None should have been an option.

@nolifebr It's "per se."

@Bunchesopuppies I mean, what's stopping you from playing it this way?

@Redefaul Newspapers reported on such matters all the time. It was called the Business section.

@DennisReynolds Haven't gotten to Stellar Blade. But thanks for the recommendation.

@DennisReynolds I am enjoying everything about it so far. What was considered a better action game the year it came out?

How does this compare to something like Black Myth Wukong? That's my new high bar for action games.

Burnout Paradise was trash tier. Don't @ me.

I think a new modern engine under the hood would make for a compelling enough reason to make a threequel. Add truly destructible environments and larger scale maps with the option of even larger squads. Or a PvPvE mode where you play as different factions fighting over resources on the same maps/planets (in addition to traditional PvE missions not in place of).

Really expand the lore and gameplay possibilities by making it even more chaotic.

Would sell like gangbusters all over again.

@get2sammyb Someone with endless piles of money should snatch them up. Maybe a company like Microsoft could get their hands on them! Oh, wait...

I just don't get why COD gets away with releasing ANY game with poorly constructed maps with bad spawns. These are not amateurs. They have thousands of people crafting these titles. You'd think they could leverage their literal decades of experience to get it right straight away. But this happens every release. It's absurd.

"This game cost $500 million to make. It will never recoup its budget. If we launch it on PC, Xbox, and PS5, we're estimated to lose $200 million. If we don't launch it on PS5, we'll lose $400 million. We'll lose money either way. So let's lose more."*

[Cheers around the board room]

And these people cost other people their jobs on the regular.

(*All numbers made up for the sake of argument/example.)

Arguably my proudest platinum. Fantastic game made even better by the remake.

My laptop with a Nvidia 5070 in it cost me ~$1200. There's no way I'd buy a device dedicated to one thing for that same amount or more. If that's what they want to release their console at, that's good for them, but I won't be participating in the console market any longer. Simple as.

And people honestly question whether GamePass has succeeded as a business model. Lol

The speedrun trophy in Shadow of the Colossus was the most nerve wracking trophy I've ever earned.

@Weebleman My point is they have loads of money. They can make money by subsidizing the cost of their hardware to pull in money from subscriptions and purchases if they so choose. They may just make - GASP - less money.

Which isn't our concern as consumers.

Uh... Why do we act like these multi-billion (sometimes trillion) dollar companies HAVE to make money on the sale of their product that is - let's be clear - simply a machine that lets them make more and more money off of us over time? Why do we as consumers give a ***** if a company can't make money straight away? That's not our problem. That's theirs.

Like Apple raising prices... A friggin' 5 TRILLION dollar company "having to" raise prices. Lol. Like, no. No they do NOT "need" to raise prices. They have a literal F* TON of existing value/cash/assets that they could absolutely retain their prices as is if they wanted. They chose to pass their costs onto the consumer when they technically did not need to do so.

If the point of a company is to make money to obtain value that would allow your company to survive in rough market conditions, but then every time there's a rough market you just raise your prices and make the consumer pay for it... what was the point of obtaining all that value the company built up? These companies aren't fighting tooth and nail to stay afloat. They pass that responsibility onto their customers and trick us into thinking that's how it has to be. It's insane.

@Redefaul This is "the first great arpg... we still need the first great rpg"...? What? This has to be trolling. Your takes can't be that terrible.

How is this "already working?" It's... The marketing plan. There's no data saying this video is now causing PS sales of GTA. This is such a bizarre article.

They should try improving on the games one after the other instead of trying to make them "unique" when all that really means is very slight speed and movement changes.

There's so much they could do to continually push the series forward and they just... don't bother.

Also, COD should absolutely just go free to play. It's already operated like a F2P game in terms of its content cadence and output. It's just that it charges players $70+ every year like a subscription.

If they put the whole multiplayer suite into a singular F2P framework, with Warzone and DMZ and Zombies as modes inside that, where all skins and stuff was shared, it could be huge. Think of how Fortnite has multiple modes, multiple battle passes for the main ones, COD could easily ape that.

Then take time developing campaigns and sell them as DLC to the overall suite.

But Activision is scared that they'll lose those upfront sales... but the series is already waning. They're going to need to do something to shake things up eventually.

Had a great time with the first one on my Quest, but the second one had a bad glitch where looking downward at all caused my entire headset to freeze and cancel out of the game. I got like 30 minutes into it, did my fair share of googling, but to no avail. It was just straight up busted and not resolved. I immediately deleted it. I refuse to support a dev that doesn't support its own releases and at least make them playable.

This is extremely skewed research, for a multitude of reasons. Microsoft shouldn't be polling members of its INSIDERS program, a population that will inevitably skew heavily in their favor. They need to be polling the players of their franchises on NON-XBOX platforms to find out if those players will buy an Xbox to play said franchise. THAT'S what will determine if it's a good business move.

And... telling my the way the global market has reacted to Xbox hardware over the past two generations... it doesn't exactly seem like many people are willing to pony up the cash for one no matter what franchises launch on the device. If they remove these franchises from the broader market from which they benefited into a small walled garden, it will likely piss off a whole host of those consumers and they'll simply play other games. It would be catastrophic to the market share for these titles. I guarantee it.

The fact Microsoft is not embracing the cash available to them as a publisher of cross-platform software is wild to me. They're shunning the very thing that made the companies they purchased successful: the broader market.

@Kriandis So you changed the sample size to one game in one market in order to make it seem like you're in the majority... A majority by a mere 2% for that ONE game (whose GLOBAL sales skewed 65% digital, mind).

