I really hope SP ends up making even more money on new sales of Ghost of Yotei because of this. I'm not a MP guy, but I tried Legends in GoT because I loved the game so much I wanted to squeeze more time out of it. I was surprised how much I liked Legends. I'll definitely be playing it in Yotei.
Has it been confirmed whether or not we're getting any SP DLC? Not sure where they could go with that, but one can always hope!
@JackiePriest IMO, it's the ABK purchase that changed XBox's fate. The only way that purchase goes well is if they could have made COD an XBox and PC GamePass exclusive. When it looked like legal hurdles were going to prevent approval of the sale unless they committed to keeping COD multiplatform, Microsoft should have walked away from the deal. After that decision, the console's fate was sealed IMO. The money just doesn't make sense after that. Halo & Gears aren't massive system sellers like COD would have been, and Nadella and Microsoft shareholders very clearly don't want to "subsidize" XBox, or any other hardware that isn't immediately profitable.
This is definitely Microsoft's last "console," and it's really a small form factor PC more than it is a console. Helix is likely XBox One Part Deux rather than a successor to the Series S/X. Depending on the price of the Steam Machine it's probably going to go about as well as the sales of that device did.
I can definitely see why Valve doesn't want to launch until they've exhausted all efforts into trying to get the Steam Machine under $1K-1,200. Really, the only console on the market next generation will be from Sony (PS5 Pro & PS6). The "living room PC" will be Steam Machine vs. XBox, and whichever one is cheaper ends up winning that sales battle.
I feel badly for Sharma, because she had nothing to do with the decisions that went into this console. IMO, Phil appears to have lost whatever "battles" there were during the planning/R&D for this device, and decided to get out (like other well known/public facing XBox employees) rather than be the public face of this device like Mattrick was the face of XB1.
Sharma might really actually "hear" XBox fans about the desire for more exclusives, but there's nothing she can do about it. Even if she tries to get Nadella to backtrack and keep the next Halo & Gears on Helix, all that's going to do is kill the sales of those games. They're not going to be able to sell a $1-1,200 device. Only GTA and COD could sell a device this expensive. Nadella and XBox shareholders clearly don't want to subsidize console sales anymore. Microsoft might stay in the controller manufacturing business for PC. But after Helix, they're done with consoles.
I really don't understand why Sony would release the PS6 earlier than they originally planned.
Hexe is going to face the same dynamics as the Series X/S did when those consoles released. The era where millions of gamers shifted from PS to XBox or vice versa when a new console is released is over. It ended during the XB1 generation, which Microsoft lost thanks to Mattrick and his attempt to push that console as a living room machine that just happened to also play games.
Millions of gamers aren't going to abandon their digital purchases on PS to buy Hexe just like they didn't abandon PS to buy a Series X or Series S. Millions of gamers abandoning PS to buy Hexe is even more unlikely if it costs $1K USD or more. IMO, if Sony thinks it needs to move up the PS6 release date, they've just got a corporate case of FOMO.
Furthermore, unless Valve inexplicably decides "just kidding, we're not really going to release the Steam Machine," a $1K Hexe ultimately isn't going to pull a lot of sales away from Valve's device either.
We're also all assuming that Sharma/XBox means "Steam games" when they say Hexe will play PC games. I'm not so sure about that. The XBox store does sell PC games and they at least used to have a PC version of GamePass.
IMO including Steam on Hexe would be problematic for Microsoft because of multiplayer. Either they're baking into that $1,000-1,200 console price the costs associated with eliminating XBL subscriptions entirely or they're going to have a problem convincing PC gamers to pay for something that they don't currently pay for via Steam.
In other words, Microsoft either loses money by making XBL free to everybody (and the costs to maintain the XBL infrastructure aren't getting any cheaper...) or most Steam consumers keep playing on their current setup or buy the Steam Machine. Either one, Nadella's not going to like.
In the US at least, most phones aren't purchased upfront like a console. They're paid for in monthly installments over 2-3 years. Also a study released last month showed that 29% of people were considering leasing their next phone instead of purchasing it upfront or in monthly installments. If Microsoft releases a $1K console and both the PS6 and the Valve Steam Machine are cheaper, Nadella kills Hexe and XBox entirely within 2-3 years.
@Bez87 This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical that Hexe is going to include Steam. IMO, there isn't a world where putting Steam on this console actually works out well for Microsoft.
If they put Steam on Hexe, and then tell PC gamers "sorry, you're going to have to pay for XBL to play multiplayer" the only gamers who don't quickly run the other direction will be those who have more money than brains. This is especially true because the Steam Machine will eventually be released. If you're a PC gamer, Hexe and the Steam Machine will give you the same ability to play your games using your 4K HDTV. Only a multiplayer gamer with, quite literally, money to burn would choose Hexe if they have to pay for XBL.
If you're Microsoft and don't force PC gamers to pay for XBL your console gamers are going to, metaphorically, riot. They're already not doing well with console sales and GP subscriptions have stagnated. Microsoft's still got to pay for the infrastructure that runs XBL. They can't afford more PR messes that cause more losses. Nadella isn't Gates & Co. He won't allow XBox to be a "loss leader."
Everybody seems to forget that the XBox store does sell PC games, and there at least used to be a PC version of GP. (Not sure if it was phased out in their latest round of changes or not.) IMO, we're going to find out Microsoft's being a bit disingenuous here, and Hexe doesn't include Steam, Epic or GOG.
Sharma hasn't been on the job long enough to introduce new ideas. She didn't make this announcement knowing that Hexe isn't going to be released for another 2-3 years. It's coming sooner rather than later, IMO no later than holiday 2027. Hexe has almost certainly been in development for at least a couple years.
Every time a new rumor about this console has been reported, I've thought and said the same thing. Given the fact they've made the decision to go multiplatform as a publisher and the fact they're not ever going to catch up to PS in console sales, the biggest reason they're releasing another console is it's already a sunk cost. They've already done the R&D and acquired the components to manufacture Hexe at scale. What else are they going to do with (some of) those components if they don't release the device?
Nadella hired Sharma to be a "pallative care" doctor for XBox. He's going to eventually kill the console just like he's killed off many other Microsoft hardware products (Hololens, Surface Book, Surface Studio), he just can't do it yet. I've owned XBox consoles since the 360. I'll be sad when dedicated XBox consoles are dead, but I just don't see how Nadella allows them to live beyond another 3-5 years.
Because Sony's changed their stance on PC ports of non-live service games and I can't bare the thought of missing out on any future Sucker Punch games in the Ghost franchise or Naughty Dog hopefully eventually returning to Uncharted, I won't be purchasing this console.
However...
The RAMpocalypse isn't getting better until 2028-2029 at best; with 2030 more likely. If Micosoft's determined to release in 2027, how much is Hexe going to cost? The recent report/rumor that claimed Microsoft's next console would cost $1K USD may actually turn out to be true.
Secondly, does Microsoft have a deal with Steam or Epic, or will Hexe only play PC games purchased from the XBox Store?Microsoft's been unable to "dethrone" Steam and grab more of their 75% marketshare for years.
As usual, IMO Microsoft's strategy here is odd. As a publisher, they're going multiplatform because they lost the console sales "war" to Sony a long time ago. With Hexe, it seems to me like they're going to try to convert PC gamers into console gamers by touting the fact that Hexe will make it easy for them to play their games on their big screen 4K HDTV. They're not getting a large number of gamers to abandon their PS and they know it, so the only market left to target is PC gamers.
Third, if Microsoft's targeting PC gamers, will Valve now be pressured into releasing the Steam Machine earlier than they'd like and selling each one at a loss like MS and Sony do, or will they "just deal" with any PR backlash because of the RAMpocalypse-caused pricing?
Lastly, if Hexe doesn't sell well, how long until Nadella kills XBox off? IMO, the console doesn't reach its 5th birthday.
@NonbinaryStarr Yeah, the completely rebuilt from scratch SC remake was announced in 2021. It's had problems retaining leadership and talent. The original director left in 2022. He came back in December 2025.
I think we might see this game sometime in 2027. Still no word on if they've gotten Michael Ironside back or not.
@JVCIOM70 You are the only person I've ever seen say they like S&B. That game is awful. It could have been great. The original trailer was great. Then Ubisoft management decided to make it a live service game. The only reason Ubisoft didn't cancel the game is because of a financial agreement with Singapore's government. No way should S&B and BF ever crossover. That would just encourage Ubisoft in their live service, story is irrelevent/make your own story, madness.
@CurryPowderKeg79 IMO one of the reasons Ubisoft green lit this remake is because S&B was an unmitigated disaster, and Ubisoft knew it would be even years before its release. S&B started as the response to the "we want more pirates!!" hype generated by Black Flag.
This remake is reportedly going to replace the present day/Animus content with more pirate action, and introduce new pirates like Ann Bonny and Mary Reed into the story.
Rockstar hasn't released a "janky" or "broken" GTA game yet. This is one of the reasons they take so long and are frequently delayed. Take Two's not afraid to tell their shareholders "it'll be done when it's done, and we'll all make lots of money" so the idea this isn't going to legitimately be a 10/10 game on PS5 (we'll see about XBox because of the compromises they have to make for the Series S) is preposterous. It won't require a massive "release it and fix it on day one" patch, either.
I highly doubt there will be another delay too. Looking forward to making this the only game I've preordered in a long while.
@Midnyte-Monkey I played A Thief's End and The Lost Legacy for the first time recently, and IMO they're great. I read this article because immediately after finishing them I wanted more. As many have already written, A Thief's End has an epilogue that could easily set up another game with an older Drake accompanying his kid.
