Something I’ve picked up on with my gaming preference is stories that don’t simply focus on one “mood” for the game, but alter it to fit the situation. Players get a relaxed time exploring or diving into combat, and the world is inviting and colorful, but when the story builds, it puts brutal tests of character in front...
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC
The keyword here is “my”.
It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.
I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.
It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.
I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.
What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.
I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.
So Mario Kart World was the big launch title with bundles, and they already released a new Fast game, the series that seems to have basically replaced F-Zero.
Seems like a lot of racing games early on from Nintendo.
I think the Switch 2 will do well, as it’s already had a better launch than the WiiU or 3DS. But it’s kind of in an awkward spot. The community reaction seems to be “yeah Mario Kart World is great, but it’s still just a Mario Kart game at the end of the day, and it will need some DLC to catch up to the level of content of MK8”. Donkey Kong was received well but doesn’t seem to have the staying power of a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild did. Pokemon Legends Z-A is probably going to do well, but I don’t think these kind of spinoff games are going to drive console sales like the main games do (especially when there is a Switch version coming out too).
My point is that a few months after launch I still don’t see a game where I say “wow that’s worth grabbing a Switch 2 for!”. It almost feels more like the “Switch Pro” that was rumored for years rather than a true sequel- the main reason to upgrade right now is that Switch 1 games run better. That is enough to launch, but I’m looking through the list of announced games and trying to find what the big system seller is going to be. What’s going to release this holiday season that makes parents stand in line to buy the latest Nintendo for their children?
Maybe this is by design? Maybe Nintendo has purposefully left a bit of a drought to avoid having a ton of cross-gen games, and plans to start announcing more projects in 2026?
I keep seeing this same website posted on Lemmy and it’s always the same thing. A click bait title that makes unnecessary connections between two things attached to an article that just regurgitates basic concepts without adding anything. All the paragraphs are one, maybe two sentences so the whole thing feels like reading a series of tweets instead of an actual article.
Maybe it would bother me less if this was poised less as the opinion of the authors and instead was just objective reporting on SKG. SKG has press materials available for that purpose that The Conversation is choosing not to use. Heck, they could even include some statements from game publishers or government officials. It’s still a good thing that they are spreading awareness of the movement, but I’m really confused as to what kind of person consumes and enjoys this website.
It’s frustrating because I largely agree with their sentiments. I support Stop Killing Games, and I support worker’s rights, but this article is just… Bad. It doesn’t even make a connection between SKG and the working environemt- it just makes a claim that such a connection exists and leaves that claim unsubstantiated. Such a connection DOES exist, these authors just fail to communicate that.
Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. - Jason Schreier
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
Are you saying that Valve and Itch did not respond to Collective Shout? Well, so did I… My comment was saying they were justified in doing so.
Are you saying Collective Shout are not religious nutjobs? That’s an easy mistake to make because their website and branding does a really good job of trying to hide it from a casual researcher, but the founder Melissa Reist is pretty obviously a devout Catholic- she gives interviews with Catholic organizations, appears at Catholic youth camps, and describes herself as a “pro-life feminist”, which is of course an oxymoron. She’s definitely a religious nutjob.
He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.
As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.
I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.
He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.
You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.
If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.
The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.
Does he have access to the proprietary sales data of Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, Valve, and Google?
I’d be shocked if he did, because those companies are all big enough to have their own in-house departments for that. He’s trying to sell consulting services to smaller publishers. Consults don’t get paid for saying "well I don’t really have enough information to say that for sure*, they get paid for making executives feel smart.
That still doesn’t include most of the data necessary to reach this conclusion, and furthermore the bigger issue is that THE ARTICLE ITSELF DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY. It is an unbacked claim that we cannot verify. If he can’t share the data because ris propriety, he shouldn’t be making the claim publicly.
He’s looking at software sales in a vacuum, and he is probably correct that any singular piece of software would sell more units if it were released on more platforms. That’s not new or interesting: that’s obvious.
What he’s missing, even in the screenshot of claimed data he has, is everything else.
