I think they definitely have a strategy that is timed around the age of the base PS5 release. 4 years old = PS5 Pro and beginning of refurbished console sales, to grab the consumers that weren’t enticed by the base PS5.
i mean they’ve been doing refurbished consoles for multiple generations now, no? The only new thing is that they’re selling them directly from Sony’s site, rather than going through GameStop like they used to back in the day.
Not a particularly interesting article necessarily, but I wanted to share this as the list is actually quite good in my opinion, and it’s laid out very nicely. It’s one page that’s very easy to scroll through. Might find some things you havent played!
Strange to see a game like Nex Machina on the top 10, but I appreciate Eurogamer providing unique and surprising picks. Funny to see Outer Wilds and Tetris Effect in the top 5 - makes me think Eurogamer might be staffed with more than a few old Giant Bomb fans.
soooo…all 13 games they showed in the release trailer. Coincidentally, also about 90% of all “next gen” exclusive titles. I guess it’s not surprising that games compatible with the PS4 are not getting PS5 Pro upgrades, but it also kind of highlights how Sony has barely taken advantage of the base PS5 as-is.
That announcement stream was so weird. 4 minutes of Mark Cerny talking about the features of the PS5 like it didn’t come out 4 years ago, 3 minutes of explaining the PS5 Pro “Big 3” features of GPU upgrade, advanced ray tracing, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and 2 minutes of trailers that looked too (heh) similar to current PS5 gameplay. It’s like they know that it’s impossible to make a new console look good in trailers anymore, so they just rushed to get it over with because everyone has already decided whether or not they want to pay even more for an upgraded PS5.
At least the price for the base PS5 should come down on the used market?
I guess my thinking was that people will sell their base PS5 after they buy the Pro, and basic supply-and-demand says that more PS5’s on the used market equals lower prices. It might not come down a lot, but I think it will come down.
[alt text: text that says, “When your girlfriend says, ‘it’s either me or runescape’”. Below the text is a stock photo of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a couch and looking away from each other. Between them, there is a floating screenshot from the crafting menu in Runescape, and the cursor is...
the pandemic really muffed it all up. The truth is that those product launches were lined up well before the pandemic truly began in March 2020, and it would have cost both companies an exorbitant sum to delay the launches at all. And really, they had no reason to believe that a pandemic would hurt their sales numbers, because the gaming market had never gone through an event like this before. And ultimately, the pandemic actuallly ended helping their sales because everyone was at home with nothing to do. The gaming market reached its highest revenue peak ever due to the pandemic.
I agree that it has made this whole generation feel weird as a consumer. But I think a lot of that feeling would be there with or without the pandemic, and the pandemic just exacerbated some things. Xbox is firmly in second place to the point that the PS5 is dominant, and it would have been dominant without the pandemic there. There are so few current-gen games, and even fewer PS5 exclusives, but this isn’t because of the pandemic. We live in the age of crossplay and cross-platform, mostly caused by Sony and Xbox both moving to x86 architecture last gen, and sticking with it this gen. That common architecture makes it way easier to port games to other platforms, so it takes quite a lot of money to convince a dev to go exclusive these days. Why dev for PS5 only when you could also scoop up some money from PC gamers, Switch gamers, hell even PS4 gamers! The pandemic certainly hampered some dev ability to pump out first party games, but the bigger cause is probably the ballooning size of AAA game budgets. These games have become so massive and complex that it has become very difficult to pump one out faster than once every 4 years. The only thing I would pin mostly on the pandemic is the rise of PC gaming. PC gaming is at an all-time high because many took their pandemic stimulus as an excuse to finally switch to PC, and that has further fragmented the market in ways that definitely change the “vibe” as a consumer.
TL;DR: the pandemic was a factor, but I think most of the “weirdness” of this gen has come from other market forces.