The new characters in The Lost Legacy I think could also carry the franchise forward because, unlike the recent Wolfenstein spinoff, IMO The Lost Legacy still plays and "looks" like it's part of the franchise. Hopefully, Naughty Dog will be able to get back to the franchise someday. I don't think a game franchise is necessarily ever "dead," it's all about the execution. The writing, gameplay, etc.
@TheUnrestCure We've seen something like this with Tomb Raider. I don't know how well those non-AAA Tomb Raider games did. IMO, it ultimately still comes down to the same issue as developing brand new IP, risk aversion.
When a franchise has become identified as a certain type of game, using the IP in new ways is risky because many fans may say "What is this?!?! This isn't [insert franchise name]! I hate this!!" The game might make "enough" money simply because the costs are less with a Telltale type game, but the studio/publisher simultaneously has a PR mess with the franchise's most loyal and vocal fans to deal with. That kind of thing can end up harming preorders and initial sales of the next game in the franchise as fans wait to see if the developer/publisher has "screwed up" the next game.
@Boomers-r-us No, they're not devoid of new ideas. Like the article said, the problem is AAA game development has gotten so expensive publisher and dev management are reluctant to green light something new. Even if a game earns GOTY nominations from critics and sells pretty well, if it "misses sales targets" set by the developer/publisher, that can get a studio shut down and everybody laid off.
Everybody says they want new ideas and new IP, but sales charts don't back that up. The top 12 selling games in the US in 2025:
1. BF6
2. NBA2K26
3. Borderlands 4
4. Monster Hunter: Wilds
5. BO7
6. Madden
7. College Football 26
8. FC 26 (#1 in Europe)
9. Oblivion: Remastered
10. BO6
11. Ghost of Yotei
12. MLB The Show 25
Gamers say they want new IP, but their buying habits say they don't. Many of these games do have new stories/settings but they all follow established formulas within the same franchise. Five of them are annualized sports games. Furthermore, everybody already knows what 2026's top two games will be, GTA and COD.
A game can get all the GOTY nominations possible and genuinely be an awesome game. If the game doesn't sell, developers and publishers ultimately don't care because video games are a business. AAA games are just too expensive to risk the investment on something that may not work.
Ironically, that's one of the reasons why I'm surprised Uncharted hasn't gotten a new game in a while.
I'm really shocked by how many gamers don't understand that the "old way," where each console release was an individual generation and only a relatively small amount of brand loyalty kept Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo from all "starting from scratch" in terms of sales, is completely and utterly dead. Microsoft could end putting their games on PS tomorrow, and never do it again. It's not going to help them.
Pre-digital downloads, each company had much more of a chance to convince gamers to switch from PS/XBox/Nintendo than they do now. If digital games & dlc had been an established market back when the 360 released, IMO it would have failed. Microsoft would have had to convince PS owners to abandon their digital purchases.
The XBox console's days were numbered when Mattrick and Microsoft utterly botched the XBox One. By 2023, the XB1 had only shipped 58 million units. Heading into the Series S/X generation, Microsoft started several million behind because, absent Sony making huge errors, the vast majority of PS owners who decided to buy a new console were going to buy a PS5 because few gamers want to abandon their digital purchases.
Phil talked about the fact Microsoft knew all this even before the Series X/S released. They could only close the built-in sales gap if Sony did something so stupid gamers decided to abandon PS and their digital downloads, or "go big" and bet on an exclusive so huge it would drive millions of console sales. At the time, there was only one game that could do that, COD. So Microsoft bought ABK. Unfortunately, the entire plan fell apart, and Microsoft had to commit to COD remaining multiplatform in order to get the acquistion done.
Microsoft should have killed that deal when the COD exclusivity plan fell apart. They'd financially be better off if they did, but Series X/S console sales would still be in bad shape relative to Playstation 5 sales, and they'd be facing the same "hole" when the next consoles release. If somebody at Microsoft could have seen into the future, IMO they would have walked away from the ABK deal and tried to get a deal done making Fortnite an XBox console exclusive.
The only way the XBox hardware survives is if Microsoft somehow legally finds a way to make COD exclusive, or they get a deal done for Fortnite. Halo and Gears aren't going to do it anymore, and Nadella's not going to put up with a low performing division. Past Microsoft CEOs liked XBox and believed Microsoft should be in gaming. Nadella doesn't.
@Cikajovazmaj Nadella didn't want somebody with gaming industry experience. She was hired because of her AI experience/background. A few days ago, XBox founder Seamus Blackley pretty persuasively laid all of this out.
Nadella, and thus Microsoft, see everything from a generative AI model, including XBox. For XBox to continue to exist, it's going to have to exist from within that framework because Nadella's in charge and Microsoft has "bet" tons of money on generative AI. Anything that doesn't fit, Nadella's going to kill. As Blackley said, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Nadella's "hammer" is generative AI. The "nail" is XBox and everything else Microsoft does. He said that Nadella believes generative AI is the solution to all problems. So he hired Sharma to determine how to use generative AI to fix XBox.
Blackley believes that's not going to work, so really, Sharma will be a "pallative care doctor" and usher XBox out of existance.
@Boxmonkey Legit questions. The longer this AI boom doesn't burst, does that push out the length of time the shortage exists? Or will this ease because, eventually, new production facilities come online?
Also, how does the SSD shortage play into all this? Will the RAM and SSD shortages likely get better simultaneously or is it more likely one gets better before the other?
What has me concerned/frustrated the most is IMO some of these corporations appear to not even be trying to ease the shortages, because that will reduce the $$ they can charge both enterprise clients and individual consumers, and their shareholders will hate that. Given that there's an obvious monetary benefit to this mess, what incentive do they have to ever end these shortages? It may take the AI bubble bursting to fix this mess.
@Dogbreath I'm really tempted to get the PSVR 2 for this game. Have you played the campaign? If so, how good is it and how long does it take to complete? Also, do you think the games currently available for the VR2 are worth a $400 purchase?
I may get the VR2 for this game because I'm an old guy who started with flight sims on my family's Apple IIe computer. I really miss them, and keep hoping they'll become more popular again. I loved the MicroProse PC games like Falcon 4.0 and the two F-117 games. I just can't get into a flight sim without combat like the Microsoft game, and we probably have at least a few months more to wait before AC8 is released.
@SoulsBourne128 A game almost has to try to be worse than S&B. The mere fact that Ubisoft hasn't buried that game and pretended it never existed tells you all you need to know about how bad their management is now.
One of the major differences between Mindseye and Cyberpunk is, reportedly, Cyberpunk at least broke even and possibly even made a profit off the preorders alone. There's no way Mindseye made anywhere near that when it launched. Now that they've split from IOI, I have no idea where they'd even get the funding to even try to fix Mindseye.
Build a Rocket Boy should focus on a new game as its "redemption" as a studio. Putting more work, and more money, into Mindseye could take down the entire studio and result in unemployment for everybody. We've seen far too many studio closures and layoffs already, nobody wants to see more people in gaming out of work.
I love this series. I'm really happy the next installment is on the way. It'll be one of the 2-3 games I preorder this year because the quality's always very good and AC Zero was great.
@Ichiban I disagree, this remake is absolutely necessary. I want another pirate game. I've wanted one ever since BF. Sadly, they managed to horribly mangle Skull & Bones, which originally was supposed to capitalize on the popularity of BF.
Plus the remake is rumored to have ditched the Animus stuff for more pirate action, including new characters like Anne Bonny and Mary Reed.
Ubisoft managed to screw up the pirate game everybody wanted after playing Black Flag. All they had to do was finish and release the SP non-AC pirate game they showed off in the first trailer. That game IMO would have printed money. Basically, people just wanted BF but without the Animus, Templars and Assassins. What did they actually release several years later? Skull & Bones. A game nobody wanted.
All this is to say I don't put it past Ubisoft management to have done, or do, something stupid and decide to not release the BF remake, especially if they can't figure out how to jam "live service" into it.
@Ainu20 This has been a pattern for Ubisoft for multiple years now. Not "crashing a remake" per se, but getting a game pretty far along only to completely change direction or cancel it.
Perhaps the most financially costly example of this is what they did with Skull & Bones. Back when it was announced, everybody wanted a non-AC pirate story driven game. That's what S&B was planned to be when they showed off the first trailer. Sadly, at some point, Ubisoft management decided that S&B "neeeded" to be live service. Fast forward a year or two, and they still hadn't figured out how to do both what fans oringinally wanted and management's insistance on live service. So, we got a game where they wanted gamers to "create their own story" and buy lots of live service content.
Given that in their reorganization announcement Ubisoft mentioned that going forward they would concentrate on open world and live service titles. I would not be surprised if Ubisoft management decided that this version of Prince of Persia "needed" to be killed because the game wasn't going to meet at least one of those goals, and I bet it's the live service goal. Devs/publishers IMO haven't figured out how to do live service with primarily story based, single player games because really the only way to do it is to go back to old school story dlc. They don't want to do that, because it would require them to keep enough people on staff to continually crank out new content plus hire people to develop & support other projects. The employee churn we've seen in the gaming industry the last 4-5 years saves the companies money.
I don't know if French tax law allows Ubisoft to write off the development costs of cancelled games or not. If they can write off the costs, all this is a "win" for Ubisoft. Management bean counters don't care about anybody who gets hurt by the decision to kill a game.
Just finally had time to hook up my Ghost of Yotei PS5. Unfortunately, for some odd reason my WiFi connection is taking forever to download game updates (didn't have a problem updating the console and the controller.) So hopefully I'll be able to play GoY tomorrow. I enjoyed Tsushima so much, including the Legends mode which I didn't think I'd like, I know I'm going to love Yotei.