Consultants like this are not trustworthy sources. They’re trying to sell their own product.
If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out.
Well first of all, this interview was published today so the only people who have had a chance to really respond to this are the general public on the internet. Beyond that, it is not safe to assume that any of their competitors would have any reason to respond to this publicly at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and maybe that decision has more to do with wanting to either keep up with Circana or differentiate from Circana than anything related to the truth. That’s kind of the problem with dealing with bias in sampling like this.
People have been saying this exact same thing for decades and it hasn’t happened yet.
And I’m all in favor of the end of exclusivity. Exclusivity is harmful to consumers, and to society as a whole from the perspective of preserving culture and history. But just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean I’m going to believe some consultant casually speculating while promoting his company.
If he provided data and outlined the methodology of projection they used them we could at least have an interesting conversation about this. But right now he’s just about as credible as the 3rd grader at recess whose uncle works for Nintendo and says the next Halo is coming to Switch.
I didn’t backpedal on anything at all so I’m not sure why you think that. My initial statement was that he did not provide enough data to reach his conclusion and seems to be drastically oversimplifying the problem to reach his conclusion, by focusing on the unit sales of singular pieces of software in a vacuum and assuming that games are fungible. I pointed out how different videogame companies operate with different business models that are more or less condusive to exclusive 1st party titles. None of that has changed, and the only thing you’ve said to try to dispute any of it is “this consultant said in an interview that he thinks exclusives are bad”. No attempt at discerning causation or explaining it, no attempt at even refuting the arguments I present, just “you should trust this guy, who also happens to be selling a product”. If I wasn’t bored killing time at work I wouldn’t even bother responding because this isn’t really a conversation, you just keep going “nu uh”.
Not just me: You’ve spent this whole thread arguing with myself and everyone else who are pointing out the obvious and glaring holes in what he’s saying.
One of my favorites is this one. Xbox has failed to make a profit throughout the entire history of the company. They’ve spent the last few years shutting down studios and laying people off, which has led to a lot of industry speculation. Insiders have reported rumors that Spencer might get pushed to resign or even fired. There’s been speculation that Xbox might be considering exiting the hardware side of things entirely, in part because of their own marketing campaigns. I am not saying I believe that, but these are strong signs that Xbox is doing badly.
Nintendo, by contrast, just had the single best launch week 1 in the history of videogame consoles. Pretty much every way you look at the Switch 2 sales numbers they are breaking records. And this guy saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. That is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence for me to take seriously.
And while anecdotes are pretty useless, I agree with you that many publishers have trended towards multiplatform releases and I said that earlier. I’m not disputing that: I’m disputing his comments about 1st party publishers.
Okay your first two paragraphs are just ad hominen attacks at this point. You aren’t refuting anything by just claiming I’m backpedalling on… Something? And just assuming the other people didn’t read the article when in fact it seems they did and are also making great points that you’re also just refusing to talk about. Like… Why did you even post this if you didn’t want to actually talk about points, methodology, potential explanations, etc?
Xbox is just plain doing badly. They’ve tried a lot of different approaches to change that over the years: leaning hard into alternative control schemes with Kinect, trying to push Xbox as a general multimedia machine rather than just a videogame console, pushing hard to develop small indie studios, then pushing for mega-acquisitions of publishers and developers. I’m not even sure which “old model” you’re talking about because they are constantly, desperately pivoting to something else. They seem to be terrible at predictjng what consumers want or how markets will react to their decisions. So I’m still waiting for you to explain why copying them is a good idea. As I said earlier: they have always had less focus on exclusivity because their hardware sells at a loss, and they haven’t changed that.
Nintendo is coming off the 3rd best-selling console of all time, the best-selling console in 2 decades. The Switch 2 not only had the best 1st week on history, but the best 1st month too. I suppose it is still early and totally fair if you want to wait for the first full year to make a judgement, but it seems to me like Nintendo produce a unique and innovative product that people want back in 2017 and are continuing that success now. That product is in a very different market than the Xbox, and uses a very different business model where the hardware itself is profitable. They’re the only one of the 3 that hasn’t shut down studios or laid off employees lately. So, once again, the idea that thinks he knows better than them seems pretty far-fetched right now.
