Ralizah

Hyperbolic headline. It's not good, but it'll surely get resolved sooner than later; especially if other games are being affected. "F*cked" would apply more to something like Concord, lol.

@Yousef- Right after the "Bungie Getting Its Head Pulled Out of Its Ass" headline, too.

It's like when you first allow your kid to swear where appropriate, and then they start trying to muscle fun naughty words into everything.

Still amuses me that Microsoft baited Sony into blowing so much money on this developer, and it's been an almost complete wash.

This is where reactionary business decisions get you.

@Bingoboyop Don't forget about Marathon and Fairgames. They'll sit nicely alongside all of the Chinese gachas coming to PS5.

@UltimateOtaku91 You're linking an article about PS5 Pro dildo attachments and acting offended. Why do you seem butthurt over what's clearly silly satire?

Maybe that article has a point.

Coming in second to an NBA game seems like a pretty good result for any platformer without "Super Mario" in the title.

Glad it seems to have debuted well in NA. Considering the game's Amazon chart position, I'm not surprised.

No Games
Digital Only
$1000 at launch
Final Destination

I'm pretty sure planning on a new console starts almost immediately after a new one comes out. R&D takes time, lol.

But yeah, backwards-compatibility is pretty much an industry standard between XSX and PS5. One of the few really good things about this generation, frankly.

@Bingoboyop Calling it: The Last of Us Part I - Definitive Edition as a timed launch exclusive on PS6 in 2029. The wait will definitely be worth it.

@NEStalgia l337 15 f1n3 1f y0u fully c0mm17 70 17. 17'5 7h3 p4r714l 4ppl1c4710n 0f 7h3 pr1nc1pl3 7h47 dr1v35 m3 nu75. 54m3 r3450n 1 c4n'7 347 47 z4xby'5.

By the way, this exchange has confirmed for me that we're both far too old.

@PuppetMaster Some people will always be unhappy. That doesn't mean Sony can't improve their approach, though.

Oh yeah, there's no lack of games coming that are playable on the console. It's not about that. It's about Sony's communication with their base. Which is more frustrating considering how many potential live service blunders they have in the making, and how few original PS5 games they've released overall this generation.

@NEStalgia That's true. I did. I have to say, whatever executive thought it was cute to replace the 'S' with a dollar sign deserves a good smack in the face.

@PuppetMaster There must be a middle-ground between teasing the same 2 - 4 games for half a generation and announcing a game mere months before release, lol. Nintendo does the latter a lot, but that's because they actually publish a ton of games every year.

Sony should find a middle-ground between what they're doing now (total silence on almost everything a year or more out) and teasing games that are practically a generation away. Assuming they actually have stuff coming in the next year or two other than Marathon.

@NEStalgia It is remarkable how quickly a multi-hundred-million dollar game/planned franchise went from the future of Playstation's AAA focus to "burn it with fire!"

@NEStalgia The Concord episode of that Amazon Prime series needs to spinoff into its own series on Netflix first before Concord 2 can canonically take place. Patience. Sony's ten-year-plan for the Concord universe has only just begun to take shape.

@NEStalgia LOL

You're a Sony hipster who idolizes failed live service games like Concord. I'm a Sony hipster who idolizes failed Japan Studio games like Gravity Rush.

We are not the same.

@nessisonett It's a little insane that things look brighter for the Switch's future as it nears EoL than they do for PS5, which, in the middle of the generation now, should be peaking.

Missteps like Concord aside, big home console games just take WAAAAAAAY too long to make nowadays.

I'm amused by the idea that somebody is more likely to cosplay as a Concord fan than as any of the actual characters

Team Asobi carrying on the proud Japan Studio tradition of creating amazing games that people don't want to buy, for whatever reason.

I mean, if it was $599.99 and came with the disc drive included, I'd probably opt for that over the standard one if I was to get one. Why not? Generally paying a small premium for better hardware is preferable in the long run.

