While I understand it’s not a 1:1 comparison, Final Fantasy 14 dropped support for PS3 in 2017, and the console was only 11 years old at the time.
I don’t want to say too much bc you acknowledged the apples to oranges comparison, but I’ll say the quiet part out loud for others: technology advanced way more in those 11 years than it has in the last 12 since the PS4 launch. The only conceivable limiting factor at this phase is storage speed, and as others have pointed out, Genshin on PS4 is currently MISERABLE with load times. So like, it makes sense, but still feels wrong.
yeahhhh it makes sense, just kind of wild because live service games THRIVE on old hardware. Stuff like Fortnite and Overwatch has kept the PS4 platform pretty damn lively, and i’m sure it accounts for a significant chunk of sales, so seeing a live service game cut off that revenue stream is interesting. The hardware may be 12 years old, but the new hardware has sat in a pretty steep price point for its entire history so far, so somehow this still feels premature.
I find this interesting. Do you take this tack with ALL games? Do you play on anything besides Switch? Personally, I am mostly digital with all of my game purchases these days. I understand the desire to feel like the publisher can’t take the game away from you, but I also feel like it’s a bit pointless these days given how many games need Day 1 patches to run properly. Physical games end up just being a physical license to download the digital game. In this light, I tend to prefer the convenience of digital. I don’t have to swap out cartridges, and I don’t have to worry about storing a physical item.
It looks really sick! I wish I could speak to the new expansion, I’ve never gotten far enough in the base game to attempt something like that. I always peter out after solving energy generation and finishing my first hydroponics farm.
I know our house got it bc we wanted to play Animal Crossing. A lot of homes get a Switch 1 because it makes the most sense for kids, especially after the durable Switch Lite came out. It’s just cheaper and easier-to-use than competing devices. The only real competition is phones and iPads, and smart parents know that games on those devices can be predatory in a way that Switch games usually aren’t. I know it’s not exactly as black-and-white as that, but I think a lot of parents see it that way.
Unless they make that completely seamless behind the scenes, I can’t see that working. Most people don’t use crypto and don’t want to learn how. It also requires users to sign up for a crypto exchange, which requires people to register with a photo ID. Additionally, it is difficult to exchange exactly the amount you need to purchase something, because of how volatile the currencies are. You end up spending more than the cost of the thing you are buying, just to be sure that you have enough. And then you’re in the digital currency problem of “I want the $3 skin but the smallest package I can buy is $5 worth of V Bucks”, which always feels like a ripoff.
tbh seeing “Xbox” in the same headline as Silksong makes me scared for the future. Obviously M$ can’t layoff any Team Cherry employees, I just hope this partnership is solely a marketing partnership and Team Cherry is not very exposed to Xbox’s failures.
I kind of feel like the golden age of “rebooted live service game” is behind us, tbh. We had games like FFXIV and Rainbow Six: Siege that launched rough, but committed to fixing it and then successfully turned it around. In those days, there weren’t many live service games, so people were willing to wait out a possible turnaround. In the time since, we have been absolutely drowning in live-service games, and many of them are free-to-play. Why would I wait for the Splitgate turnaround when there are 3 other live-service f2p shooters that I haven’t even tried yet? If I’m a kid or young adult that came up on Roblox, I might even be content with the shooters built into that platform.