There’s something else that’s been bothering me…
He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work
I’ve been following the videogame industry for decades and I’ve never heard of this guy. Which is not all that outlandish on its own. But I also have never heard of The Game Business- it seems like a new website just created this year. And you seem to be incredibly defensive of this guy- completely ignoring any discussion of the industry and binging your entire argument here on his credibility. Are you Mat Piscatella himself on a burner account?
After the last decade or more of people complaining about greedy publishers forcing devs to release half-baked messes too early (Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc), it feels like I’m living in a bizarro world to see so much criticism for a publisher delaying a game to (allegedly) make it better.
I’m not ruling anything out at this point. It could be a classic case of a greedy corporation pushing out the real artists in order to exploit the art. It could be that the devs (specifically the 3 guys involved in the lawsuit) got lazy after they got paid. It could be both, neither, something else entirely. Honestly with how things go these days I’m just grateful there hasn’t been anything distasteful enough tl give me qualms about playing Subnautica.
I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025
The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.
If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.
It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.
The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.
Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.
I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?
And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.
The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
Looking to ask for people’s favorite tactical RPGs because I have played a bunch but never really gotten into any. XCOM, Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Advance Wars, Fallout, etc....
Shining Force is a classic. Basically Seva’s answer to Fire Emblem.
Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern “retro pixel art” style games: the “pixels” can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn’t bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.
Banner Saga was pretty good. It’s a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven’t played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.
The Switch 2 being a bad deal and Nintendo having a VERY strong history of anti-consumer behavior has nothing to do with console wars. The person you are replying to is equally allowed to have a nuanced take.
What, are you expecting every comment critical of Nintendo to also include criticism of how terribly Xbox has managed it’s game studios just so we can be “fair and balanced”?
You and I remember the press for the Wii very, very differently. Just look at the Wikipedia article listing all the awards it won before or around it’s launch. Game Critics, Spike TV, Golden Joystick, Popular Science, IGN, GameSpot, the Guardian, and much more. including awards and praise for the innovative controls.
Was there negativity? Sure, but it was a miniscule minority. The kind of thing only an extremely defensive Nintendo fan would notice. The Wii sold out instantly and was impossible to find for the first year or two, similar the PS5 except without the excuse of a global pandemic disrupting supply chains.
It’s not some anti-Nintendo bias. The press was pretty mixed on the Xbox One for example, with some outlets pointing out it was a bit overpriced, and of course the whole debacle about being always-online and the Kinect being mandatory caused a lot of backlash. The PS3 was seen as overpriced at launch and got a 6/10 from IGN.
And another important factor is that conditions change after launch. (The 360 probably would have had worse reviews if the press knew about the red ring of death before launch. The PS3 saw price reductions and eventually outsold the 360 despite having a worse launch. The 3DS floundered for its first few months until Nintendo dropped the price.
The press is neither monolithic nor perfect. I guarantee you can find some outlet somewhere with the exact take you are looking for, but to just dismiss the entire industry because you don’t agree with most of them on the Switch 2 seems like coping.
I never understand why people are so obsessed with not getting updates. They usually just break everything and bloat the OS.
“But my security!” OS updates are going to protect you from 99% of the bad actors out there. They do nothing against social engineering. They don’t make you use strong passwords. Most of the security flaws OS updates are addressing are the kinda of attacks that only state actors or organized crime rings have the resources and abilities to exploit.
Governments? Heck yeah they need to be concerned. Large enterprises? Definitely. Small businesses? Eh it’s probably for the best to protect your livelihood even if you aren’t the juiciest target. But for an individual using their PC for gaming, social media, streaming content, online shopping, etc… The cost-benefit analysis is different.
It’s not different from physical security. Theres a reason you don’t need to go through TSA to get on a bus.
