I wonder how many times I will have to see a publisher significantly harm their reputation in the PC market in a yolo bet to set up their own ecosystem and store.
I thought Sony had been conservative and decided against it when their first steam releases hit but with this move it seems possible that a Sony PC ecosystem was always in the works and it just wasn't ready for those original releases. Oh well.
damn, I knew that Sega had had a few big blunders lately, but having to straight up sell Relic is pretty huge... Wonder how their output will look from now on, it's no secret that some of their output under Sega was questionable (primarily Dawn of War 3) and one has to wonder how much of their failings were due to Sega's directive.
If you are WB, I can't see how you compare the performance of this game vs the performance of Suicide Squad (which had similar development time) and not rethink your approach to future licensed titles
The house is going on fire and they wanna take their sweet time finding the most optimal faucet?
That basically confirms every rumor about this. It wouldn't take a week to prepare a statement if it wasn't the tectonic shift it is rumored to be. Damn.
You know what, you might be right, a second attempt at the concept of a Steam Machine, but this time done in a way that, you know, actually makes sense, with a single super-official SKU, with a lot of abstraction from the "PC" part of it (which Steam Deck has already set the field for) could potentially work.
But they did it so, so fucking badly last time, that I won't believe it until I see it.
Yeah, at the very least it would result in a brutal deterioration of the value proposition of future Playstation hardware. The harsh truth is that a large majority of Playstation players would not consider moving to PC or Switch 2 as a viable alternative, and Sony knows that, and would price accordingly. We all saw what happened the last time they felt they were uncontested in the market when they unveiled the PS3 and its pricing, but this time there would not be a 360 to punish them for it.
There is not a world in which a hypothetical PS6 isn't at least 599 ( without the hardware to make up for it) if it doesn't have a direct competitor. And that would have its own domino effect on Switch and PC hardware pricing... what are you gonna do, go to the overpriced PS6? Pleaaaaase.
At this point it's not even just about it being too expensive for an upstart, it's about being too expensive, too hard, and not at all worth the risk/reward proposition for anyone.
Microsoft is the largest public company in the world and they failed at it! Coming from two successful previous generations of products! Getting in in the market as an unproven entity at this point would be suicidal. Not to speak of the fact that the requirements to enter as a player in the market today are 10x more than when Microsoft entered the market with the XBox. When they unveiled the XBox, a half-decent network infrastructure for gaming was revolutionary; nowadays, an almost-perfect infrastructure with a good digital store is a minimum requirement.
Quite ironically, many of the players that could plausibly throw their name in the hat already have their fingers in gaming in other ways that don't exactly align with launching a domestic console. Apple is currently pushing for more ports of current AAA games to iOS and Mac; Facebook (I refuse to acknowledge their rebrand) is pushing Quest as its main platform and I imagine a traditional console would clash with that; NVIDIA provides hardware for Nintendo, sells gaming hardware for PC and a cloud gaming service, and I guess a console kinda clashes with all of that; Amazon seemed more interested in becoming a publisher than anything else when it comes to gaming; Alphabet probably still has PTSD from the whole Stadia fiasco...
Like, I don't know, I don't see a fuck you-tier company that could plausibly pull it off and at the same time would be interested in it. Tencent maybe? It's not looking good, honestly.
It didn't end up being the system seller quality game they might have wished for, so why not get some more sales out of it. Nobody is gonna base their choice between Series X or PS5 on Starfield, but a lot of PS5 owners would indulge in purchasing the game out of curiosity. The maths make sense.
The problem is, you can extend this sentiment to most if not all of the XBox console exclusives that have been released for a good while now. They have unfortunately failed at producing a killer app for far too long at this point. Ever since Mattrick killed the momentum of the brand, they have never been able to recover it.
As much as I don't want a future in which PS5 is uncontested in the console space (Nintendo is too much its own thing to count as direct competition imo), it is starting to look like, from all angles, it just makes sense for Microsoft to focus on expanding Gamepass and their games as much as possible across all platforms because there's more money in that than in salvaging the XBox hardware brand.
Most of the trailer looked like a PS3 game, especially in terms of animations and janky combat.
Honestly, combat and animation wise, I'd say that suggesting the idea that it is comparable to PS3 era games actually does a disservice to many of the games of that era (TLoU, Dead Space Series, the REs of that era, etc etc).
I might even go as far as saying that in some aspects it may even be outdone by the Silent Hill games of that era, Homecoming and Downpour, but that is probably reaching a tad too much.