He sounds confused, because somewhere on the path to the next Yakuza game something went terribly wrong and Infinite Wealth and Pirate Yakuza ended happening, and "it was Sega's big anniversary so that's why it's in Hawaii" doesn't cut it as an excuse.
He needs to stay true to his marketing speech and keep western influences out of Yakuza/LAD.
Xbox isn't doing well in Japan because it's less powerful than a PS4 for the "enthusiasts" so to say and Xbox is a western console. Japan doesn't want western games, and if they do pretty much all of them come to PS4 too, they want Asian games and obviously PS4, Vita and especially 3DS are the go to platforms for such games.
People overhype HDR and 4k so much...besides truly running some low req games at close to 4k and maybe some improvements to some games in detail or fps at 1080p (maybe, because most developers won't bother doubling their optimization work, only Sony owned studios will certainly enforce these things, it remains to be seen for the rest) it has nothing to offer.
4K didn't become a thing all of a sudden because of PS4 Pro that will still basically be an 1080p machine. Maybe it's because a lot of people don't own a 4K TV and they go crazy when they hear PR say 4K anything, but you'd be amazed at how amazing Sony upscaling tech is. PS4 Pro doesn't allow something which has never been done before, it just also unnecessarily upscales on its own now, as if any 4K TV isn't capable of that. The few games that will run at 4k (and there will be very few with the kind of power Pro has) are not the rule, they're the exception. 1080p games are crystal on 4k TVs even on PS4 and you'd have to be sitting 20cm away from the TV to notice any differences from a true 4K signal sent by a PC without the highly demanding smoothing settings available in PC games.
As for HDR, that's also a thing people hype way too much, as if it's such amazing tech and they need to sell their house to get it... HDR is a minimal improvement. Why is it a minimal improvement? because almost any decent 4K TV has outstanding color reproduction, brightness and contrast, more than is comfortable for your eyes. What has more than a minimal impact is HDR on a 6K$+ AMOLED TV, which few can afford because that's also what the PR departments tricked average consumers with, every time they showcased HDR with non HDR screens with a hint of color settings bias to spice things up for HDR panels.
It reached a point where people believe they're getting something out of this world, the next step of evolution, a revolution in digital imaging, if they spend that mere 1-1.2K $ for a TV that has HDR, which is simply bs (while these TVs would be decent compared to the 1080 garbage that is still dominating the market, they're a far cry from the HDR showcased on TVs that cost as much as a car) and I believe websites like this should keep it real and inform the people of how things really are, not jump in on the misinformation bandwagon just for the sake of sensationalism...sensationalism brings a few more clicks, integrity and quality information makes a community of dedicated readers.
The reality that nobody from the press seems to like to point out, is that Pro only brings a bit more power (they might advertise 4tf graphics power, but it certainly won't shine due to Jaguar) to stabilize the fps and to maybe ad a bit more detail while still maintaining the desired fps limit, no more no less and that is the only reason why anyone should be getting a PRO if that's what they feel PS 4 isn't providing.
Pure nonsense...what's the next step, complaining that indie games are reviewed and criticized if they are just bad? I'm sure that does actual damage compared to just assumptions that they might go free at some point.
The era of indies is no more and indie devs do not like to look at facts. People no longer treat indie games as a "uh, drop of creativity, I'll just buy because it seems interesting and different" kind of thing, not like before when people threw their wallets at indie devs that simply said they were making something unique without actually backing all that up. Now people are more selective, indies have more exposure thus more media attention resulting in reviews for quite a number of the important ones which also "help" customers in making the decision of buying or walking past a product that does not suit their needs or interests (behavior which obviously does not help developers at all).
Several years ago, indies were in heaven and everyone was purchasing all the random c*** games because everything looked so unique and wonderful just to discover that 99.9% of them were terrible and more than half not even worth a few minutes of anyone's time. Nowadays all that has changes, indies are no longer a "thing" they are just more games which the regular people simply compare with multi billion $ companies that make games which cost 300 million each.
