I had a game pass sub a couple of years ago and quit it because the games that I wanted to play quickly ran out. I had a sub for a month until a few days ago and I must say game pass is in a way better place than it used to be.
Nine Sols, Kunitsu Gami, Cocoon, Chants of Senaar and black ops 6 campaign were all unexpectedly good experiences.
Black Ops 6 and Indiana Jones released in this measured quarter. Mainly COD pulling these numbers up.
30% is huge though. I think with game pass, keeping those subscribers means adding more high quality games at a good cadence. Doom the dark ages, Avowed, Fable releasing this year might be a part of this strategy.
I haven’t thought too deep about my desire for the industry to push to indie, but this was an interesting read.
Another point that I’ve thought though, is that marketing budgets are insanely high in AAA in order to cut through the noise of the rest of social media.
I would imagine that if EA or whoever was pumping out 10 times as many games, they would need to share that marketing budget equally. The chance for cut-through for each game would be small and many of the projects wouldn’t even make financial sense compared to putting bets on a smaller number of the bigger budget games. The game release cadence would be really confusing and noisy, with people not knowing what is worth playing.
Very much agree with the last point about games being profitable as fuck. It should be enough that the industry is making shed loads of money above cost without the need to increase shareholder value every quarter by cutting jobs.
I wonder how much of the ballooning cost of AAA budgets are due to losing technical expertise by staff turnover/churn? I can’t imagine that creates an atmosphere of efficiency.
I bought Alan Wake 2, and glad I did. Accidentally decided to buy Red Dead redemption 2 on there because of a discount code making it much cheaper than steam a couple of years ago.
Huge mistake. I added it as a non-steam game so now to launch Red Dead redemption 2. I need to launch steam which then launches epic which then launches Rockstar Games launcher which then launches the game.
Maybe! There’s much bigger spaces in this one, more assets to load etc. Recommended specs are an RTX 2060 for 1080p 30fps low settings. I would say the steam deck sits around there?