Is the Legends mode the only DLC we're likely to get or might there be at least one expansion for the main game like the Iki Island dlc for GoT?
As somebody who was skeptical of Microsoft's ability to compete, but eventually went from PS to XBox after the 360 was released and has owned the XB1 and a Series S too, I'm really sad to see what's happened to the XBox console business. I vividly recall having so much fun listening to Major Nelson, E, Stepto and Laura Lollipop Massey. Also vividly recall watching Major Nelson's video when Splosion Man was released. That and other things XBox did, like memes/jokes about the banhammer, back then was great fun. Now Major Nelson's working for Unity Technologies, LL's working for Apple I think, and Stepto sadly passed away in 2017. Not sure if E's still at XBox or not.
XBox got on the wrong path when Dan Mattrick tried to sell the XB1 as a living room entertainment machine that also played games. When the Series S/X was released, I thought Microsoft had learned from those mistakes. In hindsight, I guess they probably did, they just insisted on making new ones. I don't know if their decision to segment their own customer base by releasing the Series S is ultimately what did them in or not, but it probably didn't help. Many people want to blame the Activision/Blizzard purchase and Microsoft's reported 30% profit target as the downfall of the console, but IMO we'd "still be here" even if they hadn't gone through with the purchase.
It's about the (lack of) games compared to PS and Nintendo. The last mainline Gears game, Gears 5, was released on the XB1 in 2019. Halo Infinite did well with 20 million players by January 2022, but ever since then...? There are multiple great exclusives on both PS and Switch that have released since late 2021, and most gamers don't want or can't afford two consoles. I guess you could blame the Activision/Blizzard purchase for costing Microsoft money that otherwise could have been used to do exclusivity deals, but I don't think we should assume Microsoft could have gotten those deals done. By their own admission they lost the "console war" to Sony because of the XB1. After that, Sony would have had to make serious mistakes to cause gamers to abandon their PS digital libraries and move to the S/X. Given the disparity in sales/brand loyalty to begin with, IMO only paying for COD to be XBox exclusives might have turned things around. However, if Activision was still an independent company, given Nadella's indifference to gaming and going all-in on AI/CoPilot, I don't think XBox could have ever even afforded to pay Activision for exclusivity.
My Ghost of Yotei PS5 bundle just arrived, so I'll be playing a lot of that game. If it's as good as Ghost of Tsushima was, I may not play anything else all weekend. If I do play something else, it'll be the Task Force Admiral Vol. 1 demo on my laptop.
I just bought a PS5 (pressed "buy" for the Ghost of Yotei bundle even before I was halfway through Ghost of Tsushima on my PC) so I really can't comment on how this year was for the console.
For gaming overall, IMO we're going to look back on this year as an extremely important year. Sony continued to move toward manufacturing even more gaming hardware with the announcement of a 27" gaming monitor with controller charging capability. Microsoft got into the handheld market, and seemingly decided on a confused halfway in/halfway out mess of a "strategy" for the XBox console, and Valve announced it's getting into the console space with the Steam Machine.
Regardless of whether you play on console, PC or handheld, gaming got more expensive this year too. With the RAM apocalypse growing instead of getting better, we might look back on the price hikes we saw this year as "quaint." It's already reportedly caused Sony to think more about the announcement/release date for the PS6. Whatever console Microsoft insists it's going to release will probably also get delayed. Both consoles will also probably release at higher prices because of the tarrifs and the RAM apocalypse that began this year.
If the price hikes dramatically reduce the purchase of new gaming laptops & desktops in 2026, I wonder if developers will rethink their graphic design strategies to make sure they don't outpace gamers ability to upgrade to play new games on the highest settings.
Lastly, 2025 might just have been the first dent in COD's "armor." The Black Ops 7 release quickly caused Activision/Microsoft to go into damage control mode and announce BO and MW won't ever have b2b releases again. Maybe it's just me, but I think the problem's bigger than that. With BO7's endgame mode, it seems to me like they're moving away from the traditional single player experience to more live service multiplayer like Warzone, and a large number of gamers don't want that. If 2026's game releases to a similar response, Activison's got a major problem.
The only things that seemed to remain consistent this year are Fortnite and Nintendo. Fortnite continued to dominate in a way nohody's been able to replicate, and Nintendo kept doing what they do with the Switch 2.
@old_gamer74 Black Flag is great!! It's still the best pirate themed game ever by far, and my favorite game in the AC franchise. Heck, it might be my most favorite Ubisoft game. The remake that should be out in 2026 (rumor is perhaps as soon as March) I think will be even better because it supposedly removes the present day content in favor of more pirate action.
Finally got around to playing Ghost of Tsushima on my laptop. I've completed the main story and now I'm doing the dlc. It's such an amazing game I bought the Ghost of Yotei PS5 bundle so I don't have to wait to play the sequel.
Whats everybody's opinion on the PS5 version of Rise of the Ronin? I know the launch of the PC port was pretty rough. I hope the original version is better.
I haven't gotten around to playing Robocop yet, so I didn't even know this was a standalone expansion. I just assumed this was DLC.
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Either way, I agree, companies responding to consumers by either releasing DLC they originally hadn't planned on releasing, or by developing a shorter standalone game using assets that didn't quite make it into the original game is awesome to see.
IMO, it seems like over the past 5-10 years developers/publishers, and especially their shareholders, have been chasing the money train that is COD/GTA/Fortnite. COD and GTA as an example of the AAA big budget game, and Fortnite as a live service game. In doing that, it seems like the "AA game" was forgotten. Hopefully smaller games like this one and Mafia will be well received and remind publishers there's money to be made everywhere, as long as the game's good.
According to a 1983 article in Infoworld, the VCS/Atari 2600 sold 10 million consoles in just the US by 1982. Because of Pac Man, they sold an additional 12 million consoles and 120 million cartridges by the end of 1982 alone. Internationally, the system sold 450,000 units in West Germany by 1984, and another 600,000 in France by the end of the decade. The system wasn't popular in Japan, however. Because of Japan's smaller population, the Famicom "only" sold 2.5 million units from 1983-1984.
Redesigned and named the NES, the console wasn't test marketed outside of Japan until October 1985 and wasn't released for sale worldwide until September 1986. There was an existing video game market in the US and and a few other countries well before that point. Heck, the market was sufficiently mature enough to crash in 1983. (Also, remember that because of the Iron Curtain and communist regimes in China and elsewhere in Asia, video game systems were legally available for sale in far fewer countries back then.)
Stop being nationalistic. Neither Japan nor the US can claim the popularity of video games would be what it is now without developers and consumers in both countries. Nobody did this on their own, with the possible exception of Ralph Baer, who invented the Magnivox Odyssey in 1972. That system inspired the guys who created Atari and developed Pong.
IMO, the reaction to this is "about" much more than just the closure of this studio. During the last round of layoffs, Microsoft said great things about the performance of one of the games...and Microsoft management still closed the studio. I feel badly for the Microsoft PR people, they're in a no-win situation.
Nadella wants out of the gaming business, and has since day one. Microsoft made a fateful decision when they made the XB1's focus "a living room machine that plays games" instead of keeping the focus on their core audience that made the 360 such a success. They screwed up so badly with the XB1 that Spencer eventually said the console "war" is over, and Sony won because gamers had already built up such large digital libraries by the end of that generation very few people were going to switch and lose access to all that content. Unless Sony made self inflicted mistakes and screwed up really badly, from a hardware perspective XBox was "dead" from the very beginning of this generation. Especially because consoles are intially sold at a loss, which I'm sure Nadella and the shareholders hate.
Basically, everything since the end of the XB1 generation has been about Spencer trying to keep XBox alive despite what Nadella and the shareholders want. I wouldn't be surprised if Nadella even wants out of Gamepass, becuase it's clear the numbers just don't work, and were crazy from the beginning.
They were probably too far down the road for Nadella to have killed off the Series X/S before it launched, but I am absolutely stunned that XBox keeps claiming they're going to release another console. If they do, IMO it not only is going to function more like a PC than a traditional console, it may look like one too.
@itsfoz EA tried reviving MoH, but it's EA so that didn't go well.
SOCOM's been gone so long, and I'm so old, I mostly can just recall fond memories of the PS2. I do remember the last title tried to copy COD though.
Sadly, I don't know if we'll get a "COD killer" like COD helped shove MoH into the grave EA had already dug for it. The cost of AAA development is so high, and investors/corporate suits so risk averse, IMO it's going to be difficult for someone else to even have the opportunity to dethrone them. More likely, COD just keeps going like one of their zombies (or the Madden franchise) and gamers keep buying it because there's not much else for single player shooter gamers on consoles. This is especially true if Battlefield shoots itself in both feet like they did with that last game.
I'd really love for SOCOM to come back. But I think if it did investors would want the game to be like COD, because it's all about chasing the same "golden goose" somebody else has already created, and the game would die a quick death (again.)
I haven't taken the time to try and get a translation of the original source written in Polish, but the $36 million Techland claims they're "losing" almost certainly includes the money they've already spent on development of a game that in their opinion just isn't financially viable. Meaning, to create a game out of whatever's already been done they'd have to spend even more money, all for something that still isn't necessarily going to sell. That kind of a management decision can end up tanking the entire company. In most cases, it's much better to simply abandon what isn't working rather than spend more money trying to salvage a mess. The sunk cost fallacy is real.
In today's gaming world, cancellations almost always mean layoffs as studios "get lean" while they're trying to decide what to do next. It sucks for employees, but from the developer's perspective they don't need as many people if they're just in the initial/early conceptual and design phase of development. They'll potentially get bigger if/when they're further along in development. AI's going to continue to disrupt the size of this cycle, of course.
