MrGawain

Isn’t the PS6 coming in 2026? That takes away the only argument Sony has to get anyone to buy a PS5.5.

Should have marketed it as a sleeping mask.

Somehow I get the feeling this will be about as beneficial to the PS5’s library as a New 3DS was to 3DS gaming.

Let’s be honest, Sony hasn’t made an effort to cater for the Japanese market, and they’re not going to catch up with Nintendo. But 2 weeks after release about 5% of Japanese PS5 owners own physical copies of FF7Rb. That isn’t that bad.

I find it ironic this is the PS5 game I’ve been most excited about.

The fact Sony are releasing performance specs shows they’re still sailing on the Quadruple A business model to impress their customers. How they’ll continue to do so with their budget cuts remains a bit of a mystery.

The games industry has overestimated how many ‘core’ gamers there are. Sony and MS have spent too much chasing the Mountain Dew/Doritos eating fans with big budget action games, and have ignored the casual and family gamers who were scared off by a £450 console that was almost impossible to get for 2 years and then had a drip feed of either FPS on Xbox or open world glorified films on Playstation.

Meanwhile Nintendo catered to this market whilst not busting the bank, sold 140 million units and made a fortune by selling indie and 3rd party games as well as their big tentpole titles.

If the customer doesn’t buy your console, they can’t spend any money on your games.

This wheel was set in motion a long time ago, and there’s not much Sony can do to solve it immediately. Yes we get wages and manufacturing costs have gone up, and disposable incomes have gone down. But PlayStation has made a rod for their own back by streamlining and not diversifying. They don’t care about the casual gaming market. They don’t care about the handheld market. They don’t really care about Japanese and Asian markets. They’ve just assumed everybody is a core gamer that has five hundred quid to buy a box to plug into their thousand pound 4K Sony TV and play the same sort of bloated western open world games that cost £70 a pop. They’ve limited their audience to ‘the core gamer’ because they think they’ll blindly buy whatever they put out and allow this $300m a game cycle to continue for their ego. In reality a lot of these ‘core gamers’ also have families now and can’t justify this hobby day one. And the ones that can have bought PCs instead. The new generation of gamers and family gamers are playing on phones or happy with their Switches, or have just kept their PS4s.

But as I said, this was set in motion a long time ago, a Sony can’t fix this overnight. But they can plan for a future where everything has to be so flashy and so expensive- because it’s bound by the law of diminishing returns.

I played Brothers on the PS4 and it’s a truly unique experience, both gameplay and story. Admittedly it was just as short and buggy then.

I question how improving the graphics make it any better than it was, because that really isn’t what the game was about.

The business model is unsustainable. They don't have enough games, they take too long to make, there isn't enough of a userbase, the games are too expensive for a lot of people, and yet all we hear about is more powerful consoles for more detailed games, that they can't make because they've thinned their workforce.

That's just insane.

@Herculean

Well, no. I mean the game ended with a definite story finality, and then they are going to change that ending with an update. Imagine If Charles Dickens had released a revised version of a Christmas Carol where Scrooge really killed all the Christmas Ghosts and then evicted the entire population of London. This isn’t a continuation, it’s an alteration. Being able to change a story after they’ve released it to the world cheapens the original story.

Imagine watching a tv series for a season where there the end episode resolves all the characters stories, only for a year later another episode comes out and says ‘actually all that happened in the last episode was a dream, and this is what really happened’.

And you had to pay more for it.

Well they’ve spent more money, but I don’t get how doing this sell any more copies of this game than an ordinary billboard would do?

How commerce works: consumer wants product, manufacturer makes product, consumer buys product if it is quality and priced to what they are willing to pay.

It doesn’t work by a company making a half finished product that no one asked for and expecting people to buy it and then be charged again for missing parts of the product that may or may not be delivered.

Business is simple when you listen to your customers.

“If we continue to entertain, delight, and surprise our community of gamers, I think Totoki-san and whoever follows him will be just fine.”

Unfortunately the PS5 has been focusing on remakes and very samey sequels. The developers in Japan that were trying weird and surprising stuff got canned 5 years ago.

To me Hi-Fi Rush looks like the sort of game that Playstation has been sorely missing for a while- a mix of Parappa, DMC, and No More Heroes. And it has a variety of colours in it!

