I got into it a few years back and nearly finished ARR. I found the storyline and cut scenes really engaging, and felt like I was a part of something. But I tried to pick it up and start fresh about a year ago and the bastards oversimplified my class (Summoner), and I swear they even further nerfed the low-mid level difficulty, making me feel most days as though I was playing on creative mode. For those who don’t care, though, the storyline, world and music (holy fuck, Limsa at night and Ul’dah at night are absolutely soul stirring) are really something special.
I will likely try the game again with the upcoming graphical upgrade, but I fear I will always feel too behind on the story and won’t be a part of the entirely new storyline/age that is slated to begin with the next expansion. That graphical upgrade will be huge, though. I play a ton of old games myself, but sometimes FFXIV feels like it’s running modern character models over PS2 environments and grass textures. It deserves to cast off some of that jank and show how beautiful it’s natural world can be.
F*** big gaming and their microtransaction/subscription/pay to win bull****! Indie and retro games are way better than overpriced AAA titles at his point anyway.
I’m not buying digital versions (although I have netflix) of the movies I love, so I’m not gonna start buying digital versions of the games I love.
I have a ps plus basic subscription, but I’ll not subscribe anymore if it gets more expensive. I haven’t received any email about a price hike for now though…
But how long will this last? I am not so sure that the next generation they could not get away with just digital versions not taking discs (or equivalent). The no discs versions of this generation, not just are for having a cheaper version is also a test to see how feasible could be in the future.
I mean that already is a thing on PC, although there are other reasons for it like the low adoption of bluray / DRMs / etc. Physical is non-existent except some really rare case. Even when some games are sold DRM free on GoG they aren’t sold in discs or USBs or similar.
Most I paid for a game subscription was the $1 3 month game pass. I don’t see myself paying for a regular priced month subscription like $10/month. I’d rather spend that buying a month of Humble monthly or a discounted game.
A lot of the article is focused on how games journalism has adapted to meet the current business environment (read advertising). Gaming is certainly not alone in that. Newspapers were hit a long time ago, and we've seen the same issues there too.
I'm curious -- what value do most people get from games journalism? Would people really miss if pcgamer, kotaku, or eurogamer just disappeared?
I'd really love to see a detailed balance sheet for some of these orgs to see what the actual operating costs are and how much is going to exec salaries.
People always claim they wanna see reviews before they buy their games, it’s the anthem of the anti-pre-orderer. Surely some of those reviews would come from games journalists.
The problem though is that it’s not sustainable to give away your content for free. You have to get advertisers to pay you and most people interested in games journalism are probably gonna have ad blockers, so then you have to fall back to whoever will pay you. You also have to avoid getting on a publishers bad side as a smaller journalist, or you’ll be black listed and your career will be over. So what can you do besides take money to fudge some reviews?
This is the problem with all free news content also, by the way. Somebody’s gonna pay for it, if it’s not you then it’s the people who want their opinions to be the prevailing one.
The only one I really value is Digital Foundry. I like how they break down games technically and give insight on how to get the most out of them through settings and whatnot.
But outside of that, I generally trust user reviews more.
We played Awesomenauts quite a while. It was a super fun 2D Moba with unique chars/skills. At some point we got so much lag/server issues where we had to drop it because it wasnt fun anymore.
Super sad that this “small” studios (mimimi and daedalic also) have to close. They are like the last bastion of devs who still have passion for games, not these three companies espacially but these “small/indie studios”.
I hope the employees gonna find a new place where they get paid better and still can follow their passion.
On March 28, 2022, U.S. federal judge Stephanos Bibas accepted a motion by investors Innovate 2 Corp., Continental General Insurance Company, and Leo Capital Holdings LLC to sue Motorsport Games in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. In the filing, the investors accuse four Motorsport Games executives of securities fraud, claiming that the executives provided misleading statistics to the remaining investors of 704Games about the company’s financial situation and the sales performance of its main product, the NASCAR Heat franchise. The investors allege that the information they received allowed Motorsport Games to buy out the remaining shares of 704Games at a significant discount to what Motorsport Games offered at their IPO, at which point the NASCAR Heat series accounted for a majority of Motorsport Games’ total net revenue, estimated at 99%. [48]
In November 2022, Motorsport Games received a notice of non-compliance with Nasdaq listing rules after its board of directors resigned over funding disputes. The company reported losses of $7.5 million against revenue of $1.2 million in the third quarter of 2022.[49]
In January 2023, Motorsport Games organised the fourth annual Le Mans virtual 24-hour endurance race, a parallel to the real-life 24 Hours of Le Mans event. The race took place in Motorsport Games’ sim racing video game rFactor 2 and featured notable motorsport drivers such as Formula One World Champion Max Verstappen and former Formula One driver Romain Grosjean. The event was plagued with server issues and disconnections, and featured a lot of backlash from participants. Verstappen described the event as a “clown show”[50] and online content creator and participant Jimmy Broadbent stated that this would ultimately “damage sim racing”[51] as a medium. Several days after the event, an anonymous employee threatened to publicly leak the source code for NASCAR Heat 5, NASCAR 21: Ignition, KartKraft, and the unreleased IndyCar game unless unpaid wage payments were made.[52]
I honestly have no idea why. I have had both the PS5 and XSX since launch (yes, I got very lucky), and I have been a PS fanboy since the original, but the XSX is just way better IMHO. I barely use the PS5 unless it’s for exclusives, of which there are very few.
