Well, now that everyone who want to play day one bought it, the only remaining market are the people of !patientgamers that are waiting for a sale to buy it.
And considering it is on the game pass, 4.4 million is quite good.
It was more like an oopsie moment during the Zevent weekend at the start of September. As the event takes place in Montpellier (same city as Sandfall), that the opening concert had some Clair Obscur music and most of those streamers living in Montpellier are already friends with the devs (they were invited in the studio for a huge party).
So a few devs went to the Zevent to offer gifts and answer questions and that’s when Antoine Daniel asked about sales. The answer was 3.3 and 4.4 at the same time, then they looked at each others and said "officially 3.3, in reality 4.4).
But they did not stated when those numbers were achieved.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.
I can’t see streaming games being anything other than a niche market. It puts the burden onto the streamer, in order to be competitive they look after constantly be upgrading their offering, they will have to have multiple server centres around the world, they will always be beholden to crappy ISPs who just don’t upgrade their infrastructure.
With local hardware you shortcut all of that, upgrading of your hardware is done by the user so they’re not going to complain if it’s out of date, you don’t have to have any server centres, and the ISP issues either don’t matter for single player games that were massively reduced for multiplayer games, now they don’t actually have to send video over the connection. .
This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.
Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.
EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.
And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.
Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.
or they will also become Streaming Platforms
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.
I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.
GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.
It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.
The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.
I just assumed they hired the same person that was previously in charge of naming Street Fighter games from Capcom. I was sure the next Xbox would be named something like Xbox X 360 Series X Alpha Championship Edition with Hyper Fighting
I’d encourage folks to watch some gameplay videos on this instead of just reading this article. Every one I’ve watched showed gameplay that looked like lot of fun and the folks playing had a much different opinion than this. Looks a lot more interesting than Marathon at the very least.
I jumped ship from Switch to handheld pc. The pc game prices was a big part, especially older games don’t hold value. For example I got Middle Earth shadow of war for like $6. I still sometimes miss my switch but I will definitely wait a while before I decide on a switch 2.
Yeah it’s a hefty price tag but I wanted the extra battery. The Z1 extreme has pretty much the same performance and come with 500gb storage, with a better price tag. You can always upgrade your battery and ssd if you want to later down the line.
I love the device! The fact that I can play pc games in my hand is a huge win for me. I work in front of a pc the whole day. Last thing I want is to sit in front of a pc for gaming. But you must understand it is a pc and not a console. You have more setting and things to tinker with setting to get best performance unlike a console where it is just plug and play.
I never do but I know you can. But once again it is not as easy as casting. You could for example get a dock and have Xbox remotes which could emulate a console feel. My suggestion is to do research before you buy and see if it caters for your needs. Is it a good device? Yes. Is it super user friendly? Depends on the user.
I am genuinely surprised that they’re suggesting physical games that act as keys for digital downloads. What is the point of getting a physical cartridge if you can’t play the whole game offline? I guess they’re just trying to kill physical media, and this is the first step in this direction.
By the sounds of it, Sony isn’t even getting paid for these ads. They’re replacing the art with shit like a video explaining what the universe is. It’s just an algorithm they put in to keep it “fresh” and it’s amazingly shitty.
It’s not an algorithm, it’s just the latest news for the game. The news feature has been a part of ps5 since the beginning. This is replacing key art with the picture for the news article/video and the title replacing the games logo.
I think the end goal may be to monitize the news feed, but overall the news feed sounds like it’s so poorly designed that nobody would want to use it in the first place. Being Japan, maybe the news feed was some high ranking dickhead’s pet project and they got this “feature” pushed through without anyone actually having the guts to say it was idiotic.
Not sure how much you can monetise the news feed for a game you already own… The publisher may already control all the things linked to it. If unmonetised things are “ads” now, then the whole Steam UI is a giant ad.
I feel like the villains weren’t awful (yes the rest of the writing was awful) but gearbox didn’t really commit to the bit hard enough. At the start of the game they were clearly being set up as vapid streamer culture twins but it never really escalated beyond that, instead of ticktock villains we just got villains who happen to use ticktock. It was like if upon reaching the city in BL2 Handsome Jack just continued being a corrupt CEO with a penchant for robots and didn’t spiral all the way into megolomania.
Good idea bad execution, if it had escalated to raiding a warehouse full of people strapped into vr goggle to up their view numbers and destroying a crowdfunded giant laser to carve their faces on the moon then they could have made for really good villains. Instead we got stale memes, also the final boss fight was somehow worse than BL1.
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