You fell in love with a game and it's characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish......
I mostly just hated that the story was largely delivered via info dump and nearly every character was a terrible person to the point of being grating. I don’t have to enjoy every video game, but I wish I at least understood why this one got this much acclaim.
Because they were. Maybe not the first 6 people verbatim, but of the characters you have a significant amount of dialogue with, the only one who didn’t give me this impression was your partner. You run into the asshole kid, the other cops over the radio are assholes, the guy on the wall to the docks is an asshole, and beyond that, I didn’t take notes, but it annoyed the hell out of me.
They’re just going to roll people onto servers slowly to make sure they can handle the capacity. And it’s only on PlayStation because they fear the piracy that happened with fighting game betas in the past.
There have been some great games with development times that long. But for crying out loud, if you’re not making a surefire success, make a smaller game so it’s less risky.
I don’t see how this thing possibly competes with a handheld PC. It’ll play the same games approximately just as well but with a tiny fraction of the library, and unless something changes, online play won’t even be free.
I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II right now, and it’s excellent. Baldur’s Gate 3 took 6 years, though they attribute a good portion of that to an Eastern European war and a pandemic. Given other side projects, it’s a bit nebulous exactly how long Indiana Jones and Great Circle took that team to make, but it was somewhere between 5 and 7 years, and I loved it. I’m not exactly a fan of Nintendo lately, but people sure do love Donkey Kong Bananza, and that team had been working on that game more or less since Mario Odyssey’s release in 2017.
That’s surely what they’re planning, especially since the architecture won’t be very different this time around, but that still pales in comparison to the value you’d get from a PC handheld for what will likely be an extremely similar price.
Correct me if I’m wrong: they all complied because action from the payment processors was imminent, and GOG and Itch have both made public statements about next steps that Valve hasn’t, which doesn’t mean that Valve isn’t taking next steps. Did I miss anything?
Nah, this isn’t a memorization type of game, or at least not so much based on the other games this developer has made. You’re basically just going to press Light then Medium then Heavy, or you can just mash on any one of those three buttons in order to do a combo. And largely, everyone has pretty similar reaction times when you’re familiar enough with a game to know what might be coming; in general, you mostly just want to hold down-back until your opponent does a big slow move.
My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you’d expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon’s Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don’t really get how one of those games looks unless you’re playing on the genuine article. That’s the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.
I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world’s largest arcade. It’s got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I’ve always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they’re having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I’d expect a museum to take on.
Join us for a Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase on July 31 at 6am PT! Tune in for roughly 25 minutes of information on upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch games from our publishing partners.
I imagine Silksong gets a release date announced for all platforms during Microsoft’s Gamescom things, but there are a number of third party games with no release dates that could feasibly show up here. I’m hoping for the likes of Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Plus there will probably be a bunch of games that are old news on PC and other consoles but get release dates for Switch 2 now that Nintendo has a platform that can handle them.
The base price increase would still raise the total with DLC. Not including the DLC is still worth talking about, since there are plenty of ways to enjoy a game without it.
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
In order to be efficient, it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally. It’s one of those things where it’s both true and false at the same time, somehow.
At this point, I’m convinced that most developers have forgotten how to make a multiplayer game that isn’t live service. Larian still remembers, but you’d think some people who make action games would remember too.
No, that’s not it. Single player games still get made. You can monetize multiplayer much the same way, but basically no one makes a multiplayer game that you just sell once, maybe with an expansion or two, like they do single player games. Naughty Dog threw their hands in the air and said, “These are the only two options, and we choose single player!” instead of just selling a Last of Us multiplayer game for a single purchase.
No, they tell a lot of those same lies to their consumers, too, so the market is acting somewhat rationally related to what they’re told. It’s why you still have a “buy” button on store pages instead of “purchase temporary license” or “rent”.
Sony Interactive Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against Tencent over its upcoming game Light of Motiram, with Sony saying it is a "slavish clone" of the Horizon series.
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
I liked Hollow Knight just fine, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy Silksong, but it definitely doesn’t have me super excited. Invincible Vs, though…that one I’m looking forward to.
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.
The article is a summary of an interview. If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out. I know how the world looks from our perspectives and how the console markets have always worked, but that’s why there are companies out there collecting data, and that’s why their perspectives can be worth listening to. No one can predict the future, but he’s sharing his insights into where the wind is blowing, and yes, it’s so that his company can sell a premium product to companies doing market research. The console business model has changed quite dramatically very recently and is looking like it will continue to change. He’s not the only one claiming that the console wars are over.
This isn’t the first time he’s spoken. He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work. It would be a hell of a thing if he picked this time to start making things up. The trend he points out is something he acknowledges as a recent trend, in the last year or so, but he’s working with data that’s consistent with my own anecdotes, like how publisher after publisher have found that they’re making more money on PC than on consoles; that games that used to never come out on PC now dwarf the console versions in sales; that my friends mostly stopped playing on consoles last gen, and that I don’t see a need for new ones; that when I see kids playing games out and about, they’re on mobile far more often than they’re on Switch; and on and on.
