Matroska

@Ralizah Well my point is that if you visited 150 Switch owner's houses, we all know most of them would have Mario Kart. How many Switch owners do you know that don't have it? And yet if you visited 100 Switch owners, apparently about 60 of them wouldn't have it on average.

With other platforms no one sees certain games as an automatic buy as much as they do with Nintendo.The Switch doesn't get most games, people aren't split in as many directions. It's a lot harder to imagine a Switch owner not having BotW and Mario Odyssey and Mario Kart 8 than is is to imagine a PS owner not having Spider-Man, GoW and GoT. Basically, how many people do you know with a Switch without MK8? Is it twice as many as those you know with it? Because that's what the stats say. And how many people have you seen on Nintendo Life or other sites that say they have a Switch and an OLED or Lite? Or various SEs? It's incredibly common on gaming sites to see this, especially with Nintendo.

You might want to say that's just hardcore, internet people, but as I said, the PS4 Pro's sales were 40% regular PS4 owners. So the total unique owners was a lot lower than it sounded. Now bear in mind the Switch has three models and loads of SEs. The unique owners and the total sales are increasingly different as the number of models increases.

@NEStalgia Well All-Stars was £50 which is £100 now. And the time to complete all four of the games is probably less than 10 hours. Whereas this like 60 to 100 hours for probably £50 to £60. And with the sequel thing, I can see why you thought what you did but I didn't mean to compare sequels to remasters but just give a sense of the passage of time. Like going from FFVI to X feels like a huge chunk of my life, but HZD feels like it came out so recently. It really is weird how time speeds up as you get older. 🤯

Don't get me wrong, this is a pointless remaster. I just think the reasons we're critical of stuff now often aren't applied equally to older things. All that aside, this is bad for Sony's image. It's just a bad look to do this even if you accept what I said above. With this generation feeling like it still hasn't started, the lack of big exciting PS5 exclusives, and the embarrassing Concord flop, this is not what Sony need to be doing.

In reference to the Pro point, the thing is many of those sales will be current PS5 owners. I think something like 40% of PS4 Pro owners were people that already bought a regular one. So it's not expanding the userbase as much as it seems, not increasing the potential for software sales and subscriptions.

Same as with things like the Switch Lite and OLED, and all these special edition versions of various consoles. I mean, talking of the Switch, that's sold something like 150 million now, right? And as impressive as it is, Mario Kart 8 has "only" sold 60 million IIRC. Considering it's been charting highly (and therefore consistently selling very well on a weekly basis) since it released and that it's such a must-have game for the system, it's very weird that 90 million Switch owners haven't bought it. Unless you consider that the actual userbase is considerably smaller than what the sales suggest. Of course there are other factors, like people buying a console but then not using it after a while (like my nephew with his Switch...)

@NEStalgia I have no interest in this Zero Dawn remaster but, in fairness, by the time it comes out, if it comes out in 2025, HZD will be 8 years old. That's a bigger time difference than you have between the very first Sonic game and Sonic Adventure. Or a bigger time difference than between FFVI and FFX. It does feel pointless to me but at the same time the age of the game isn't really the issue, yet people commonly focus on that as an issue. As you get older each year seems quicker and 8 years doesn't seem like much now.

I mean, it's crazy to me that the difference between when the first Sonic game came out and when the PS1 came out is just 3 years. When Super Mario All-Stars came out, no one complained that it was just remasters of games aged between 5 to 8 years old because back then that seemed like an immense amount of time to us (and admittedly Lost Levels sweetened the deal).

I've been having issues with it for a while now - but then I was in the last beta so this still makes sense. Flickery shadows and complete crashes. The last crash was particularly bad as it was during the finishing scene and the last autosave was before the final boss.

If you got a regular PS5 at launch, are going to get the Pro and paid £10 a month for PS+ for as long as you've had it, you'll have paid a total of £1,620. Even without PS+, that's £1,150. You could've got an amazing PC for that first figure and a pretty good one for the second figure - and paid less for all your games too. And that PC isn't going to be made totally redundant in a few years when the PS6 comes out. And you'd have various things we keep asking for like PS3 emulation - and even folders!