Yeah. That's not the "gotcha" that you think it is, dude.

@OmegaStriver I came to say the same thing. I HATE the thought of paying good money just to play the same damn maps I've played for over a decade. I want new content, not rehashed crap I didn't even enjoy playing way back when.

I don't understand some FPS player's obsession with certain levels. No other genre spends resources recreating the same exact levels ad nauseum for every new entry. It's bizarre to me.

@Kriandis Dude, you are delusional. You are not a part of a large majority. The actual physical sales numbers across the industry for physical copies of titles shows that extremely clearly. You just refuse to accept the truth.

Videogame development is, at its core, simply software design. Artistic software design, yes. But still just software design.

The software design industry has already embraced AI in its development process. It is nearly ubiquitous.

If you think videogame software won't be (or isn't already) using AI, you are delusional. Anyone not using the AI tools to develop software will stand out as a bespoke software engineer, but there will be very few of them. The efficiency gains at the most base levels is just too radical to ignore.

I say this as someone whose company has already shifted its entire enterprise over to AI-led software development.

Software development is already saturated with AI tools. It's ubiquitous in the broader industry. This doesn't surprise me at all, besides them openly embracing its use for art generation.

I loved the demo they released but I'm afraid the game will end up being too vague for me. I don't like a ton of hand holding, but I need a bit sometimes.

@themightyant Agreed. I bought this on the back of how strong their TMNT game was and this was far weaker. I don't see how they managed to make the gameplay feel slower and less complex considering these characters all had unique abilities while the turtles hold different melee weapons.

@ShadowRJ "Obviously in real life, that isn't how gaming has worked for the last decade or so, but that is the theory."

That's why I said it should be what they do: because it's better to run your business on facts than theories.

This is what Sony should be doing all the time: taking pitches from up and coming studios to revive classics that otherwise likely would never get another title. You can do a lot for these brands simply with good quality, AA releases that don't cost hundreds of millions to develop.

I've wondered for years why Marvel or DC wasn't copying the style of those gacha games, but... this doesn't look like it has NEARLY the level of production value or quality that those other games have.

It doesn't make sense to me that, as a company with loads of dormant IP, this isn't the regular way of doing business at all times. Why would you need to launch any sort of explicit initiative to do something like this? It's just smart business to constantly have your brands out there creating new fans and satisfying old ones.

This makes it sound like they're finally trying to crawl back into the good graces of the hardcore fans they've continued to snub their noses at for the better part of a decade. That makes them sound weak and without imagination or a true plan.

I've always been intrigued by Hunt so I'm excited to try it, but I've also heard that Crytek has been awful at supporting the console editions and that the player base has suffered because of it, so I don't have high hopes.

So lemme get this straight... The supremely masculine, alpha, in no way homoesexual gamer dudes out there are bemoaning the fact they're getting a game starring a beautiful actress because they'd much prefer to play as an insanely ripped, jacked pile of man meat? And wanting to play as that giant beefcake makes them more straight than you can comprehend, right? Are these the same sort of men who say pleasing a woman is gay?

These chuds are complete disgraces to civil society. Why even pay any attention to them, honestly? Discussing "the discourse" only feeds them. Any sane person knows it's not worth discussing. Just stop covering these non-stories.

(Devout Lego nerd here) While it was originally announced as a GWP (gift with purchase) explicitly with the PS1 set, it has since been updated to be available for all Lego Store purchases over $150 during the period, while supplies last.

So if you want Astro Bot but don't love the PS1 set, but have your eye on other sets, you still have a chance to snag him.

@Mr-Cage I cannot tell what you're trying to say.

It's worth noting that they're phrasing states that this is a toggle for pre-MW4 skins. Which implies that if MW4 itself gets stupid skins (and let's face it: it will), that THOSE wacky skins won't get caught by this filter/button.

@get2sammyb Why buy a skin in a first person game at all? Why do people buy skins to flex on others? Shouldn't the satisfaction come from having it and seeing it yourself?

The fact the Nemesis system was patented and then never licensed out for other titles is bonkers to me. Can you imagine how cool it could make, say, a superhero game where over the course of the game it helped you develop a wholly unique arch enemy?!

I've always thought that would be an amazing hook for something like a Batman game - a personal rogue added to the rogues gallery. Then it would be doubly cool if you could share them somehow or have them show up in the games of your friends.

But, no. We can never have nice things.

@Mythologue I took my time during my first (and only) playthrough and between the base title and the DLC, I definitely cracked 200 hours. I don't know why that's hard to believe. It's my literal experience.

I've wanted to replay Witcher 3 for years, but the idea of tackling a 200+ hour game has always deterred me. It's one of my favorite games of all time but at the rate I currently consume games, it would take me literally months to come close to finishing.

That being said, this rerelease with all these improvements and bells and whistles is EXTREMELY tempting to me. I just wish it wasn't releasing right before GTA 6, another game I'll likely spend months working through.

This sucks so hard. I wanted Hyper Light Breaker to be so good, as I love me a good rogue like. I'm so disappointed they shut it down before being able to complete their vision for it.

I still have my GTA Vice City album collection sitting on my shelf. I may need to get this as a companion collectable.

@REALAIS Which means the game could very well already be dead or at least far in decline. There's no guarantee it ever releases on PS5 given how turbulent the live service portion of the market is.

It doesn't make sense to get hyped for anything in that realm unless it has a firm release date.

2028?! Hype instantly deflated.

Those animations look basic af.

But please, give us more live service games.

I really wish they'd address how finicky the building mechanics are. For a game where building is so core to the experience, it always surprises me they refuse to refine the wonkiness that's been there from the beginning.