You seem awfully optimistic about Microsoft’s response time lol.
How many people are out there today with broken locks on their doors or windows? How many stores do you think close every night with the minimum wage worker forgetting to lock up properly? How many people out their use incredibly weak passwords, share their credentials with others, or leave everything on post-it notes?
Security is a cost-benefit analysis. Depending on what exactly this hypothetical exploit requires I might very well be comfortable running Windows 10 anyways. The vast majority of security exploits require physical access to the machine- we only hear about the remote ones more often because they are scarier.
That’s where the “analysis” part of “cost-benefit analysis” comes in and it doesn’t make sense to generalize like you seem to want to.
Is it really that much more responsible to run Windows 11? You seem to have a LOT of faith in Microsoft to keep you safe. There’s plenty of reasons to not switch to Windows 11.
I also use Linux on some machines. But I can also see why there are reasons why one distro or another, or even Linux in general, may not be the right call for some people.
The 9070’s on eBay are getting cheaper and cheaper the further we get from the launch. I think scalpers underestimated AMD’s stock and they are slowly discovering that.
Immediately after the launch the XT seemed to be starting at $1,200. Now they are down to $800. The non-xt is down to $650.
Depends on how much stock AMD can provide in the coming weeks and months, but I’m still thinking I’ll be able to get one at MSRP this year.
I blame the consolidation of sports titles under a limited number of developers and publishers. But maybe I just feel this way because sports games aren’t my thing.
It’s so weird to me how many people seem to just hate Sony for doing milder versions of what Nintendo and Microsoft have been doing for much longer.
Sony didn’t buy Zenimax or Activision-Blizzard. Or heck, you could point to the gigantic graveyard of studios that EA and Microsoft have purchased and shut down over the years.
Nintendo doesn’t “personally” do anything. They are a corporation.
And they do purchase both IP’s and studios. Just off the top of my head they bought Monolith from Bandai-Namco and Bayonetta has been exclusive ever since the second one.
Microsoft has been way worse than Sony. Zenimax alone was might have been bigger than Sony’s entire portfolio depending on how you measure. Activision-Blizzard was far, far bigger. And at least with Zenimax, it seems like most of their studios have gotten worse since acquisition, with a lot of them being shut down.
I don’t mean to overly defenf Sony, but just paying publishers for 1 year of exclusivity seems pretty mild in comparison. I’d prefer they didn’t buy studios like Bungie, but at the same time the acquisitions of Naughty Dog and Insomniac seem to have worked out pretty well.
That’s been rumored for years. I remember back in the day seeing rumors about Halo coming to PlayStation.
Not entirely without merit. Minecraft has been released on pretty much everything with a CPU, although some of those may have been before Microsoft purchased Mojang. There were a lot of weird scenarios after the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard where the now-Microsoft-owned studios had pre-existing contracts with Sony they needed to honor. It looks like some of the IP they recently purchased that had traditionally been multiplat might remain that way, like the “Age of ___” series, Doom, and Call of Duty.
I’ve seen rumors that Starfield might come to PS5, but nothing substantial. I don’t think there would have been any chance of that if it had sold well on Xbox and Windows.
I’ve also seen rumors of Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, but I will not start buying those unless there are more signs that Xbox is giving up on hardware entirely. If they could get deals done to get GamePass on Playstation and Switch that might start to look more realistic though.
Most of their games are still exclusive though. Avowed just released last weekend for Xbox and Windows and no hint of a PlayStation release for example.
The reverse is also true. Sony has published MLB games for the Xbox and Switch for example.
So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.
When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.
These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.
So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.
There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.
The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.
My experience on the Deck and Switch is the opposite: different games lend themselves to different form factors. And both of those (along with other handhelds like the Logitech G Cloud, PlayStation Portal, AYN Odin series, etc) are not really in the mobile space. I can’t imagine a middle schooler taking their Deck or Switch to school. I can’t imagine breaking one of those out on a 15 minute break while working retail or food service. I would not have lugged those devices around campus to play between college classes. The Switch is an exception because it’s a home console too, but the rest of those devices are incredibly niche products that sell orders of magnitude less than either consoles, gaming PC’s, or phones.
