I'm 100% up for Infamous and Motorstorm remakes. I never ever buy day 1...but I'd be seriously tempted for those and if reviews were good I might break my rule. I wouldn't mind a Burnout announcement, either, even if Burnout Paradise is the only title I played (I played that game to death).
That said, none of those will happen. All would require Sony actually listening to what fans want. Of the three, only Motorstorm feels like they could sell a ton of DLC and turn it into something of a service game.
@ShadowRJ When you alphabatize titles, you're supposed to drop A, An, The, and other such words - so it SHOULD be alphabatized under P.
But Sony's UI doesn't follow that common rule, so no, you have to find it under A (just like all the titles that start with "The" are together). It's wrong, but that's what it is.
I'd love for there to be an option for users to apply a "sort name" to titles, for sorting and filtering purposes. You could put all titles from a studio together by having the studio name first in the sort name, or call this "Plague Tale 3" to have it sorted after the first two games (or "Plague Tale 0" to put it in front, if you prefer).
I don't see them doing that, but I have an app that sorts the movies I own this way, and it's awesome.
Though it is a little odd to search for Iron Man under M, for "Marvel 01" - my wife lists all of them in release order. If they keep going Iron Man will need to become "Marvel 001" instead.
Interesting that they're switching to Unreal - Genshin, and I think several of their other games, are on Unity (a customized version of Unity, I believe).
Then again, they may not be trying to make this mobile-compatible like the gacha games are.
I like the art style - it's the description of it as co-op that has me pessimistic. They'll have to work pretty darn hard to pull me into “co-op multiplayer gameplay” - unless one of my kids pulls me in, this is almost certainly a pass for me.
Will this appeal to anyone who didn't have a C64 themself as a kid, or at least a friend with one?
I went from the Atari 2600 to a Sanyo MBC550 (an early DOS machine, predating the IBM PC - it had an overwhelming 256k RAM, when the C128 was shiny, new, and overpowered). That means I mostly skipped the C64, and this does nothing for me. I suspect anyone with less than half a century under their belt will be skipping this one - or am I wrong?
I suppose in places where the ad is targeted to an XBox audience, it makes sense to focus on XBox.
But in places where you're targeting a general audience, it's idiotic - yes, idiotic - not to list every platform you're releasing on, in order to maximize your sales and excitement for the new release across your entire customer base. Some fans are looking for their preferred platform, and if they don't see it in your ads, they may never look for it in their platform's store.
And yes, I stand by that statement for any games released by Sony which are cross-platform as well.
There are changes. I'd classify them as minor, especially if you have an option to remove the scars/markings on her face or if they accumulate over time through the game, but they're not identical, and saying so is foolish and dishonest.
It's also true that the changes are minor, and not more than I'd expect with iterations over time trying to improve and polish the game, so I don't know why anyone is upset over it enough to demand a response from the studio in the first place.
@Vertere Except anybody buying a studio would open the books and look at actual revenue numbers before the sale closes.
No, this is more about PR. People are pointing out how this might affect consumer choices - but it's also PR for studios who have to decide if it's worth porting their game to XBox (or Playstation or Switch) or not. It's not clear what sales data studios might have access to that the general public doesn't.
You tend to go quiet if the news is either very, very good or very, very bad.
This type of humor done judicially can be awesome - it's when it's every other sentence that it's a problem.
You can't get a good feel for the humor from a trailer - for all we know, they took every self-referential bit from the first dozen episodes (how many will there be?) and spliced them all into the trailer. Or these are all from the first half of the pilot. Either could be true.
As a character, Wolverine strikes me as someone who doesn't want to stand around and talk, but move on to the fighting - perhaps not as quickly as Sabertooth, but he's not wanting to talk everything to death. So this works.
I don't have the open world fatigue some people seem to (at least I don't think I do), but there have been several great games lately that were less open world than they may have seemed - God of War, for example. Linear storytelling/gameplay is only a problem if it's done poorly (same with open world).
Personally, I'm not too excited or upset just yet - I'll wait for the game to drop, some reviews based on the whole thing to come out, and at least the first sale to hit, before I pick it up. But I will pick it up (on disk, if practical).
Looks like it supports Windows as well as Linux. I asked for an invite. I've got a clunky remote play method on my Asus ROG Ally with Chiaki, which is solid but not user friendly (and for local connection to a PS5 only, AFAIK). This might be a cleaner option for when I'm away from home.
@FinalBoss "Another example is the music industry. 25 years ago, if you wanted to hear that music, you had to buy that vinyl and have a ritual with your receiver, speakers, turntables, etc to be finally able to play that one song."
25 years ago nobody was buying vinyl - it was very nearly dead, in favor of CDs and, already by 2001, MP3 players. Apple released the first ipod 25 years ago.
I think you mean 50-60 years ago people were buying vinyl.
Who is Sony's customer? Are we, the players who buy games, their customers? Yes, in part - but we're not their only customers. Third-party publishers are ALSO Sony's customers in a very real sense, and those customers want to eliminate physical media, and have wanted to do so for a long time.
It's not that Sony isn't listening to customers - it's that Sony is listening more to one group of customers than another.
I've been saying it, and I'll repeat it again - publishers WANT this change.
Rightly or wrongly, they see the used game market as lost revenue. They see the physical game market as less profitable, since they lose money to manufacturing, shipping, and wholesale pricing that's higher than the 30% premium from PSN sales. They keep physical around because they know it will boost some sales, but they've been watching that effect shrink year over year for over a decade now.