@SterlingEyes Do it. The OLED version, specifically, which has a far better battery life and gorgeous display. There's some really demanding AAA titles that won't run well on it (the Final Fantasy XV demo was... rough, let's say), but most games you throw at it run fine. Cyberpunk runs shockingly well.

The thing has almost completely replaced my Switch.

Genuinely makes me wonder what Sony's plan is for next-gen. The PS6 is gonna need to be more powerful, but how are they going to keep costs down? You can only loss lead to a point.

$700 hardware (sans disc drive lol). $70 games. Jacking up prices on controllers worldwide. Expensive paid online. And, really, barely any games to even begin to justify all of this (that isn't available to the competition, anyhow). It really feels like Sony is testing its luck as much as possible.

@UltimateOtaku91 I guess we'll see, but their change in strategy sounded like a broader shift in general away from timed exclusivity. Although didn't they also announce they were going to focus more on core properties and have less of these smaller projects in the pipeline?

We'll see what happens. Hopefully, in the future, their games launch across all platforms capable of hosting them.

@UltimateOtaku91 What recent indication is there that they're going to continue doing exclusivity deals with Nintendo?

The most fascinating aspect of this entire... episode... to me isn't so much the scale of failure that it represents, but more the level of almost universal disdain and vitriol it attracted. People tarred and feathered this thing well before the public execution even commenced.

Makes you wonder how much money Sony wasted overall trying to push this game as some instant classic of the live service genre. Funny stuff.

This tells me enough about the factors involved in selecting games to adapt for this show that I don't really feel the need to ever watch it.

I'd absolutely watch a documentary on the factors leading up to Concord's failure, though. Like a postmortem.

The second best Castlevania collection after Dracula X Chronicles on PSP (Rondo remake with ports of OG rondo and SOTN). The NDS era was the peak of this style of Castlevania game.

While that is a rather cynical take on Astro Bot, I can also see their point: in the context of modern-day, PS5-era Sony, there is a bit of melancholy to Astro Bot's celebration of PS history. Compare their creative output on PS5 to any other generation and the result is rather stark.

It's awesome seeing current-gen tech being directed toward a beautifully stylized, gameplay-centric title that emphasizes fun and probably also didn't cost $300 million to make.

This sounds delightful. I'll wait to see if it's going to enjoy a PC port at some point, though. The fact that they're already talking about it makes me think it's more likely to happen than not.

Concord aside (lol), definitely a pretty decent year for PS5 owners.

Ubisoft shot themselves in the foot by punishing early adopters with subscription options and rapid price drops. Not to mention content/early access locked behind special editions.

@Arnna When I posted my comment, the article was basically a stub that only mentioned the game was shutting down and little else. They've updated it in the hours since.

@Wallace80 I have no idea what you're trying to say to me, lol.

Anyway, everyone uses pronouns, friend. YOU have pronouns. Guess even you aren't safe from the woke mind virus.

lmao

Everyone who bought this deserves a refund immediately.

What a mess.

"Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch is expected to eventually overtake the PS2’s record, a feat many thought previously impossible."

More context for the scale of Nintendo's victory this generation:

it'll achieve this with a device that has virtually no multimedia capabilities. I think you can watch Hulu on it, but it's pretty much a pure gaming machine. There's no browser, no blu-ray playback, nothing. Whereas PS2 sold heavily on its value as a DVD player back in the day.

It'll achieve this with no price drops (or will come very, very close to doing so if they decide to drop the price when the successor drops). PS2 was discounted quite heavily later in life, as I recall.

It'll achieve this, most likely, very close to its active lifespan as a console, whereas the PS2 was sold for many, many years after the PS3 dropped before it achieved its current numbers.

Perhaps most incredibly, the Switch generation has generated more profit for Nintendo since launch than all of its other generations combined. In other words, more profit from 2017 till now than 1981 to 2016.

I have no idea what'll happen with Sony and Microsoft long term in the console space, but Nintendo will be just fine.