And you said yourself: you pick the right game for the job. I could totally emulate Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 on the Deck, maybe even 4. But I would inevitably get stuck in a 30 minute long cutscene from Kojima. It may be possible to either use a save states or just hit the power button to suspend, but that’s still a bad experience. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good. I do keep a selection of games on the Deck for different situations.
My wife and I love Skyrim and have almost every version of it. I probably have 1,000 hours in, she is probably close to 10,000 at this point. We always joke about how one of the worst things you can do for yourself is save and stop playing mid-dungeon. You get in a groove and reserve some of the RAM in your brain for keeping track of the in-game space, and if you stop and come back to it a day, week, month, or year later it takes some work to mentally recover. We always try to go back to a house, or at least a town, to save.
For something like Candy Crush or Sudoku? No problem, I can get right in. For a big AAA action game? I need to remember the controls, the map layout, what’s going on with the plot, what my items or build or whatever is, what the enemies are like and how to deal with them, etc. If I’m sitting down for a 2 hour gaming session it’s no problem if I take 3 minutes to get up to speed again, but for a 15 minute break that’s 20% of my time.
Another factor is how long it takes to get in game. I recently played through Subnautica (streaming with Steam Link to either my Deck or Shield), and while it was a great time I was annoyed at just how long it takes to get into the game. Even on an SSD it simply takes forever to load, sometimes close to 2 whole minutes. And I know of plenty of other games that are even worse with all the splash screens and BS before the start menu- the Crash N Sane Trilogy is a big offender for example. If I’m on a 15 minute break I don’t want to spend 20% of that time waiting for the game to start.
It’s exit points and entry points. Most console or PC games are designed with play sessions of at least 30 minutes, usually more like an hour. If you don’t take the exit points, you’re starting a new dungeon or new quest line or whatever and are locking in for the next 30-60 minutes. (You could argue games like Civ might have intended play sessions more like 8-16 hours). Successful mobile games have much more frequent entry and exit points.
RE2 would certainly work fine on the Deck and Switch, but not in those “mobile” contexts. And I don’t think there is enough demand to add Android and IOS support on top of that.
“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he said, per machine learning translation, “which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”
The Series X|S combined has sold less than half the units of the PS5. I can’t find sales numbers on the X vs S, but it seems like a lot of studios have determined it’s just not really profitable to do that level of optimisation unless you can also squeeze the game onto Switch, which does not have as much overlap in demographics as the Xbox and PlayStation do.
The article cites Larian having similar issues with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Remedy with Alan Wake 2. This isn’t just one shitty lazy dev studio- this is Microsoft forcing hard decisions on devs by insisting on walking the Series S like they’re in Weekend at Bernie’s.
I don’t think a ton of people would care enough in the first place, and those that do would probably prefer SetamOS or PopOS or something else that isn’t affiliated with Microsoft.
I guess I’m confused about what you’re proposing then. Why would anyone - consumers, Microsoft, or Nintendo/Sony - want an Xbox operating system on a non-Xbox console?
I don’t know the details of how hands-on or hands-off Microsoft has been or should have been with studios, but even at the time of the AB acquisition the reputation for results was bad. I found an article from 2018 looking at the studios Microsoft had purchased up until then. Mohjang is really the only success story- Bungie never got back to where they were with HALO and got spun off, Rare has never reached their N64 peak again, and several other studios just closed.
Things have not been close to “okay” since these acquisitions. Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 people from Activision-Blizzard in January 2024. Then in May they closed 3 Zenimax-owned studios- Tango, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog. They then announced another 650 layoffs in September, with more expected in 2025. Microsoft is throwing money at buying up IP and then firing the employees and closing down.
