It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.
I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.
Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.
the problem with the mobile game market is that it is aggressively opposed to any kind of premium experience. Time and again, the market has proven that they are not willing to pay very much upfront for a premium gaming experience. Games that try to charge a “premium” price like $10 or $20 tend to suffer for the choice to charge that much. You’ve seen attempts to address this problem (like Apple Arcade), and they’ve seen moderate success, but it doesn’t seem to be changing the overall shape of the market. App stores are still full of free-to-play slop because that is what gets the most downloads and plays and positive reviews.
How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.
Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.
PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.
There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.
There really aren’t that many premium experiences on mobile that are worth a damn imo. They’re usually just ports of games from other platforms that control terribly on a touch screen. For me to be willing to pay for a mobile game it has to be a good game and a good fit for the platform. Apart from Balatro not much comes to mind.
But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.
So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.
It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.
If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.
I find a big impetus to mobile games (on phones) is the interface. Touch screens absolutely SUCK for most games. Holding a rectangle is uncomfortable.
Its interesting to me that playstation isn’t new to the mobile market.
They’ve had the accessories for the psOne to add a battery and monitor, the psp, and the psvita. They are one of the companies I’d be interested in another mobile platform.
It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.
I at least like the idea that a console can act as both. I just can’t get behind this form factor of “handheld” consoles that are so large. Like, yeah, I can hold it in my hands. But a steam deck, or even a switch aren’t exactly easy to carry around.
Not in the way that my old DS or GBA could. Hell, there’s a reason I do most of my handheld gaming on a Miyoo Mini Plus. The idea of taking a full console experience with me, on the go, was a neat idea when I was 10. But those kinds of games just don’t lend themselves to riding the bus, or sitting in the doctors office waiting room.
Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.
There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.
I think people just go for the cheaper option which coincides with being a mobile form factor. If Sony thinks they can be more expensive than the switch they are mistaken.
I would really like to see a company go back and make unique handhelds. Handhelds have become portable consoles, which is cool, but I miss the unique games that were built around limitations or unique hardware like the DS and 3ds.
Also I would really like a handheld that doesn’t hurt when you hold it for extended periods of time.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don’t like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it’s doing laps around all 3.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
I think even if they did, we’d still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they’re not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they’re maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they’re outliers.
not too suprised, given the game runs fairly poorly on the base PS4, and I believe with Natlan, they made the decision to increase the quality of certain elements of the game, and its not going to get any lighter.
I just hope they don’t get burned out and there is no crunch. The only other company that did so much in short time I can think of is Insomniac Games. It’s actually how it was used to be with how frequent we got games from single studios. But since they are so big and expensive nowadays, it seems a bit unreal for how fast some companies are able to pump out so many high quality games in relatively short time.
I always worry about that with From, and Japanese studios in general. They are often black boxes, and the only reason we don’t talk about them as much is because they do a good job of “keeping it in the family”. Maybe From is way bigger than we realize, or maybe they are just grinding entry level devs into dust. We truly just do not know.
I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.
My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.
The difficulty is not a problem for me so much as the very slow movements. It takes like 2 seconds to swing a sword. Meanwhile the opponent is still attacking. Just can’t figure these games out, myself 😮💨
have you swung a melee weapon before in real life, like maybe a baseball bat? Does swinging the bat happen instantaneously, or do you have to wind up the swing for momentum? Would a bigger, heavier bat be faster or slower to swing?
Souls games have slow melee attacks compared to something like Devil May Cry, but the speed is intended to be more realistic compared to those kinds of speedy action games. Just apply real life logic to it, and it should make more sense. If the weapon you are using is too slow for you, find a smaller, lighter one that would be easier to swing in real life. If starting out as a regular dude and then becoming more powerful is not appealing to you, or if realistic fights are not exciting to you, then maybe the Souls games just aren’t your bag.
That is a really odd comparison because in real life, even 2 handed longswords are very fast and souls like games slow them down a lot. They are not meant for realism at all. A baseball bat is also not made for fighting but for putting as much force as possible into the ball and is very top heavy whereas a sword is balanced close to the guard and very quick, meant to outmanoeuvre the opponent
in souls, the 2-handed longswords that are a realistic size are realistically fast when you wield them in 2-handed mode. the ones that are slow are more anime sized.
baseball bat was not the best metaphor, i went with that because most people (including souls fans) haven’t swung an actual sword in their lives.
Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.
I still disagree. I’ve done longsword fighting for multiple years and in the time a souls character does two hits with a bastard sword i probably do about 6 and that’s fine. Souls games are designed so that you can react to attacks and not for realism. A falchion in souls is about as fast as a longsword meant for 2 handed irl if not still a bit slower
interesting. I was watching some videos comparing the two yesterday, and honestly i came away still feeling like Souls combat speed is fairly realistic. This bloke makes fair points about the true practicality of a huge greatsword, and swings at a speed that is maybe two swings per second. A DS1 claymore has similar swing speed, particularly in two-handed mode. The DS1 Zweihander is right on that line between “realistically-sized” and “anime-size”, and I would agree that they make that thing look heavier than a real zwei.
On the flip side, the longsword is barely any faster than the claymore, so I could see that feeling unrealistic. I guess my brain just likes to rationalize that sort of thing away, like “yeah that seems slow but maybe I would fight carefully like that too if I was fighting multiple people that were actually trying to actually kill me”. Do you disagree with that? Do you feel like you would still swing a longsword at two or three swings a second if you were in a life-or-death fight?
Especially then. What souls gets realistic is the sizing up the enemy before clashing. Our flights usually were: pace back and forth together waiting for an opportunity/bait with an opportunity. Then execution of each person’s plan was over in a flash and either one landed a hit or you separated again, going back to pacing. But a plan of a person usually was not a single hit unless you were just probing for their reaction.
For example my favourite thing to do, was lowering the point of my sword (you usually start with tips touching uwu), baiting the opponent to attack the opposite side of were my tip was moving, the snapping the tip back up to hit the opponents incoming sword close to the handle, transferring a lot of kinetic energy into a fairly static part of their blade, thus moving their hands and influencing their whole arc such that their blade passes over me. Now i have to be very quick to attack them while repositioning into a new defensible line towards them to not get hit by their hit after recovery. This whole interaction would take about a second or less maybe.
Then there’s also the thing not really represented in souls at all which is driving your opponent through the hall. So if you attack and your opponent does only manage to block, you sometimes keep going to not give them the time to counter attack, and each swing carries you quite far which causes them to have to walk backwards very fast, to keep in blocking distance and not get into grapple range. This phrase usually has 3-4 hits a second and is quite tiring but being the one attacking usually is the winning move while the defending person has to get creative to get back into the attacking position.
I now realize that talking about sword fighting in English is quite tiring as i don’t know the terminology outside of German
And the opponents wait for 2 seconds after finishing their attacks. Soulslikes are all about learning the patterns and finding the opportunities to hit between dodges, not about mindlessly hack-n-slashing your way to victory.
And different weapons work for different people, I have some I’m absolutely useless with because I just can’t work with their movesets.
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