Nintendo’s moat is quite a bit bigger, but they’ll likely see similar diminishing returns on that old strategy as the younger generation is just as likely to play only Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. It’s not just based on what Microsoft does but how much demand there was on other platforms for their games that didn’t drive Xbox sales, and not even just that.
Sony just released Helldivers 2 on Xbox, and their delayed PC releases are because of exactly the phenomenon that Piscatella concludes here: people are perfectly content to wait for these games to come to the platform of their preference rather than get invested in another one.
Did you read the article? Because the thesis is that even if this is working, they could stand to make more money by not doing it. Piscatella’s thesis would disagree with this statement of yours, for instance:
People already know Pokémon and Mario, and know those are good games. If they wanted to play them, they would’ve bought a Nintendo console.
And instead he’d say that people are happy where they are and would buy the game if it came to them, as evidenced by how high something like Stellar Blade or Forza Horizon 5 shoot up the charts when they get a port; FH5 already became one of the best-selling PS5 games for the year almost immediately, even though PS5 owners could have bought an Xbox to play it at any point. Or, not mentioned in the article, there’s the night and day financial difference that a PC port makes for the likes of a mainstay franchise like Final Fantasy. It’s not just an Xbox thing that he’s speaking to. Speaking for myself, I’d have bought Tears of the Kingdom if it came to PC, and instead I was happy to just not play it at all.
There’s no reason for Nintendo to give up their 30% sales cut to reach audiences in their system of choice.
There is if the volume of what they’re taking 30% of doesn’t make up for the money they would have made by making Mario Kart, Zelda, and Smash Bros. multiplatform releases. There are no guarantees that Switch 2 reaches the install base of Switch 1, especially with headwinds from the general state of the economy, and that can change the math on that equation very quickly.
The only concession Nintendo has done so far is to bring some spin-off titles to mobile, possibly in an attempt to corner the younger market that seems to be less interested in traditional consoles, and hook them with their games in the hope of them buying a Switch and doing their purchases on the Nintendo store.
They can hope that, but as Piscatella sees in the data, getting people to move largely isn’t happening.
The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis
He works at Circana. He’s working with way, way more data than he’s allowed to publicly disclose, since part of Circana’s business is selling the in-depth stuff to partners, as well as analyzing it to show trends to their partners who want to know what is and is not working across the industry at the moment.
He posts an image like this one along with each monthly report, but that’s also the sort of thing you should probably know before you claim that the author doesn’t have the data he needs. The data they don’t have, they disclose that it’s an estimate. Nintendo doesn’t like to share, but the retail partners that sell their consoles do.
because nobody in their right mind would buy a $500 console for FH5 alone
But that’s exactly the same reason I stopped buying any console. I was more than happy to let the handful of Sony exclusives pass me by, and then they started coming to PC. Now I’m more than happy to let a handful of Nintendo exclusives pass me by.
Third parties have nothing to gain from exclusivity deals but the initial paycheck, while console manufacturers keep cashing in from people who bought into their ecosystem and are now locked into paying them a 30% from all their purchases.
But that’s not driving console sales like they used to. The last few Final Fantasy games seemed to do quite well on PC, indicating that people did not buy a PS5 to play them, and PS5 is having difficulty matching PS4 units sold even with the utter decimation of their closest competitor. That’s another point you made later in your post; wherever Xbox players went, it wasn’t to PlayStation. Data would seem to indicate that not even all of the PlayStation players stuck with PlayStation.
Port [Nintendo games] over [to PC], and a lot of people would just… Not buying the console at all.
Exactly, but potentially, they would stand to make way more money by selling more copies of those games than by selling more Switch 2s and getting those customers locked in.
There is no chance in hell that 30% from all purchases from a healthy fanbase on all games, DLCs and subscriptions (and that’s not factoring in hardware sales, like consoles, Amiibos and other overpriced plastic thingamajig Nintendo fans spend their money on) is even remotely comparable to a 70% cut on some titles, especially if taking that 70% cut risks lowering the interest and engagement on their main platform.
Yes, there is. If you got 30% of all sales from games on an install base the size of the Wii U, it’s not going to make up for a game like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros. selling 100M additional copies on extra platforms. We don’t know yet how well Switch 2 will do (probably better than Wii U and not as well as the Switch 1), but at certain thresholds, that 30% leaves them worse off than that other 70 that reduces the value of their platform.
Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I have a feeling it will. Subnautica 2’s contract was signed in the middle of market mania with very unreasonable sums of money at stake. Krafton should honor the insane deal they made instead of everything we’ve seen lately, but I doubt they’ll make a deal like that again after the gold rush ended.
It doesn’t inspire confidence, but we’re not looking at a market where people are expecting there to be no ceiling to gaming anymore, so I doubt they bought this studio for hundreds of millions of dollars like they did Unknown Worlds.
We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
Sure, I’ve bought tons of games that are on Game Pass, because I like keeping the game when I’m done, and not having to rush to finish it before the subscription renews.
