I’m still not 100% sold on the shoulder force feedback. Sometimes it works well, but many games do this odd thing where you hold it down and it clicks repeatedly and uncomfortably like you’re breaking it and I’ve no idea what they’re really trying to convey.
I think in this business you can survive a generation in the wilderness. Nintendo had it with the Wii U. Arguably Sony had one with the PS3.
Two in a row? Well you’re out. Saturn followed by Dreamcast. MS are in their second, and tbh, it looks like they’re pivoting towards being a cross platform publisher and subscription provider. They can certainly afford to keep throwing money at the issue, but if there’s no results, there’s only so long they’ll be allowed to continue doing that before the boss pulls the rug on it. He does not seem like a man who is excited by his gaming division.
I don’t think anybody wants a monopoly, because it means the leader can stagnate, and honestly that’s already happened. Sony are getting complacent, the big releases are few and far between. We’re all getting less for our money, no matter what team you’re on.
I often buy multiple consoles in a generation, but I didn’t get the Xbox One or Xbox Series consoles, because there’s no reason to, and it’s not because I’ve got an expensive PC either, still being on a 1060. Being late to the game is fine, PS3 did that and ended up selling pretty much as many as the Xbox 360 in the end, but where is that spark from MS? They’ve gambled it all on Game Pass and I’m not sure you can run an entire gaming division on that, same as Netflix couldn’t compete with Hollywood without the box office money. The cloud growth just hasn’t happened for them. It doesn’t feel as good as local play, and I suspect it never will. A PS5 has hit pricing that isn’t really that expensive for fairly casual gamers, although the most casual went mobile ages ago and I doubt they’re coming back.
Xbox hardware is fine, there just isn’t any reason to own it. If it ran Windows and I could install my Steam library on it, I’d have got it on day one, but how does that make MS money? There’s even been noises about the next Xbox allowing Steam, although I don’t know how true that it is. I would guess the only way that can happen is if MS get a chunk of Valve’s money every time somebody buys a game through Steam for Xbox. It’s the only real feature that would get me to buy one right now.
If you ever wonder why gamers buy Playstation and not Xbox, here is your reason.
MS have no idea what they’re doing with gaming. There will be no The Last of Us or God of War coming from them. They don’t want to sell you games. They want to sell you GamePass. They don’t want you to have a great time. They want you to have a time that is just about acceptable enough to keep paying for it.
The only one of their games I’ve heard people get excited about is Hi-Fi Rush, and you can see here what they think of that. Clearly it didn’t maintain enough Monthly Active Users, or have a short enough Time To Purchase or whatever other bullshit mobile-era metric determines whether a studio lives or dies.
Sony took some headlines for doing it, but there’s loads of stuff disappeared from the Google Play store and I never saw anybody complaining about them.
Rayman Jungle Run and Fiesta Run are two (single player) games I paid for and they’ve vanished. I mean, it’s only a couple of quid, but that doesn’t make it OK.
At least Steam continue to host stuff, even if they’re not allowed to sell it.
It’s OK. I do miss the Steam sales actually being worthwhile. They used to be really good, where now I mostly use Steam for games bought elsewhere.
I miss ownership. At least I own my Playstation discs. I can trade them with others when I’m done with them. I can still buy games that have been delisted from digital stores.
One of them had Space Invaders. I can’t remember for the life of me which one. It was apparently used on the C64 quite a lot, under the name Invade-a-Load.