We're not going to convince Sony to change, or the publishers to change. The only ally we might have is retail stores, and they're seeing shrinking sales, too.
@Gaymer90 Sure, in a perfect world studios would stage multiple games at multiple places in the pipeline so when work is compete on one they can move to another. But there are so many variables that timing those perfectly is apparently very difficult, because very few studios seem to be any good at it. I assume they're not ALL idiots.
The few studios who actually do it - often sports-centered studios churning out Madden and similar titles - are constantly accused of cookie-cutter releases with not much new or imaginative from year to year.
If so many studios are having the same issues over and over again, perhaps it's not just poor management in a single company - perhaps it's an endemic problem that's a bigger challenge to solve than people give credit for.
Billboards in a racing game or city-based game can be for real products and why should I care? Burnout Paradise had real ads on billboards for a while, and then fake ones later, and I couldn't care less. If the ad sales let them sell the game for less, then I'm even for it.
If a sports game can show ads without violating any licensing agreements (Lee Jeans ads in Madden at Levi Stadium in San Fransisco might be an issue), then sure - so long as they're no more intrusive than the fake ads or "real world" ads would be. If there's product placement and a character wears Nike shoes in an urban game, so what?
But if I have to watch an ad during a game, or in loading screens, then that makes the experience worse and I'm against it. If it intrudes on the home screen where I'm trying to select the game I want to play, I'm against it. If I can't get to the gameplay because of in-game popups, I'm against it (which is why I don't buy Madden any more - stupid games spends way too much time trying to get me to buy DLC, before I can actually play what I already own).
Unless you've got a very, VERY well-managed studio with multiple games in the pipeline managed and timed perfectly so when one game finishes, the next game is ready for the employees who just finished the last one...this is inevitable and even somewhat healthy for the industry (if not for the individual developers).
If you don't want crunch time, then they need to hire up more staff to push the game through the final polish and release. When that's over, what work do they have for them? They don't hire people to give them a job, they hire people because they have work they need done. When the work's gone, so is the need for the employee.
In an ideal world, if your company isn't ready with the next thing to work on and you're laid off, another company is hiring for their push and will pick you up - at least for a while. It won't always work that way, obviously, but hopefully it's relatively close and most of those laid off will find another gig before long.
@ShadowRJ Once Sony decided they're going to do it, giving as much advance notice as possible is as consumer-friendly a decision as they can make. Sitting on the decision and springing it with less notice would be even worse.
And as I said earlier - people want Sony to say more, but what else are they going to say that will make you happy if they're not giving in?
Do I think they should announce some disk-to-digital plans? Yes, I do. Do I think they should announce allowing third-party sellers to sell PSN codes to unlock a game (not just store credit)? Yes, I do. But most of the things people want aren't coming any time soon.
And Sony isn't alone on this. Their publishers WANT this. They see physical sales as a loss, and resales as very close to theft. I'm not saying they're right - but that's definitely their point of view.
Also, FWIW, it sounds like Genshin doesn't purge inactive accounts - so @AndyKazama and others may very well pick up from 5-year-old saves, so long as they log in using the same server (America, Europe, etc) that they originally did.
I don't get it. I think it looks great, and while I can't understand a word, sounds good too.
If the entire thing is AI-generated, then that's less interesting to me. But if even 20% of it is from in-game clips, then it's a great video.
If they used AI primarily for the parts where the character is singing with a microphone, I honestly don't care - why spend developer and artist resources on that, when they might be heads-down working on finishing the game? If any of the other pieces of the video are in-game content clipped into the video, then that makes up for any AI in it.
Look, it's not like this is all hand-drawn art - everything you see when you're playing a modern game is all computer-generated on some level, even if it's based on models originally created by hand. The tech is changing, will continue to change, and at some point you won't be able to tell what's AI-generated just by looking.
@AndyKazama It's basically single player now, if you want it to be. I almost never play co-op with anyone. Sometimes one of my kids will come into my world to farm for region-specific items they need that I don't, or vice-versa, but I can count the number of times I've played MP on one hand...at least if you don't count some of the special limited time events where you're thrown into an event with multiple other people. But if you treat those like you're playing with bots - which is easy to do, since you can't talk to each other while you play, and there's not a lot of cooperation involved - you can still think of it as single player.
@get2sammyb I wouldn't say you can IGNORE the gatcha - you still need to pull for characters even if you're not spending a penny on the game.
The longer you've been playing, the more viable it is for free pulls to give you a lot of characters worth having. Starting today, it would take a while to get enough free characters to play end-game content, but you could still have a blast.
And if you started today, I'd probably urge you to work through the story quest so you enjoy all the pieces along the way, rather than skipping to the new content which won't be as meaningful or interesting without the lore.
My kids got me into it years ago, and it's been able to remain a topic of conversation into their adulthood. It will be interesting to see how the studio handles the next year - not just with Snezhnaya itself, but at some point after it's been introduced and expanded, the endgame for the narrative can't be too far behind.
I haven't touched the Miliastra Wonderland add-on, and really wish it would just go away, or at least split off into its own separate thing. I suspect that's how they're hoping to keep long-term engagement if they ever wrap up the main story.
@Zuljaras Trading digital titles is very possible if they build it out, but as you pointed out, publishers don't like the secondary market, so they wouldn't want Sony to implement this. But while it's possible, it also has risks. Think of the support headaches:
Person 1: Someone hacked my account and traded all my games to another account without my permission!
