According to Circana, the physical market has halved in the past three years, and potential US tariffs on Mexico aren’t going to help the physical game market. The longer it takes Sony to release a PS6, the less likely it is that it will have a disc drive.
This is near and dear to me, and I’d say it goes beyond just co-op. We used to get “the whole package” with a game. Arguably Call of Duty is one of the few still offering it. We used to have games with campaigns and multiplayer. Story mode and challenge rooms. Other modes of play sitting alongside the main event to round out the package. Now developers look at any data point to see how many people are using it, and if the number isn’t high enough, they cut it. But that’s a mistake. Most people might only dip their toes into these side features, but they can usually be implemented relatively cheaply (because of asset reuse), and they can add a ton of value even if most players don’t spend a lot of time in them. Co-op is one of those things.
The games that used to offer these co-op modes tended to stop getting attention from their publishers. Then once they’ve got a multiplayer mode, they try to make it a live service and monetize it instead of just letting it be. I was screaming at my monitor when I read that Naughty Dog open letter about canceling the Last of Us multiplayer game that said they had two choices and neither of them was making a multiplayer game that they just sold for a box price and didn’t manage as a live service; the possibility, seemingly, had never even crossed their minds. Co-op games can’t just be a campaign you play through once with a friend; they have to be PVE grinds where you play the same content over and over until the next pack of it comes out in a few weeks. The likes of a Baldur’s Gate 3 or an It Takes Two feel rare by comparison.
Really? Because there are plenty of reviews that captured the state of that game at release, and they’re generally better at articulating it than the guy who has 1000 hours in a game and calls it “literally unplayable” in a Steam review.
People like what they like, and the core of CoD hasn’t changed enough to dissuade people, in general, yet it still has bad years where it doesn’t do as well as it did this year.
I think yes, people will stop buying video games (at that price). There are very few games that carry the demand that GTA does, and customers have shown with the likes of Suicide Squad that they won’t just buy anything that marketing tells them to. Meanwhile, customers are very aware of the options available to them for free.
It makes a lot of sense to at least ask the question if you should split this game into two parts when each part has a very different pool of customers. I don’t think they’ll do it, because they want people in the online component to be present for multiplayer in the first place, but it makes sense to ask the question.
If this game is going to have issues running at 60 FPS on the PS5, I don’t think 30 FPS is for the benefit of the Switch 2. Even if it was, Switch 2 is a platform that people will want to play GTA on. The tech that Rockstar is trying to push forward comes at the cost of frame rate. That’s not making it shittier; it’s making different trade-offs.
It’s a number that divides easily into 120, which mattered more for old TVs, and it’s far enough over the threshold to trick our minds into seeing a bunch of still frames as a moving thing.