If Sony is willing to put up a bunch of money to get a game made with a 3rd party company like Square, and if Square wouldn’t have been able to make the game otherwise, then being an exclusive could be the only reason it exists.
Similar to Alan Wake 2, which I still haven’t played, it’s possible that this game owes its existence to the exclusivity agreement giving the necessary upfront funds to get the game development going.
But this isn’t like the previous generations of exclusive consoles. These consoles are significantly more expensive, development on video games is significantly more expensive, and the profit margin that you could make from being exclusive to just a single console is significantly lower.
This is a combination of ballooning budgets, expensive hardware with lower sales, and the PC gaming market looming over Sony and Microsoft’s shoulders. And don’t forget to mention the explosion of the free to play, micro transaction riddled games they also have to compete with for screen time now.
Does this mean exclusives will go away? Probably not. If it’s financially beneficial to go exclusive, they’ll do it again.
But it does mean that the gap between the potential gained revenue of not going exclusive and the potential locked in revenue from the exclusivity agreement is currently looking razor thin.
Oh don’t dismiss that they’re also graphics and programming wizards. They don’t work with the cutting edge, but they run circles around anyone on the lower end, making games look and run better on potato hardware is no easy feat.
I’d argue the optimization required to make something like that happen is significantly more skillful than all of the crap AAA stuff that takes 250gb and requires shader compilations every boot.
The bounty dispatcher or whatever is a woman version of budget Snake Plissken and a smoker, but the voice actor sounded like she was lifted from a 1940s movie and had never smoked a day in her life (rare, I know, but still). I expected at least a hint of gruffness from her character and got absolutely zero of that.
I felt the same way when I heard her voice. Not near rough enough for how that character looked.
At the same time, this could be your typical Kojima fuckery where he makes it seem like he’s talking about himself, but he’s actually talking about an exhaustion mechanic from Death Stranding.
Four characters, and 3 hours of extra story. But I heard the extra story sucked and wasn’t in any way worth the time or money put into it.
I’ve been holding off on picking it up until it goes on a deep deep discount because there’s no way I’m paying nearly the full price of the game for a fraction of the content.
They 100% did this to themselves. Tons of fans loved the precious story DLC’s on the older games. Those were cheaper and way longer. They didn’t justify the extra cost for this DLC in any way.