Person 2: No, I didn't hack anything, I paid him for all those games to be traded to me, and he's cheating me out of what I paid for!
How do you resolve that?
@Leinad7 The concerns about Sony monopolizing the store has a relatively simple solution, which is something not mentioned in this article that needs to be added - THIRD PARTIES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO SELL GAME CODES AGAIN. If you can pick up a valid code for a game from a vendor other than Sony, that can re-introduce the competition that's currently lacking from the PSN Store. Maybe that's a code on a physical card sold at a retailer, maybe it's a store (maybe even Steam or Epic) that can sell a PSN code - anything that lets them sell a code for a game at a price they set, not PSN credit.
That actually addresses the gifting idea, too - if you can buy a gift card at a local store that has a code for the game on it, there's your gift.
So a hair over 20% of their console sales are physical.
6.7% overall when only 32.9% are console sales, means that it's less valuable to compare the 6.7 to 100 than it is to compare 6.7 to 32.9, which is a hair over 20%.
The underlying point remains and is still valid, but 20.4% of console sales is not as dire as 6.7% of all sales sounds.
It's still something that publishers have reason to want to go away, which I still think is driving this even more than Sony. How much profit do they make on the physical sales vs the digital sales? How much do they lose in manufacturing, shipping, wholesale pricing, and buy-backs from retail? How does that compare to their margin on digital? Standard practice is to assume they get just 50% of the retail price - that's less than the 70% from the Playstation store even if the disks and shipping were free.
I bought Spider-Man 2 on sale, played the opening bit, and got sidetracked on other things. I meant to go back when I picked up my PS5 Pro (but didn't, for more than a quick look around), and recently I've been thinking of going back again.
I've played very little of the story and will need to start over. Probably worth doing before Wolverine drops.
@LordOfTurnips I assume it's either because Brazil is large enough to be its own market, or there are some laws in Brazil that force them to treat it differently in order to comply with them. Hard to tell which, without some public statement from Sony.
That's one detail people forget - local laws can make this more complicated than just "Sony needs to fix it."
So I saw a graphic in a YouTube video and came here looking for more details, because if it was true, it had the potential to change my mind (which, for the record, is that as much as I hate seeing physical disks go away, I expect it's inevitable and a couple years after the PS6 rolls out it will be largely forgotten).
The graphic reported to show disk vs digital sales for specific titles, including Spider-Man 2, Last of Us 2, God of War Ragnarok, and several others. In most cases, the disk version was over half the sales - the lowest was Spider-Man 2, from what I saw.
I don't see such an article here, and quick search didn't turn up anything like it online - anybody else seen the source for that, or do I need to try to go hunting in YouTube videos to see if somebody has a source?
@ElPenitente Gaming has always been "Adapt or die" - just ask people who worked for Atari in the 1980s, or one of countless other companies that rose and fell over the years (Sierra springs to mind as another great example, at least if you're as old as I am).
@get2sammyb Those used sales are worthless to publishers, yes...unless they lead to DLC sales. Which is one (of many) reasons why there's so much monetization after the initial purchase these days.
And nobody ever talks about services like Gamefly. Publishers likely hate game rentals even more than used markets.
The truth is, publisher prefer digital sales. It costs them less to make, so they get more profit. They don't have to worry about losing sales to the secondary market (no matter what you think about how you'd only buy games because of the secondary market, they see those sales as pure loss of revenue).
The reason the XBox One announcement had all those anti-consumer features was that the publishers wanted them, and Microsoft was going to oblige. That hasn't really changed in all these years.
I'm saying this as someone who still buys physical disks - but I recognize I'm in the minority. If I wasn't in the minority, if most gamers were buying physical disks or appeared willing to spend extra for physical releases and extra content, then the news would be different. But as an industry, we've been asking for this with our spending.
@ShadowRJ Well, they could say it's all our fault for not buying enough disks. Or they could say their customers are whiny babies who don't know what's best for them. Those would surely make things worse, wouldn't they? If you can't think of what they could say to make it worse, you lack imagination.
The question I asked, that I think is more interesting, is what can they say that will make it better?
I gave two possibilities. They could change their mind (not happening - look at the sales data for disks in the US this year, it's a blip that costs more than it's worth) or they could announce a plan for disk-to-digital conversions so you can keep playing your games on a disk-less system. The latter, if it's coming, probably isn't ready yet, and announcing anything like that before it's ready is risky.
What else can they say at all? What would make YOU happy to hear, if it's not either of the two things I mentioned?
First, I'm not happy that Sony will stop publishing game disks. I bought two during the June Amazon Prime sale.
Second, I think this was inevitable, and not at all a surprise. To those predicting Sony's impending doom, I point to smart phones without removable batteries, SD slots, or headphone jacks, to laptops without DVD drives, and to Steam (and GOG and Epic). People get used to the new normal and their outrage flames out - I'm sure that's what Sony is expecting to happen here. And I think they're right.
Third, I disagree that they should say anything more UNLESS they have something meaningful to say. If they don't have a plan for some sort of disk-to-digital option already worked out, they shouldn't talk about now, because anything they say will be seen as a promise. And nothing else they can say would temper the resentment right now - unless they decide to reverse the decision, and I very much doubt that's possible. If you can't make it better, stay silent and don't make it worse.
