MrGawain

Meanwhile PS5 owners are wondering if the PS5 will have more games like Mario Galaxy than just Astrobot.

I know I’m wondering that.

I guess the problem Sony has is that people want another Astrobot style game this year (that would be nice), but they haven’t had their development teams working on that for 5 years.

Instead they have put all their development eggs into one basket with a bunch of live service games. No way to alter them into single player experiences, just shoot people online and pay for fancy hats for bland characters to wear.

It makes sense. The Switch has already proven this, but in general people now watch Films, TV, and listen to music in a more solitary smaller fashion.

The question is does Sony’s current output of big visually impressive, cutscene filled, little text, long playtime style game naturally fit on a handheld, or will they have to slightly rethink some of their design choices?

Stuff like Ape Escape and Parappa would add variety, colour, and humour to an otherwise very limited palette of brown and grey, depressing, story heavy sandboxes that makes up most of the Sony produced lineup.

Unfortunately they’ve only just figured this out four years in and it will take at least a couple of years to produce just remasters of these games. A new game in this style will be 5 years away.

PlayStation had gotten too big and lumbering to react to trends, hence why they couldn’t pivot on the live service front.

I don’t think the sales are FF7R’s problem. It’s how much it cost in the first place.

Fun game, but too big for it’s own good.

There are 3 games that were released this year on the PS5 that interested me enough to purchase- Eiyuden, Astrobot and FF7R.

FF7R is a really wonderful game, but in ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ or ‘The Extended Peter Jackson Cut Of Lord Of The Rings’ way. It’s a lot to take in. Probably also harmed by dividing opinion on how the story has been playing out.

I think console gaming has grown up with its gamers. At 5 we had fun Mario, at 15 we had sexy Tomb Raider, 25 violent Call Of Duty, 35 graphic Witcher 3, 45 a bunch of monthly charges for something that doesn’t work properly.

But that’s the problem. Although consoles are for everyone no matter how old they are, they should also be for everyone no matter how young they are. Aside from Astro Bot, Sony hasn’t really convinced families little Timmy needs a PS5 when the games he likes are on the iPad. Xbox hasn’t anything for this demographic. Add this to the fact consoles will be more expensive and you alienate the audience consoles were originally for. This will continue to shrink the market and force someone out.

Game developers need to make games for the audience that is there, not the audience it wants to exist.

Both Tifa and Aerith are both rounded, fun, intelligent, caring, and sensible characters.

Cloud however is a grumpy, selfish, untalkative twit that occasionally spaces out and puts Tifa and Aerith in mortal peril. Why would either of them want anything to do with this spiky haired pillock is beyond me.

This was the year Japanese and Asian made games stood out as the best. Astrobot, Final Fantasy 7, Metaphor Refantazio, Black Myth Wukong.

Western developers could learn to put a bit of fun and escapism back into their games.

Maybe this isn’t the same for games, but when it comes to music and dvd I own a lot of stuff that isn’t available on streaming. And I’m sure if certain big companies one day decide to only offer the media they have produced, they will dump a bunch of other stuff and there won’t be a way to access it. Plus I don’t appreciate the playlist format instead of finding what I like for myself on an album, or being told I’d like this because I watched that.

Also I already paid for it once, why should I need to pay a rental fee to watch what I already paid for? And if I have to pay for streaming, I want that money to go to the artist, not a holdings company that owns the platform.

I may have to buy an emergency Blu Ray player for when my one gives up the ghost.

The problem I have with the game awards is it makes a big deal out of the stuff I don’t care about in the games industry- dlc and microtransactions for online shooty games with Hollywood celebrities in them talked about by twitch influencers sponsored by Mountain Dew and Doritos.

We’re constantly told video games are for everyone in the world, and then they focus on the stuff they think that the key demographic for their advertisers like. Great for those people, irrelevant for me.

It’s undeniable that Playstation made gaming something more than a child’s toy.

I just think Sony has just got to open the appeal of the PS5 up to more than middle aged men’s hero fantasies, and I say that as a middle aged man.

I’m not surprised because the PS5 is now very US centric. Where previous consoles have had lots of 1st party games from Japanese and European publishers, PS5’s 1st party lineup is probably 90% US made. This has concentrated on narrative action games for young adult men with certain types of interests.

But then this isn’t really panning out as a global business strategy, is it?

Personally I think this year is written off. Currently PS UK pushing ads out using previously released games and trying to get PS4 players to move up and appeal to lapsed Playstation owners. There is lots of Black Friday game reductions.

