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 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.
I got into a lot of discussions with people who seemed to believe that Microsoft would “save” Activision-Blizzard. Clean up the culture, create a better work environment, shift the focus away from live-services and micro-transactions. People were expecting a lot of their older games to make their way to GamePass… Which is a whole other kind of predatory pricing.
Lo and behold- AB went ahead and laid off almost 2,000 redundant positions after the acquisition and don’t seem to have changed their business structure much.
It’s so funny to me how vigorously the internet defended Microsoft, a much much larger company than Sony, buying Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, each much larger companies than Kadokawa.
Consolidation is bad for everyone except owners and I hope this doesn’t happen.
Silver linings: at the very least this would probably result in the Bloodborne re-release people have been begging for. If it were Microsoft purchasing them I would expect a ton of immediate layoffs and maybe studio closure after a few years. While Sony has closed a couple of studios (mostly their own home-grown ones that were re-structured into other things) they seem more focused on actually using their acquisitions than just gobbling the IP and eliminating competition.
Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.
Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.
As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.
Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?
Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!
Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.
I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.
Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.
That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.
Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?
Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.
I also have a gaming PC (and I stream to every screen in the house) and a Steam Deck, so from that perspective it’s even fewer exclusive games.
I do really prefer physical games, but even that is going away. Some games just don’t release physically, or even if they have a physical version it’s basically just a different kind of DRM. I recently bought Gran Turismo 7 physically and was incredibly disappointed that it had to install 128GB to the PS5 to even open, then it took a while downloading ever more updates and data once I opened it.
I traditionally loved Naughty Dog and Insomniac franchises, but Naughty Dog has only re-released games on the PS5 so far. Insomniac… Rift Apart is decent. I don’t really like Marvel or superhero stuff though. I tried Spiderman and it’s… Fine., but it really makes me wish I was just playing Sunset Overdrive instead. I’m in the process of playing through the older God of War games for the first time- so far they aren’t bad but they seem overrated considering how hyped they were back in the day.
There’s no killer Hideo Kojima game yet. Gran Turismo is a micro transaction, always online, multiplayer-focused shell of what used to be a great series. There isn’t any equivalent to creative games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Katamari Damacy, etc. Stray was really good- my PC kind of struggled with it so I might pick up the PS5 version if I ever see a physical copy on sale.
I don’t know that it’s just PlayStation either. Looking at my Steam library by release date, the last big AAA games I have are Yakuza 6 (2021, still haven’t played it yet), Control (2020- although I think that’s because I have the complete edition. The base game was from 2019), and Horizon Zero Dawn (similarly listed as 2020, but the base game would have been 2017). It seems like more and more studios are closing, more games being released are just “meh”.
I bought it in the fall of 2022, when the shortages were just starting to end, expecting it would get more games. I wanted to get one before they did a mid-gen refresh that removed stuff like backwards compatibility, the disc drive, etc.
It’s been really disappointing so far. I still think I’ve put more time into PS4 games than PS5 games. Astro’s Playroom was fantastic, but unfortunately it is still probably the best game for the console.
I’d say fantastically. I went back to it for a bit last month.
I played the Legendary edition on the Steam Deck. Graphically, I think it’s fine (it’s way better than how I played it on the PS3 originally). The draw distance was always a strength, I think the Legendary edition included some visual upgrades, and being a game so much older than the Deck it runs at max settings 60FPS with no problem, so it looks better than it did on the PS3/360/most PC’s in 2011. I also think games from that era really hold up well because the generational jumps weren’t quite as big- the consoles had HDMI and a lot of games aimed for at least 720p, if not 1080p. Contemporaries like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Uncharted, and the Last of Us are all similarly still pretty good looking. Audio quality more or less peaked too, at least for stereo.
There’s also the Anniversary edition, which I have on PS4 but not PC. It looks more modern- tons of fancy lighting effects and upgrades textures. The models and terrain are still a bit low-poly, the animations a bit stiff, but overall I think it’s good.