What don’t you like about Sony releasing their games on PC? Almost all of Microsoft’s games have been (at least most of the ones worth playing) throughout the history of Xbox. I think timed exclusivity is reasonable and I can be patient. Some of the ports had better or worse launch experiences but it’s been a while since I can remember a bad one. If anything I wish Nintendo would get with the program and release games on PC too, though that probably will never happen.
The PS5 is leading the Xbox, but neither are anywhere close to the Switch. Microsoft absolutely dwarfs Sony as a parent company- Sony never would have stood any chance at buying Zenimax, let alone AB. I do agree that this isn’t necessary to remain competitive and would be and for the industry, but this isn’t anywhere close to the scale of those deals. I will note that the Activision-Blizzard merger is still pretty recent, and Phil Spencer has mentioned wanting to continue acquisitions (like King, the maker of Candy Crush), so this could also be Sony trying to respond to that.
The estimated I see have all of Kadokawa values at ~$2.7 billion. My uneducated guess is that FromSoft is probably a couple hundred million of that, just knowing how many other assets Kadokawa owns (and remember- Sony has non-gaming-related interest in Kadokawa too). Activision-Blizzard was sold for ~$69 billion.
Also it’s worth pointing out that Sony are already partial owners of FromSoft. And Sony, while not perfect, had a much better record of managing their acquired studios than Microsoft. Look at Naughty Dog and Insomniac for examples. I’d have to go back and do research to confirm, but I think the only studios Sony has closed have been ones they started. London studios (which was mostly focused on toe-in titles for hardware gimmicks like the Move and Wonderbook) and Japan Studios, which for years was more of a support studio and an incubator for talent they would move to other studios later- like Team Icon and Team Asobi.
I don’t mean to come across as a PlayStation fanboy- Sony has made a ton of mistakes of their own over the years. But most of their mistakes have just been side projects like VR, Move, the EyeToy. You can argue whether the PSP and Vita were successful or not. On comparison, Xbox has consistently sold less and has still not been profitable in close in 25 years, while Nintendo has been wildly volatile with huge hits like the Wii and Switch and huge misses like the WiiU.
Virtual Boy: Nintendo Classics - Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Incredibly cursed. Who asked for this.
What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"? angielski
Something I’ve picked up on with my gaming preference is stories that don’t simply focus on one “mood” for the game, but alter it to fit the situation. Players get a relaxed time exploring or diving into combat, and the world is inviting and colorful, but when the story builds, it puts brutal tests of character in front...
Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow (www.theverge.com) angielski
Nintendo Direct Announced for Tomorrow Focused on Kirby Air Riders (www.ign.com) angielski
‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights (theconversation.com) angielski
Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. - Jason Schreier
"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana (www.thegamebusiness.com) angielski
Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry....
Krafton Issue Statement Regarding Subnautica 2 angielski
To Our 12 Million Fellow Subnauts,...
Pop it in your calendars angielski
Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Microsoft is closing down Xbox studio The Initiative, with Perfect Dark killed as well — joining Everwild and ZeniMax's new IP, and other unannounced projects (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
EU citizens better get to signing! (fedia.io) angielski
What are your favorite Tactical RPGs? angielski
Looking to ask for people’s favorite tactical RPGs because I have played a bunch but never really gotten into any. XCOM, Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Advance Wars, Fallout, etc....
Switch 2 Breaks Records By Selling Over 3.5 Million Units In Four Days (www.forbes.com) angielski
6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? angielski
The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025 (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Is Rocket League a sports game? angielski
I blame the consolidation of sports titles under a limited number of developers and publishers. But maybe I just feel this way because sports games aren’t my thing.
FromSoftware didn’t want Sony to publish Dark Souls as it was ‘disappointed’ by how Demon’s Souls was treated (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Resident Evil 2 remake has sold fewer than 10,000 copies on iOS, estimates suggest (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Black Myth: Wukong Dev Bemoans Lack of Xbox Version, Points the Finger at Xbox Series S - IGN (www.ign.com)
“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he said, per machine learning translation, “which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”
Rumors of Sony Acquiring FromSoft’s Parent Company - GAMESCENSOR (www.gamescensor.com) angielski