Everyone already knows or should know that the game development industry is very competitive, stressful and hard, almost all projects get canned in the concept phase, most of the rest get shut in the switch to actual production, a lot of what goes further is killed off after getting some kind of actual game up and running, a good number of what actually advances through multiple stages of development might run out of funds or simply cease development due to an unsatisfactory product and only very few actually see the light of day.
Game development is hard and it's almost an impossible task to make PC/PS/Xbox games and it's growing harder to make a living with every single day especially for indies. Sure there are indie behemoths which made their devs rich beyond belief like Minecraft, but those kind of scenarios are so rare they're like myths and are rarer than indie games which actually get released from Steam early access (which is a good representation of almost all indie games that are anything from abysmal to the next hit) as a final release with EVERYTHING the devs set out to include from day one (you can count these games on two hands ever since Greenlight was launched).
In a perfect world, everyone would be successful at what they do and they'd have more than enough money they could ever spend, but we do not live in a perfect world and you need to face the consequences of your decisions. Indie devs going for big games could easily switch to mobile development and make some decent money with way less effort, but it's easier to just go full speed ahead, never look around and think about what your're doing, then to complain that things aren't going how you expected. I pity the situation of devs who have it very rough and can't get a lucky break, but they should know full well what they signed up for at the start of their game development road.
@Ralizah Witcher hasn't aged well, it was pretty "dated" in design even when it was just released, but its charm and story made people enjoy it. You should just watch a montage on youtube with all the cutscenes and just read up on the story on some random wiki or website.
However, Witcher 2 was a great game all around and you should play it before 3 for two reasons, 1 there are certain characters which you will spend a lot of time in 2 that will be relevant and important in 3 and simply because gameplay wise, it's almost identical to Witcher 3. Pair the still great looking graphics with almost identical gameplay with a more linear focus and you have a fantastic game that lasts about 35 to 40 hours to fully complete. 2 especially has some game altering decisions that will cut a lot of content while making another chunk of content available and you'd need two playthroughs to see most of what the game has to offer, but I personally do not like replaying games to make decisions that do not fit with my way of thinking even if a certain decision changes more than 1/3 of the game, but for those who like replayability, there's certainly enough to justify at least 2 or 3 playthroughs.
Lost all my excitement when I saw that it's a musou, but maybe this will be the first that I'll enjoy. I'd love some more Berserk, god knows the manga's barely advancing/being made anymore.
No, I don't need a 4K Blu Ray player because I don't care about blu ray movies, which is all this new PS4 will offer besides some more USBs which will probably be of the 3.0 sort.
Most people like to bite the insane click bait news the media writes, I don't, there's no way Polaris or anything even close to that will be put in a PS4, that's not a tablet/console grade GPU, it won't be slimmer or smaller no matter how efficient, powerful and cool hardware in the future will be and there's no way in h it will play games at 4K, any of them, not even indies even 1080p / 60 FPS is a far fetched dream, I'd be surprised if they actually make it powerful enough to run games like Until Dawn, Bloodborne or the relatively soon to be released FFXV run at 1080p / 30 FPS, which the current PS 4 hardware isn't capable of.
These licenses cost cents, not dollars, euros or pounds, just cents, the licenses themselves cost no money for the publishers to generate and it's most likely based on purchases/downloads/activations which dictates the amount of money they get overall. The point about more subs = more games offered = exponentially more money given by Sony = trash can games of close to 0 value is invalid and a very flawed assumption, that's not how buying bulk works...
You are severely overestimating how much a license costs for these "affairs", even for games with more value than pretty much everything given in the last year they'd still be paying less/a lot less than 50 cents, except Rocket League, it probably got decently close to 1€ per license, unless they really sold themselves very cheap since nobody expected it to be an extreme hit in the gaming world.
You gave Red Dead Redemption as an example, which was a one off that will never happen again, stating that it only happened because the subs were low enough, which is another invalid statement. That was a deal they had to "secure" and they most likely spent a decent sum on it, if the subs weren't as high as they were the deal wouldn't have happened, in other words, it's the other way around. Games in general were of higher quality for subs because other than their share, they could use all that was left to buy licenses for games which had some value, not just 5-6 cent throwaways that almost nobody cares about like the current situation on PS4.
