Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
Hopefully, I won’t have to get the console for several months - if not years. Nintendo’s launch titles usually aren’t anything to write home about. BotW was a notable exception in recent memory, but was also available on the previous generation.
Well, no, once a Monster Hunter game releases on the S2, my partner makes me buy one.
I could get something else, assuming cross play exists, but the only exclusives across all platforms I care about are games made by Monolith. So, at some point I’ll need the S2.
I notice they tend to have one “killer app” and then the rest of it isn’t much to write home about, at least since the N64 (SNES had a whopping 2: F-Zerp and Mario World). The exception being the Wii U, which had… Nintendo Land? NSMB-U? Nothing really.
N64: Mario 64 (and had almost literally nothing else until StarFox) GameCube: Luigi’s Mansion Wii: Twilight Princess, or Wii Sports, since TP also released for GameCube Switch: BotW
It’s been so long since Odyssey and we’ve just had Totk, I’d guess another 3D Mario is likely their S2 ‘killer app’. Could be Legends Z-A or Metroid Prime 4 too, both of which would be cross generation. However, I’m not exactly dying to get my hands on any of these either way, especially not Pokemon.
Yeah, I’m betting on at least a new 3D Mario too. Wouldn’t be surprised if Z-A was cross generation. Maybe the new Mario Kart they showed off in the short trailer. I don’t think Prime 4 will be out right at launch but I could see it in the first year.
They sell the hardware at a loss and initial adopters are more likely to be able to find an exploit that allows the console to play pirated games. If a Lite comes out early enough, there's hope that it might be exploitable.
It's my understanding that the Steam Deck is not performant when it comes to running Switch games via Yuzu/Ryujinx so it would probably be even worse with Switch 2 games, which are probably more taxing to emulate.
All that said, I have a Switch Lite that I share with my wife and I like it. There are so many companies you're "not allowed" to buy from according to Lemmy lol, I don't have the time for that. Almost all publishers are ass, should I never buy a game again?
Edit: As pointed out, Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
To be fair though, this is about the easiest prediction you could possibly make. I don’t think anyone expects this thing to come in under $400 even in a world where there aren’t tariffs looming in the distance.
Finally the live service bubble is popping.
I hope the developers working on these projects get put on to something else, instead of shown the door as is so often the case.
Sony specifically had to learn many harsh lessons recently.
The Bungie acquisition brought them nothing but issues. Concord being shutdown immediately after launch was a huge was of money too. Other titles under the Sony umbrella are either struggling, or gaining poor reputation due to their completely numbskull decision to enforce PSN account usage, even for single player offline games.
Had to check what movies you’re talking about because the spiderman movies have all been successful. Didn’t know that Venom, Morbius, Madam Webb and Kraven were actually Sony spiderman universe (SSMU) garbage and not MCU garbage.
There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven’t seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?
I mean, they spent what 400 millions on developing it and they won’t spend 10k - 100k to keep that game running for a while? Like “NO NOT A SINGLE CENT MORE SPENT ON THAT SHIT GAME!” XD
Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.
I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.
I played a dead MMO where i was the only person in the game. They where shutting down the servers soon and it was an interesting experience. The game wasn’t bad honestly. As a single player experience at least. Maybe that was the issue.
It had matchmaking so if there weren’t enough players it would take a long time and you’d end up in the same lobbies with the same players every time, if you could even get in apparently. Not like you could play solo even if you wanted to.
Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.
bloomberg.com
Aktywne