The reality is Sony needs a nice solid 2025 with lots of games, and more importantly lots of different games. The people that like God of War and Horizon already own a PS5, but there is a huge untapped market of kids and families that Sony hasn’t been catering for. They are going to have to compete with the Switch 2 next year, and they need a showcase just after Nintendo to show they are just as if not more relevant in 2025.

Will it happen? I’m slightly doubtful.

Just to think it was only 5 years ago Sony were desperate to eradicate any connection to Japan and bulk ordered mini American flags….

All the nominations shows is it’s been a pretty bad year in gaming. At least in the triple A side of it.

Astrobot unfortunately won't win back bunch of people that feel their interests aren't being served by the PS5. It also won't cause a bunch more similar games to appear in the next year.

It may however hopefully prove to PS bosses they need to diversify their games lineup for the PS6.

This time next year Martians could land in a Morrison’s car park in Slough.

D’ya remember that Dress meme where some people thought it was Blue and Black, while others thought it was White and Gold?

Well like that but some people see a discernible upgrade in graphics, and the others don’t.

I’m not a Horizon fan, but I do remember when Nintendo remastered Super Mario 1, 2, and 3 for the SNES which was a much bigger graphical leap than this. Mechanically they were the same games just one generation on. When people play Mario now, they play a version with the original graphics. I really don’t think Horizon made enough cultural impact for most people to pay more money 5 years later to play it again.

Now is the best time for you to buy a PS5.

For Sony, as they need to fill in a $300m black hole in their finances.

In fact, you should buy 4.

I wonder if anyone in triple A gaming knows how to make anything other than live service shooters, open world collectathons with cutscenes, high end racing games and copy paste sports games?

The problem with this forward thinking is you have to guarantee that Playstation will still be around, you will still be around, and that you’ll be bothered about what Sony is offering.

Trust me, nothing is guaranteed and things change.

I get the feeling the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing at XBox, and that doesn’t even count the Head, Legs and Bum into the equation.

One day something will really happen and we’ll know that it happened.

I think the concept of a Spider-Man game is actually very limited. If you think about other games you can take your character and put them on a horse, or in a car, or speedboat or jet pack or whatever, and place them in the Jungle, Desert, Space or depths of hell.

Spider-man swings on webs in New York, and that’s hard to spin into 3 games.

Because the PS5 has been such a disappointment to me this gen so far, if the PS6 is digital download only I don’t think I would invest in another generation. I accept the world moves on, but it doesn’t mean I have to. Playing more expensive games I don’t really care with lots of extra charges on a more expensive system where I have no security just seems like a brilliant jumping off point.

There are creative people out there in games, it’s just Sony and the triple A brigade shut a bunch of the studios they worked for in favour of sandbox and live service factories.

Nintendo have had some good ideas, but I think Sony really screwed up shuttering their Japan Studios.

Technology should be created to solve a problem, we shouldn’t create a problem to justify a technology.

So far Eiyuden is the only game I was excited about enough to buy day one. Everything else is just more of the same.

I’m about 8-12 months behind being current these days, and I’m quite a bit better off for it.

I’ve not been impressed by the PS5, but I will admit I’ve played Eiyuden and Hi Fi Rush released this year and have just got FF7R to play in the latter part of the year. I can eventually see myself getting Astro when it drops to around £40. I won’t complain there isn’t anything to play this year…

…It was Sony who said it ‘had no plans to release any major existing franchise titles before April 2025’. And that’s the point: PS is focused on one or two exclusive massive budget titles a year, but doesn’t care about the smaller games that add innovation any more.

The PS4 to the PS5 is a reflection of the Wii to Wii U- No real system seller difference, not many games, people sticking playing the old system because they don’t need the extra 5% of power to play their basic games.

If they think copying Ninty, then I honestly think Sony would be better off avoid chasing graphics and make the PS6 a handheld hybrid like the Switch. The amount of people playing this suggests that people want to play off TV.

Seeing the mess of this generation, and the general apathy to it you would think Sony would temper their aspirations for next gen. How many people aren’t impressed or financially capable to move on from the PS4?

Assuming the audience will lap up whatever you do is a recipe for disaster. Just look at Hollywood Movies.

Not a big issue if you’re spending time playing games instead of staring at the Home Screen, but just another thing that Sony is doing to drive away their customers.

The whole reason for this state of play was to show Ghost of Thingy to justify the PS5 Pro. It felt very cobbled together otherwise.

I’ve sort of accepted Playstation is only making a few po faced photo realistic games a year, and what I really want is a bunch of fun but simpler stuff like what Nintendo provides. I will see the generation out, but I doubt I will buy a PS6 if this is what Sony wants to sell us, as opposed to what we want to buy.

