’t work for Arkane Austin. Stop it.
For what? They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore. Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian. Bethesda as a whole is not trusted for big RPGs after Starfield. Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. Id has been doing okay, but has had a lot of brain drain, and they definitely don’t produce the “live service hits” MS appears to be looking for - just things people would love to see on Game Pass and discard. There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
…We about to see Crash vs Spyro Autobattle Royale?
That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.
Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.
You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.
(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)
Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.
I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.
There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.
Welp, reckon it’s time I take my happy ass down to the local used game store and sell my Xbox. Thing’s collecting dust anyway. I think I’ll get a new camera lens instead.
Give it a year. Thankfully Toys for Bob was able to buy themselves out, otherwise surely they would have either been shut down or put to work in the Call of Duty mines.
Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division, which also develops Fallout and Doom, to put more focus on fewer projects. “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,”
Why gobble up so many studios to consolidate into a gaming megacorp, then get gobbled up yourself by Microsoft? What’s the purpose of acquiring so many studios and holding onto so much IP if you can’t handle them?
That was my take too. “We’re spread too thin”… Then why the fuck did you buy up all these companies? Sure sounds like they just gobbled up all the good IP to hoard like a dragon on its pile of gold. Or to make sure those IPs don’t make it to Sony exclusives, wish the FTC would hang them by the balls since they’ve basically done opposite of what they promised during the mergers.
Because CEOs are fucking idiots. So many companies do this shit, it’s not just the gaming side. A company starts to grow and instead of keeping with an organic growth they buy companies over and over.
Best case scenario, they learn from No Man’s Sky with what few devs they have left. Worst case scenario, the game remains shit, and we all continue to enjoy modded to hell KSP 1/Juno/etc.
bloomberg.com
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