I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?
Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.
The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.
Save files have a ton of variance. They can be as small as a few KB or they can be full save states of an entire open world. Back in the mid 00s, I had save file folders that were larger than the install directory, like The Witcher and Prey (2006).
The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.
EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.
No, there hasn’t been, but there is a distinction between currently experiencing high inflation and previously experiencing high inflation in the middle of a hardware product’s life cycle.