The combat is simple- it always was, even compared to its contemporaries in 2011. A lot of people just call it bad, but I actually like the game design of Skyrim’s combat. Success or failure largely is just a preparedness check- is your combination of character level, skill level, equipment, buffs, follower, and consumable items good enough to get you through the fight(s)? It’s about resource management and good use of downtime. It’s not about mechanical proficiency or complexity, and I think that can be a good thing. I don’t have to be sober to play Skyrim. I don’t have to dodge and block for 3-5 business days before I get a turn to attack. It’s a power fantasy- ebony great sword go ‘brrr’.
And I think that helps the roleplay too. Mechanically intensive soulslikes can be fun too, but I find they feel fun in a more arcade-y way. Using mechanical proficiency to defeat an enemy your character is underpowered for feels great as a player, but for me that also kind of ruins the immersion and reminds me that it’s a videogame. To apply the same concept to something other than combat- it’s similar to replaying a game where the player has all of the knowledge the character doesn’t - where the best items are, which direction to go, which NPC’s to kill before they betray you, etc. Speed running stuff. Which is great in its own right, just not what I’m always looking for.
Then the quests. There’s a lot of quests, some better than others, but on the whole I would say they’re pretty good. The main quests early on are basically tricking you into visitng all of the major cities and points of interest across the map, introducing you to all of the factions and mechanics. A lot of quests are just “go clear that dungeon, either to kill someone hiding there or get an item”. Which is fine because clearing dungeons is fun- there’s a good variety of enemy types and dungeon themes. There is a LOT of voice acting for it’s time, and it’s mostly pretty good. Not on par with something like Hades, but still good.
The puzzles are notoriously simple, but they function more as a way to change the pace and have downtime in dungeons. They aren’t supposed to be hard.
On the whole, Skyrim probably isn’t (and never was) the deepest game in any one area. Soulslikes have deeper combat. Plenty of games have more intriguing plots and better characters. The lore is strong in the Elder Scrolls, but Skyrim only contributed a small part to what was built by other games. The crafting system is… Okay. There are hundreds of books in-game, but most are only a couple of pages. The leveling system is less complex than Morrowind or Oblivion. Everything is just as deep as it needs to be and no deeper. And that makes everything really intuitive.
You can’t ruin a build with a bad decision. You can’t get screwed by a bad loot drop. You don’t need to min-max to feel powerful. You don’t need to find one activity that gives a lot of XP to farm to build other skills. You can’t kill 100 rats to level up your lockpicking- you just need to pick locks to get better at lockpicking.
I also don’t mess with mods. I tried it out years ago and found it just wasn’t worth the effort of dealing with a mod manager. I find most mods are trying to turn Skyrim into another game. Shit posts like adding Shrek or Thomas the Tank. Adding ridiculous anime swords and big-tiddied women with bikini armor. Re-creating other games like Ocarina of Time or Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. Adding guns. Adding a bunch of fetch quests with whole novels of text and no voice acting. I’m sure there are some decent ones out there (especially visual and UI improvements) but the process of modding is much less convenient than Steam Workshop games. I haven’t seen anything that looks good enough to merit going to a 3rd party website to download stuff and fuss with a mod manager for.
Also, I find vanilla Skyrim is pretty stable and bugs are rare. Some of that is from things being patched over time, but also I think Skyrim just received an unearned reputation upon release. The rag doll physics cause a lot of chaos, but I don’t know that I’d call that a bug. There’s the occasional clipping. Even back on the PS3 where I first played it, I’d say 80% of issues were solved by reloading the area I was in, with another 19% solved by restarting the game. There were some interesting exploits (Fortify Restoration potions used to be broken, there are still item dup’ing exploits with merchants, you can access the hidden “chests” that the game uses for storing merchant inventory in the overworld, etc) but I find most of them are things you really need to go out of your way to find, and actually can make the game more fun if that’s what you’re going for.