I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.
Though I agreed with you. It’s still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony “caring”.
So, at first install, I actually linked my account to a PSN account that I knew was banned due to a charge back on an unwanted purchase. At the time, I figured if I discovered that I can’t play because my account is banned from PSN, I’d just refund on Steam. I feel I’ll be very justifiably pissed if my account is now banned from playing retroactively, long after the refund window.
Weird take, imo. Mobile games are probably the best they’ve ever been. They were traditionally a place for rampant p2w garbage gacha machines, and while those are still there, the platform has actual decent games nowadays. Real PC games are being ported to mobile and the platform is being taken seriously. Even in the world of micro transactions and gacha games, there are far more that are actually decent as games then there ever has been.
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Now and I’ve been really impressed with it. The entirety of the Riot games are good games with reasonable microtransactions. Vampire Survivors, my go-to “I am offline” game, is the exact same game on mobile as PC, save the fact that it’s free and you have a choice to watch ads for marginal farming speedups (which can be disabled if you buy literally any of their ~$1.50 DLC expansions, which are hilariously large considering their price). Fucking Warframe is coming to/already on (?) mobile.
I genuinely can’t say mobile games have ever been in a better place than today, despite the existence of the shovelware P2W games that continue to roll out.
I watched the gameplay trailer and was so confused as to why Ubisoft thought it could get away with so blatantly ripping off Dead Cells.
Still confused why it’s in the “triple-i” showcase, though. I know the definition of “indie” has become more and more loose as of late, but I’d think the core concept of being self-published would have to be a pre-requisite.
I tried the game two or three times sitting down with the “I want to play a space sim” mindset and could never get past the tutorial. Then the next time, it had clicked that it’s a survival crafter that just happens to have a space theme. When I sat down with that mindset and perspective on what I was in for, I suddenly throughly enjoyed the game.
The game just does a really bad job of showing you what it is trailers and other media. Sure, all the things it shows off are there, but they’re not the core of the game.
The android version is free with optional benefits for watching ads. If you buy any of the paid DLC (~$2 per DLC?) you are given a menu option to disable the “watch an ad for free shit?” prompts, but they’re hardly in the way if you don’t want to pay a cent. Playable offline, controller supported and is tbh a massive game.
The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.
Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.
Though, somehow the golden episodes they made later were oddly weak? But the core anime is actually the best anime adaptation of a story-heavy game I can think of.
MAYBE the Tales of Symphonia anime, if you can find that anywhere.
But seriously, I wasn’t aware that there was a TWEWY anime…
I absolutely love the games, and the anime is just… Bad. I couldn’t stomache watching more than the first two episodes. I suppose there’s the off chance it “gets good”, but somehow they took a game that has one of the most bangin’ soundtracks of its era and made an anime that is mostly talking with basically no music and little to no ambiance. The flair and style is just completely absent in a franchise that literally built game mechanics around style.
Show her the P4 anime. It’s really, really good. It makes me wonder how the P5 anime shit the bed so hard. I imagine the answer is different studios, but I haven’t really looked into it.
Path of Exile has “evolved”, and not in a way I like, in the most recent years.
It’s a very fast, clear-speed focused game, now, more so than ever. Even inside it’s genre, it’s exceptionally build focused and not very interactive during play, which is impressive, considering these are things the genre is known for.
I play a lot of genres of games and as a result like weird genre mashups, so Helskate really stuck out to me. Hades meets Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater isn’t a game I would have thought up myself, but it seems hella cool.
I just messed around with the demo a bit. There are some rough edges and no meta progression yet, but the core concept feels good. Landing a trick on an enemies head to proc stone effects and then following with a couple attacks to put them down is a super fun concept when you hit everything just right. A little bit of tactile feedback when you get hit and land things would really push the gameplay into the amazing territory.