It's not hard to offer decent games, it's can't be easier actually, for both the devs/publishers to get more money and Sony to get good PR. They could pay for decent games and offer a limited number of licenses, let's say 30-45K per region, first come first served, that solves the PR issue. As for those who do not manage to activate them, the game(s) are available in the store at 66-80% off which should theoretically make more money if the games aren't terrible and people would actually be interested in owning them.
@MetalGear_Yoshi That's what Trackmania was always about for all its 6+ games.
It's a Wipeout with wheels and completely different handlings for each environment and infinite content made by the community, which is why this game isn't recommended for consoles, but PC.
You should stop treating your opinion as the community's, because you are only one biased individual you can't represent your own country not to mention the entire community. You have no real statistics about the customer satisfaction, a lot of people are not pleased that is all you should know, Europe in general is not pleased with Sony itself, not just the uselessness of the sub.
I also like how you contradict yourself because deep down you know how things are. You say go play on PC or get a sub, because you know you can't really play all the worthwhile games without a subscription which means that the only reason you associate growing PS4 numbers with growing PS+ sub is because at the end of the day, for a lot of people, you can't have one without the other to enjoy the full experience.
Now I also want to pull some statistics out of my behind. You definitely represent the minority which thinks Sony gives them stuff for free while sending money to Sony's account, just because they put a simple word on the store for subscribers only as part of their paid subscription.
Now for straight-up facts, you have no idea of the abysmal costs required for the still miniscule Sony infrastructure, you have no idea how cheap storage and bandwidth is these days, you have no idea what peer to peer means and how it functions and you definitely have no idea that companies handle the servers of their own games in case they are not peer to peer. The cost to Sony for the entire operation is very small compared to what they make/offer which is nothing.
@SonyInfinity The games are not free (you pay for them, nobody gets anything for free, we do get shovelware because their licenses only cost Sony a few cents per license literally), the sub is 84€ since I prefer the montly sub not years at a time, there are no more than 2 which I cared about for the last year (terrible math btw, you mistakenly assume that most PS+ owners have anything more than PS4, there's a reason PS+ wasn't popular until PS4), discounts do me no good since I prefer retail, I can't get any movies because Sony does not offer their services in almost all of Europe and you've got to be a troll to mention online features since that's what people are forced to pay for by default, it's not a benefit of the sub, nobody would even get it for any of the things you mentioned if it had nothing to do with online features.
It's good for you that you can think of worse sub based services, I can't because there aren't any, 84€ just to have access to online features and 10 pathetic gigs of cloud storage isn't value for your money (with that kind of money, you personally are able to get more than 200 games on PC since you seem to have a thing for pointless games that are in a high number, online is also free, you can also get around 160 gigs of free cloud storage) and eliminate free from your vocabulary, the monthly sub games are not a free bonus Sony gives out of kindness.
PS+ has been a scam for quite a while, with maybe a worthwhile game every 4 months or so (worthwhile but not necessarily good). It's a scam because Sony made a commitment when they first asked for this money, they said it was all going towards better infrastructure and better user experience and we all know that's not happening. Their infrastructure is the same as before at least in Europe (where they even increased the sub price...), their engineers are certainly not working towards giving users what they want from their PS4 experience and they add unnecessary limitations each time they make anything new (like the community features).
The only thing Sony did with the money they earned from keeping multiplayer hostage, for the user that is, was to increase cloud storage. They don't care about the user experience, they never did (how hard is it to make it easy for users to manually save their games to the cloud or removable storage? What can we really expect from their engineers if they didn't think it was not logical to go through each and every single game and make 4 actions in total per game instead of 4 actions per ENTIRE game list?).
These so called bonus games that we get are just to give the average user some sens of value, removing them wouldn't even reduce the sub cost, because all of them wouldn't cost more than a few cents (except those rare, 4 months or more apart, decent games that might end up taking close to 1€).