Gaming isn't the only industry that behaves like this. For example, a slowdown in sales of cars often leads to a slowdown in factory production. Dealerships don't need more inventory they can't sell, and an automaker doesn't need 10,000 cars sitting on a lot waiting to be shipped to dealerships so they cut production. That=factory layoffs.
Remember, every large corporation in the world, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, Toyota, Nissan, whatever...exists to maximize "shareholder value." Cutting projects that result in layoffs = savings. Humans are the biggest "cost" for a corporation and make no mistake, they all see employees as simply a cost to be minimized. The major difference in these layoffs seems to be that because Microsoft is headquartered in the US there's often no warning because the US doesn't have any federal laws that mandate employees be given any warning at all. If the corporation is located in a so-called "right to work" state, there are even fewer employee protections than in other states.
Benzies (and Gerhard) both need to shut up. The publisher, IO Interactive, flatly denied Gerhard's allegations and they'll probably deny these too if they're asked.
Ultimately, the major reason this game hasn't a chance at a "redemption arc" comes down to $$. Cyberpunk was profitable the day it released because the wild hype and lengthy development time led to an incredible amount of preorders. Not to mention the fact CDPR had built up goodwill among gamers.
This game, the studio's new, very few people preordered it, and even fewer are purchasing it now because the game's trash. On Steam, Mindseye hit a 24-hour peak of 46 players. As of 10 am this morning, only 26 people were playing. I doubt the console numbers are much, if any, better.
So the CEOs are going to have to convince investors to foot the cost of fixing this broken mess. All while Gebhard is apparently working on another game titled Ascendant, which was originally scheduled to be released this year. I'll be stunned if that game's ever released.
This is why delays and sometimes cancellations are ultimately less costly than releasing a rushed or poorly done game. A bad/broken attempt at a AAA game usually will take a new studio down with it.
@get2sammyb According to Jeff Grubb back in 2024, he'd been "hearing for years" that Perfect Dark was in "rough shape" overall. That's why Microsoft had to get Crystal Dynamics involved in 2021. They weren't originally supposed to work on this game.
IMO Perfect Dark was doomed from the start because, according to Grubb, development began with Microsoft unable/unwiling to set a clear direction for it. Management allegedly initially couldn't decide if the Perfect Dark reboot should be a FPS or not!
Management paralysis/dysfunction is the beginning of a perfect storm that'll usually lead to cancellation/vaporware.
Cyberpunk has to be the greatest reclimation project in video game history. Heck, it might be the greatest reclimation project in software history. What the devs at CD Projekt Red were able to do, once management backed off and gave them the time they needed to do it, is nothing short of phenominal.
When the game launched, I was really down on them. The fixes, expansions, dlc, etc. that have gotten pushed out by the devs since that disasterous launch day remind me of the good things we all hoped online connectivity could bring to video games when Internet capable consoles first launched. In the old days, this game would have just stayed broken and hardly anybody would have gotten to see how the devs wanted this game to look and how they wanted it to play.
As an XBox owner, IMO nobody should be buying a console expecting a ton of permanantly console exclusive games anymore. Both Microsoft and Sony game division executives have upper management and investors to answer to. For XBox games that's obviously going to happen sooner than for PS games, but eventually most, if not all, PS games are going to appear on PC. It makes too much $ sense for them not to. The only exception to this financial "rule" is Nintendo. They've always been different, and absent a major financial disaster nobody can reasonably predict happening, always will be.
So the questions become "Can I afford a gaming PC and how long do I want to wait for a PS/XBox game to appear on a device I don't have? And, how much do I really want to play a game on the original system it was designed for?" I gotta admit, even though I have a gaming laptop, if Sony released a Ghost of Tsushima bundle instead of this Black Ops 6 bundle I'd press a website "Buy" button in less than a second. It's irrational, but I'd do it.
I definitely agree that the price of the PS5 consoles are unlikely to get better until after the PS6 releases. But a multiplatform game like BO6 and the games that aren't already on PC just don't move the needle for me, even though the irrational FOMO part of my brain is definitely screaming "Buy it!!" anyway.
Given that it appears likely Sony's got some kind of a deal with Rockstar in place for GTA 6, if there's a bundle that'll fly off the shelves, and my FOMO will be screaming "Buy it!!" too even though I already own an XBox. IMO, a Ghost of Yotei bundle would quickly sell out too, and that I would definitely preorder in a second.
I thought about purchasing a PS5 for Ghost of Yoti and to play Rise of the Ronin, but it's just not worth it now because eventually Ronin's reported issues will (hopefully) be fixed and Yoti will be on PC in a year or two.
If nothing else, Microsoft's "issues" already caused me to decide to switch back to PS next generation. Now I'm not sure I'll buy another console at all. MS's strategy is 100% about putting XBox everywhere, so there won't be any console specific games at all. PS games eventually appear on PC, they just take longer to get there.
One thing I'm slightly concerned about is the fact the new price point for even digital versions of console games is likely to be $70-80 now. At what point do Steam, Epic and other digital PC storefronts and/or PC game publishers raise prices, if for no other reason than just because they can? I wouldn't bet on this not happening.
Secondly, how does this all impact GTA 6? As we all know, that game will sell to current console owners even if it's released at $100 (or more, in some countries.) But will it sell many new consoles? I don't know about that anymore. If it doesn't meet the new console sales expectations set by Wall Street analysts, how soon does Rockstar release it on PC? Rockstar's management has to be at least a little frustrated by this mess. The game's much too far down the road to release a PC version at launch, and they don't want to release a rushed port that just has to be massively fixed later because that leads to bad press and fewer initial sales.
Forgot about another thing, sports games. Does this cause EA, and even smaller studios like San Diego Studios the developer of MLB the Show, to start releasing their games on PC at launch next year?
@Dampsponge I agree with you. I know this is definitely not the first collectors edition to do this. I forget which game it was, but the first time I heard about a collector's edition being released without a physical game on disc I was like, "How? Then it's really not a collector's edition of the game. It's just a bunch of stuff related to the game put in a big box." 😂
Was there always going to be a DLC "roadmap?" I thought I'd read elsewhere (maybe GR?) that, prior to Shadow's launch Ubi only planned to release one DLC mission. If they've pivoted from that and decided to release more content because the response to the game is so positive I think that's great.
Yeah, I'm an old guy with "adult responsibilities" now and don't have the time to play nearly as much as I did 25 years ago. But I still absolutely love "big" games where I can spend 50- 60 or more hours on single player content (if the content's good of course.) I never understood the "it's too big/too long" criticism Valhalla got. Now that AC and a few other franchises are being spun off into their own company, if management wants to let the developers create new content for months until they absolutely "have" to move on to support development of the next game in the franchise, I'd be very happy with that.
@Bingoboyop This is hopefully shaping up to be the anti-2024. Even if GTA gets pushed to 2026, if everything else in your list releases on time or close to it, this year will IMO be a lot more packed (and fun) than last year. I kind of felt like last year was pretty sparse other than the "usual suspects" like COD.
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Re: Ghost of Yotei's Free Legends PS5 Update Looks Generous in the Live Service Age
I really hope SP ends up making even more money on new sales of Ghost of Yotei because of this. I'm not a MP guy, but I tried Legends in GoT because I loved the game so much I wanted to squeeze more time out of it. I was surprised how much I liked Legends. I'll definitely be playing it in Yotei.
Has it been confirmed whether or not we're getting any SP DLC? Not sure where they could go with that, but one can always hope!
Re: 'Exclusives Are Absolutely Not Happening': Xbox Helix Will Share Library with PS6
@JackiePriest IMO, it's the ABK purchase that changed XBox's fate. The only way that purchase goes well is if they could have made COD an XBox and PC GamePass exclusive. When it looked like legal hurdles were going to prevent approval of the sale unless they committed to keeping COD multiplatform, Microsoft should have walked away from the deal. After that decision, the console's fate was sealed IMO. The money just doesn't make sense after that. Halo & Gears aren't massive system sellers like COD would have been, and Nadella and Microsoft shareholders very clearly don't want to "subsidize" XBox, or any other hardware that isn't immediately profitable.
Re: 'Exclusives Are Absolutely Not Happening': Xbox Helix Will Share Library with PS6
This is definitely Microsoft's last "console," and it's really a small form factor PC more than it is a console. Helix is likely XBox One Part Deux rather than a successor to the Series S/X. Depending on the price of the Steam Machine it's probably going to go about as well as the sales of that device did.
I can definitely see why Valve doesn't want to launch until they've exhausted all efforts into trying to get the Steam Machine under $1K-1,200. Really, the only console on the market next generation will be from Sony (PS5 Pro & PS6). The "living room PC" will be Steam Machine vs. XBox, and whichever one is cheaper ends up winning that sales battle.
I feel badly for Sharma, because she had nothing to do with the decisions that went into this console. IMO, Phil appears to have lost whatever "battles" there were during the planning/R&D for this device, and decided to get out (like other well known/public facing XBox employees) rather than be the public face of this device like Mattrick was the face of XB1.
Sharma might really actually "hear" XBox fans about the desire for more exclusives, but there's nothing she can do about it. Even if she tries to get Nadella to backtrack and keep the next Halo & Gears on Helix, all that's going to do is kill the sales of those games. They're not going to be able to sell a $1-1,200 device. Only GTA and COD could sell a device this expensive. Nadella and XBox shareholders clearly don't want to subsidize console sales anymore. Microsoft might stay in the controller manufacturing business for PC. But after Helix, they're done with consoles.
Re: 'They're Not Going to Delay PS6': Hardware Leaker Says 2027 Still Likely After Xbox Helix Reveal
I really don't understand why Sony would release the PS6 earlier than they originally planned.
