Why is it that you draw the line at season passes? Does it just mean you pick it up on sale later? Usually a DLC pipeline is the best way to keep your employees working on something productive while the tech folks are setting the ground work on the next project.
“Most profitable” just means it exists in the age where people who play FIFA and CoD are more milked for microtransactions. That line trends down when their hardware units sold do too. PS5 isn’t seeing the growth rate Sony wanted given their investment, even with complete domination of their market segment. If everything were hunky-dory in PlayStation land, I doubt they’d bother to bring God of War, Spider-Man, and Horizon to PC at all. There’s also the fact that PC over the past few years overtook consoles for where the most copies of games are sold, for most franchises anyway, which never used to be the case.
I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?
Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.
The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.
I’m early on in Animal Well and enjoying it so far…
…but I keep ending up playing Divinity: Original Sin instead. It’s extremely combat heavy and the swings in damage are way too wide, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Besides those, I’ve been playing V Rising in co-op with a friend or two, and man, that game’s combat is satisfying. Unfortunately, the upgrade paths end up with some weird recursive loops. I need stone dust in order to make whetstone in order to make a grinder that can create stone dust. Otherwise I guess I’m just supposed to find it, but the game doesn’t instruct me as to what drops it? It’s a strange choice, and I don’t think the game is better off for it, but I am really enjoying the game.
One of them was literally just to press 4 buttons and then talk to a guy again. I don’t know who at Bethesda thought these quests were even worth putting in the game.
Gotcha, I didn’t know that, but I guess it feeds into their new game plus mechanic. To be clear, I don’t believe that stuff sucks because it’s random; it sucks because it was poorly crafted. You can do good environmental storytelling even when the environment is determined by RNG (Dwarf Fortress and Shadows of Doubt both do), and you can have manual, hand-crafted content that sucks (like every non-faction quest in Starfield…why are we still doing thoughtless, boring fetch quests in 2023?!).