They said it's a new Fallout project. No word on what kind of project it is. If it wasn't strictly a game studio they were partnering with, I'd be warning to be prepared for a new Fallout comic or something.
But...mobile game? Live service? SP? MP? No hints yet.
Fair enough, "hundreds" of tracks is a bit of hyperbole, though not so much if you combine the two titles. And maybe some people feel a difference between the cars - for me, any difference in the handling or speed or acceleration were always vastly overwhelmed by the difference in boost. It quickly felt like that was the ONLY stat to pay any attention to, and to figure out which boost type you worked with best.
As for the playable for young kids, I suppose some of that depends on how young you're talking about. I do appreciate there are some harder difficulties for a challenge for older players like me, but I also felt the track designs were too often too hard to play until you memorized what was around each corner - there was just very little reaction time available. The first time through a new track was often a nightmare.
To each his own - it's been a popular series, so clearly a lot of people enjoy it more than I have. I hope they take the new one with an open world in places that improve the playability and make it more enjoyable for me, personally.
@MFTWrecks The first two can be fun if you're good at racing (or more realistically, kart-racing style) games. But even if you are, don't expect to go into a new track and do well - the signposting is awful, you can end up off the track like you said, many tracks have shortcuts that at higher difficulties you simply MUST use to do well (but they may be hidden and you have to watch another racer take them or explore for ages to discover them yourself).
And once you master one track, there's mostly one or two races at that track, and then it's off to learn a new one. Great for hours and hours and hours and hours of content, awful for pick-up-and-play progression, or for kids.
And that cool new car you unlocked (Snoopy on the sopwith camel doghouse!!!) is probably garbage in a race so if you play with it for fun you're going to lose.
If it has more of a Burnout Paradise feel, I'm in. But I tend to doubt it will go that far - I hope they prove me wrong.
I got tired too quickly of the previous Hot Wheels games - you had to learn and master hundreds of individual racetracks to win consistently, and the choice of car was almost always which had the most boost - nothing else mattered most of the time. It was fun for what it was, but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
On a side note - I think this tells me the PS6 won't release until the 2028 holiday season at the earliest, after the demise of disks has blown over at least a little and a disk-less PS6 will be expected. That gives Sony time to announce some sort of disk-to-digital plan before an official PS6 announcement, too.
@Th3solution The problem with asking "why is Sony forcing this when it will happen naturally?" is that the long tail will be cut off at some point. Do they stop making disks when disk sales are 20% of sales? 10%? 5%? Even if they wait until they're 1% of sales, they're going to upset the people who make up that 1% - and by then, the cost of supporting that 1% of sales probably means they're losing money on it.
So they're cutting it off before it gets so low that they lose significant money supporting the sales. If you're part of the minority still buying physical disks (I am), then you're not happy with the decision, but it's a decision that's been coming for years, and a decision we'll never be happy with whether it's today or 10 years from now.
The statistic "Nielsen data says 45% of all physical games sold in the UK last year were for the PS5 and PS4, representing almost half of the revenue generated." tells me almost nothing. That same statistic would be true if there were a total of 9 playsation physical games sold in all the UK, and another 11 total divided between XBox and Nintendo. It's meaningless.
The number that would mean more is how many are being sold AND for what profit for the publisher? A related piece of information this statistic ignores is that Nintendo is not offering as many true physical sales as they used to - you may buy a box in a store, but it's just a code, so is that a physical sale or a digital one?
Look, I'll miss disks when they're gone, and I sure hope they still make UHD movies on disk (because there the quality often is truly better than streaming - not the identical experience, just with or without a disk and, at least theoretically, with more protections having a physical copy). I'll join in the outrage if the outrage really helps - but I don't think it will. Macs haven't supported drives in what...a decade? PCs don't often ship with physical media drives of any kind, unless you count an SD slot. The industry is speaking.
If you really REALLY want to make a difference, go talk to the stores that sell disks and get them on your side. In the US, get Best Buy and Walmart up in arms over the loss of sales, and you might get somewhere. But don't get your hopes up.
"unexpected production delays" can mean a lot of things. Maybe a quality assurance check found a defect that they need to fix. Maybe one of the components didn't get delivered on time and held up manufacturing. Maybe there was a strike at a manufacturing plant...or a fire (a fire that damaged products ready to ship delayed a kickstarter I bought into once). SO MANY options.
I kind of hope they abandon the idea of releasing games scattershot all month - if they're waiting until Wednesday to announce them, just release them all the following Tuesday.
If they're going to release them on different dates, announce them on different dates. Don't hold onto them and draw it out - there's no benefit to that at all.
As for Premium vs Extra...I only upgraded to Premium beause of a sale, and because of the streaming. I didn't have a PS1 or PS2, so most of the games of that era hold no nostalgia for me (or if they do, it's PC nostalgia). And let's be honest - most of them don't translate well to modern gameplay if you're just emulating them and not rebuilding them.
You can be upset at how the modern gaming industry has changed "buying" a game into a somewhat long-term "rental" of a game, as they can disable their games at any time without warning and face almost no consequences.
And people who buy a game can be legitimately bothered by people actively interfering with their ability to enjoy the game they bought.
Both things can be true at the same time - I don't understand why that would be controversial, or why you'd attack anybody over buying a game you wouldn't buy. I wouldn't touch either of these games, they're just not my thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's okay that they're being hacked and made unplayable.