Hexe is going to face the same dynamics as the Series X/S did when those consoles released. The era where millions of gamers shifted from PS to XBox or vice versa when a new console is released is over. It ended during the XB1 generation, which Microsoft lost thanks to Mattrick and his attempt to push that console as a living room machine that just happened to also play games.
Millions of gamers aren't going to abandon their digital purchases on PS to buy Hexe just like they didn't abandon PS to buy a Series X or Series S. Millions of gamers abandoning PS to buy Hexe is even more unlikely if it costs $1K USD or more. IMO, if Sony thinks it needs to move up the PS6 release date, they've just got a corporate case of FOMO.
Furthermore, unless Valve inexplicably decides "just kidding, we're not really going to release the Steam Machine," a $1K Hexe ultimately isn't going to pull a lot of sales away from Valve's device either.
We're also all assuming that Sharma/XBox means "Steam games" when they say Hexe will play PC games. I'm not so sure about that. The XBox store does sell PC games and they at least used to have a PC version of GamePass.
IMO including Steam on Hexe would be problematic for Microsoft because of multiplayer. Either they're baking into that $1,000-1,200 console price the costs associated with eliminating XBL subscriptions entirely or they're going to have a problem convincing PC gamers to pay for something that they don't currently pay for via Steam.
In other words, Microsoft either loses money by making XBL free to everybody (and the costs to maintain the XBL infrastructure aren't getting any cheaper...) or most Steam consumers keep playing on their current setup or buy the Steam Machine. Either one, Nadella's not going to like.
Re: 'They're Not Going to Delay PS6': Hardware Leaker Says 2027 Still Likely After Xbox Helix Reveal
@StrickenBiged
In the US at least, most phones aren't purchased upfront like a console. They're paid for in monthly installments over 2-3 years. Also a study released last month showed that 29% of people were considering leasing their next phone instead of purchasing it upfront or in monthly installments. If Microsoft releases a $1K console and both the PS6 and the Valve Steam Machine are cheaper, Nadella kills Hexe and XBox entirely within 2-3 years.
Re: PS6 Competitor from Xbox Revealed as Project Helix
@Bez87 This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical that Hexe is going to include Steam. IMO, there isn't a world where putting Steam on this console actually works out well for Microsoft.
If they put Steam on Hexe, and then tell PC gamers "sorry, you're going to have to pay for XBL to play multiplayer" the only gamers who don't quickly run the other direction will be those who have more money than brains. This is especially true because the Steam Machine will eventually be released. If you're a PC gamer, Hexe and the Steam Machine will give you the same ability to play your games using your 4K HDTV. Only a multiplayer gamer with, quite literally, money to burn would choose Hexe if they have to pay for XBL.
If you're Microsoft and don't force PC gamers to pay for XBL your console gamers are going to, metaphorically, riot. They're already not doing well with console sales and GP subscriptions have stagnated. Microsoft's still got to pay for the infrastructure that runs XBL. They can't afford more PR messes that cause more losses. Nadella isn't Gates & Co. He won't allow XBox to be a "loss leader."
Everybody seems to forget that the XBox store does sell PC games, and there at least used to be a PC version of GP. (Not sure if it was phased out in their latest round of changes or not.) IMO, we're going to find out Microsoft's being a bit disingenuous here, and Hexe doesn't include Steam, Epic or GOG.
Re: PS6 Competitor from Xbox Revealed as Project Helix
@Crimson_Raven
Sharma hasn't been on the job long enough to introduce new ideas. She didn't make this announcement knowing that Hexe isn't going to be released for another 2-3 years. It's coming sooner rather than later, IMO no later than holiday 2027. Hexe has almost certainly been in development for at least a couple years.
Every time a new rumor about this console has been reported, I've thought and said the same thing. Given the fact they've made the decision to go multiplatform as a publisher and the fact they're not ever going to catch up to PS in console sales, the biggest reason they're releasing another console is it's already a sunk cost. They've already done the R&D and acquired the components to manufacture Hexe at scale. What else are they going to do with (some of) those components if they don't release the device?
Nadella hired Sharma to be a "pallative care" doctor for XBox. He's going to eventually kill the console just like he's killed off many other Microsoft hardware products (Hololens, Surface Book, Surface Studio), he just can't do it yet. I've owned XBox consoles since the 360. I'll be sad when dedicated XBox consoles are dead, but I just don't see how Nadella allows them to live beyond another 3-5 years.
Re: PS6 Competitor from Xbox Revealed as Project Helix
Because Sony's changed their stance on PC ports of non-live service games and I can't bare the thought of missing out on any future Sucker Punch games in the Ghost franchise or Naughty Dog hopefully eventually returning to Uncharted, I won't be purchasing this console.
However...
The RAMpocalypse isn't getting better until 2028-2029 at best; with 2030 more likely. If Micosoft's determined to release in 2027, how much is Hexe going to cost? The recent report/rumor that claimed Microsoft's next console would cost $1K USD may actually turn out to be true.
Secondly, does Microsoft have a deal with Steam or Epic, or will Hexe only play PC games purchased from the XBox Store?Microsoft's been unable to "dethrone" Steam and grab more of their 75% marketshare for years.
As usual, IMO Microsoft's strategy here is odd. As a publisher, they're going multiplatform because they lost the console sales "war" to Sony a long time ago. With Hexe, it seems to me like they're going to try to convert PC gamers into console gamers by touting the fact that Hexe will make it easy for them to play their games on their big screen 4K HDTV. They're not getting a large number of gamers to abandon their PS and they know it, so the only market left to target is PC gamers.
Third, if Microsoft's targeting PC gamers, will Valve now be pressured into releasing the Steam Machine earlier than they'd like and selling each one at a loss like MS and Sony do, or will they "just deal" with any PR backlash because of the RAMpocalypse-caused pricing?
Lastly, if Hexe doesn't sell well, how long until Nadella kills XBox off? IMO, the console doesn't reach its 5th birthday.
Re: Ubisoft Officially Reveals Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Remake, Gives Hexe and PvP Game Updates
@NonbinaryStarr Yeah, the completely rebuilt from scratch SC remake was announced in 2021. It's had problems retaining leadership and talent. The original director left in 2022. He came back in December 2025.
I think we might see this game sometime in 2027. Still no word on if they've gotten Michael Ironside back or not.
Re: Ubisoft Officially Reveals Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Remake, Gives Hexe and PvP Game Updates
@JVCIOM70 You are the only person I've ever seen say they like S&B. That game is awful. It could have been great. The original trailer was great. Then Ubisoft management decided to make it a live service game. The only reason Ubisoft didn't cancel the game is because of a financial agreement with Singapore's government. No way should S&B and BF ever crossover. That would just encourage Ubisoft in their live service, story is irrelevent/make your own story, madness.
Re: Ubisoft Officially Reveals Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Remake, Gives Hexe and PvP Game Updates
@CurryPowderKeg79 IMO one of the reasons Ubisoft green lit this remake is because S&B was an unmitigated disaster, and Ubisoft knew it would be even years before its release. S&B started as the response to the "we want more pirates!!" hype generated by Black Flag.
This remake is reportedly going to replace the present day/Animus content with more pirate action, and introduce new pirates like Ann Bonny and Mary Reed into the story.
Re: Rumour: GTA 6 Pre-Orders Incoming as Game IDs Are Finally Added to PS5 Database
@Yousef- Me too. I really don't want to have to delete everything on my drive to play this game.
Re: Rumour: GTA 6 Pre-Orders Incoming as Game IDs Are Finally Added to PS5 Database
Rockstar hasn't released a "janky" or "broken" GTA game yet. This is one of the reasons they take so long and are frequently delayed. Take Two's not afraid to tell their shareholders "it'll be done when it's done, and we'll all make lots of money" so the idea this isn't going to legitimately be a 10/10 game on PS5 (we'll see about XBox because of the compromises they have to make for the Series S) is preposterous. It won't require a massive "release it and fix it on day one" patch, either.
I highly doubt there will be another delay too. Looking forward to making this the only game I've preordered in a long while.
Re: Opinion: If Sony's Doubling Down on Its Most Popular Franchises, Where's Uncharted?
@Ravix I just got a PS5 so I'm new to this "party." When did this screenshot get released and what was the context?
Re: Opinion: If Sony's Doubling Down on Its Most Popular Franchises, Where's Uncharted?
@Midnyte-Monkey I played A Thief's End and The Lost Legacy for the first time recently, and IMO they're great. I read this article because immediately after finishing them I wanted more. As many have already written, A Thief's End has an epilogue that could easily set up another game with an older Drake accompanying his kid.
The new characters in The Lost Legacy I think could also carry the franchise forward because, unlike the recent Wolfenstein spinoff, IMO The Lost Legacy still plays and "looks" like it's part of the franchise. Hopefully, Naughty Dog will be able to get back to the franchise someday. I don't think a game franchise is necessarily ever "dead," it's all about the execution. The writing, gameplay, etc.
Re: Opinion: If Sony's Doubling Down on Its Most Popular Franchises, Where's Uncharted?
@TheUnrestCure We've seen something like this with Tomb Raider. I don't know how well those non-AAA Tomb Raider games did. IMO, it ultimately still comes down to the same issue as developing brand new IP, risk aversion.
When a franchise has become identified as a certain type of game, using the IP in new ways is risky because many fans may say "What is this?!?! This isn't [insert franchise name]! I hate this!!" The game might make "enough" money simply because the costs are less with a Telltale type game, but the studio/publisher simultaneously has a PR mess with the franchise's most loyal and vocal fans to deal with. That kind of thing can end up harming preorders and initial sales of the next game in the franchise as fans wait to see if the developer/publisher has "screwed up" the next game.