Think how many times Mario died in video games- falling down pits, getting burned by spinning flame thingys, and walking into mushrooms and the NYT has NEVER covered any of those.

Think of all the hypothetical games you could play with EVEN MORE power!

Eventually, that is.

Not this year, obviously.

I wonder if the news Sony hasn’t got a big exclusive for the next year changed the announcement?

Why give Playstation the big titles when you now have the upper hand?

@Grumblevolcano

I guess the current argument is the next generation are playing on phones and tablets, and the games they play like fortnite aren't graphically intensive.

I wonder if the play for Sony is to go Switch style portable console? Because there is no reason to release another console at a loss if Sony can't make a profit on games.

Seeing they’re worried about budgets and development time for their games, I’m not entirely sure how replacing the PS5 for something more powerful in 3-4 years will solve the problem?

Quick, the horse has left the barn! Close the door!

I can’t believe three years in they’ve only just noticed they don’t have enough games and have spent too much cash.

@themightyant

But TOTK is maybe one of 2 or 3 first part big budget games on the Switch. Everything else is comparably much cheaper. Even by your own example, TOTK is around 60m cheaper than TLOU2, which I bet could be 2 more budgets for some of Nintendo’s less costly games. Plus a Zelda or Mario game is pretty much guaranteed to succeed. There are lots of big budget AAA games that get released that are still broken, or dull, or cynically propped up with extra charges. Nintendo tend to avoid those issues.

@get2sammyb

I get the metrics of it, I just think the business plan is deeply flawed. Especially when you consider Sony’s biggest games on the PS5 are never going to sell as well as Animal Crossing or Mario Kart 8 that have a fraction of the budgets. Having bigger, prettier games hasn’t gained more players for those games, it’s just caused Sony to give up on smaller games that could have been a bit more creative.

I feel very foolish buying a PS5 assuming there would be a steady flow of fun experiences to play.

I thought we had been going through the drought, and now the drought is the next year?

This console generation has been absolutely pathetic.

The Xbox has barely any compelling exclusives. And the PS5 is beating it on compelling exclusives 2 to 1.

Still not great, is it?

Thank goodness they delayed it a year to completely polish it.

@get2sammyb

But how can a company grow more by limiting the audience? When I think of Playstation I no longer think of family gaming, I no longer think of party gaming, it doesn’t have an Animal Crossing type game for casual gamers beyond Stardew that you can get on other consoles. We had Astrobot and Sackboy early on and then Ratchet and Clank, but since then very little to change the taste of the fighty open world formula. In all those media blitzes where Sony shows it’s past it leans into all the variety and weirdness, that is now very missing.

The PlayStation is for a certain type of player at the moment who likes single player open world story games, but they’ve given up on a bunch of other audiences who would be better served buying a Nintendo product. I hope they rectify this soon.

It’s really obvious how westernised Sony’s 1st party software offering is now. They’ve lost the variety in their lineup beyond open world games where the main character is suffering from depression. By shutting down all of their software developers in Japan they’ve lost a lot of fun, creativity, colour, escapism, and downright weirdness that mixed things up.

I’m guessing Japanese gamers have bought a PS5 for the promise of 3rd party games from Capcom, Square Enix, and From Software- but even a lot of those games have been very westernised and drab as well.

The reason we still call this generation of PS5 and XBX ‘next gen’ is because nothing has turned up yet that feels special that couldn’t have been on the last generation. I would like to see Playstation make games that are more inventive and unusual than just shinier open world sequels. Stuff like The Last Guardian or Parappa or Buzz really made Playstation feel unique, now we just get the same sandbox game with different skins on it.

What this shows me is Sony makes lots of gloomy 3rd person open world games, and a lot of its audience wants something else.

It wouldn’t hurt to make some fun colourful games every so often.

I’m playing it at the moment and I would say it’s the best PS5 game of the year.

I wouldn’t call it a Final Fantasy game however.

Unfulfilled promise.

Apparently the PS5’s tech is only really built to play Open World games with excessive cutscenes. It barely has enough power to run stuff like RPG’s, Platformers, Strategy, Rhythm, Puzzle, and Party games. Everyone loves Astrobot, and since the launch we’ve seen nothing like it that you couldn’t buy on the PS4.