@Oram77 I'm willing to bet that Sony CAN'T copy this. XBox has unique codes on each disk to identify it individually - that was part of the whole fiasco when they announced how XBox One was going to restrict sharing/selling disks, which is only possible if each disk has a unique identifier.
I'm not sure Sony does the same thing for Playstation disks - does anybody know for sure? If they don't, and it would be a lot cheaper if they don't since each disk could be identical, then they wouldn't have a way to implement an identical feature. If they did something similar, it would probably require you to mail your disk to them, so they can destroy it when they give you digital access.
@get2sammyb It will be interesting to see if the PS6 offers a drive at all, and if it does what formats it supports for movies. I picked up a separate UHD player for my system, because the PS5 doesn't support DolbyVision on movie disks, which was disappointing.
I suspect if they offer a disk at all, it will be like the Slim and Pro - an add-on (maybe even the same add-on, if they can make it work) for an extra price. Availability will be another question, as well as features.
Honestly, I think it's more likely that if Microsoft's idea of mailing in disks works well, they'll copy that idea - ship them your disks so they can be destroyed, and get a code for a digital copy (that they can never ever take away, pinky promise!).
While I won't touch the discussion of the working conditions, as I don't know enough about them for my comment to be useful, I do think the layoffs after releasing a game are going to be trend that continues for everything that isn't a live service game. The developer needs all hands on deck to wrap it up and get it out the door, and maybe for the first patch post release, but at some point that full staff you had to finish the game no longer has work to do. Some studios may be able to switch people over to the next game rather seamlessly, but that requires excellent management that has games staged and ready at the right time. That's hard to pull off.
Jobs aren't there for the sole benefit of the employee - they're there to provide something the employer needs, too. If the next project isn't at the stage they need all hands on deck, then it's time to lay off some of those hands until you have work for them to do and need to start hiring again. It can be brutal, but it's still a better career than hunting wild animals with a sharpened stick to get food for dinner.
Comments 1,060
Re: 16 PS5 Predictions for State of Play September 2026
I'm 100% up for Infamous and Motorstorm remakes. I never ever buy day 1...but I'd be seriously tempted for those and if reviews were good I might break my rule. I wouldn't mind a Burnout announcement, either, even if Burnout Paradise is the only title I played (I played that game to death).
That said, none of those will happen. All would require Sony actually listening to what fans want. Of the three, only Motorstorm feels like they could sell a ton of DLC and turn it into something of a service game.
Re: Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy (PS5) - Solid Story Game without the Rats
@ShadowRJ When you alphabatize titles, you're supposed to drop A, An, The, and other such words - so it SHOULD be alphabatized under P.
But Sony's UI doesn't follow that common rule, so no, you have to find it under A (just like all the titles that start with "The" are together). It's wrong, but that's what it is.
I'd love for there to be an option for users to apply a "sort name" to titles, for sorting and filtering purposes. You could put all titles from a studio together by having the studio name first in the sort name, or call this "Plague Tale 3" to have it sorted after the first two games (or "Plague Tale 0" to put it in front, if you prefer).
I don't see them doing that, but I have an app that sorts the movies I own this way, and it's awesome.
Though it is a little odd to search for Iron Man under M, for "Marvel 01" - my wife lists all of them in release order. If they keep going Iron Man will need to become "Marvel 001" instead.
Re: Genshin Impact Dev Swaps Anime Waifus for Dark Fantasy in Nodusfall
Interesting that they're switching to Unreal - Genshin, and I think several of their other games, are on Unity (a customized version of Unity, I believe).
Then again, they may not be trying to make this mobile-compatible like the gacha games are.
Re: Genshin Impact Dev Swaps Anime Waifus for Dark Fantasy in Nodusfall
I like the art style - it's the description of it as co-op that has me pessimistic. They'll have to work pretty darn hard to pull me into “co-op multiplayer gameplay” - unless one of my kids pulls me in, this is almost certainly a pass for me.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for September 2026 Leaked Early
I've held off picking up Sniper Elite Resistance on sale, figuring it would show up here eventually like many of the others have.
Re: These 10+ Commodore 64 Games Are Coming to PS5 Soon
Will this appeal to anyone who didn't have a C64 themself as a kid, or at least a friend with one?
I went from the Atari 2600 to a Sanyo MBC550 (an early DOS machine, predating the IBM PC - it had an overwhelming 256k RAM, when the C128 was shiny, new, and overpowered). That means I mostly skipped the C64, and this does nothing for me. I suspect anyone with less than half a century under their belt will be skipping this one - or am I wrong?
Re: Xbox 'Heard You', Purges PS5 Logos from Multiformat Game Trailers
I suppose in places where the ad is targeted to an XBox audience, it makes sense to focus on XBox.
But in places where you're targeting a general audience, it's idiotic - yes, idiotic - not to list every platform you're releasing on, in order to maximize your sales and excitement for the new release across your entire customer base. Some fans are looking for their preferred platform, and if they don't see it in your ads, they may never look for it in their platform's store.
And yes, I stand by that statement for any games released by Sony which are cross-platform as well.
Re: Tides of Annihilation Dev Insists It Didn't Change Its Heroine's Face
There are changes. I'd classify them as minor, especially if you have an option to remove the scars/markings on her face or if they accumulate over time through the game, but they're not identical, and saying so is foolish and dishonest.
