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.
I think what really started the current levels of rot was online passes for used games. They saw that people were playing without paying them directly, and wanted to stop it.
It was unpopular, as were map packs (which split the player base in online games), and here we are now with endless lootboxes and gacha elements. Sure, you can play without paying, but you’ll always feel like a second class citizen if you do. Everything you want will be held deliberately out of reach, and the aspect of “fun” has been reduced to collections and bars filling up.
It’s bred this generation of zombie gamers. I went to see my sister at Christmas, and her husband was playing Fallout 76 “doing his dailies”. I did ask what it was for and he said he didn’t really play it or want anything from the points it gives, and admitted what he was doing was kind of pointless. And then fired up the next game and did the same thing.
I tend to just stay away from multiplayer games these days. They’re pretty much all like that. The idea of playing because it’s fun is dead.
Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I’d bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I’d originally bought them for.
Cell was just PowerPC as was the Xbox 360’s Xenon chip. PowerPC is all but dead now, but the same thing could happen to x86 or ARM in the future. No king rules forever.