They really could learn from the Switch about fun and variety.

@Member_the_game

Yup, stable connection and affected by latency caused by distance.

In reality it probably won’t be useable outside your own home, especially in countries without 5G everywhere.

Sometimes there’s a problem that new technology solves, other times there’s new technology that needs a problem to solve. This is the latter. A device for playing your PS5 as long as your not that far away from your PS5 with a stable internet connection.

I bought my PS5 about a year ago now and I must admit I’m disappointed with the variety of games they’ve had so far. Lots of open world games filled with expositional dialogue which is great for the core audience who like that sort of stuff, but there has definitely been a lack of Japanese style RPG’s (FF16 wasn’t an RPG), platformers, puzzle games, family games and just weird stuff like Parappa, Buzz, or the Last Guardian that adds a bit of spice to the lineup. This also applies to XBox as there is a lack of quality unadulterated fun in triple A gaming recently. It’s as if they’ve decided they can’t compete against Nintendo so they aren’t even trying anymore. Hoping they diversify the sort of games they make next year and appeal to the rest of their audience.

I’m pretty sure Sony (and Microsoft) are determined we won’t be playing any physical media within the next 5 years.

I’m not even sure it was worth me buying my original PS5.

To me the general consensus of this game is it’s a well made game that’s fun, but it breaks no new ground from the last 2. The problem I had with Miles Morales was it was way too familiar to the first one. It’s a shame they couldn’t have found a way to put Spidey in a new setting that wasn’t New York. I don’t think I want another 30 hours of the same stuff. Sure it’s a great game, but they better be careful it doesn’t go the way of Assassins Creed Sequelitis.

Personally I think Playstation has offered a very Vanilla lineup recently. There’s been lots of open world action games, but they’ve really lost a lot of variety in other styles of games. That works against XBox who can barely put out 2 or 3 exclusives a year recently (usually fps), but Sony is ignoring family gaming and the casual market and is losing to Nintendo badly in this respect, especially in Japan. I would hope who ever takes over permanently will try and make the console lineup more well rounded.

Due to delays we now have jam packed starts to the year, but very little in the traditional Christmas sales period.

Wow, such emotion and gravitas behind each of her lines. I can see why she beat out Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep for the part.

Looking forward for 6, but I wonder how many times they can update/remaster/remake the 1st. A classic that doesn’t really need re-releasing. Maybe they’re waiting for someone to mention the Batman connection of the Clown, Penguin, Man In Green and Woman dressed as a Cat?

This isn’t just happening in video games, all forms of entertainment and luxury items are dropping in price- Holidays, Guitars, High End Clothes, Jewellery, Toys and Electronics.

Companies know interest rates going up mean the average shopper has less disposable income, and are cutting their cloth appropriately. This will bring down inflation.

I bought one. Yet to be convinced if it was worth it for the sort of games I like.

To me the shape looks a little cumbersome with the controller grips to being part of the body. It looks like it would be less sturdy if you dropped it than the solid tablet/bar shape of the Switch.

‘I had to stop playing, I was breaking my neck for a pee.’

I think it’s fair to say that both the green and blue sides of gaming have struggled to have a continuous run of games this generation. The pandemic didn’t help, but you also feel they’re stretching what is realistically possible with man hours to make pretty graphics, and checking for bugs. Neither side has really put out an original idea in a while that really justifies why we bought new consoles. All the promises for 2024 mean nothing- 2023 has proven that.

Luckily I have my ‘last generation’ Switch that has kept me amused with a pretty good run of games recently. I shudder to think what happens when Ninty goes next gen.

Recently I tried Apple TV for a month. I became aware Apple doesn’t really care about creating much content for its ventures. Undoubtedly this headset is a device that could do miracles… if anyone could be bothered to make something to use it for.

I always felt the more memorable parts of FF7 were where you followed a linear path. Aimlessly wandering around the empty world map got a bit tedious, especially without a locked orientation so you didn’t know up from down. There’s side paths with optional content, and then there’s vast spaces of nothingness except an Easter egg cutscene on an undetermined point.