Consoles shouldn’t tie their success to a single game. Nintendo, the creators of such model, ditched it almost immediately. After the Famicom. Volume of games + convenience is what move consoles, not a single game. Exclusives have diminishing returns and at the beginning of console sales cycle they’re more likely to hurt the game.
The problem is that the first is easy, the later is hard, nigh impossible.
Software development is notoriously hard to predict. Specially features against time and cost of development. But video games are even harder to predict. It’s impossible to know how many copies a game will sell, you might as well hire a tarot reader. Specially if the game doesn’t exist yet.
This is not a justification of the AAA practices. Quite the contrary, things are this way because mid and high management refuse to do their job or plainly suck at it. I guess that the adage still rings true: I want smaller games, with worse graphics, made by well paid developers who work less hours. But this games have never sold billions of dollars or sparked billion dollar game as a service IPs. So executives think it can’t be done and keep expending more in a desperate chase of the golden eggs goose.
My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won’t be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.
Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.
You just know that there used to be an “…at this time” at the end of that sentence and some good PR folk edited it out because managers are out of touch douches.
I agree, but that doesn’t apply to multiplayer with server side verification and matchmaking. It’s notoriously difficult, near impossible to pirate exclusively multiplayer games.
Yes, when you own the thing you can say no to selling it. Why is this point so hard to understand? Even if you don’t have a monopoly or even if your product sucks you get to say no.
When you own something and someone comes to offer you money to buy it, you have this thing called “No” you can say, and then they don’t buy it. It’s a pretty neat hack. I learned it from Gaben.