It's not a complete waste. The amount of schadenfreude generated by news of this game's failure seems to be pretty immense.

@B0udoir I was thinking the same thing. If even 10,000 people bought it on Steam... where are they? I get people can't be on games all the time, but the game is struggling to host a few hundred players at a time not long after launch. Heck, I just checked and the player count is 96 right now!

"The problem is there’s a huge disconnect between the cost of making games and the prices fans are willing to pay. Sony’s giga budget single player games demand many hundreds of millions these days, and while it’d be fair to point to the platform holder’s record-breaking profits, that’s still an enormous amount of money for a publisher to spend on a title that could, potentially, flop."

Movies and TV shows can cost hundreds of millions and flop as well lol. That's just the risk of doing business.

These big companies rake in more and more money and still keep arguing for bleeding the customer drier and drier.

I've never paid $70 for a standard edition of a game, and I won't start now. Jacking it up even more in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis sounds like a good way to kill launch day sales.

@Link41x Things only worked out for Nintendo and Falcom because of how hard NIS worked to establish that relationship. But NIS seems to have zero interest in working with Microsoft in bringing games to Xbox.

Also, Xbox has, like, zero presence in Japan.

Not saying it'll never happen, but, you know, definitely don't hold your breath.

@NEStalgia Eh. The PS5 has always looked like a cheap, needlessly gigantic router that also inexplicably has a popped collar. It's possibly the ugliest console I've seen since some of the really early, pre-NES consoles.

I don't mind the PS4. It's a bit annoying how you need to remember which pressure-sensitive spot is eject vs power down, but I always liked how it looks like a stealth jet or something.

@Haruki_NLI There's been an incredible tactics game revival lately. XCOM and recent Fire Emblem games (primarily Awakening and Three Houses) seem to have helped spark interest in the genre again.

@Haruki_NLI I mean, I acknowledged that in the words IMMEDIATELY preceding that remark, lol

It's been a dead IP for more than a decade. Them farming out some cheap remakes to a Western dev doesn't constitute doing much with it.

Still bought them, though. I've been desperate for more AW for a long time. It kills me that Days of Ruin tanked the series, because it's an incredible game.

Considering the long-strained relationship between Nintendo and Falcom, the idea of a Trails game being exclusive for any period of time is incredibly funny to me. They've long gravitated toward handheld consoles, and I feel like, to them, the Switch is the new PSP/Vita.

Anyway, it'll probably be ported to everything before the Western release. Except Xbox, which will, as usual, get absolutely nothing.

I remember this.

Yeah, Wargroove is a good example of a game "inspired by" Advance Wars, but still manages to do its own thing.

This is... just a rip-off, lol. Even the unit types are almost identical.

That said, if they can replicate the excellent map and mission design from Nintendo's series, I'll give it a chance. Apart from those remakes, it's not like Nintendo is doing much with the IP anyway. I have strong doubts they really understand what makes that series so good, though.

@Qu1n0n3z Advance Wars 3 already exists. It's called Advance Wars: Dual Strike.

Sigh

We're never getting a good-looking PS5.

@NEStalgia Sony has been pretty good about supporting Steam. Can't imagine they're dumb enough to nuke their PC presence by releasing a launcher. Just forcing a log-in has been garnering significant pushback lol.

I'm not sure I've seen a major release bomb this hard, this quickly in my lifetime. It's extremely interesting to watch from a distance.

I expected the game to do poorly, but this is... something else, lmao.

@IntrepidWombat "if the market is willing to pay $110 for a game, then that's that game's full price, and the $70 price point is the first price drop based on a projected fall-off of demand."

With big releases, up to a certain theoretical limit, there's going to be a tiny portion of the audience that'll spend hundreds of dollars for 'special editions' of games. You talk about 'the market,' when, in reality, that's a tiny minority of people. Actual game launches, on the other hand, are typically when game sales are at their peak (thus the game being full MSRP).

Moreover, if the special edition price was the 'full price,' it wouldn't be bundled with season pass vouchers and release days early.