It's also true that the changes are minor, and not more than I'd expect with iterations over time trying to improve and polish the game, so I don't know why anyone is upset over it enough to demand a response from the studio in the first place.
Preview images are not a contract, people.
Re: Take-Two Aims to Bring the Hammer Down on GTA 6 Leaker, Requests Help from Microsoft, Discord
@ducklagom "theft is not ok" is both something I agree with, and something ironic given the nature of the specific game involved in the discussion.
Re: Microsoft Stops Sharing Digital Sales Data with Circana
@Vertere Except anybody buying a studio would open the books and look at actual revenue numbers before the sale closes.
No, this is more about PR. People are pointing out how this might affect consumer choices - but it's also PR for studios who have to decide if it's worth porting their game to XBox (or Playstation or Switch) or not. It's not clear what sales data studios might have access to that the general public doesn't.
You tend to go quiet if the news is either very, very good or very, very bad.
Re: I Didn't Have a Golden Axe Cartoon on My 2026 Bingo Card
This type of humor done judicially can be awesome - it's when it's every other sentence that it's a problem.
You can't get a good feel for the humor from a trailer - for all we know, they took every self-referential bit from the first dozen episodes (how many will there be?) and spliced them all into the trailer. Or these are all from the first half of the pilot. Either could be true.
Re: After Online Storm, Here's the Truth About Wolverine PS5
As a character, Wolverine strikes me as someone who doesn't want to stand around and talk, but move on to the fighting - perhaps not as quickly as Sabertooth, but he's not wanting to talk everything to death. So this works.
I don't have the open world fatigue some people seem to (at least I don't think I do), but there have been several great games lately that were less open world than they may have seemed - God of War, for example. Linear storytelling/gameplay is only a problem if it's done poorly (same with open world).
Personally, I'm not too excited or upset just yet - I'll wait for the game to drop, some reviews based on the whole thing to come out, and at least the first sale to hit, before I pick it up. But I will pick it up (on disk, if practical).
Re: Irate Physical Game Fans Prepare for Their Big PS5 Blackout
@HOWARDSROCK Wait, you bought a PS Portal, but you won't buy digital...how does that work? I can't find the disk drive in my Portal.
Re: Irate Physical Game Fans Prepare for Their Big PS5 Blackout
@ButteredCrumpet Wait, you didn't get a copy of the call sheet? Who's got it? Pass it on, we missed somebody!
Re: Your Steam Deck Can Now Moonlight as a PS Portal, with PS Plus Cloud Streaming
Looks like it supports Windows as well as Linux. I asked for an invite. I've got a clunky remote play method on my Asus ROG Ally with Chiaki, which is solid but not user friendly (and for local connection to a PS5 only, AFAIK). This might be a cleaner option for when I'm away from home.
Re: 'Discs Don't Really Make Sense': GTA 6 Boss Says 'Sony Understands That' as It Kills Physical Games
@FinalBoss "Another example is the music industry. 25 years ago, if you wanted to hear that music, you had to buy that vinyl and have a ritual with your receiver, speakers, turntables, etc to be finally able to play that one song."
25 years ago nobody was buying vinyl - it was very nearly dead, in favor of CDs and, already by 2001, MP3 players. Apple released the first ipod 25 years ago.
I think you mean 50-60 years ago people were buying vinyl.
Re: 'Discs Don't Really Make Sense': GTA 6 Boss Says 'Sony Understands That' as It Kills Physical Games
Publishers want this.
Who is Sony's customer? Are we, the players who buy games, their customers? Yes, in part - but we're not their only customers. Third-party publishers are ALSO Sony's customers in a very real sense, and those customers want to eliminate physical media, and have wanted to do so for a long time.
It's not that Sony isn't listening to customers - it's that Sony is listening more to one group of customers than another.
Re: Quake Adds Free 30th Anniversary Campaign for All PS5 Players, Developed by MachineGames
Was listening to "Working for a Living" (Garth Brooks version, with Huey Lewis) as the video started, and it went surprisingly well.
"Workin' for a livin'...takin' what they're givin'...!"
Re: With Digital Game Sales at 90%, Capcom Appears Unfazed By Sony's Disc-Free Future
I've been saying it, and I'll repeat it again - publishers WANT this change.
Rightly or wrongly, they see the used game market as lost revenue. They see the physical game market as less profitable, since they lose money to manufacturing, shipping, and wholesale pricing that's higher than the 30% premium from PSN sales. They keep physical around because they know it will boost some sales, but they've been watching that effect shrink year over year for over a decade now.
We're not going to convince Sony to change, or the publishers to change. The only ally we might have is retail stores, and they're seeing shrinking sales, too.
Re: Halo Made Its PS5 Debut, So Now It's Time for Xbox to Lay Off the Team That Made It
@Gaymer90 Sure, in a perfect world studios would stage multiple games at multiple places in the pipeline so when work is compete on one they can move to another. But there are so many variables that timing those perfectly is apparently very difficult, because very few studios seem to be any good at it. I assume they're not ALL idiots.
The few studios who actually do it - often sports-centered studios churning out Madden and similar titles - are constantly accused of cookie-cutter releases with not much new or imaginative from year to year.
If so many studios are having the same issues over and over again, perhaps it's not just poor management in a single company - perhaps it's an endemic problem that's a bigger challenge to solve than people give credit for.
Re: Sony's Looking to Bring More Ads to PlayStation, and Fans Won't Like It
Implementation is everything.
