Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore’s Law kicking in. The difference is that they’re making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren’t.
At this point, I don’t know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say “Xbox everywhere”, what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don’t think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.
I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I’m happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.
“I may have stolen your wallet, but it’s okay - I gave it back. Surely it wasn’t because several police officers were walking over with curious expressions.”
If their game was that good, we would read about it up and down the net. The fact that I read about it here for the first time tells a different story.
Completed both 100% and they’re such great fun games.
Hogwarts was awesome to walk through the wizardry world. Battling wizards, poachers, spiders, etc. Finding all the secrets and going through the story. Finished the game in a week, I just couldn’t put the controller down.
That was my reaction as well. I wonder if they’re just trying to reassure people since they announced today they’re discontinuing online services for Wii U and 3DS.
The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)
As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.
I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.
Most “reviewers” get a version of the game with infinite money and health to get through the game quickly and only talk about story and size.
I bet there’s bosses and quests that have a special place in our rage that these people just breezed through and they don’t remember them a single bit.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
About time. The PSP and Vita were beautiful devices that gave a great playing experience. Sony obviously knew how to make a good portable, and throwing that away was a big mistake.
Vita was a little too ahead of it’s time - trying to use psn without consistent network traffic was awful.
You shouldn’t need to reconnect just to see if you have messages. Hopefully they don’t require propriety memory or abandon the unit months after release either
Imo the biggest failure of the bits was the egregiously priced proprietary memory cards. Outrageously expensive for very little space. Made the value proposition compared to the post price drop 3ds (which used micro SDS) a no brainer unfortunately
Honestly the biggest failure IMO, was because like usual, they didnt actually support it after release. I’ve fallen for this one too many times with Sony, but no more. Whenever Sony releases something other than their mainstream products, they immediately stop developing for it and basically rely on a bunch of third parties. Who usually give up shortly thereafter when they notice the dwindling support.
My vita is collecting dust with my PSVR, my PS proprietary headphones, and all the other useless shit Sony has released over the years.
They didn’t support either VR’s. Most of the titles for PSVR were third party, there was very little AAA support after the first few months around it’s release. Two years later it was dust and echos, just like PSVR2 (Blood & Truth arguably an exception, but I also believe it was still released within that two year window).
I recently dug up my vita and installed CFW out of boredom. With the built-in PSP and PSX emulation, decent retroarch support and a fair few source ports, it’s quite a respectable retro handheld these days. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend sourcing one over say, an anbernic unit, but if you already have it, it’s a fairly easy jailbreak and worth the effort IMO.
Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don’t really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony’s profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don’t buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There’s barely a difference between each system’s capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn’t have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5’s speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren’t anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
Don’t forget the game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven’t gotten appreciably better.
While thats definitely true for many games it’s less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don’t seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it’s definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
Fucking thing is 8 years old. That is now going to cost more than 8 years ago. Sure blame tarrifs, but it should be at least $100 cheaper now than launch.
I think it’s Nintendo being Nintendo and in general, a company being a company. The tariffs will be used as an excuse to raise the prices but even if they’d go away, the prices won’t come down. Because why would they? They got away with it. Might as well continue.
We see this trick over and over again. Usually it’s inflation. Oh, we need to raise our prices because of inflation and then inflation goes down but the prices don’t.
Oh, we need to raise our prices because of inflation and then inflation goes down but the prices don’t.
I mean, this is literally how inflation works. Inflation rates go down, but things don’t magically become cheaper again. It just doesn’t get more expensive as quickly. If they raise prices over what you’re willing to pay, then don’t buy it. That’s how prices drop.
Is it bullshit? Absolutely, no argument there. That’s just how things work unfortunately.
Oof, can’t lie, that significantly impacts my desire to get the game. They did such a good job with 1+2 in fighting years of licensing rot, I’d assumed they’d have equivalent success with 3+4.
there are apparently a few cases where they didn’t get the same song, but they got a new song from the same artists. But yeah…it’s a bummer from a game preservation perspective
definitely licensing issues, 100%. The record company owns the old song and doesn’t want to allow it in the game again, at least not for a reasonable price. Could the artists re-record songs to bypass the record company, like Taylor Swift did? Yeah sure, but only if they are still around, and only if they care that much about being in the Tony Hawk remake. Re-recording songs includes re-doing all the mixing and mastering, and that is a decent chunk of time and money for essentially no return on investment. Most of the bands in original Tony Hawk that are still around are pretty focused on ROI at this point.
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