The only thing I would say is the reason Nintendo games work so well on Switch is that their games can break up easily into 5 minute experiences. Waiting for the bus you can play a level of Mario. On your lunch break you can do some chores in Animal Crossing. I wouldn’t want to turn on a PS6 handheld game and watch a bit of a 15 minute cutscene only to have to turn it off halfway through.

Saying that, I do think the future in gaming is more about being able to play you want to, not about experiencing the most realistic digital earhair.

I wonder if Playstation or Xbox is making a profit this year? They both seem determined to throw money at massive projects that are ridiculously expensive and out of touch with what their customers actually want. Even popular games that sell 10 million are having trouble making their budgets back. Meanwhile Nintendo is financially responsible and just makes fun little games that people buy, and keep selling for years after.

Remastering games stuck on previous platforms like Demon Souls that are looking their age are one thing, but stuff like Horizon, TLOU and Spider-Man from the PS4 really doesn’t make sense. If we wanted to we would have played them, and we can still play them on the PS5. I doubt there’s 10% visual difference between the PS4 and PS5 versions.

For me personally, I now only buy a select few games at launch that I know I’m going to love (Eiyuden being the only one this year on PS5). I finally got FF16 at Christmas when it was on sale for £30 and my opinion of it was that it was very pretty looking, but it felt a slog to get through and didn’t really feel like a Final Fantasy game with little humour. I’m very glad I didn’t spend £70 on it.

Because I was feeling fatigued by 16, I held back on getting FF7R yet, and it seems I was right to. I have loved a lot of the 2D stuff Square Enix has been putting out, but I feel they’ve jumped on a Western bandwagon to make Final Fantasy like every other Playstation Action Adventure/Open World-ish thing.

I’m not entirely sure, but am I right in thinking there wasn’t any swearing in the original Horizon, even mild stuff?

Or have I forgotten even more about that game beyond the robot dinosaurs?

You don’t need a Playstation, we have one already at home.

Can’t announce anything if there’s nothing close to being ready yet.

PlayStation’s problem is that they are committed to making powerful out of the box hardware to run photo realistic style games, but a new generation of gamers couldn’t care about that. Games like Among Us, Fortnite, and Five Nights at Freddie’s don’t need a PS5 to run. If anything the biggest competition PS5 has is PS4, and let’s not forget Nintendo. If you add mobile and tablet it there is a lot of ‘good enough’ ways to play games these days that don’t cost Four to Seven hundred quid.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, but at the end of the day the PS5 Pro is something I don’t need to improve on something I have no problem with for an amount of money I don’t want to pay. I’m not angry Sony is offering this, I think the best thing to do is not buy it, and show Sony that we don’t want or need this. If we buy it they will just continue bloating with pointless tech and charging money above what the average consumer is willing to pay.

I would think the amount of people sticking with their PS4’s would already show this.

Am I the only person who didn’t know you could actually chose between the two? Frankly the PlayStation UI is a weird thing to navigate.

Sony is firmly entrenched in the idea we all want shinier, faster, and more lifelike games and are willing to pay for it. At the beginning of this generation they started pushing this boulder up the hill which was very hard and arduous with little to show for. Now it’s reached the top of the hill and has no choice but to set the ball in motion even though the majority doesn’t want it any more. Most people are either playing their simple games on the PS4, Switch, or Mobile, and the flashier games on PC. Triple A gaming is too bloated to react to trends now.

I get the feeling tomorrow we’ll see the reaction from the stock market to this and and Concord as Sony’s share price follows the ball down the hill.

I’m not even convinced I was right to get my current PS5.

Nintendo have a vast library of iconic IP, but the only reason this IP is iconic is because they’ve had a variety of games to put them in. Mario is in different styles of games to Link, who is in different styles of games to Samus, which are all different to Pokemon.

Sony have abandoned Parappa, Buzz, Jak and Daxter, Destruction Derby, Dark Cloud etc… because they don’t make those sort of games any more. To me a lot of recent Sony games have just felt like reskins of others.

How can you produce games that are in fashion when it takes 8 years to make them? Sequels have a natural audience built into them, but when a new game is made to jump on the bandwagon, how can you be sure that will be the bandwagon the audience is chasing in almost a decade gone by?

It feels the AAA games industry is too big and lumbering to be successful any more.

Maybe naming it after a decommissioned plane wasn’t a good omen to start with.

I get this has nothing to do with quality. It has everything to do with a large part of the gaming world asking for something different, and Concord being very familiar to what there is a lot of.