[alt text: text that says, “when your friend is in an argument online and asks you for memes”. Below the text is a screenshot from The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, where the shopkeeper Ulfberth War-Bear is looking at the player character and saying, “Looking to protect yourself, or deal some damage?”]
[alt text: a semi-surreal meme image on a plain white background. Two characters from Dark Souls are saying, “My lord, we have absolutely ESSENTIAL lore information for the player. Should we make a cutscrene for it?”. They are looking at Hidetaka Miyazaki, who has the From Software logo emblazoned over him, and he is...
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Sounds like Sony finally has their very own Mario game! I hope Sony leans into this side of their portfolio in the future. And more selfishly, I REALLLY hope this one comes to PC
Are we going to reach the same levels of player count and engagement again when there are so many other draws on their attention and time compared to 2020 or 2021? Not anytime soon, if we ever do.
As I see it, the video game market went from a growth market to mature practically overnight. Meaning, since Pong, the video game market has continued to grow as more and more people have discovered gaming over time. But in 2020-21, a huge influx of players and time found their way to the video game market and many of them liked it and stuck around. Others have again left gaming, having been pulled away by other things. So now, it’s more about optimization of the player base rather than pursuing more organic growth by finding new players.
This has been a painful transition in thinking for many in the industry, especially those who assumed that player growth would continue forever, especially after the boom seen in 2020-21.
It’s not just that gaming had an unusual growth period during COVID lockdown. It’s that gaming had its final big growth period ever during this period. Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them. From here on out, the gaming industry is more like the food industry or something. They won’t find new pockets of untapped consumers. They have found them all, and now developers and publishers need to be smarter about scale and burn rate.
That statement was my attempt to summarize a chunk of the article, and was not my own analysis. From my perspective, I will say that I understand that there are parts of the world that don’t have access to PS5 games or whatever. However, I don’t think that this market is going to massively shift at any time in the next decade, because that would mean a shift of the entire socio-economic balance of the world. As much as I would love to see the Global North take a backseat while other nations rise, I think it’s fair for an analyst to assume that this is not going to happen.
Today, we have an exciting update: Duncan and Paul, alongside many other talented members at Hopoo Games, will now be working on game development directly at @valvesoftware
With the release of the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine mod, I’ve been motivated to pick that game back up again. I played DS2 for the first time about a year ago, got maybe a third through, and then kind of fell off. It’s fun to be back in Drangleic! Last time I was rolling a Paladin-type character with Faith and melee weapons, this time I’m interested in making a huge-sword type build and pivoting to hexes in the later game. The lighting mod also let’s you mod in HDR if your monitor is capable, and boy howdy does it look incredible with the improved lighting and HDR 🤩
Edit: here’s some screenshots i took capturing how bright Majula is, and capturing the added shadows.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about.
Does it feel like anything more than a level pack for Galaxy 1? That was the general impression that I remember. My lil bro beat Galaxy 2 but I never got around to it.
more puzzle-like than tactical combat, but the added “Confidence” objectives are fun to try to get.
Yeah it’s giving me Into the Breach vibes, and that was a game that also felt very “puzzle tactics”.
EDIT: actually I have a question for the group. How do y’all feel about “puzzle” tactics games like this versus more open-ended tactics games like XCOM? Personally I can sometimes get turned off from games that feel like all the levels are predesigned with a “best” solution that i have to work out. XCOM can feel freeing because when you come up with an incredibly efficient turn that synergizes everyone’s abilities, it can feel like you “got one over” on the game.
i mean…you could always buy the add-on disc drive? Assuming that it is still compatible with the Pro, not sure why it wouldn’t be. They get to fleece physical media heads for an extra $80, that’s a win for Sony.
the hardware design team is so far up their own asses with the PS5 design. Here’s two articles where you can read how high they are on their own supply: One, Two
awesome! just double-check that it’s compatible with the new one before dropping the extra $80! Nothing about the Pro is official yet, so we still gotta wait and see.
a crime if true. The article says that it “will include ‘more than 15’ playable games from the series’ history”, and they only list 9 in the article and trailer, so maybe it will be one of the versions not listed?