Billboards in a racing game or city-based game can be for real products and why should I care? Burnout Paradise had real ads on billboards for a while, and then fake ones later, and I couldn't care less. If the ad sales let them sell the game for less, then I'm even for it.
If a sports game can show ads without violating any licensing agreements (Lee Jeans ads in Madden at Levi Stadium in San Fransisco might be an issue), then sure - so long as they're no more intrusive than the fake ads or "real world" ads would be. If there's product placement and a character wears Nike shoes in an urban game, so what?
But if I have to watch an ad during a game, or in loading screens, then that makes the experience worse and I'm against it. If it intrudes on the home screen where I'm trying to select the game I want to play, I'm against it. If I can't get to the gameplay because of in-game popups, I'm against it (which is why I don't buy Madden any more - stupid games spends way too much time trying to get me to buy DLC, before I can actually play what I already own).
Re: Halo Made Its PS5 Debut, So Now It's Time for Xbox to Lay Off the Team That Made It
Unless you've got a very, VERY well-managed studio with multiple games in the pipeline managed and timed perfectly so when one game finishes, the next game is ready for the employees who just finished the last one...this is inevitable and even somewhat healthy for the industry (if not for the individual developers).
If you don't want crunch time, then they need to hire up more staff to push the game through the final polish and release. When that's over, what work do they have for them? They don't hire people to give them a job, they hire people because they have work they need done. When the work's gone, so is the need for the employee.
In an ideal world, if your company isn't ready with the next thing to work on and you're laid off, another company is hiring for their push and will pick you up - at least for a while. It won't always work that way, obviously, but hopefully it's relatively close and most of those laid off will find another gig before long.
Re: Disc-Based PS5s Now Warn Buyers About the Impending Death of Physical Games
@ShadowRJ Once Sony decided they're going to do it, giving as much advance notice as possible is as consumer-friendly a decision as they can make. Sitting on the decision and springing it with less notice would be even worse.
And as I said earlier - people want Sony to say more, but what else are they going to say that will make you happy if they're not giving in?
Do I think they should announce some disk-to-digital plans? Yes, I do. Do I think they should announce allowing third-party sellers to sell PSN codes to unlock a game (not just store credit)? Yes, I do. But most of the things people want aren't coming any time soon.
And Sony isn't alone on this. Their publishers WANT this. They see physical sales as a loss, and resales as very close to theft. I'm not saying they're right - but that's definitely their point of view.
Re: Six Years of Genshin Impact Support Culminates in Next Month's Sequel-Sized PS5 Update
Also, FWIW, it sounds like Genshin doesn't purge inactive accounts - so @AndyKazama and others may very well pick up from 5-year-old saves, so long as they log in using the same server (America, Europe, etc) that they originally did.
Re: 'I Feel Profoundly Disappointed': Stellar Blade Dev Destroyed for 'AI Slop' Music Video
I don't get it. I think it looks great, and while I can't understand a word, sounds good too.
If the entire thing is AI-generated, then that's less interesting to me. But if even 20% of it is from in-game clips, then it's a great video.
If they used AI primarily for the parts where the character is singing with a microphone, I honestly don't care - why spend developer and artist resources on that, when they might be heads-down working on finishing the game? If any of the other pieces of the video are in-game content clipped into the video, then that makes up for any AI in it.
Look, it's not like this is all hand-drawn art - everything you see when you're playing a modern game is all computer-generated on some level, even if it's based on models originally created by hand. The tech is changing, will continue to change, and at some point you won't be able to tell what's AI-generated just by looking.
Re: Six Years of Genshin Impact Support Culminates in Next Month's Sequel-Sized PS5 Update
@AndyKazama It's basically single player now, if you want it to be. I almost never play co-op with anyone. Sometimes one of my kids will come into my world to farm for region-specific items they need that I don't, or vice-versa, but I can count the number of times I've played MP on one hand...at least if you don't count some of the special limited time events where you're thrown into an event with multiple other people. But if you treat those like you're playing with bots - which is easy to do, since you can't talk to each other while you play, and there's not a lot of cooperation involved - you can still think of it as single player.
@get2sammyb I wouldn't say you can IGNORE the gatcha - you still need to pull for characters even if you're not spending a penny on the game.
The longer you've been playing, the more viable it is for free pulls to give you a lot of characters worth having. Starting today, it would take a while to get enough free characters to play end-game content, but you could still have a blast.
And if you started today, I'd probably urge you to work through the story quest so you enjoy all the pieces along the way, rather than skipping to the new content which won't be as meaningful or interesting without the lore.
Re: Six Years of Genshin Impact Support Culminates in Next Month's Sequel-Sized PS5 Update
My kids got me into it years ago, and it's been able to remain a topic of conversation into their adulthood. It will be interesting to see how the studio handles the next year - not just with Snezhnaya itself, but at some point after it's been introduced and expanded, the endgame for the narrative can't be too far behind.
I haven't touched the Miliastra Wonderland add-on, and really wish it would just go away, or at least split off into its own separate thing. I suspect that's how they're hoping to keep long-term engagement if they ever wrap up the main story.
Re: 8 Ways Sony Must Improve the PS Store for Our All-Digital Future
@Zuljaras Trading digital titles is very possible if they build it out, but as you pointed out, publishers don't like the secondary market, so they wouldn't want Sony to implement this. But while it's possible, it also has risks. Think of the support headaches:
Person 1: Someone hacked my account and traded all my games to another account without my permission!
