Carnage

I mostly play on my tv, but I use my Portal as a second screen device in the evenings (mostly for strategy games).

In regards to AA and smaller games the PS5 and every other modern platform has an embarrassment of riches (nods towards games like Clair Obscur, Absolum, Peak, Sea of Stars, Balatro, Silksong, The Last Spell, The Alters, Hades, Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Promise Mascot Agency and Shinobi Art of Vengeance) due to cheap development costs, the low cost of distribution and of course commercial success in the space.

If someone legit only enjoys smaller games that’s cool but I don’t see why one would ignore all the quality smaller games that are out there and get stuck on the fact that the ‘right’ publishers or developers aren’t making them.

Nice. I’m kinda surprised SH’s cumulative sales are so low. Konami is happy with the recent numbers so clearly they are budgeting for the market Silent Hill has rather than burning a big pile of cash to try to mainstream the series. I enjoyed the first four games and the last two.

I knew SH4 was widely disliked but I didn’t know its sales were that bad. I personally enjoyed it and remember the creators were very enthusiastic about it because it was a big deviation from the formula but clearly most SH fans didn’t share their thirst for change, or at least the specific changes The Room made.

I’m 43 hours in and the popularity doesn’t surprise me. Ghost is a fast moving, beautiful game whose world is a joy to explore due to its beauty and its design and whose brutal combat system boasts a lot of depth (playing on hard I’ve had many opportunities to see fights play out differently depending on how one tries to tackle them 😅).

Given all the commercially successful single player games we’ve seen recently (including but not limited to Silent Hill F, Silksong and Cronos:The New Dawn) it’s not a surprise Ghost of Yotei (which improves across the board on its very popular predecessor) has joined their ranks.

Last of all, as I tend to note in sales threads fans people who genuinely enjoy something and want to see more of it should focus on absolute rather than relative performance.

Given the new Ubisoft-Tencent partnership now helming what used to be their biggest IPs (including AC) I think the longtime lead’s departure and more interference by investors mean things will likely get worse.

Interesting rumor. I’m going to start setting aside a dollar a day. Hopefully that will cover the PS6 and a full priced game or two.

I enjoyed Modnation Racers’ campaign but didn’t get much out of the UGC (which I played with my kids a bit though they preferred LBP2’s UGC). Maybe if I was playing the best tracks competitively with randoms I would feel differently about it.

I was fine with Metaphor before the big non-event and I am fine with it afterwards.

I played a a lot of Ghost of Yotei and a little bit of Helldivers 2. Yotei’s combat is glorious, gory fun.

Given that Roblox is bigger than Steam I’m not surprised someone is coming for its UGC crown. I didn’t care for base Genshin and while I spent hundreds of hours playing UGC in LBP and later Dreams (damn near perfect IMHO but in hindsight it’s decision to not charge anyone for anything past the point of purchase while noble, was a fatal mistake) so I am sure some talented creators will surface in Genshin.

@Leinad7 The internet abounds with people unhappy with the PS5 and the Switch 2. That is reasonable because tastes vary. Objectively the PS5’s user engagement and game sales are high.

There are big spending gamers who own every platform under the sun and only care about games if they are exclusive to a platform but the vast majority of gamers own one dedicated gaming system, buy roughly ten games a generation and view consoles as game delivery devices. For such gamers the appeal of the likes of Clair Obscur, Unicorn Overlord, Silent Hill, CoD, Helldivers 2, Cult of the Lamb, Black Myth Wukong, Forza Horizon 5, Stellar Blade, Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Balatro, Genshin Impact, To a T and Metaphor Refantazio and suchlike has everything to do with the games themselves rather than where else they can or can’t be enjoyed.

All that aside I completely agree with your statement most people won’t but the PS6 early in when it launches in a few years’ time. That has always been the case with dedicated hardware. The majority of sales take place over years, not in the initial months. Price cuts (not a thing this generation sadly) and expanding libraries increase sales over time.

I only played through the new SH one time so far (too many games and too much work) but based on my playthrough Silent Hill F is dark, twisted stuff.

The video mostly went over my head but it sounds like the PS6 is still a few years off, which works for me. Most games live well within the limits of current gen hardware and those pushing the edge don’t seem to be hobbled by it.