Not to burst your bubble, but that is a screenshot of the “Time Warp” mode from the trailer. Although if they built the GB style into that mode, maybe that is promising for getting the actual GB game in the collection?
@chloyster I think you can still see my reply even though i deleted the other thread, but thanks again for the advice! For others that may want to post review threads in the future: OpenCritic has a “share” button with several options, and the “reddit” option formats nicely for Lemmy. However, the “share” button only seems to show up on OpenCritic’s mobile site, so you may not see it if you are trying to create a review thread on your desktop computer.
right there with you. I saw some gameplay footage yesterday and thought it looked like great videogame junk food, especially if you’re a Star Wars mark like me. I just finished Fallen Order, and tbh I think the comparisons are spot on. The most notable similarity is both protagonists having a shoulder-perched sidekick that is responsible for like a quarter of your moveset. I think it’s neat in this game, but if we get ANY other Star Wars game in the next decade that has a shoulder-perched companion like this, it’s gonna feel really stale.
aha i was actually hoping you would comment when i posted this! i juuuuuust figured it out and posted a review thread. They don’t show those “share” links unless you’re on mobile, and I was banging my head against it on desktop. Thank you!
Sony to Start Selling Refurbished PS5 Consoles [Push Square] (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
The Eurogamer 100 - 100 best games to play right now (www.eurogamer.net)
Not a particularly interesting article necessarily, but I wanted to share this as the list is actually quite good in my opinion, and it’s laid out very nicely. It’s one page that’s very easy to scroll through. Might find some things you havent played!
Here are all the games enhanced by PS5 Pro (www.theverge.com) angielski
PlayStation 5 Pro Blog Post (blog.playstation.com)
$700 no disk drive 💀
Choose Option (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: text that says, “When your girlfriend says, ‘it’s either me or runescape’”. Below the text is a stock photo of a man and woman sitting next to each other on a couch and looking away from each other. Between them, there is a floating screenshot from the crafting menu in Runescape, and the cursor is...
Sony looks set to announce the PS5 Pro tomorrow in a strangely short livestream (www.engadget.com) angielski
they're a powerful tool (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: text that says, “when your friend is in an argument online and asks you for memes”. Below the text is a screenshot from The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, where the shopkeeper Ulfberth War-Bear is looking at the player character and saying, “Looking to protect yourself, or deal some damage?”]
the secret recipe (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: a semi-surreal meme image on a plain white background. Two characters from Dark Souls are saying, “My lord, we have absolutely ESSENTIAL lore information for the player. Should we make a cutscrene for it?”. They are looking at Hidetaka Miyazaki, who has the From Software logo emblazoned over him, and he is...
Heaven 17 claims it turned down GTA 6 soundtrack offer over pay offer: ‘Go f*** yourself’ [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Astro Bot (2024) Review Thread
Game Information...
Five Questions About Gaming’s Future With a Video Game Analyst [Remap] (remapradio.com) angielski
Risk of Rain developers join Valve, announced in a twitter post. (x.com)
Today, we have an exciting update: Duncan and Paul, alongside many other talented members at Hopoo Games, will now be working on game development directly at @valvesoftware
Concord may have sold as few as 25,000 copies, it’s claimed [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 1st
Whatcha all playing!...
The Meditative Power of Irritation [Remap] (remapradio.com) angielski
Tactical Breach Wizards | Review Thread (opencritic.com) angielski
Game Information...
PS5 Pro announcement plans and console design have been leaked [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 (www.remedygames.com)
cross-posted from: sopuli.xyz/post/16447519
Bungie's former Marathon reboot director Chris Barrett reportedly ousted following inappropriate behaviour [Eurogamer] (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Digital Eclipse is releasing a Tetris collection called Tetris Forever [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Star Wars Outlaws | Review Thread (opencritic.com) angielski
Game Information...
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