I feel like there is a lot of inertia keeping people with what they know, but if you were to give a PS5 owner an XSX for a month, they’d go, “Oooh, I get it now!” and switch.
At a bare minimum, the XSX is much better for everything besides gaming (streaming, etc), the controller is SIGNIFICANTLY better (subjective, but man…huge difference), Gamepass is way better than PS+, and there are more exclusives on Xbox.
I wish the PS5 were better because I’d rather not support MS. But the gulf is so wide, it’s hard to validate buying the PS5 in my mind. There’s a reason I have a second XSX while the PS5 is gathering dust until Spider-man 2.
My issue at this point is I have SOOOO many PS games that I wouldn’t want to have to re-purchase on Xbox. I’ve had a playstation since the 2 so have a pretty extensive library. If there was a way to transfer things over without re-purchasing I would likely make the switch. As it stands, I made my bed so now I lay in it, lol.
I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.
Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.
Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.
Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.
And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.
People have been saying these things since 2020 and it has convinced me that people in online gaming forums are out of touch.
Here's my argument against the Series X though:
It has nothing I can't play on my PC. Even though Sony has started releasing their games on PC, their ports usually come years later. I don't hold this against Microsoft though, I'm more than happy to play games like Halo on PC instead of buying another console.
Sony console exclusives are better and more numerous than Xbox exclusives. This has been the case since the Xbox One.
The DualSense is a way cooler controller. I'm pretty miffed that the Xbox controller still doesn't have a gyroscope, When utilized properly a gyroscope makes aiming in shooters a lot easier.
So the way I see it, there isn't much reason to buy a Series X beyond its awesome backwards compatibility.
Does even Sony utilize the gyro though? Returnal didn't when I played it on a friend's PS5, and that game really felt like it needed it to control comfortably.
I have both also. The Series X is the more powerful machine, no doubt about it. I prefer the DualSense for everything but FPS games, though. I much prefer Sony’s exclusive lineup, and having ps4 games work makes it even better, because I much preferred Sony’s exclusives in that generation too. Overall I end up playing the PS5 far more often than my Xbox. Microsoft’s backwards compatibility is so great though. I love being able to pop in original Xbox games I have laying around and playing them in 4k. That alone was enough reason for me to pick it up.
I know it’s about as subjective a thing as you can get, but I find the ergonomics of the DualSense to be atrocious. Like it’s so bad that it hurts my hands to play for too long. I also hate the squishy feel of the triggers when they’re not using the gimmicky feedback stuff. Overall, I was pretty amazed at how badly they ruined the controller for the PS5 compared to the PS4 one, IMHO.
It’s funny to me to see people say they prefer it but hey… some (read: billions of) people also think Twitter was ever worth using. Different strokes for different folks.
The DS4 was too small for my hands, I always felt slightly cramped on it, even worse on the DS3, so the extra girth of the 5 helps me feel more comfortable. I Can see why it’s not universally loved though, for sure. It’s an odd controller overall, but it works well for me.m, especially the Edge.
PS4 is 117M lifetime, PS3 is 87M lifetime, PS2 is 155M lifetime.
40M sits between the N64 lifetime and SNES lifetime sales. Keep in mind, as time progresses, the gaming market is bigger, so direct comparisons cant be done. Its only the 3rd year for the PS5, so it hasnt hit its half way point in its projected timeline.
Also, the PS2/3/4 all had hardware revisions, then the 4 had a Pro model. The PS5 will inevitably do the same eventually, and get a boost in sales numbers for it.
Not a surprise. They still have to deal with the UK I think? As much as I don’t like a giant corp getting more giant, I hope Xbox cleans house at Activision Blizzard and does some good to the IPs they have.
Yeah, they’ve offered to sell off the UK game streaming rights to appease UK regulators, but no word on if they’ve gotten a response. They’re lucky they’ve gotten that, but the UK game streaming market is probably so miniscule that Microsoft doesn’t really care anyway. It’s a drop in lake Baikal in terms of the revenue ABK will bring in elsewhere.
Thanks for that! Hadn’t seen what came of the initial ruling over there. Yeah it will be a few years until streaming is more of a viable option. Latency, stability, and trust aren’t there yet for the general public. Especially after Google killed off stadia.
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