I mostly play new games, but I respect admiration for old games. It’s fun to see people speedrun old SNES games - but it’s disturbing to think an entire generation will just become inaccessible to history, even if a lot of the games in question were kind of bad.
I actually agree with you in the case of online multiplayer games - I don’t think the devs can keep them available forever. But when a game is singleplayer, like The Crew, it feels like planned obsolescence.
It’s hard to tell if this would have been the case in past generations. I think this only became true once we crested the graphical plateau where all games look “good enough” in HD.
Myself, I count the catalog of PS+ as an “exclusive feature”, plus it’s nice to play some of the PS4 games that struggled on a better machine. I loaded my God of War save and went from 30 to 60fps, which was great (sad that it was one of few games to offer PS5 enhancements in the PS4 version)
If a PC GPU is only slightly better than a console counterpart, typically its games will run slightly worse - since it loses the benefit of devs spending time optimizing for that profile.
They can still kind of kill physical games with good service. The whole “honey rather than vinegar” argument.
That’s what happened with the PSVita. While overpriced game cartridges existed, most of its lifespan people were buying its games digitally which worked great for indie developers that didn’t have a budget for physical releases.
I was very close to getting a digital PS5, but I still need the drive for my old PS4 games and movies. If I were just getting into Sony now though, I imagine the story would be different.
Much as I’ve come to hate Xbox, this could be the beginning of signs of monopoly - they don’t have so much competition anymore, so they can do what they want. Certainly doesn’t help that unofficial controllers have never been good.
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
I remember distinctly Danganronpa’s problem with shock value.
I finished the first case of the third game, and thought “Wow! That was incredible! I hadn’t anticipated that ending at all!”
And then, once the dust on the case had settled, because of the effects of that change in circumstance, I had no interest in playing the rest of the game.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.