Topic: PlayStation 5 --OT--

I just wanted to copy this down in the forum somewhere, as to me it feels like an interesting discussion relating to PS imploding it's live service push and all that wasted time, money, effort, and literally people's lives.

Seriously, think for a moment how many small scale independent studios could have been financially supported by Sony/SIE over these past few years. Studios that could themselves potentially hit live service/latest craze or cult hit gold with the type of genuine artisan creativity that can only be achieved in small passionate teams.

Sony could have literally given heaps of money to every single genuine independent game studio in the world and in return published their games for them... for free! And it would still have been money better spent with much more of a chance of a positive return on it than what they have got by backing all of these failed and binned "AAA live service" ideas.

It is gobsmackingly crazy that they ever thought "you know what makes a live service hit... a giant AAA budget" 🤔 it is probably the most stupid thing they have ever done as a company. How many live service hits have started as mega budget, mega expectation efforts anyway, and how many have simply happened by sheer f***ing chance? The scales must favour "sheer f***ing chance" by a fair few.

It kind of hurts my soul that they have gone through this period, when much more genuine efforts could have been supported without the need to fully own the license of the ideas. And I kind of hope Sony now take a more benevolent approach in the future. They have done it before, and that has led to them eventually acquiring the talented creators to be a part of SIE anyway. But that doesn't even need to be the end goal. Let's just use all that money in the future to support gaming as a whole (as well as the stuff you actually do well) and I'm sure in the end it will pay off a little bit more than whatever the sh** they've been trying this whole generation has or ever will.

Also, f*** Bungie. Just because they started all this and have poisoned Sony from within. I know they recently started to get rid of all the bad apples and Sony had to step in, but their influence has already ruined a generation of work. The hot takes thread is maybe where that last bit should be 😅 but still, f*** Bungie.

@Ravix Didn't Sony bring in Bungie specifically to help with the live service initiative? As in they already had plans in place and wanted them to help?

@Ravix I’m sure they Sony would like to call a Mulligan with the whole Bungie acquisition. What an expensive mess that’s become.

I have been fairly vocal about my displeasure with the GaaS push and my overall disinterest with live service games. Even the successful ones hold no interest for me. Any of them that I seem the least bit curious about are so incredibly impenetrable for newcomers or exploitative that it kills all appeal.

Seeing that BluePoint’s project was an online live service game that’s been shuttered really hurts. I was very excited to see that studio do something new. We’d be so much better off if they’d spent the last 4 years doing a Bloodborne Remake. 😅

The ironic thing is that I’ve never had so many games to play in my backlog. Despite Sony first party basically taking the entire generation off, I still can’t catch up. So if I’m honest with myself, I shouldn’t really complain. Still, it sucks. So much wasted time and money. Concord by itself would be considered catastrophic. Apparently that was just the tip of the iceberg.

@Herculean @KilloWertz
Even though I am detached from the live service side of gaming, I do acknowledge that it takes a different skill set to develop and produce games in that environment. I think that’s become very clear now and a hard lesson learned by many companies, not just Sony. Rocksteady and Warner Bros as well as Crystal Dynamics / Platinum Games and Square-Enix, not to mention major failures by Ubisoft, BioWare, and others.

I suppose Bungie is an expert in the area, and the knowledge and experience of doing it was coveted enough to spend that money acquiring them. But to me, I think it’s becoming apparent that not all live service games are the same. I think what Bungie does well (or at least did well) was keeping a game going through regular expansions and holding onto a dedicated online fanbase. They talk about having a game with “stickiness”, or one that can remain relevant and keep players coming back. I think that’s really a different animal than the big GaaS hits like Fortnite, Genshin and the Hoyo-verse. And I think that GTA online, Minecraft/Roblox, FIFA/NBA2K, and CoD are an even separate sub-genre.

All live service needs stickiness, but that can come from various elements, such as: an engaging gameplay loop, a creative outlet that evolves, a community and social space, an addictive gambling/loot box style dependence, an engaging developing and well realized narrative, a low barrier to entry for consistent new player recruitment, or a popular pre-existing IP that already is established with a rabid fanbase. There’s probably other elements I’m not thinking of too, but the point is — I’m not sure Bungie is good at many of those things, but has really had success only in one little corner of the live-service market. And the slow death of their marquee property Destiny shows that even they don’t have all the answers for colossal success.

I also think that in additional to a special sauce of stickiness, there needs to be an element of luck. The stars need to align in the marketplace, the online buzz and discourse needs to be just so, and world events and economy have to be conducive to a specifics idea’s success. What worked in 2020 may not work in 2025.

