Strange to see a game like Nex Machina on the top 10, but I appreciate Eurogamer providing unique and surprising picks. Funny to see Outer Wilds and Tetris Effect in the top 5 - makes me think Eurogamer might be staffed with more than a few old Giant Bomb fans.
soooo…all 13 games they showed in the release trailer. Coincidentally, also about 90% of all “next gen” exclusive titles. I guess it’s not surprising that games compatible with the PS4 are not getting PS5 Pro upgrades, but it also kind of highlights how Sony has barely taken advantage of the base PS5 as-is.
I guess my thinking was that people will sell their base PS5 after they buy the Pro, and basic supply-and-demand says that more PS5’s on the used market equals lower prices. It might not come down a lot, but I think it will come down.
That announcement stream was so weird. 4 minutes of Mark Cerny talking about the features of the PS5 like it didn’t come out 4 years ago, 3 minutes of explaining the PS5 Pro “Big 3” features of GPU upgrade, advanced ray tracing, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and 2 minutes of trailers that looked too (heh) similar to current PS5 gameplay. It’s like they know that it’s impossible to make a new console look good in trailers anymore, so they just rushed to get it over with because everyone has already decided whether or not they want to pay even more for an upgraded PS5.
At least the price for the base PS5 should come down on the used market?
the pandemic really muffed it all up. The truth is that those product launches were lined up well before the pandemic truly began in March 2020, and it would have cost both companies an exorbitant sum to delay the launches at all. And really, they had no reason to believe that a pandemic would hurt their sales numbers, because the gaming market had never gone through an event like this before. And ultimately, the pandemic actuallly ended helping their sales because everyone was at home with nothing to do. The gaming market reached its highest revenue peak ever due to the pandemic.
I agree that it has made this whole generation feel weird as a consumer. But I think a lot of that feeling would be there with or without the pandemic, and the pandemic just exacerbated some things. Xbox is firmly in second place to the point that the PS5 is dominant, and it would have been dominant without the pandemic there. There are so few current-gen games, and even fewer PS5 exclusives, but this isn’t because of the pandemic. We live in the age of crossplay and cross-platform, mostly caused by Sony and Xbox both moving to x86 architecture last gen, and sticking with it this gen. That common architecture makes it way easier to port games to other platforms, so it takes quite a lot of money to convince a dev to go exclusive these days. Why dev for PS5 only when you could also scoop up some money from PC gamers, Switch gamers, hell even PS4 gamers! The pandemic certainly hampered some dev ability to pump out first party games, but the bigger cause is probably the ballooning size of AAA game budgets. These games have become so massive and complex that it has become very difficult to pump one out faster than once every 4 years. The only thing I would pin mostly on the pandemic is the rise of PC gaming. PC gaming is at an all-time high because many took their pandemic stimulus as an excuse to finally switch to PC, and that has further fragmented the market in ways that definitely change the “vibe” as a consumer.
TL;DR: the pandemic was a factor, but I think most of the “weirdness” of this gen has come from other market forces.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
Sounds like Sony finally has their very own Mario game! I hope Sony leans into this side of their portfolio in the future. And more selfishly, I REALLLY hope this one comes to PC
That statement was my attempt to summarize a chunk of the article, and was not my own analysis. From my perspective, I will say that I understand that there are parts of the world that don’t have access to PS5 games or whatever. However, I don’t think that this market is going to massively shift at any time in the next decade, because that would mean a shift of the entire socio-economic balance of the world. As much as I would love to see the Global North take a backseat while other nations rise, I think it’s fair for an analyst to assume that this is not going to happen.
Are we going to reach the same levels of player count and engagement again when there are so many other draws on their attention and time compared to 2020 or 2021? Not anytime soon, if we ever do.
As I see it, the video game market went from a growth market to mature practically overnight. Meaning, since Pong, the video game market has continued to grow as more and more people have discovered gaming over time. But in 2020-21, a huge influx of players and time found their way to the video game market and many of them liked it and stuck around. Others have again left gaming, having been pulled away by other things. So now, it’s more about optimization of the player base rather than pursuing more organic growth by finding new players.
This has been a painful transition in thinking for many in the industry, especially those who assumed that player growth would continue forever, especially after the boom seen in 2020-21.
It’s not just that gaming had an unusual growth period during COVID lockdown. It’s that gaming had its final big growth period ever during this period. Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them. From here on out, the gaming industry is more like the food industry or something. They won’t find new pockets of untapped consumers. They have found them all, and now developers and publishers need to be smarter about scale and burn rate.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about.
Does it feel like anything more than a level pack for Galaxy 1? That was the general impression that I remember. My lil bro beat Galaxy 2 but I never got around to it.
With the release of the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine mod, I’ve been motivated to pick that game back up again. I played DS2 for the first time about a year ago, got maybe a third through, and then kind of fell off. It’s fun to be back in Drangleic! Last time I was rolling a Paladin-type character with Faith and melee weapons, this time I’m interested in making a huge-sword type build and pivoting to hexes in the later game. The lighting mod also let’s you mod in HDR if your monitor is capable, and boy howdy does it look incredible with the improved lighting and HDR 🤩
Edit: here’s some screenshots i took capturing how bright Majula is, and capturing the added shadows.