@Leinad7 The Switch 2 (like the PS5) is a linear sequel to its popular predecessor which early in its life has benefitted heavily from B/C (Switch sales tanked once rumors of the Switch 2 started swirling). Furthermore the Switch 2 has seen a historically strong launch in part because it launch with more systems available than any prior system (great for gamers and the game industry, bad for scalpers).

Which parts of that statement do you disagree with and on what basis?

As for the certainty of a future PS and the probability of another Xbox, I think there are too many unknown data points (release dates, libraries, prices) to start predicting anything though that has never stopped the internet before.

https://gamerant.com/nintendo-switch-lifetime-sales-2025-slowing-down-forecast/

The internet hating or loving something has little connection to the popularity of the thing in the real world.

Given the massive popularity of the Switch and the fact Nintendo positioned the Switch 2 as a linear follow up (B/C, no big design deviations) it would be shocking if the Switch 2 wasn’t a huge success.

PS5 sales seem to be holding up well given that its price has risen a bit (as opposed to the old console norm of falling sharply).

This rejected protagonist/setting doesn’t sound too far off from that of AC Liberation (which I loved because like Black Flag it revolves around battles at sea). I haven’t played an AC game in years because they cranked them out ridiculously fast on a wide variety of platforms for a hot minute (I tried to keep up for a while) and eventually it became clear there was no coherent plan (kinda like what happened with Star Wars).

I’ve got nothing against the AC games as games but I don’t know if I am ever going to get back into the series.

Ten games per system was what the PS4 averaged and that was considered healthy back then. I get more games than ever are being released but the amount of free time (or money) people have isn’t increasing.

On a personal note I buy roughly a game per month but I get that’s very unusual.
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2019/01/ps4_has_a_very_high_software_attach_rate_average_player_owns_around_ten_games

I’m over twenty hours in and having a great time. Combat is really dynamic (me playing on hard has given me the opportunity to fight some of the tougher battles a couple times) and just wandering around on foot or horseback is really fun.

I’m hoping for additional content but as the article says a Switch port is more likely.

I really loved Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate and at the time I would have been thrilled if he joined PlayStation studios.

But in hindsight Sony lucked out. I didn’t care much for Fable in part because it wasn’t the game he promised it would be and Molyneux’s tendency to overpromise and underdeliver has only gotten worse since then. He wasted a lot of MS’s money then once they got rid of him started swindling people on Kickstarter and via NFTs.

MS radically increased spending as its console marketshare dwindled post X360. Yes MS can afford to lose a lot more than the Xbox has lost but MS did not get to be one of the biggest, richest companies in the world by letting divisions eat losses indefinitely without having a path to profitability. Eventually upper management/shareholders were going to step in. That time seems to have come.

An honest, thorough review. Nothing it says is out of line with what I’ve seen of the game (and a PSVR2 owning fan of the early Pixeljunks I’ve seen everything posted on the internet about it).

I’m still interested in Dreams of Another but I of course haven’t played it. For the curious below is the most gameplay footage I’ve seen and it is a trailer rather than just video of somebody playing.

https://youtu.be/gE5Wfc99voE

@MrStark I think if Vita as a portable rather than a console (though it presaged the hybrid Switch in many ways) but yes, it certainly was a commercial dud.

I agree MS had a lot of good effects on the industry (for my money, the top two are Xbox Live’s single digital ID and storefront and MS encouraging a lot of Western developers and/or indies to enter the console space) and I’ll go a step further and repeat what I said in another recent thread, that they make some really fun games.

However I’ll disagree about competition this generation. In my opinion competition is more intense than ever because game development is cheaper than ever and there are a lot of other ways people have to play games (the cellphone is the all in one device everybody has in their pocket).

The resultant flood of games is great for gamers but has been very tough for developers and publishers (more games are released in a week than the average gamer buys in a year and most get no coverage and people don’t buy what they are unaware of). Furthermore games people enjoy tend to take big chunks of their time and be given months or even years of postlaunch support from developers (and on the PC side modders), which is great for gamers and the lucky game(s) not so great for those seeking attention. The two things the gaming internet loves most are celebrating popular successes (often a tautology) and dancing on the bones of high profile failures but many solid to great games die without anyone noticing. Cough Rant over 😋.

@MrStark Thanks for the clarification.

I don’t think every entrant being competitive is the key to a thriving console industry (clear losers in what was at the time a healthy industry include Intellivision, Jaguar, Wii U, Saturn, GameCube, Dreamcast, SMS and 3DO).