All that said, there’s some very obvious red flags that Sony and Bungie really should have seen. As gamers who engage in this hobby on a daily basis and are the backbone of the industry, we could all see the train wreck coming even though we don’t have MBA’s or decades of business expertise.

@KilloWertz @Herculean

Yeah, you can mostly ignore the Bungie element. I just wanted to vent about them at the end of the rest of my comment, because they are and have been atrocious and consistently run by a type of scammer mind set execs (that directly influenced Concord with their ex Bungie execs conning the idiotic Hermen into funding that too) I do think they were in Sony's ear the whole time telling them that 12 live service games are worth pursuing, though, whilst lining their pockets as "consultants" even though these other games were being made by devs that could be making good games, that they already knew how to make, instead. It was only this past year thay Sony had to send in the troops to reorganise Bungie, wasn't it? And it is also this past year that they have realised it has all been for nothing. I'd say Sony are pretty pissed with Bungie, and maybe that was a bit of foreshadowing when they gave them all slap. I'm unfamiliar with the timescale of everything though, hence it was mostly a hot take. I don't think they are innocent bystanders, let's say 😂

But anyway, my other thought still stands. Waste of time and money, and probably lost so much talent by trying to force them to make sh** they don't want to make. Time to go back to supporting the genuine creators rather than the suits

@Ravix The timeline is the real issue now. The projects coming out now were probably greenlit like 5-8 years ago. And likewise, canceled projects have been in the works for many years, most likely. Add to that the general stagnation of development caused by the pandemic, and you have a situation where studio production is going to be a whole console generation behind. It would be possible (maybe even probable) that Bend and BluePoint aren’t heard of again until PS6.

If Microsoft hadn’t fallen on their face this gen with all their own flavor of mismanagement, we could have been experiencing the swan song of the PlayStation brand over the next 5 years. Nevertheless, I think Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch can keep them afloat, on top of their second party relationships and aggressive pursuit of console exclusives. They have a sizable cushion in the market, so should have time to right the ship. We may have something actually viable cooking from Housemarque, Media Molecule, Guerilla, and Santa Monica. Faith in the system is shaky at this point though.

@Herculean as far as Concord it was people who worked at bungie that were in charge there. That's all. Never mind 😅 I know Concord as an entity was a new venture. It was two seperate points, and just for the sake of venting. Take no notice of me 😛 I did think Bungie was acquired way earlier than that, too, to be fair 🤦‍♂️

@Herculean no worries. I know can be a bit exaggerated and miss some actual factual information out when I'm doing hot take elements in posts 😂 I do think a rot has set in, and there are multiple sources of that rot. But it is indeed wild speculation. The whole Concord saga reads like a story about a con would read. And every time bungie change ownership the reasons read a little like they are the problem, but are blaming outside sources for everything, or... playing the victim to get what they want, a bit like a con artist would. So I like to throw some of those elements in sometimes, considering the link between people that worked for both.

It probably boils down to, Big Jim overreacted and overcommited to GaaS and had way too many of SIE's studios working on them. They Bought Bungie to print some GaaS money and help. Then doubled down on the plan. Then Hermen trying to be a good little boy tried to snatch up something he was convinced to be "the one" whether he was misled, or bought into the fact that the devs really thought they'd thought of something unique without stepping back to ponder: maybe there's a reason GaaS don't usually have AAA budgets and storylines unrelated to the gameplay.

I do remember genuinely thinking when the Concord trailer dropped: okay it is a little goofy but I could really buy into a fun space heist game with a crew and a ship and plenty to plunder. And then being totally shocked and disinterested by the reveal that it was in fact a PvP shooter with no connection between the cutscenes and the game play of randomly shooting the people you were just talking to like mismatched partners in crime in a Marvel buddy comedy or whatver 🤷‍♂️ it was properly bananas 🙈

But, yeah. That's why I mostly wanted to focus on the hypothetical of what Sony could have better spent the money on instead of all the massive live service gambles, and what they can do to attone in the future. They have a lot of making up to do, but there is probably still a way to focus on GaaS on a much smaller scale using independent studios with much lower risk, or by using IP's suited to being GaaS in the first place 😬

Amen to this! As much as I have close to zero interest in the multiplayer online GaaS universe, I completely recognize its importance in the market. I don’t expect Sony to completely concede the whole live service arena to the competition. Even though I’ll never play them, I do think it best that they have some efforts to be active in that space. But good grief, use some basic sound judgment and don’t bet the whole farm on this stuff. I wouldn’t even mind a couple of the larger AAA studios to work on a GaaS from time to time, but not 75% of the entirety of PlayStation Studios. Or at least reign in the costs.