Re: Opinion: If Sony's Doubling Down on Its Most Popular Franchises, Where's Uncharted?
@Boomers-r-us No, they're not devoid of new ideas. Like the article said, the problem is AAA game development has gotten so expensive publisher and dev management are reluctant to green light something new. Even if a game earns GOTY nominations from critics and sells pretty well, if it "misses sales targets" set by the developer/publisher, that can get a studio shut down and everybody laid off.
Everybody says they want new ideas and new IP, but sales charts don't back that up. The top 12 selling games in the US in 2025:
1. BF6
2. NBA2K26
3. Borderlands 4
4. Monster Hunter: Wilds
5. BO7
6. Madden
7. College Football 26
8. FC 26 (#1 in Europe)
9. Oblivion: Remastered
10. BO6
11. Ghost of Yotei
12. MLB The Show 25
Gamers say they want new IP, but their buying habits say they don't. Many of these games do have new stories/settings but they all follow established formulas within the same franchise. Five of them are annualized sports games. Furthermore, everybody already knows what 2026's top two games will be, GTA and COD.
A game can get all the GOTY nominations possible and genuinely be an awesome game. If the game doesn't sell, developers and publishers ultimately don't care because video games are a business. AAA games are just too expensive to risk the investment on something that may not work.
Ironically, that's one of the reasons why I'm surprised Uncharted hasn't gotten a new game in a while.
Re: 'The Plan's the Plan Until It's Not the Plan': Xbox All Over the Place on Future PS5 Ports
I'm really shocked by how many gamers don't understand that the "old way," where each console release was an individual generation and only a relatively small amount of brand loyalty kept Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo from all "starting from scratch" in terms of sales, is completely and utterly dead. Microsoft could end putting their games on PS tomorrow, and never do it again. It's not going to help them.
Pre-digital downloads, each company had much more of a chance to convince gamers to switch from PS/XBox/Nintendo than they do now. If digital games & dlc had been an established market back when the 360 released, IMO it would have failed. Microsoft would have had to convince PS owners to abandon their digital purchases.
The XBox console's days were numbered when Mattrick and Microsoft utterly botched the XBox One. By 2023, the XB1 had only shipped 58 million units. Heading into the Series S/X generation, Microsoft started several million behind because, absent Sony making huge errors, the vast majority of PS owners who decided to buy a new console were going to buy a PS5 because few gamers want to abandon their digital purchases.
Phil talked about the fact Microsoft knew all this even before the Series X/S released. They could only close the built-in sales gap if Sony did something so stupid gamers decided to abandon PS and their digital downloads, or "go big" and bet on an exclusive so huge it would drive millions of console sales. At the time, there was only one game that could do that, COD. So Microsoft bought ABK. Unfortunately, the entire plan fell apart, and Microsoft had to commit to COD remaining multiplatform in order to get the acquistion done.
Microsoft should have killed that deal when the COD exclusivity plan fell apart. They'd financially be better off if they did, but Series X/S console sales would still be in bad shape relative to Playstation 5 sales, and they'd be facing the same "hole" when the next consoles release. If somebody at Microsoft could have seen into the future, IMO they would have walked away from the ABK deal and tried to get a deal done making Fortnite an XBox console exclusive.
The only way the XBox hardware survives is if Microsoft somehow legally finds a way to make COD exclusive, or they get a deal done for Fortnite. Halo and Gears aren't going to do it anymore, and Nadella's not going to put up with a low performing division. Past Microsoft CEOs liked XBox and believed Microsoft should be in gaming. Nadella doesn't.
Re: 'The Plan's the Plan Until It's Not the Plan': Xbox All Over the Place on Future PS5 Ports
@Cikajovazmaj Nadella didn't want somebody with gaming industry experience. She was hired because of her AI experience/background. A few days ago, XBox founder Seamus Blackley pretty persuasively laid all of this out.
Nadella, and thus Microsoft, see everything from a generative AI model, including XBox. For XBox to continue to exist, it's going to have to exist from within that framework because Nadella's in charge and Microsoft has "bet" tons of money on generative AI. Anything that doesn't fit, Nadella's going to kill. As Blackley said, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Nadella's "hammer" is generative AI. The "nail" is XBox and everything else Microsoft does. He said that Nadella believes generative AI is the solution to all problems. So he hired Sharma to determine how to use generative AI to fix XBox.
Blackley believes that's not going to work, so really, Sharma will be a "pallative care doctor" and usher XBox out of existance.
Re: Horror-Tinged Assassin's Creed Hexe Loses Its Creative Director Years into Development
The horror elements aren't really my thing. But to each his own.
Hexe isn't the only AC game that's been in a long development cycle. I don't think we've heard anything at all about AC Jade in over a year.
Re: Sony Will Offset Soaring RAM Prices by Further Monetising PS5 Players
@Boxmonkey Legit questions. The longer this AI boom doesn't burst, does that push out the length of time the shortage exists? Or will this ease because, eventually, new production facilities come online?
Also, how does the SSD shortage play into all this? Will the RAM and SSD shortages likely get better simultaneously or is it more likely one gets better before the other?
What has me concerned/frustrated the most is IMO some of these corporations appear to not even be trying to ease the shortages, because that will reduce the $$ they can charge both enterprise clients and individual consumers, and their shareholders will hate that. Given that there's an obvious monetary benefit to this mess, what incentive do they have to ever end these shortages? It may take the AI bubble bursting to fix this mess.
Re: Mini Review: Aces of Thunder (PSVR2) - Immersive Spectacle Throws You to the Wolves
@Dogbreath I'm really tempted to get the PSVR 2 for this game. Have you played the campaign? If so, how good is it and how long does it take to complete? Also, do you think the games currently available for the VR2 are worth a $400 purchase?
I may get the VR2 for this game because I'm an old guy who started with flight sims on my family's Apple IIe computer. I really miss them, and keep hoping they'll become more popular again. I loved the MicroProse PC games like Falcon 4.0 and the two F-117 games. I just can't get into a flight sim without combat like the Microsoft game, and we probably have at least a few months more to wait before AC8 is released.
Re: Pirate RPG Sea of Remnants Has Some Seriously Ambitious Post-Launch Plans
@SoulsBourne128 A game almost has to try to be worse than S&B. The mere fact that Ubisoft hasn't buried that game and pretended it never existed tells you all you need to know about how bad their management is now.
Re: Rumour: MindsEye Dev Splits From Hitman Publisher, Seeks to Fix 2025's Biggest Flop
One of the major differences between Mindseye and Cyberpunk is, reportedly, Cyberpunk at least broke even and possibly even made a profit off the preorders alone. There's no way Mindseye made anywhere near that when it launched. Now that they've split from IOI, I have no idea where they'd even get the funding to even try to fix Mindseye.
Build a Rocket Boy should focus on a new game as its "redemption" as a studio. Putting more work, and more money, into Mindseye could take down the entire studio and result in unemployment for everybody. We've seen far too many studio closures and layoffs already, nobody wants to see more people in gaming out of work.
Re: Rumour: Ace Combat 8 Online Beta Test Inbound, Pre-Order May Include a Whole Other Game
I love this series. I'm really happy the next installment is on the way. It'll be one of the 2-3 games I preorder this year because the quality's always very good and AC Zero was great.
Re: Even Ubisoft Is Poking Fun at the Endless Assassin's Creed 4 Remake Rumours
@Ichiban I disagree, this remake is absolutely necessary. I want another pirate game. I've wanted one ever since BF. Sadly, they managed to horribly mangle Skull & Bones, which originally was supposed to capitalize on the popularity of BF.
Plus the remake is rumored to have ditched the Animus stuff for more pirate action, including new characters like Anne Bonny and Mary Reed.
Re: Even Ubisoft Is Poking Fun at the Endless Assassin's Creed 4 Remake Rumours
Ubisoft managed to screw up the pirate game everybody wanted after playing Black Flag. All they had to do was finish and release the SP non-AC pirate game they showed off in the first trailer. That game IMO would have printed money. Basically, people just wanted BF but without the Animus, Templars and Assassins. What did they actually release several years later? Skull & Bones. A game nobody wanted.
All this is to say I don't put it past Ubisoft management to have done, or do, something stupid and decide to not release the BF remake, especially if they can't figure out how to jam "live service" into it.
Re: 'Everything Had Been Going Smoothly': Prince of Persia PS5 Remake Actress Found Out About Cancellation from Family
@Ainu20 This has been a pattern for Ubisoft for multiple years now. Not "crashing a remake" per se, but getting a game pretty far along only to completely change direction or cancel it.
Perhaps the most financially costly example of this is what they did with Skull & Bones. Back when it was announced, everybody wanted a non-AC pirate story driven game. That's what S&B was planned to be when they showed off the first trailer. Sadly, at some point, Ubisoft management decided that S&B "neeeded" to be live service. Fast forward a year or two, and they still hadn't figured out how to do both what fans oringinally wanted and management's insistance on live service. So, we got a game where they wanted gamers to "create their own story" and buy lots of live service content.
Given that in their reorganization announcement Ubisoft mentioned that going forward they would concentrate on open world and live service titles. I would not be surprised if Ubisoft management decided that this version of Prince of Persia "needed" to be killed because the game wasn't going to meet at least one of those goals, and I bet it's the live service goal. Devs/publishers IMO haven't figured out how to do live service with primarily story based, single player games because really the only way to do it is to go back to old school story dlc. They don't want to do that, because it would require them to keep enough people on staff to continually crank out new content plus hire people to develop & support other projects. The employee churn we've seen in the gaming industry the last 4-5 years saves the companies money.