Star Wars Outlaws. I'm not even into Star Wars but I'm really enjoying it. I've seen videos of the terrible AI but that's not what I'm experiencing myself. I love the atmosphere and feel of it - it's like the Hogwarts Legacy of Star Wars. I'm going to get Caravan Sand Witch too. I've got a fiver off so it'll only be about £12.

"You can still order physical games online, but considering the state of the postal service, it’s easy to understand why players are transitioning to digital storefronts"
I'm sure most people buying games online use Amazon and I always get things the day after ordering, sometimes even the same day. Not many online services use Royal Mail. Sports Direct uses Evri, for example.

@Northern_munkey "Being crowned on" doesn't make any sense, though. Unless it's placed in a very specific format of "Charles is being crowned on Tuesday". But "it is being crowned on BY" something is gibberish. Being "clowned on" just means people are taking the piss out of it. For a grammatically similar but more harsh version, it's like "being sh*t on by the entire internet".

I mean, surely you know this already , but "clowned" is the past participle of the verb version of "clown", which means to act foolishly - but there's the more modern meaning of it, as used above, where it's being done in a mocking way, like clowns often do (e.g. when they make fun of the king, like in King Lear or the Northman). Yeah it's zoomer slang but it makes sense.

@waynesworld This isn't because it's an exclusive. As the chart above shows, there are 6 million PS5 owners in Japan. Only 12,000 of them wanted this game. That's 0.2% of owners. 99.8% of Japanese PS5 gamers didn't want to buy this game.

Yes, this is physical only but that's still awful. Yes, it will sell more over time but games almost always sell way better in the earlier weeks than they do in later weeks.

@dardel Yeah, to be honest I haven't wanted to play a platform game since I was about 11. No one I know does either. I'm not saying this to diss people who do like to play them (play what you like, of course!), but for everyone I know, it was a thing you'd play back in the Mega Drive or SNES days. Even my 7 year old nephew is drawn to games like GTA, THPS, Hogwarts Legacy or FFXVI - more 'adult' art styles and more to gameplay than, frankly, jumping to the right place at the right time. Also, and to be honest I haven't checked, but I doubt anyone I know even knows this game exists, other than my one friend who's a terminally online guy.

Long story short, it's a genre that doesn't generally appeal to most adults, and less kids nowadays than in the 90s, and this particular game isn't backed up by being a household name like Mario.

@NoHope It says
"The Welcome hub is now available in the home screen. For users in North America, this enhancement replaces the Explore hub."
That should be clear enough, but he's saying the US had something called the Explore hub and no one else did. The Welcome hub is for everyone internationally but is being rolled out over time. For users in the US it will replace the Explore hub.

All those games that could've been on PS4 that looked better on the PS5 will look a bit better on the PS5 Pro - but still worse than if you'd bought a PC within the last 5 years or so. Or in other words, this would've been easier to swallow if this gen hasn't basically been PS4 games on higher settings.

@The_Elder What they mean is how he has this sloppy way of doing things where he scrappily kinda bumbles his way through things a lot. He's brave and has good instincts but he's not exactly John Wick. He always makes mistakes (e.g. the incredibly iconic boulder scene is him screwing up) but gets through in the end.

Another example:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hl8e9i6YiA8

I played it the night it came out and enjoyed it, but then I was drinking some beer and got to the point where I became terrible at the game. Now my memories of it are all of me not knowing which direction I should be flying in. But anyway, yeah, I liked it but I'm not sure if it has that much longevity. It has this Foamstars kind of vibe to it for me.

I mean, he can't even spell "shill" so it's even more embarrassing to see him say that stuff.

Brings back memories...

@dark_knightmare2 And this is more like 1 year and a quarter too. I've got to say, it feels like way longer than that to me - I'd have guessed it was about 2.5 years ago.

@Max_the_German Well in an Occam's razor approach it's more likely one company is lying than two companies. Especially when that company is being sh*t on by one of the other ones in terms of success. And especially when Sony normally happily announce timed exclusives.