Sony should have been frank from the start "we'll keep multiplayer under a sub, because we want your money, we might use that money for PS4 features rarely, we might even spend it on infrastructure once or twice, but really we just want that money so we can make exclusivity deals" because that's what they do with the sub money, they wanted resources to burn on exclsivity deals and they didn't want it to be "their" money.
All in all, the issue isn't the crappy games, it's that we are paying for nothing.
I never got into these series, I even forced myself to play Dark Souls on PC with a trainer for the sake of exploration and even so I couldn't play more than half the game, but people praised BB way too much and I got curious, bought the GOTY on launch day and I was not in the mood to start playing it knowing what kind of game it is. That changed today, I started playing and I can't believe I wasn't frustrated at all after getting killed by the scouting groups at the start of the game for more than 1 hour I'm even more amazed that I loved every second of it even if it took me half a day to reach and beat Gascoigne.
Never at any point did a "Souls" game feel even remotely as good as BB, but this one is outstanding, great atmosphere, combat and level design, if I'd have to give it a thumbs down for something, it would be the sound at this point, the walking sound ruins the game when there's nothing going on to cover it up.
I don't like making a top of anything, but Bloodborne is definitely one of the best games I played this year, with games like Ori and the Witcher around it (not a Fallout fan and MGS V being a side quest simulator is also not relevant for me).
Comments 14
Re: 'We Might as Well Dissolve the Team Right Now': Like a Dragon Boss Won't Bend to Overseas Popularity
He sounds confused, because somewhere on the path to the next Yakuza game something went terribly wrong and Infinite Wealth and Pirate Yakuza ended happening, and "it was Sega's big anniversary so that's why it's in Hawaii" doesn't cut it as an excuse.
He needs to stay true to his marketing speech and keep western influences out of Yakuza/LAD.
Re: Review: Rise of the Tomb Raider (PS4)
@SuperSilverback It gets worse. The first one was way more enj.....actually enjoyable at its time.
The reviewer must have been starved for games if this mediocrity was given an 8.
Re: Japanese Sales Charts: PS4 Enjoys Another Week at the Top
Xbox isn't doing well in Japan because it's less powerful than a PS4 for the "enthusiasts" so to say and Xbox is a western console. Japan doesn't want western games, and if they do pretty much all of them come to PS4 too, they want Asian games and obviously PS4, Vita and especially 3DS are the go to platforms for such games.
Re: TGS 2016: Ogle Some Off-Screen PS4 Pro Images
People overhype HDR and 4k so much...besides truly running some low req games at close to 4k and maybe some improvements to some games in detail or fps at 1080p (maybe, because most developers won't bother doubling their optimization work, only Sony owned studios will certainly enforce these things, it remains to be seen for the rest) it has nothing to offer.
4K didn't become a thing all of a sudden because of PS4 Pro that will still basically be an 1080p machine. Maybe it's because a lot of people don't own a 4K TV and they go crazy when they hear PR say 4K anything, but you'd be amazed at how amazing Sony upscaling tech is. PS4 Pro doesn't allow something which has never been done before, it just also unnecessarily upscales on its own now, as if any 4K TV isn't capable of that. The few games that will run at 4k (and there will be very few with the kind of power Pro has) are not the rule, they're the exception. 1080p games are crystal on 4k TVs even on PS4 and you'd have to be sitting 20cm away from the TV to notice any differences from a true 4K signal sent by a PC without the highly demanding smoothing settings available in PC games.
As for HDR, that's also a thing people hype way too much, as if it's such amazing tech and they need to sell their house to get it... HDR is a minimal improvement. Why is it a minimal improvement? because almost any decent 4K TV has outstanding color reproduction, brightness and contrast, more than is comfortable for your eyes. What has more than a minimal impact is HDR on a 6K$+ AMOLED TV, which few can afford because that's also what the PR departments tricked average consumers with, every time they showcased HDR with non HDR screens with a hint of color settings bias to spice things up for HDR panels.