Losers doesn’t inspire in the same way winners do but they do teach lessons even if those who developed the commercially unsuccessful system decide not to continue developing hardware.

@MrStark So you don’t see the Switches, streaming services, mobile or PC as competitors for the PlayStation in the gaming space? Why not?

So far I’ve been playing a lot of Ghost of Yotei (on hard which means my character has died more times than I care to remember particularly in the duels) and a little bit of Frostpunk 2, GT7, Helldivers 2 and the VF5 open beta.

I’m sure the leadership/shareholders were okay with losing money in the short term when they believed it would win them dominance but once it became clear all the tens of billions burned hadn’t even stopped the sharp post X360 market share erosion they ended the gambit.

Sports games have been hugely popular since videogames began. In the 2600 days there were the likes of Pong, Realsports Volleyball, California Games, Ice Hockey and Boxing. A bit later in the NES/SMS era there Mike Tyson’s Punchout, Bases Loaded, Double Dribble, Ten Yard Fight, Track and Field. John Montana Football and Blades of Steel.

If one has no use for sports games that is fine but it’s silly to pretend that there hasn’t always been a ginormous appetite for them. It’s increased over time as games have developed the ability to put full teams and distinct players onscreen but it has always been there.

Last but not least as I pointed out in another recent top sales thread what should be important to people who choose to focus on sales is commercial success/profitability not success relative to everything else out there.

If you honestly enjoy a genre you should be happy when a developer in said genre announces the game has met or exceeded expectations and they will continue work in the genre, not be upset that some other game in some other genre outsold it.

I loved Tsushima and I’m loving Yotei. I started playing on hard and with default graphics settings and have had a great time wandering around the gorgeous world and kicking butt (so far with just a sword). So many badass moments happening during fight scenes.

During a night ride through a forest it suddenly occurred to me that I had never messed with the graphics settings. I turned on ray tracing (I have a Pro) and was immediately even more impressed by the moonlight. I am tempted to play in black and white but I really like the way the colors pop so I’ll save that for a later playthrough.

I can see why XBox or Gamepass fans aren’t happy about it but I don’t think the fate of Gamepass or even Xbox is that big a deal for anyone else. Sony and Nintendo have made lots of mistakes but consistently stayed squarely focused on games and dedicated hardware because it is huge business for them.

MS has thrown around a lot of money by industry standards but for MS the game division was always a side project of little consequence (to their overall earnings and thus their big bosses and shareholders, though I am sure there are lots of passionate people in its game division) and MS wasn’t going to tolerate loss forever.

I’m not saying Gamepass or even Xbox is doomed because it does have a lot of talent and makes a lot of fun games but clearly it no longer has the blank check it used to.

Cronos is a great game and I’m glad it found success. The absorption mechanic ensures every fight is tense until it is over.

Just finished my first playthrough of SH F. Trippy, brutal stuff. I hope some of the other possible endings are somewhat happier.

I don’t buy all that many EA games anymore so I don’t feel strongly about this but I don’t see this ending well for developers or gamers.

I could contain my disappointment in a very small jar in if just EA crumbled but this might presage a broader intervention by the American government. It’s worth keeping in mind yesterday the president announced he was going to levy a 100% tax on foreign made movies.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-impose-100-tariff-movies-made-outside-country-2025-09-29/

"Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing candy from a baby," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social.
However, it was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would use to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films.

No doubt launch sales have a lot to do with the quality of the SH2 remake but the success is well deserved based on the nine hours I’ve spent playing F.

I played and mostly enjoyed all three of the games but Parasite Eve was has been dead for a long time and it’s sequels went through a lot of contortions in the face of steadily shrinking sales (the only series constant was Eve, the plot and the gameplay varied wildly from game to game).

I neither blame Squenix for saying ‘Let’s stop here’ nor I do blame the new developer for seeking to capitalize around the vocal nostalgia the internet seems to invariably develop for dead IP.

I play a little of a couple games (GT7, Helldivers 2 and Frostpunk 2) and a lot of Silent Hill F. As a Silent Hill veteran fresh off of completing Cronos: The New Dawn I initially set both combat and puzzles to hard but that proved optimistic. Eight hours in I am still tackling the puzzles on hard but I had to knock down the difficulty of the combat after a boss kicked my teeth in many, many times in a row 😋. Good stuff though. Starts off pretty in line with past Silent Hills but eventually gets even more bizarre.