@Angelus3K I found it in the app. Here's the website location.

https://store.playstation.com/en-gb/concept/10004151

@Deoxyr1bose
But layoffs can't happen if:

• You're in a managerial position and actually responsible for the decisions that led to the financial woes in the first place

Weird 🤔

@Bez87 Yeah I played it for about 20 minutes, thought it was okay in a "I've got nothing else to do" kind of way, but that was it. Never went back to it. I know different people have different opinions on things but for this game it seems to be either "eh, it was okay for a bit, quite fun" or "I've been playing for 75 hours nonstop, send help".

@riceNpea Come on, in football all the players wear adverts on their shirts, the pitch is completely bordered by adverts and for most of its existence the Premier League has been named after a product. Don't get me wrong, the American thing of saying "this replay is brought to you by McDonald's - I'm lovin' it!" is laughable and annoying, but then Americans often find it weird that our players are walking billboards. We're just used to it.

I've wanted to get back into MLB The Show for ages and I quite like the idea of a Quidditch game for a bit of lighthearted fun - and I think my nephew will like playing it too which is a bonus. So for once, I'm actually happy with this selection.

@NoWayJose @riceNpea Well the obvious implication is that it feels like a mere product rather than a passion project. It's polished and refined but lacks soul - that's what I'd infer from that.

@Ravix Yeah, not to mention you're saving such a relatively small amount of money while waiting 3 months or more to do something you want to do. If you save £30 by waiting 3 months, you now have about 33p a day more for those 3 months. You go to a pub for a meal and a few pints and spend £40 but if I put off something I enjoy for a quarter of a year I can save less than that? Wow.

If you wait for it to be more patched, I can understand that - though personally, the games I buy aren't the ones that release as a buggy mess.

Well I'll just say I wouldn't even know this game existed if it wasn't for this site. For most people it's not about sending a message, it's just about not even knowing it exists - and if they do know, simply not being interested.

@Northern_munkey 10 hours a day playing the game would give someone 8 hours sleep a day and 6 hours to do whatever else. This is his job, he's not just managing to fit in a couple of hours of gaming a day after working at Greggs.

@Vivisapprentice Lost Souls Aside is Chinese but this game is made by a South Korean team. It's the same dev as Black Desert Online.

A nice surprise would be Fable getting announced for PS5.

@Kenshir0 "No physical release 60 dollars is 46 quid on the exchange rate"
To be fair, US prices don't include tax whereas ours always do. We still pay slightly more than them because we're a much smaller market but if they had to pay what we do for VAT, they'd be paying £55.20. Or in other words, while the pre-tax price in the US is equivalent to £46, the pre-tax price here is £50.

Not a massive difference given how much easier it is to manufacture and ship the product en masse across the US compared to the UK, and with us being a significantly smaller market for games.

@KeanuReaves It's not borne out of ignorance, it's borne out of the knowledge that they intentionally avoided giving a PS site the PS version. Also, as said right above my post, UE5 games have struggled on PS5. And as said above that, they've never shown this game running on consoles. That said, it's typical that publishers show off the PC version because they want to put their best foot forward; it's not remotely standard to give a PS site access to only the PC version, though.

"you’re in the minority, because the Remote Play portable is proving a runaway hit for the platform holder."
I'm not saying this to diss the Portal, I have no strong feelings about it either way, but unless the Portal has sold about 4 billion units, people with no interest in it are not in the minority. Even limiting it just to PS5 owners, there's no way the Portal has sold something like 25 million units (whatever half the PS5 install base is). If it's sold a million units, which would surprise me, that means 98% of PS5 owners haven't bought one. Anyway, some actual sales figures would be nice.

To be honest, I played it once on my phone, thought it was mildly diverting, then never felt like playing it again. There was some old twin stick shooter on PC, alien themed, that I got into years ago and it reminded me of that.

I've never liked Borderlands, so I'm glad to see I'm not alone in that. This article feels like I wrote it. The "humour" is painful and the characters are either so annoying that you wish you could manually delete your memories of them, or just embarrassingly try hard "badasses" that feel like a 14 year old who collects katanas created them.

@BeerIsAwesome It's pretty much been annual since it started in 2005. Only 2007, 2013, 2019 and 2022 didn't have a Yakuza game. So out of the 20 years of its existence there's been at least one release (sometimes two or three) in 16 of those years.