It reached a point where people believe they're getting something out of this world, the next step of evolution, a revolution in digital imaging, if they spend that mere 1-1.2K $ for a TV that has HDR, which is simply bs (while these TVs would be decent compared to the 1080 garbage that is still dominating the market, they're a far cry from the HDR showcased on TVs that cost as much as a car) and I believe websites like this should keep it real and inform the people of how things really are, not jump in on the misinformation bandwagon just for the sake of sensationalism...sensationalism brings a few more clicks, integrity and quality information makes a community of dedicated readers.
The reality that nobody from the press seems to like to point out, is that Pro only brings a bit more power (they might advertise 4tf graphics power, but it certainly won't shine due to Jaguar) to stabilize the fps and to maybe ad a bit more detail while still maintaining the desired fps limit, no more no less and that is the only reason why anyone should be getting a PRO if that's what they feel PS 4 isn't providing.
Re: PlayStation Plus Rumours Can Hurt Studios, Indie Dev Explains
Pure nonsense...what's the next step, complaining that indie games are reviewed and criticized if they are just bad? I'm sure that does actual damage compared to just assumptions that they might go free at some point.
The era of indies is no more and indie devs do not like to look at facts. People no longer treat indie games as a "uh, drop of creativity, I'll just buy because it seems interesting and different" kind of thing, not like before when people threw their wallets at indie devs that simply said they were making something unique without actually backing all that up. Now people are more selective, indies have more exposure thus more media attention resulting in reviews for quite a number of the important ones which also "help" customers in making the decision of buying or walking past a product that does not suit their needs or interests (behavior which obviously does not help developers at all).
Several years ago, indies were in heaven and everyone was purchasing all the random c*** games because everything looked so unique and wonderful just to discover that 99.9% of them were terrible and more than half not even worth a few minutes of anyone's time. Nowadays all that has changes, indies are no longer a "thing" they are just more games which the regular people simply compare with multi billion $ companies that make games which cost 300 million each.
Everyone already knows or should know that the game development industry is very competitive, stressful and hard, almost all projects get canned in the concept phase, most of the rest get shut in the switch to actual production, a lot of what goes further is killed off after getting some kind of actual game up and running, a good number of what actually advances through multiple stages of development might run out of funds or simply cease development due to an unsatisfactory product and only very few actually see the light of day.
Game development is hard and it's almost an impossible task to make PC/PS/Xbox games and it's growing harder to make a living with every single day especially for indies. Sure there are indie behemoths which made their devs rich beyond belief like Minecraft, but those kind of scenarios are so rare they're like myths and are rarer than indie games which actually get released from Steam early access (which is a good representation of almost all indie games that are anything from abysmal to the next hit) as a final release with EVERYTHING the devs set out to include from day one (you can count these games on two hands ever since Greenlight was launched).
In a perfect world, everyone would be successful at what they do and they'd have more than enough money they could ever spend, but we do not live in a perfect world and you need to face the consequences of your decisions. Indie devs going for big games could easily switch to mobile development and make some decent money with way less effort, but it's easier to just go full speed ahead, never look around and think about what your're doing, then to complain that things aren't going how you expected. I pity the situation of devs who have it very rough and can't get a lucky break, but they should know full well what they signed up for at the start of their game development road.
Re: Relive the Greatness of The Witcher 3 with Its Final Trailer
@Ralizah Witcher hasn't aged well, it was pretty "dated" in design even when it was just released, but its charm and story made people enjoy it. You should just watch a montage on youtube with all the cutscenes and just read up on the story on some random wiki or website.
However, Witcher 2 was a great game all around and you should play it before 3 for two reasons, 1 there are certain characters which you will spend a lot of time in 2 that will be relevant and important in 3 and simply because gameplay wise, it's almost identical to Witcher 3. Pair the still great looking graphics with almost identical gameplay with a more linear focus and you have a fantastic game that lasts about 35 to 40 hours to fully complete. 2 especially has some game altering decisions that will cut a lot of content while making another chunk of content available and you'd need two playthroughs to see most of what the game has to offer, but I personally do not like replaying games to make decisions that do not fit with my way of thinking even if a certain decision changes more than 1/3 of the game, but for those who like replayability, there's certainly enough to justify at least 2 or 3 playthroughs.