I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don’t care if they got the full experience. If you’re playing with your friends, they’ve got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they’ve just got a character that you don’t, or in something like Civilization, if they know they’re playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn’t include the DLC you don’t have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
Sorry, I’m not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn’t charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren’t doing so hot. Microsoft hasn’t done console exclusives for a decade.
But this game is on Steam, and $80 is a price point companies are flirting with regardless of their ownership of the storefront, like Grand Theft Auto, for instance.
Developers are also incentivized by profit when they’re entitled to keep it rather than a publisher, and this is the case regardless of being AAA or not.
Any free to play game operates on the same principles that are as “horrible” as EA or Ubisoft, which honestly feels like a dated point of reference when your phrasing was “feels like you have to pay to have a good time”. First, it’s highly subjective. I came away from my time with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey feeling like I had a bad time because I didn’t buy their XP boosters, but fans of the game said they never bought one and had a great time, perhaps because they had more fun with the game’s side activities than I did, so they got more XP from content that I was more than happy to skip. I haven’t bought sports games in a long time, but if I still did, I wouldn’t touch Ultimate Team with a ten foot pole; not just because of the business model, but because the fantasy to me would be playing with the real teams as they actually exist; and the parts that I would want to engage with don’t ask any more spending of me. And for as much as you associate predatory monetization with those companies, they also put out the likes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and work with partners on Split Fiction and The Rogue Prince of Persia, which use very normal and ethical monetization strategies.
For as much as mobile games often can be a different market, plenty of times they’re not. Thatgamecompany may be known for Journey in our circles, but their big hit is Sky: Children of Light, which started on mobile and came to platforms you and I are more likely to play games on. Uma Musume is blowing up regardless of platform, but it’s a gacha that’s typically found on mobile, and Cygames expanded from their mobile market to putting out console and PC GranBlue games. Mihoyo’s games are in both places and found success using gacha. My point in all of this being these companies, all self-published successes, operate in both spaces, because building a game in either place requires much the same skillset, and they’ve found an audience in both, often with the same exact games.
The last thing I’ll say about this being developer vs. publisher is that if you’re successful enough as the former, you often become the latter, like with Cygames or Epic. These kinds of monetization methods are very feast or famine, so you’ll get survivorship bias of some games getting so big that they’re a publisher now, like Riot, for instance, or they get bought by a bigger fish like Microsoft.
I recall them saying that their tech stack in the first game couldn’t handle the influx of players that they got at their peak, and that’s what led them to start with a rewrite.
I love Strive and tag fighters, so this should be way up my alley, but I’m concerned about a couple of things. First and foremost, it’s Sony published, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the online is going to work on Proton when it has to go through PSN. Second, there was a moment in the gameplay trailer that showed air teching, and that usually means hitstun decay, which is a mechanic I’m not a fan of. But at least if this one doesn’t work out for me, Invincible Vs will also be showing at Evo.
I don’t like hitstun decay for a few reasons. For one, it’s not easily observable. If you’ve got a combo limit meter (like Skullgirls, Killer Instinct, and the upcoming Invincible Vs), you can see how much the move you just used has gotten you closer to the limits of the combo. It’s not intuitive for a player to track how close they are to the combo dropping with hitstun decay. So because of this, you’re basically just memorizing combos. If you land a hit with a move, or in a situation, that you haven’t practiced, you have no idea how to guarantee that you can finish the combo, which means that if you’re improvising, you’re just quickly routing your combo into a knockdown. As a player, I hate memorization, and as a spectator, I hate watching a game that has just a few bread and butter combos and quick routes to knockdowns when they don’t know what to do. I do like one game with hitstun decay, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, which at least allows you to do “tech traps”, where I’m expecting my opponent to air tech, and if they do, I get a new combo for free, so there’s a mind game there that most games with hitstun decay, in my experience, don’t have.
Hitstun decay is, by and large, the most prevalent form of infinite combo prevention in games with big combos, but it’s the one I dislike most. Guilty Gear Strive, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken all use juggle decay, or gravity decay, where the opponent just falls harder and harder until eventually they hit the floor, and you can’t combo them anymore. This is, of course, much easier for everyone to observe. My favorite method though is just using a meter to limit combos, because it allows for something much closer to freeform jazz. Every combo in Killer Instinct is different, because if you use the same combo every time, the opponent can break it. In Skullgirls, you’re usually unable to do enough damage in a single combo with its limits, so instead you’re looking to tactically drop your combo and sneak in a new one, which is called a reset.
Ubisoft reports that around 58% of their PC revenue last year came from digital add-ons, and despite the fierce backlash, the company maintains that this model is both sustainable and future-proof.
So future-proof that they’re bleeding customers, and everyone can see it plain as day.
I don’t think Unreal Tournament 2004 would have been considered live service just because they occasionally gave out a free new map. It was a form of marketing for the thing they already made. TF2 at least was a product when they sold it up front before it was free to play, when it had no microtransactions and they weren’t the goal for getting paid for having made TF2.