I don't know if French tax law allows Ubisoft to write off the development costs of cancelled games or not. If they can write off the costs, all this is a "win" for Ubisoft. Management bean counters don't care about anybody who gets hurt by the decision to kill a game.
Re: In a Sea of Live Service, Ghost of Yotei Was the Third Best-Selling PS5 Game of 2025 in the US
Just finally had time to hook up my Ghost of Yotei PS5. Unfortunately, for some odd reason my WiFi connection is taking forever to download game updates (didn't have a problem updating the console and the controller.) So hopefully I'll be able to play GoY tomorrow. I enjoyed Tsushima so much, including the Legends mode which I didn't think I'd like, I know I'm going to love Yotei.
Is the Legends mode the only DLC we're likely to get or might there be at least one expansion for the main game like the Iki Island dlc for GoT?
Re: Xbox Sales Hit New Low in UK, Barely Competes with PS5 at This Point
As somebody who was skeptical of Microsoft's ability to compete, but eventually went from PS to XBox after the 360 was released and has owned the XB1 and a Series S too, I'm really sad to see what's happened to the XBox console business. I vividly recall having so much fun listening to Major Nelson, E, Stepto and Laura Lollipop Massey. Also vividly recall watching Major Nelson's video when Splosion Man was released. That and other things XBox did, like memes/jokes about the banhammer, back then was great fun. Now Major Nelson's working for Unity Technologies, LL's working for Apple I think, and Stepto sadly passed away in 2017. Not sure if E's still at XBox or not.
XBox got on the wrong path when Dan Mattrick tried to sell the XB1 as a living room entertainment machine that also played games. When the Series S/X was released, I thought Microsoft had learned from those mistakes. In hindsight, I guess they probably did, they just insisted on making new ones. I don't know if their decision to segment their own customer base by releasing the Series S is ultimately what did them in or not, but it probably didn't help. Many people want to blame the Activision/Blizzard purchase and Microsoft's reported 30% profit target as the downfall of the console, but IMO we'd "still be here" even if they hadn't gone through with the purchase.
It's about the (lack of) games compared to PS and Nintendo. The last mainline Gears game, Gears 5, was released on the XB1 in 2019. Halo Infinite did well with 20 million players by January 2022, but ever since then...? There are multiple great exclusives on both PS and Switch that have released since late 2021, and most gamers don't want or can't afford two consoles. I guess you could blame the Activision/Blizzard purchase for costing Microsoft money that otherwise could have been used to do exclusivity deals, but I don't think we should assume Microsoft could have gotten those deals done. By their own admission they lost the "console war" to Sony because of the XB1. After that, Sony would have had to make serious mistakes to cause gamers to abandon their PS digital libraries and move to the S/X. Given the disparity in sales/brand loyalty to begin with, IMO only paying for COD to be XBox exclusives might have turned things around. However, if Activision was still an independent company, given Nadella's indifference to gaming and going all-in on AI/CoPilot, I don't think XBox could have ever even afforded to pay Activision for exclusivity.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 614
My Ghost of Yotei PS5 bundle just arrived, so I'll be playing a lot of that game. If it's as good as Ghost of Tsushima was, I may not play anything else all weekend. If I do play something else, it'll be the Task Force Admiral Vol. 1 demo on my laptop.
Re: A Very Happy New Year to You
Sadly no, we're not driving hover cars yet. Science has even failed to give us the hoverboards I've wanted since 1985.
Happy New Year anyway everyone!
Re: Our PS5 Predictions for 2025 - Results Revealed
I just bought a PS5 (pressed "buy" for the Ghost of Yotei bundle even before I was halfway through Ghost of Tsushima on my PC) so I really can't comment on how this year was for the console.
For gaming overall, IMO we're going to look back on this year as an extremely important year. Sony continued to move toward manufacturing even more gaming hardware with the announcement of a 27" gaming monitor with controller charging capability. Microsoft got into the handheld market, and seemingly decided on a confused halfway in/halfway out mess of a "strategy" for the XBox console, and Valve announced it's getting into the console space with the Steam Machine.
Regardless of whether you play on console, PC or handheld, gaming got more expensive this year too. With the RAM apocalypse growing instead of getting better, we might look back on the price hikes we saw this year as "quaint." It's already reportedly caused Sony to think more about the announcement/release date for the PS6. Whatever console Microsoft insists it's going to release will probably also get delayed. Both consoles will also probably release at higher prices because of the tarrifs and the RAM apocalypse that began this year.
If the price hikes dramatically reduce the purchase of new gaming laptops & desktops in 2026, I wonder if developers will rethink their graphic design strategies to make sure they don't outpace gamers ability to upgrade to play new games on the highest settings.
Lastly, 2025 might just have been the first dent in COD's "armor." The Black Ops 7 release quickly caused Activision/Microsoft to go into damage control mode and announce BO and MW won't ever have b2b releases again. Maybe it's just me, but I think the problem's bigger than that. With BO7's endgame mode, it seems to me like they're moving away from the traditional single player experience to more live service multiplayer like Warzone, and a large number of gamers don't want that. If 2026's game releases to a similar response, Activison's got a major problem.
The only things that seemed to remain consistent this year are Fortnite and Nintendo. Fortnite continued to dominate in a way nohody's been able to replicate, and Nintendo kept doing what they do with the Switch 2.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 613
@old_gamer74 Black Flag is great!! It's still the best pirate themed game ever by far, and my favorite game in the AC franchise. Heck, it might be my most favorite Ubisoft game. The remake that should be out in 2026 (rumor is perhaps as soon as March) I think will be even better because it supposedly removes the present day content in favor of more pirate action.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 613
Finally got around to playing Ghost of Tsushima on my laptop. I've completed the main story and now I'm doing the dlc. It's such an amazing game I bought the Ghost of Yotei PS5 bundle so I don't have to wait to play the sequel.
Whats everybody's opinion on the PS5 version of Rise of the Ronin? I know the launch of the PC port was pretty rough. I hope the original version is better.
Re: There's Unfinished Business in Robocop: Rogue City's Standalone Expansion on PS5
I haven't gotten around to playing Robocop yet, so I didn't even know this was a standalone expansion. I just assumed this was DLC.
,
Either way, I agree, companies responding to consumers by either releasing DLC they originally hadn't planned on releasing, or by developing a shorter standalone game using assets that didn't quite make it into the original game is awesome to see.
IMO, it seems like over the past 5-10 years developers/publishers, and especially their shareholders, have been chasing the money train that is COD/GTA/Fortnite. COD and GTA as an example of the AAA big budget game, and Fortnite as a live service game. In doing that, it seems like the "AA game" was forgotten. Hopefully smaller games like this one and Mafia will be well received and remind publishers there's money to be made everywhere, as long as the game's good.
Re: Romero Games Allegedly Met with Microsoft a Day Before Funding Was Pulled
@reek
The the VCS/Atari 2600 says "Hi!"
According to a 1983 article in Infoworld, the VCS/Atari 2600 sold 10 million consoles in just the US by 1982. Because of Pac Man, they sold an additional 12 million consoles and 120 million cartridges by the end of 1982 alone. Internationally, the system sold 450,000 units in West Germany by 1984, and another 600,000 in France by the end of the decade. The system wasn't popular in Japan, however. Because of Japan's smaller population, the Famicom "only" sold 2.5 million units from 1983-1984.
Redesigned and named the NES, the console wasn't test marketed outside of Japan until October 1985 and wasn't released for sale worldwide until September 1986. There was an existing video game market in the US and and a few other countries well before that point. Heck, the market was sufficiently mature enough to crash in 1983. (Also, remember that because of the Iron Curtain and communist regimes in China and elsewhere in Asia, video game systems were legally available for sale in far fewer countries back then.)
Stop being nationalistic. Neither Japan nor the US can claim the popularity of video games would be what it is now without developers and consumers in both countries. Nobody did this on their own, with the possible exception of Ralph Baer, who invented the Magnivox Odyssey in 1972. That system inspired the guys who created Atari and developed Pong.
Re: Romero Games Allegedly Met with Microsoft a Day Before Funding Was Pulled
@mazzel
IMO, the reaction to this is "about" much more than just the closure of this studio. During the last round of layoffs, Microsoft said great things about the performance of one of the games...and Microsoft management still closed the studio. I feel badly for the Microsoft PR people, they're in a no-win situation.
Nadella wants out of the gaming business, and has since day one. Microsoft made a fateful decision when they made the XB1's focus "a living room machine that plays games" instead of keeping the focus on their core audience that made the 360 such a success. They screwed up so badly with the XB1 that Spencer eventually said the console "war" is over, and Sony won because gamers had already built up such large digital libraries by the end of that generation very few people were going to switch and lose access to all that content. Unless Sony made self inflicted mistakes and screwed up really badly, from a hardware perspective XBox was "dead" from the very beginning of this generation. Especially because consoles are intially sold at a loss, which I'm sure Nadella and the shareholders hate.
Basically, everything since the end of the XB1 generation has been about Spencer trying to keep XBox alive despite what Nadella and the shareholders want. I wouldn't be surprised if Nadella even wants out of Gamepass, becuase it's clear the numbers just don't work, and were crazy from the beginning.
They were probably too far down the road for Nadella to have killed off the Series X/S before it launched, but I am absolutely stunned that XBox keeps claiming they're going to release another console. If they do, IMO it not only is going to function more like a PC than a traditional console, it may look like one too.
Re: What the Hell Has Happened to Call of Duty?
@itsfoz EA tried reviving MoH, but it's EA so that didn't go well.
SOCOM's been gone so long, and I'm so old, I mostly can just recall fond memories of the PS2. I do remember the last title tried to copy COD though.