Re: First Berserk PS4 Screenshots Are Soaked in Blood
Lost all my excitement when I saw that it's a musou, but maybe this will be the first that I'll enjoy. I'd love some more Berserk, god knows the manga's barely advancing/being made anymore.
Re: Talking Point: Would You Buy an Upgraded PS4K?
No, I don't need a 4K Blu Ray player because I don't care about blu ray movies, which is all this new PS4 will offer besides some more USBs which will probably be of the 3.0 sort.
Most people like to bite the insane click bait news the media writes, I don't, there's no way Polaris or anything even close to that will be put in a PS4, that's not a tablet/console grade GPU, it won't be slimmer or smaller no matter how efficient, powerful and cool hardware in the future will be and there's no way in h it will play games at 4K, any of them, not even indies even 1080p / 60 FPS is a far fetched dream, I'd be surprised if they actually make it powerful enough to run games like Until Dawn, Bloodborne or the relatively soon to be released FFXV run at 1080p / 30 FPS, which the current PS 4 hardware isn't capable of.
Re: Talking Point: What's Gone Wrong with PlayStation Plus?
These licenses cost cents, not dollars, euros or pounds, just cents, the licenses themselves cost no money for the publishers to generate and it's most likely based on purchases/downloads/activations which dictates the amount of money they get overall. The point about more subs = more games offered = exponentially more money given by Sony = trash can games of close to 0 value is invalid and a very flawed assumption, that's not how buying bulk works...
You are severely overestimating how much a license costs for these "affairs", even for games with more value than pretty much everything given in the last year they'd still be paying less/a lot less than 50 cents, except Rocket League, it probably got decently close to 1€ per license, unless they really sold themselves very cheap since nobody expected it to be an extreme hit in the gaming world.
You gave Red Dead Redemption as an example, which was a one off that will never happen again, stating that it only happened because the subs were low enough, which is another invalid statement. That was a deal they had to "secure" and they most likely spent a decent sum on it, if the subs weren't as high as they were the deal wouldn't have happened, in other words, it's the other way around. Games in general were of higher quality for subs because other than their share, they could use all that was left to buy licenses for games which had some value, not just 5-6 cent throwaways that almost nobody cares about like the current situation on PS4.
It's not hard to offer decent games, it's can't be easier actually, for both the devs/publishers to get more money and Sony to get good PR. They could pay for decent games and offer a limited number of licenses, let's say 30-45K per region, first come first served, that solves the PR issue. As for those who do not manage to activate them, the game(s) are available in the store at 66-80% off which should theoretically make more money if the games aren't terrible and people would actually be interested in owning them.
Re: Live: Watch as We Shave Seconds Off Our Laps in TrackMania Turbo
@MetalGear_Yoshi That's what Trackmania was always about for all its 6+ games.
It's a Wipeout with wheels and completely different handlings for each environment and infinite content made by the community, which is why this game isn't recommended for consoles, but PC.
Re: PS4 Fans Are So Mad at PlayStation Plus They're Making Parodies
You should stop treating your opinion as the community's, because you are only one biased individual you can't represent your own country not to mention the entire community. You have no real statistics about the customer satisfaction, a lot of people are not pleased that is all you should know, Europe in general is not pleased with Sony itself, not just the uselessness of the sub.
I also like how you contradict yourself because deep down you know how things are. You say go play on PC or get a sub, because you know you can't really play all the worthwhile games without a subscription which means that the only reason you associate growing PS4 numbers with growing PS+ sub is because at the end of the day, for a lot of people, you can't have one without the other to enjoy the full experience.
Now I also want to pull some statistics out of my behind. You definitely represent the minority which thinks Sony gives them stuff for free while sending money to Sony's account, just because they put a simple word on the store for subscribers only as part of their paid subscription.