Also worth mentioning that a more expensive edition of this game exists as well. Does that mean the game's full price is $130, and it releases simultaneously with a price drop? Do you see how this framing breaks apart with just a little bit of scrutiny?

"Ubi's credibility went out the window ages ago. This doesn't hurt their brand image because it's already in the toilet, but that doesn't stop people from buying the corporatized garbage they continue to spew out."

Sure, and it has damaged them when it comes to all but the biggest releases that have penetrated into the mainstream. Companies can and do reverse course and repair their brand image over time.

When one is in a hole, it's usually advisable to stop digging, even if it takes a bit of time to climb out.

@LadyCharlie Yup. The evasive lack of committal this signifies has a very 'I'm sorry you're upset' feel to it.

Own up to your actions, or deny them and maintain your innocence. I'd honestly respect either of those approaches far more.

@IntrepidWombat "People want it, and they're willing to pay the price, so why not make a buck?"

You realize this reasoning can be used to justify just about anything sleazy in the industry, right?

Sacrificing trust and your brand image for short-term money grubbing schemes like this is a bad trade.

Games starting at full price and dropping in sales is about adjusting prices to account for lessening demand, not milking your biggest fans for everything they're worth.

Not that I agree with how they adjust their prices, either, because rapidly devaluing your games after launch is also pretty unfair to the people who support your games at launch. Punishing people for buying in early is a good way of pushing people off of day one purchases for all but the biggest franchises. Which ends up impacting their smaller, better games the most.

@NEStalgia Well, Xbox games release day and date on PC, so there's even less reason to buy one of those consoles.

I could maybe see Sony porting a couple of cross-gen games with big sequels to incentivize buy in, but the moment they started porting major platform exclusives and big sequels, anyone with a lick of sense would conclude that they're all eventually going to PC anyway.

Sony's hardcore fanbase will still want that early access, of course, but anyone questioning whether to buy a PS5 or not at this point clearly isn't a part of that demographic.

Monetizing early access to a game is gross, and I will purposefully wait to buy games that are published in this manner in deep sales.

That said, at this point you're pretty loose with your money if you're not waiting the three months it takes for their games to be discounted 50% anyway.

@PegasusActual93 No, over-budgeted AAA single-player games are less viable. Sony has a budgeting issue with its big games. If they can control costs, they'll be fine.

Anyway, if Sony wants a Genshin or Fortnite-level success, it needs to start monetizing their games like those. In what world is a $40 live service title, even one that isn't a total shipwreck, going to be as lucrative as the giants of that model?

Sony is not an endless pit of money, and these games are expensive. They can't afford too many abject flops before they shift focus (actually, they already have, and I expect multiple live service titles failing in a row will motivate them to lean even further away from that push).

It's also worth mentioning that as more successful live service titles release, the less viable that model will be over time. Single player game fans tend to play what they want and move on to new games, but people deeply invested in live service titles have a limited amount of time to play games and so will stick with a few core games that are already well-established. I'm not saying new ones can't succeed (Helldivers 2 illustrated this well), but it's going to be tougher and tougher to compete with established titles that have a captive audience.

Never owned a PS3, so I've been waiting so long to play this.

My current plan is to marathon the series once MGS3 is eventually liberated from PS3 prison.

Good lord, how hard is it for people not to be creepy?

It's gonna be pretty funny if most of these Sony live service titles tank. Although I don't expect anything on the level of Concord.

Not currently planning on buying a PS5, so it's the only way they're going to get my money.

That said, more broadly, I think it's smarter for console makers to keep their games exclusive to their platforms, but that ship has long since sailed for Sony, so why not port as many games as possible?

@NEStalgia Still have no idea why anyone would think the PC ports would draw people into their ecosystem. It does the opposite: shows that if you wait, the games will come to you instead of you needing to buy a $500 console for a few exclusives.

I'd have a PS5 by now if they hadn't started porting their games to PC lol.