I was a casual fan of H1 but I’ve been a huge fan of H2 since launch (have 1200 hours in and play it pretty much daily) and supporting the game rather than cranking out a new game with new assets and new physics which might or might not capture the appeal of H2 makes sense to me.

They just need to keep up the stream on content (new enemies and a new warbond every several weeks, a big event with new biomes and mission types every several months) and of course try to minimize bugs. The Into the Unjust event, two warbonds in rapid succession and the Xbox version all hitting within the timeframe of a few weeks meant that the minor instability that normally afflicts H2 after a new addition became major instability. The developers simply need to pace themselves better (and work on getting the game out of the state it’s currently in) if they want to keep H2 going for the long haul.

Since the game is only a year away, a CGI trailer is strange but the later release for the PS5 strikes me as a reasonable move though it might suck for people who primarily play FH online competitively..

In the broadest strokes more platforms equals more technical headaches. Not that such problems can’t be solved with time but it’s perfectly reasonable for developers to choose to focus and given who signs their checks not including Xbox on their highest priority list isn’t in the cards.

I hope to see Media Molecule’s next game. None of the rumors seem to indicate that but one can hope.

I’m a casual but consistent GT fan (play single player a couple times a week) and I love the range of vehicles in the trailer.

IMHO no free stuff for avid players makes the program pointless for gamers.

I don’t see the point for Sony either. Why not just sell what appears to be full priced merchandise to whoever wants it rather than tying it to a trophy?

I’ve pretty deep into Cronos: The New Dawn. Aside from the absorption mechanic it doesn’t break much new ground but it beats the heck out of the old ground and the absorption mechanic ensures fights are always intense. I’m not sure what impact the choices have but the plot is clever and I’m curious to see where it goes,

Also played some good rounds of Helldivers though the crash rate on level 10 matches is really high right now (3 of the 13 rounds I played crashed). Still had a lot of fun blowing up bots with randoms.

I started Frostpunk 2. I got past the tutorial chapter but I’m still early in. Haven’t had to make any of the monstrous choices I associate with Frostpunk but some of the elderly did offer to die to ensure that kids have enough to eat (hasn’t come to that yet but like I said it’s early).

My brother was a longtime fan of MSFS and the then new 2024 was the first game he bought when he decided to become a PC gamer but he ran into so many crazy tech bugs like lag and suchlike that after a while he gave up on it.

I remember how gorgeous the blimps looked in one of the prerelease trailers though. If they sorted out all its problems I could see it finding an audience on the PS5 though pure flight sims aren’t my thing.

The trailer is great and the concept as outlined sounds very promising. I’m keeping an eye on this (would love the demo to hit PSN but a lot of games with Steam demos don’t).

Every version of Borderlands 4 can make a case for being the worst version.

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2025/09/borderlands-4-performance-degrades-on-xbox-the-longer-you-play-dev-suggests-workaround

It feels like I’ve been waiting forever for Frostpunk 2 to hit consoles. Day 1 for me.

I don’t put much weight on corporate statements of intent but Sony has offered a steady supply of high quality games with strong single player modes and most have found commercial success so there’s no reason to assume the pattern won’t continue for the foreseeable future.

Synth Riders just went on sale for $15 (the normal price is 25) so I picked it up as well as the played through the tutorial, the Kendrick Lamar track and four random songs. As one might expect the Kendrick Lamar stage boasted much more elaborate visuals than the vanilla stages I saw but the tracking is flawless and the game clearly communicates where you need to move (which is of course the tricky part). So far so good.

I jumped from the Saturn to the PS1 about a year (maybe a little more than that) after the PS1’s release. The early Saturn had some gems (nods to Panzer Dragoon and VF) but generally support was very weak (a big fall off from the Genesis) and I eventually decided to make a mid-gen leap.

Thanks to games like Carnage Heart, Gran Turismo, Vandal Hearts, Disgaea, Chrono Cross, Silent Hill, Xenogears, Soul Blade, Vagrant Story, Tecmo’s Deception, Wipeout, Parappa the Rappa and Final Fantasy Tactics I felt like I had transitioned from the desert (developer support for the Saturn was weak) to a lush jungle.

Since then I’ve been there day 1 for every PS system except the PS5 (which I wasn’t willing to pay scalping prices for).

I’m glad about the addition of Persona 5 Tactica and Crow Country.