Now for straight-up facts, you have no idea of the abysmal costs required for the still miniscule Sony infrastructure, you have no idea how cheap storage and bandwidth is these days, you have no idea what peer to peer means and how it functions and you definitely have no idea that companies handle the servers of their own games in case they are not peer to peer. The cost to Sony for the entire operation is very small compared to what they make/offer which is nothing.
Re: PS4 Fans Are So Mad at PlayStation Plus They're Making Parodies
@SonyInfinity The games are not free (you pay for them, nobody gets anything for free, we do get shovelware because their licenses only cost Sony a few cents per license literally), the sub is 84€ since I prefer the montly sub not years at a time, there are no more than 2 which I cared about for the last year (terrible math btw, you mistakenly assume that most PS+ owners have anything more than PS4, there's a reason PS+ wasn't popular until PS4), discounts do me no good since I prefer retail, I can't get any movies because Sony does not offer their services in almost all of Europe and you've got to be a troll to mention online features since that's what people are forced to pay for by default, it's not a benefit of the sub, nobody would even get it for any of the things you mentioned if it had nothing to do with online features.
It's good for you that you can think of worse sub based services, I can't because there aren't any, 84€ just to have access to online features and 10 pathetic gigs of cloud storage isn't value for your money (with that kind of money, you personally are able to get more than 200 games on PC since you seem to have a thing for pointless games that are in a high number, online is also free, you can also get around 160 gigs of free cloud storage) and eliminate free from your vocabulary, the monthly sub games are not a free bonus Sony gives out of kindness.
Re: PS4 Fans Are So Mad at PlayStation Plus They're Making Parodies
PS+ has been a scam for quite a while, with maybe a worthwhile game every 4 months or so (worthwhile but not necessarily good). It's a scam because Sony made a commitment when they first asked for this money, they said it was all going towards better infrastructure and better user experience and we all know that's not happening. Their infrastructure is the same as before at least in Europe (where they even increased the sub price...), their engineers are certainly not working towards giving users what they want from their PS4 experience and they add unnecessary limitations each time they make anything new (like the community features).
The only thing Sony did with the money they earned from keeping multiplayer hostage, for the user that is, was to increase cloud storage. They don't care about the user experience, they never did (how hard is it to make it easy for users to manually save their games to the cloud or removable storage? What can we really expect from their engineers if they didn't think it was not logical to go through each and every single game and make 4 actions in total per game instead of 4 actions per ENTIRE game list?).
These so called bonus games that we get are just to give the average user some sens of value, removing them wouldn't even reduce the sub cost, because all of them wouldn't cost more than a few cents (except those rare, 4 months or more apart, decent games that might end up taking close to 1€).
Sony should have been frank from the start "we'll keep multiplayer under a sub, because we want your money, we might use that money for PS4 features rarely, we might even spend it on infrastructure once or twice, but really we just want that money so we can make exclusivity deals" because that's what they do with the sub money, they wanted resources to burn on exclsivity deals and they didn't want it to be "their" money.
All in all, the issue isn't the crappy games, it's that we are paying for nothing.
Re: Game of the Year: #1 - Bloodborne (PS4)
I never got into these series, I even forced myself to play Dark Souls on PC with a trainer for the sake of exploration and even so I couldn't play more than half the game, but people praised BB way too much and I got curious, bought the GOTY on launch day and I was not in the mood to start playing it knowing what kind of game it is. That changed today, I started playing and I can't believe I wasn't frustrated at all after getting killed by the scouting groups at the start of the game for more than 1 hour I'm even more amazed that I loved every second of it even if it took me half a day to reach and beat Gascoigne.
Never at any point did a "Souls" game feel even remotely as good as BB, but this one is outstanding, great atmosphere, combat and level design, if I'd have to give it a thumbs down for something, it would be the sound at this point, the walking sound ruins the game when there's nothing going on to cover it up.
I don't like making a top of anything, but Bloodborne is definitely one of the best games I played this year, with games like Ori and the Witcher around it (not a Fallout fan and MGS V being a side quest simulator is also not relevant for me).