And the point about using the right IP is a good one too. Marvel Rivals hero shooter — ok, I think it fits. A Spider-Man multiplayer PvP game?… uh, I don’t think so. A God of War multiplayer game? …also not sure that makes sense. Last of Us Factions 2? … uh, ok but do we have a support studio who can do that instead of our single player A-team? A Horizon MMO? …ok, it might work, but is there a team we can farm that out to as a side project if we still want a Horizon 3 in the next 5 years?

Basically — the right project, by the right team, at the right time, for the right cost. Is that too much to hope for? 😄

@Th3solution it is indeed too much to ask for, a bit like asking for the Celtics to play fast for more than one quarter 🙈 Which games succeed as live service? Low budget, cheap and cheerful graphics, addictive gameplay loop and/or shiny loot. What kind of basketball is more effective than walking it up and being incredibly slow and predictable with your passes? Playing fast, loose and free.

Logic will never prevail, and the forest will remain hidden by all those damn trees 🤦‍♂️😅

@Ravix 😂 … Sorry about your Celtics. Don’t worry. Just like Sony will rise again, I’m sure they will too. 📈

Stumbled upon this this morning while scrolling through the store. It released last week without any fanfare whatsoever but looks pretty incredible tbh - The Reward of Cherishment and Eternity:

One of my DualSense controllers was hardly holding its charge, so I decided to try and replace the battery. I got one from Amazon for about 15 quid which also contains a couple of tools that you need.

It is quite straightforward but I did need to follow a guide. I'm not really someone that does a lot of this stuff, but went for it after looking into it and and finding out how simple it was.

So I've replaced it now and need to charge it up fully, then see how long it lasts. From the reviews I read it will either be not all or substantially longer than a new OG battery. I've got two other controllers, so not bothered if it ends up being junk.

@JohnnyShoulder yeah my original two DualSenses charge drains very quickly rn… deffo let us know how you get on with this, as I’d be looking to do the same if it’s successful.

@JohnnyShoulder Yeah, I’m also curious to know how it goes. So far all to three of my DualSense controllers work fine and the battery life seems ok. I’ve not timed them, but I can go two or three long gaming sessions without recharging, so maybe 8 hours or so…? It also depends greatly on how much haptics and adaptive trigger use the game has. I have all the extra tactile functionality cranked up to the full experience.

I worry more about my Portal’s battery life. A DualSense is easier to replace, as opposed to the $200 Portal. It’s definitely got a shorter playtime. Maybe 3-4 hours or so. If the battery replacement for the DualSense works out then it might bode well for the eventual Portal battery replacement I might need.

It is kind of ridiculous that having a second dualsense is almost essential with how often they need charging. But it’s also kind of silly how bad the battery gauge is on it; I used to charge mine whenever it showed only one bar left but you can still get loads of play out of it. Even when “empty” it still goes on for a fair bit.

It also seemed to never actually charge if I plugged it into my laptop and carried on playing. So now I’ve probably ruined the battery further by always having one constantly plugged into the console and ready to go.

@Th3solution @graymamba I used the controller for the first time yesterday and it seems to OK. My main concerns were that it would get too hot or maybe even explode, which hasn't happened yet. It has also kept its charge so far and still on three bars after a couple of hours play.

@Thrillho This controller is about 4 years old at this point, so on par for lasting as long as other wireless controllers from previous generations.

@JohnnyShoulder Thanks for the update. Sounds like it’s a successful experiment so far. If it heats up or explodes during gameplay that would definitely be the ultimate in haptic feedback! Talk about immersion —Tossing a grenade in Uncharted never felt so authentic!

@Thrillho I have definitely played for a good hour or two even after the warning message pops up that the battery is spent. I think the controller has shut off on me from a dead battery only once during gameplay. Fortunately, if memory serves, the game pauses when that happens. I guess it’s not good for the battery to be completely discharged like that so I try not to push it that far.

I also try not to leave the DualSense (or any of my electronics) plugged in longer than overnight due to the supposed adverse effect of staying 100% charged for a long time either. So for my DualSenses I’m trying to rotate them so one particular unit doesn’t sit too long in a full charge.

I shudder to think how long my PS3 controllers would keep a charge. They’ve been sitting there completely discharged for years. Even my DualShock 4’s aren’t maintained anymore since my PS4 hasn’t been turned on in at least a year.

@JohnnyShoulder nice, sounds like it’s worked a treat. So you just searched DualSense battery replacement on amazon I take it?

@graymamba It was this one https://amzn.eu/d/bdVJYTQ