I would say it’s no coincidence we’ve seen a drought of good singleplayer games around the same time as a drought of console exclusives.
Technology-wise, there’s no “reason” to buy any particular console. They’re all PCs. So, console makers have to invent that reason; and little things like a screenshot button, or family features, don’t pull people into the store. Exclusive games do.
And one key thing is, those exclusive games can’t be F2P microtransactions-laden casinos or live-service games. No one is spending $500 just to play something free; they’ll try to install that on a device they have. The exclusives have to be full, complete, well-voice-acted, well-written masterpieces respected by the gaming public - making anyone without that console envious.
But couldn’t devs just sell those games without making them exclusive? Perhaps not. Look at the credits for the latest God of War and you get a sense of how much they’re spending to make those types of games.
Yes, the game alone is still profitable. But A) It’s paying for a dozen failures Sony has also put out - no-name experiments they greenlit, and B) It might not be as profitable as many other reliable industries investors could put their money into. Why not just buy an index fund?
Thankfully, the equation works out better for indie studios; their games aren’t so massive as to need to account for millions in costs. So we’ll keep getting those. But big-budget singleplayer arrangements aren’t as likely when they’re not pushing some bigger product like a game console.
FedNow is an option within the USA that uses a government-provided system to cheaply transfer money, and a number of banks have signed on. It’s not in use because it’s not as universally available yet.
I negative-one that recommendation. Game is very hard to play well when you’re new; I’m used to lots of games in that style and GTFO was impossible; always hard to tell what players should be doing and is very unforgiving. Unless both players are hardcore gamers I wouldn’t recommend it.
I would hope most of the industry learned a big lesson from Apex Legends. The day before its release, no one knew of its existence. The sole reason that it blew up was because it was fun.
Viral sharing of interactivity is likely the most cost effective way to run a marketing campaign for games - not bus ads, pre-order hype, etc. In other words, Make good games.
I’ve heard that there’s a huge market for Hidden Object games. Like, double-digit percentage of the market.
Often the “mainstream, hardcore soulslike” gamer section of the market that’s targeted for discussion only ends up being a part of it. Most people who have a family member with a PlayStation are more likely to have a row of the latest sports games than anything else popular.
I enjoyed this one a lot, but I eventually got stuck on a yeti boss, and quit.
It felt like his next move was somewhat randomized, and you needed to react in much less than a second to the type of move he was doing. While a lot of bosses develop patterns you can get used to, I couldn’t form any rules in my mind that could account for my reflexes not improving.
That’s the thing, a lot of investors almost don’t like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
I could also point out: If the main sales race was for the gold-plated base copy of a game, instead of nickel and dining people who only have nickels and dimes, then it’s possible we would have a gaming world entirely focused on churning out AAAA singleplayer experiences, back to putting out trilogies of obscure gaming experiences.
This is not blaming gamers for not accepting higher prices for incomplete games; publishers moved where the money was, and I don’t blame them. I blame the rest of OTHER industries for not updating their wages so the world is livable and people have extra for entertainment.
What sucks on my end is that this has only been the latest in a long chain of reasons to boycott Microsoft - so I can’t exactly claim, if they take a step back from “Systematically murdering innocent people” then I’ll go back to giving them money.