@Mikey856 Same, but the other way around.

@Mikey856 Yeah I think the Wadjet Eye games are only on Steam (or GOG etc). There might be some exceptions. I'd really recommend Technobabylon, Unavowed and Resonance. The Blackwell games are very highly thought of, but I've not played them yet. Not a Wadjet Eye thing but that Pillars of the Earth game is meant to be really good too but again, I've not played it. It has a PS4 version.

@Mikey856 You should check out the other games Wadjet Eye have published and/or made. Loads of great stuff there.

I downloaded a few old JRPGs I'd never heard of from the classics collection and had a little look at them. Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light is one of them. It seems pretty cool but the main character moves so slowly, like he's underwater, and there's no sprint button (which is typical of older games, but still). You also have to press Square to target something before you can interact with it, including NPCs. Oh, and you move the camera with the shoulder buttons and it's soooo slow.

It's interesting playing older, forgotten games and then playing an older, not forgotten game like Tales of Symphonia. It's really clear why some games did well and others fell by the wayside when you play them years after release.

@UnlimitedSevens It went a bit further than that:

"Callender's suit alleges that Pitchford "breached his fiduciary duties by exploiting Gearbox employees and property to fund Pitchford’s private cravings," and one portion of the suit makes two sensational accusations about Pitchford's behavior: that he accidentally left a selection of "underage" pornography on a USB stick at a restaurant, and that he used his company's money to host parties where "adult men have reportedly exposed themselves to minors, to the amusement of Pitchford.""

@3Above Yeah, definitely. Despite being retro in style and inspiration, it's a very fresh take on all the elements. It's like Ogre Battle (not Tactics Ogre), Fire Emblem with a kind of FFT feel to the story.

A great thing is you don't just go "cutscene, battle, cutscene, battle..." like most SRPGs. Instead you walk around a huge world map like, say, FFVI, in between fights. There's side quests, main battles, special battles where you reclaim territory, you can upgrade towns you've retaken, talk to party members, do mock battles (basically little puzzles where you have to wipe out the enemy unit in one round), etc etc. It's all pretty non-linear so the order you get characters in, and thus who you have available for different battles, will change. Also dialogue choices that actually change things (basically if people die or join your party, but it's obvious which is which, so don't worry).

Overall it's just such a high quality thing, an obvious passion project rather than some churned out product. It feels like you've discovered a lost SNES or PS1 masterpiece.

Jeanne D'Arc and Unicorn Overlord. Both very good, but the latter in particular just keeps blowing me away with just about everything it does. Also dabbling in Borderlands 3 even though I don't really like it, just as a palate cleanser.

@StylesT Yeah, I had the same thing with the original. After I'd showed my friends the shark diving thing, and got them to try it; after we'd all had fun being too scared to go through a door in RE7; after I'd got bored of the novelty of watching films in VR like I was on a pitch black cinema... after all that, I realised I just wasn't going to use it again.

I do think there's something magical about VR, certain experiences felt like playing games for the first time as a kid, but at the same time there are too many problems with it and not enough support.

When you fill the airbags with helium.

Where's the Unicorn Overlord controller? But yeah I do like the look of this.

It looks pretty interesting, in that "game you'd buy on a whim from CeX and enjoy more than you'd expect" kind of way. But yeah, the animations look a little cheap. It's like everyone weighs about 4kg.

To be fair, they know this isn't going to blow up online so they seem to have treated it as a curiosity for nostalgic players to mess around with. With that in mind, the imbalance in the characters makes for a fun, drunk time with friends. It's never going to be a serious tournament fighter.

@Deadlyblack If he was a titular character in Tekken, he'd be called Tekken (or the series would be called Heihachi - which it might as well be at this point.)

@Yousef- You can get various editions for PS4 and PS5 from NISA's online store. There's a nice limited edition you can still get.

https://store.nisaeurope.com/products/disgaea-7-vows-of-the-virtueless-limited-edition-plushie-bundle-ps5

This complete edition that's coming out soon has all the DLC included as well as new content, features and characters.