Sadly, I don't know if we'll get a "COD killer" like COD helped shove MoH into the grave EA had already dug for it. The cost of AAA development is so high, and investors/corporate suits so risk averse, IMO it's going to be difficult for someone else to even have the opportunity to dethrone them. More likely, COD just keeps going like one of their zombies (or the Madden franchise) and gamers keep buying it because there's not much else for single player shooter gamers on consoles. This is especially true if Battlefield shoots itself in both feet like they did with that last game.
I'd really love for SOCOM to come back. But I think if it did investors would want the game to be like COD, because it's all about chasing the same "golden goose" somebody else has already created, and the game would die a quick death (again.)
Re: Dying Light Team Reportedly Cancels Two Games
@Balie3000
I haven't taken the time to try and get a translation of the original source written in Polish, but the $36 million Techland claims they're "losing" almost certainly includes the money they've already spent on development of a game that in their opinion just isn't financially viable. Meaning, to create a game out of whatever's already been done they'd have to spend even more money, all for something that still isn't necessarily going to sell. That kind of a management decision can end up tanking the entire company. In most cases, it's much better to simply abandon what isn't working rather than spend more money trying to salvage a mess. The sunk cost fallacy is real.
In today's gaming world, cancellations almost always mean layoffs as studios "get lean" while they're trying to decide what to do next. It sucks for employees, but from the developer's perspective they don't need as many people if they're just in the initial/early conceptual and design phase of development. They'll potentially get bigger if/when they're further along in development. AI's going to continue to disrupt the size of this cycle, of course.
Gaming isn't the only industry that behaves like this. For example, a slowdown in sales of cars often leads to a slowdown in factory production. Dealerships don't need more inventory they can't sell, and an automaker doesn't need 10,000 cars sitting on a lot waiting to be shipped to dealerships so they cut production. That=factory layoffs.
Re: Romero Games Appears to Have Closed as Xbox Layoffs Cast Dark Shadow Over Industry
@B0udoir There's often a tax writeoff.
Remember, every large corporation in the world, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, Toyota, Nissan, whatever...exists to maximize "shareholder value." Cutting projects that result in layoffs = savings. Humans are the biggest "cost" for a corporation and make no mistake, they all see employees as simply a cost to be minimized. The major difference in these layoffs seems to be that because Microsoft is headquartered in the US there's often no warning because the US doesn't have any federal laws that mandate employees be given any warning at all. If the corporation is located in a so-called "right to work" state, there are even fewer employee protections than in other states.
Re: Rumour: PS5 Disaster MindsEye Wants 'Redemption Arc' Despite Hundreds of Jobs Being 'At Risk'
Benzies (and Gerhard) both need to shut up. The publisher, IO Interactive, flatly denied Gerhard's allegations and they'll probably deny these too if they're asked.
Ultimately, the major reason this game hasn't a chance at a "redemption arc" comes down to $$. Cyberpunk was profitable the day it released because the wild hype and lengthy development time led to an incredible amount of preorders. Not to mention the fact CDPR had built up goodwill among gamers.
This game, the studio's new, very few people preordered it, and even fewer are purchasing it now because the game's trash. On Steam, Mindseye hit a 24-hour peak of 46 players. As of 10 am this morning, only 26 people were playing. I doubt the console numbers are much, if any, better.
So the CEOs are going to have to convince investors to foot the cost of fixing this broken mess. All while Gebhard is apparently working on another game titled Ascendant, which was originally scheduled to be released this year. I'll be stunned if that game's ever released.
This is why delays and sometimes cancellations are ultimately less costly than releasing a rushed or poorly done game. A bad/broken attempt at a AAA game usually will take a new studio down with it.
Re: Xbox's Phil Spencer 'Not Retiring' After Dark Day of Cancellations and Job Cuts
@get2sammyb According to Jeff Grubb back in 2024, he'd been "hearing for years" that Perfect Dark was in "rough shape" overall. That's why Microsoft had to get Crystal Dynamics involved in 2021. They weren't originally supposed to work on this game.
IMO Perfect Dark was doomed from the start because, according to Grubb, development began with Microsoft unable/unwiling to set a clear direction for it. Management allegedly initially couldn't decide if the Perfect Dark reboot should be a FPS or not!
Management paralysis/dysfunction is the beginning of a perfect storm that'll usually lead to cancellation/vaporware.
Re: Rumour: New Cyberpunk 2077 DLC Is Incoming, Developer Leak Suggests
Cyberpunk has to be the greatest reclimation project in video game history. Heck, it might be the greatest reclimation project in software history. What the devs at CD Projekt Red were able to do, once management backed off and gave them the time they needed to do it, is nothing short of phenominal.
When the game launched, I was really down on them. The fixes, expansions, dlc, etc. that have gotten pushed out by the devs since that disasterous launch day remind me of the good things we all hoped online connectivity could bring to video games when Internet capable consoles first launched. In the old days, this game would have just stayed broken and hardly anybody would have gotten to see how the devs wanted this game to look and how they wanted it to play.
Re: Reaction: There's Never Been a Better Time to Buy a PS5
As an XBox owner, IMO nobody should be buying a console expecting a ton of permanantly console exclusive games anymore. Both Microsoft and Sony game division executives have upper management and investors to answer to. For XBox games that's obviously going to happen sooner than for PS games, but eventually most, if not all, PS games are going to appear on PC. It makes too much $ sense for them not to. The only exception to this financial "rule" is Nintendo. They've always been different, and absent a major financial disaster nobody can reasonably predict happening, always will be.
So the questions become "Can I afford a gaming PC and how long do I want to wait for a PS/XBox game to appear on a device I don't have? And, how much do I really want to play a game on the original system it was designed for?" I gotta admit, even though I have a gaming laptop, if Sony released a Ghost of Tsushima bundle instead of this Black Ops 6 bundle I'd press a website "Buy" button in less than a second. It's irrational, but I'd do it.
I definitely agree that the price of the PS5 consoles are unlikely to get better until after the PS6 releases. But a multiplatform game like BO6 and the games that aren't already on PC just don't move the needle for me, even though the irrational FOMO part of my brain is definitely screaming "Buy it!!" anyway.
Given that it appears likely Sony's got some kind of a deal with Rockstar in place for GTA 6, if there's a bundle that'll fly off the shelves, and my FOMO will be screaming "Buy it!!" too even though I already own an XBox. IMO, a Ghost of Yotei bundle would quickly sell out too, and that I would definitely preorder in a second.
Re: Opinion: If You're on the Fence, Consider Buying a PS5 Now Before the Prices Inevitably Rise
I thought about purchasing a PS5 for Ghost of Yoti and to play Rise of the Ronin, but it's just not worth it now because eventually Ronin's reported issues will (hopefully) be fixed and Yoti will be on PC in a year or two.
If nothing else, Microsoft's "issues" already caused me to decide to switch back to PS next generation. Now I'm not sure I'll buy another console at all. MS's strategy is 100% about putting XBox everywhere, so there won't be any console specific games at all. PS games eventually appear on PC, they just take longer to get there.
One thing I'm slightly concerned about is the fact the new price point for even digital versions of console games is likely to be $70-80 now. At what point do Steam, Epic and other digital PC storefronts and/or PC game publishers raise prices, if for no other reason than just because they can? I wouldn't bet on this not happening.
Secondly, how does this all impact GTA 6? As we all know, that game will sell to current console owners even if it's released at $100 (or more, in some countries.) But will it sell many new consoles? I don't know about that anymore. If it doesn't meet the new console sales expectations set by Wall Street analysts, how soon does Rockstar release it on PC? Rockstar's management has to be at least a little frustrated by this mess. The game's much too far down the road to release a PC version at launch, and they don't want to release a rushed port that just has to be massively fixed later because that leads to bad press and fewer initial sales.
Forgot about another thing, sports games. Does this cause EA, and even smaller studios like San Diego Studios the developer of MLB the Show, to start releasing their games on PC at launch next year?
Re: Ghost of Yotei Gets PS5 Release Date, Trailer, Pre-Order Details
@CieloAzure Absolutely. The CE's $249.99. Putting a disc in the box is what they choose to "skimp" on? 😂
Re: Ghost of Yotei Gets PS5 Release Date, Trailer, Pre-Order Details
@Dampsponge I agree with you. I know this is definitely not the first collectors edition to do this. I forget which game it was, but the first time I heard about a collector's edition being released without a physical game on disc I was like, "How? Then it's really not a collector's edition of the game. It's just a bunch of stuff related to the game put in a big box." 😂
Re: Assassin's Creed Shadows Update and DLC Roadmap Will Be Revealed Next Week
Was there always going to be a DLC "roadmap?" I thought I'd read elsewhere (maybe GR?) that, prior to Shadow's launch Ubi only planned to release one DLC mission. If they've pivoted from that and decided to release more content because the response to the game is so positive I think that's great.
Yeah, I'm an old guy with "adult responsibilities" now and don't have the time to play nearly as much as I did 25 years ago. But I still absolutely love "big" games where I can spend 50- 60 or more hours on single player content (if the content's good of course.) I never understood the "it's too big/too long" criticism Valhalla got. Now that AC and a few other franchises are being spun off into their own company, if management wants to let the developers create new content for months until they absolutely "have" to move on to support development of the next game in the franchise, I'd be very happy with that.
Re: Ghost of Yotei Gets PS5 Release Date, Trailer, Pre-Order Details
@Bingoboyop This is hopefully shaping up to be the anti-2024. Even if GTA gets pushed to 2026, if everything else in your list releases on time or close to it, this year will IMO be a lot more packed (and fun) than last year. I kind of felt like last year was pretty sparse other than the "usual suspects" like COD.