I’ve been polite this whole time, but you decided this man didn’t know what he was talking about, backpedaled very hard when you found out what his actual credentials were, and then decided he was untrustworthy instead. He’s not the one with the credibility of a 3rd grader.
The Switch 2 has not sold 20M units yet. They just hit 5M, and they’re projecting they’ll sell 15M by the end of the fiscal year, which is by March.
Exactly, which shows that players do move to whatever platform is more enticing to them.
But not for exclusives, not like they used to, which is the author’s point.
The question is, does that risk them losing more money in the long run, as players buy their games elsewhere?
And Piscatella’s position is “maybe, but maybe not”. The Switch 2’s success in reaching those numbers is not a sure thing, and Nintendo’s games have enough appeal that they could be potentially reaching enough additional players that their method may not be the right call anymore. The point is a bit moot, because he also acknowledges that Nintendo is unlikely to change their ways anytime soon, but the possibility is there that they could make more money by going multiplatform. For Sony and Microsoft, that time has already come.
No worries. The Wii U sold 12M units in its lifetime, which is surely the floor for how many the Switch 2 can possibly sell, and it will almost certainly beat that, but at $500 with looming tariffs, not to mention how the market has changed in the past 8 years, I’d be shocked if it approached an install base as large as the Switch 1.
If you didn’t backpedal on the data that you thought this man didn’t have access to, or for not understanding how platforms taking a cut of sales works, then I’m sorry for thinking you could admit when you were wrong.
Those aren’t glaring holes in his argument; those are people rebutting the summary I put in the blurb that Lemmy lets me add without reading the article.
Xbox is doing badly, at least by the old console model, which is why they aren’t doing it anymore. Sony has reduced how much they’re sticking to the old model as well, by putting Helldivers on Xbox and most of their games on PC; does that not indicate the same thing to you?
Nintendo had the best launch in the history of game consoles because they had the most supply available in the history of game console launches, which is why Piscatella is noncommittal on how well the console is doing. Consoles basically always sell out, so it only shows that the people buying them are the people who would have bought it regardless, until we see how it does around the holiday.
He is not saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. He is saying Nintendo might see a similar boon if they do what both Xbox and PlayStation are doing, because we are not seeing evidence that people are moving to a platform for exclusives, and we are seeing evidence that people are more than happy to wait on the platforms they’re on for the games to come to them. He also says Nintendo is unlikely to do it regardless, at least right now.
You can click on my profile and see how long I’ve been on Lemmy, and the fact my name is definitely derived from “Andrew” but his is “Mat” would be odd. There are lots of ways to follow the game industry, and I suppose many of them do not involve coming across his name, but many of them very much do. His work is US-focused, so maybe if you’re not from the US, it’s less likely. That is all stuff you could have researched before you asserted that he did not have access to enough data to come to his conclusions or that he doesn’t understand the economics of how game consoles make money. I promise you he does, to both.
The old model I was referring to was making a console, making exclusives to drive people to that console, and then making money on each game sold for that console, whether the console maker developed it or not. Sony would not have put any games on PC at all if that model had no holes in it. It isn’t copying Xbox to put your first party games on other platforms; it’s acknowledging the way the market has changed. Peak spending on console hardware was all the way back in 2009. This year might exceed that due to the supply of the Switch 2, or at the very least, this June was the most successful June since 09, but that’s a downward trend line. When most games must and easily can release on all platforms, your reason to get a machine for a handful of exclusives drops precipitously, especially since Piscatella argues that most of those customers are spending their time on a handful of multiplatform games anyway.
What I thought the discussions would revolve around was how wild it is that an Xbox game could release on PlayStation and immediately become one of its best sellers for the year, because those PlayStation players clearly wanted that game but would not buy an Xbox for it. What it turned into was people saying that of course Nintendo would never do this for reasons that Piscatella very much understands why they haven’t done it to date; what’s interesting about this interview is what has changed in the market that would make it potentially worth it for Nintendo to port their exclusives.
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.
What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you? angielski
You fell in love with a game and it's characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish......
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Beta takes place September 5-7.
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Boycott Steam....
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Join us for a Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase on July 31 at 6am PT! Tune in for roughly 25 minutes of information on upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch games from our publishing partners.
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Warner Bros. Games is working on another live-service game, despite Suicide Squad flop (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
Sony Sues Tencent Over Horizon Lookalike (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Sony Interactive Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against Tencent over its upcoming game Light of Motiram, with Sony saying it is a "slavish clone" of the Horizon series.
"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
Xbox returns to gamescom next month with over 20 playable demos, including Hollow Knight: Silksong (news.xbox.com) angielski
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One-tap dial phone numbers:...
"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
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