I don’t think you’re going to find many sharing your definitions. GaaS has just been simply replaced by the term live service in how people talk about this stuff. Perhaps Valve showed their hand early with this interview, but the expectation we had as customers with early TF2 was very different back then. I definitely wouldn’t consider No Man’s Sky to be any form of service; it might be the industry’s best example of being a form of penance for what they promised their customers at the start.
The closure the article speaks to is also just not turning the game into a perpetual expectation that more is coming. Multiplayer games have always been built around being “endless”, but there was never the expectation that this Halo would be the last Halo and just keep getting updates when you bought it 20 years ago. That expectation has led to sustainability problems we’ve all seen and that the article calls out.
Nah, Fast and Furious’ days are numbered. They already broke the glass on the storyboard card that says, “Go to space”, and the only one left to break is, “Time Machine”.
Oh, fair enough. But it’s still only going to have so much gas in the tank, and a cliff-hanger or sequel potential is very different than some continual expectation, either by consumers or the developers that the game can or should be updated forever.
I enjoy the Fast & Furious movies. The advantage to them releasing one movie at a time, or in games, one game at a time, is you can more accurately gauge the appetite for the next one, and they don’t have ongoing costs to keep the last one going. The ten F&F movies out there now are not in danger of disappearing if F&F11 bombs. The people who worked on those movies don’t have an expectation for or reliance on employment any longer than the time it takes to make one movie. And outside of Fast X, despite being pulpy and constantly recontextualizing and retconning old events, they all have their own endings with closure. Fast X does have a cliffhanger, and that is a bet that they made with their audience that they’ll be back, but the most likely scenario is that the next one offers closure. In some ways, cliffhangers can be closure themselves, too; I think more highly of Arcane season 1’s ending as closure for the series than I do of season 2, for instance. Meanwhile, the most likely scenario for a live service game is that it doesn’t have an ending or even exist anymore, only a few years in the future.
And all that said, it also doesn’t mean that I don’t understand your perspective, but I do see eye to eye with the author.
It can be an ongoing series, but you can get a sense of closure each time. Star Wars had closure in 1983 and 2005 and 2019 as they kept adding on to it, each time seeming like it was done; and each spin-off had closure by the time credits rolled.
They briefly got a Fierro into space so they could mess with a satellite. Somewhere around the fifth movie, they became very tongue in cheek action movies, with one character whose entire job is to break the fourth wall.
This story comes alongside numerous reports from the dev team that said the team felt it was ready. Plus it was only supposed to launch into early access.
The conversation around gen AI seems to go to putting people out of work or replacing tons of human effort, and I’m sure some companies are led by people with those naive dreams, but that My Summer Car example is exactly where my head goes when I think what the future of the technology is. It’s artwork that ought to be there, because the scene demands that there’s art on the walls, but what that artwork is basically doesn’t matter, so if gen AI can get the job done cheaply, it’s probably the right tool for the job. However, I’d have thought that the scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution were another prime use case for it too, but people rioted over that one. Even if it’s a good tool for the job, if it’s poison in the marketplace, it’s no longer a good tool to use.
I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
I’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do. The reason I brought up small teams in particular is not just because of cost savings but because you’re less likely to have a specialist who excels at or enjoys every single part that makes up a video game.
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.
"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana (www.thegamebusiness.com) angielski
Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry....
Last Epoch developer Eleventh Hour Games gets acquired by KRAFTON (forum.lastepoch.com) angielski
Poor timing considering the subnautica drama
Ubisoft Has Reportedly Scrapped A Sequel To Star Wars Outlaws (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Stop Killing Games is facing a complaint in the EU that uses nonsense logic to accuse the movement's founder of failing to disclose financial contributions he never made: 'It's not paranoia if they re (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Splitgate 2 Will ‘Go Back to Beta’ to Undergo a Massive Rework Amid More Layoffs and Splitgate 1 Shutdown (www.ign.com) angielski
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls debuts at Evo 2025 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Stop Killing Games reaches its goal of 1.4M signatures, covering the risk of valid signatures going under 1M angielski
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/...
Ubisoft: Microtransactions make games more fun (www.gamereactor.eu) angielski
Has the live-service dream crashed back down to earth? | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Novels and Movies Offer Closure. Video Games Should Too. [The New York Times] (www.nytimes.com) angielski
New gaming website "This Week in Video Games" launched by Skill Up (thisweekinvideogames.com) angielski
>>This video’s first part
‘Subnautica 2’ Leaders Say Krafton Sabotaged Game Over Payout [new events in the Subnautica 2 story] (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
You know that personal film project they claimed one of the founders was distracted by? It was a Subnautica film they asked him to make.
7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 (www.totallyhuman.io) angielski
A New Guilty Gear Game Has Been Canceled (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Not actually cancelled but “back to the drawing board”. It’s weird how 4 or 5 years between entries actually feels short these days.