Person 2: No, I didn't hack anything, I paid him for all those games to be traded to me, and he's cheating me out of what I paid for!
How do you resolve that?
@Leinad7 The concerns about Sony monopolizing the store has a relatively simple solution, which is something not mentioned in this article that needs to be added - THIRD PARTIES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO SELL GAME CODES AGAIN. If you can pick up a valid code for a game from a vendor other than Sony, that can re-introduce the competition that's currently lacking from the PSN Store. Maybe that's a code on a physical card sold at a retailer, maybe it's a store (maybe even Steam or Epic) that can sell a PSN code - anything that lets them sell a code for a game at a price they set, not PSN credit.
That actually addresses the gifting idea, too - if you can buy a gift card at a local store that has a code for the game on it, there's your gift.
Re: Amidst Sony's Disc Debacle, Capcom Sales Data Is a Brutal Reality Check for Fans of Physical Media
So a hair over 20% of their console sales are physical.
6.7% overall when only 32.9% are console sales, means that it's less valuable to compare the 6.7 to 100 than it is to compare 6.7 to 32.9, which is a hair over 20%.
The underlying point remains and is still valid, but 20.4% of console sales is not as dire as 6.7% of all sales sounds.
It's still something that publishers have reason to want to go away, which I still think is driving this even more than Sony. How much profit do they make on the physical sales vs the digital sales? How much do they lose in manufacturing, shipping, wholesale pricing, and buy-backs from retail? How does that compare to their margin on digital? Standard practice is to assume they get just 50% of the retail price - that's less than the 70% from the Playstation store even if the disks and shipping were free.
Re: Spider-Man 2 Gets Enhanced PS5 Pro Support Today, Plus New Suits
I bought Spider-Man 2 on sale, played the opening bit, and got sidetracked on other things. I meant to go back when I picked up my PS5 Pro (but didn't, for more than a quick look around), and recently I've been thinking of going back again.
I've played very little of the story and will need to start over. Probably worth doing before Wolverine drops.
Re: GTA 6 Region Locks Raise More Questions About PSN's Flaky Infrastructure
@LordOfTurnips I assume it's either because Brazil is large enough to be its own market, or there are some laws in Brazil that force them to treat it differently in order to comply with them. Hard to tell which, without some public statement from Sony.
That's one detail people forget - local laws can make this more complicated than just "Sony needs to fix it."
Re: Physical Game Fans Won't Like This New Data About US PS5 Sales
So I saw a graphic in a YouTube video and came here looking for more details, because if it was true, it had the potential to change my mind (which, for the record, is that as much as I hate seeing physical disks go away, I expect it's inevitable and a couple years after the PS6 rolls out it will be largely forgotten).
The graphic reported to show disk vs digital sales for specific titles, including Spider-Man 2, Last of Us 2, God of War Ragnarok, and several others. In most cases, the disk version was over half the sales - the lowest was Spider-Man 2, from what I saw.
I don't see such an article here, and quick search didn't turn up anything like it online - anybody else seen the source for that, or do I need to try to go hunting in YouTube videos to see if somebody has a source?
Re: Physical Game Fans Won't Like This New Data About US PS5 Sales
@ElPenitente Gaming has always been "Adapt or die" - just ask people who worked for Atari in the 1980s, or one of countless other companies that rose and fell over the years (Sierra springs to mind as another great example, at least if you're as old as I am).
Re: Physical Game Fans Won't Like This New Data About US PS5 Sales
@get2sammyb Those used sales are worthless to publishers, yes...unless they lead to DLC sales. Which is one (of many) reasons why there's so much monetization after the initial purchase these days.
And nobody ever talks about services like Gamefly. Publishers likely hate game rentals even more than used markets.
Re: Physical Game Fans Won't Like This New Data About US PS5 Sales
The truth is, publisher prefer digital sales. It costs them less to make, so they get more profit. They don't have to worry about losing sales to the secondary market (no matter what you think about how you'd only buy games because of the secondary market, they see those sales as pure loss of revenue).
The reason the XBox One announcement had all those anti-consumer features was that the publishers wanted them, and Microsoft was going to oblige. That hasn't really changed in all these years.
I'm saying this as someone who still buys physical disks - but I recognize I'm in the minority. If I wasn't in the minority, if most gamers were buying physical disks or appeared willing to spend extra for physical releases and extra content, then the news would be different. But as an industry, we've been asking for this with our spending.
Re: Sony Imposes 'Strictest Ever Social Media Guidelines' on Staff Due to PS5 Disc Debacle
@ShadowRJ Well, they could say it's all our fault for not buying enough disks. Or they could say their customers are whiny babies who don't know what's best for them. Those would surely make things worse, wouldn't they? If you can't think of what they could say to make it worse, you lack imagination.
The question I asked, that I think is more interesting, is what can they say that will make it better?
I gave two possibilities. They could change their mind (not happening - look at the sales data for disks in the US this year, it's a blip that costs more than it's worth) or they could announce a plan for disk-to-digital conversions so you can keep playing your games on a disk-less system. The latter, if it's coming, probably isn't ready yet, and announcing anything like that before it's ready is risky.
What else can they say at all? What would make YOU happy to hear, if it's not either of the two things I mentioned?
Re: Sony Imposes 'Strictest Ever Social Media Guidelines' on Staff Due to PS5 Disc Debacle
First, I'm not happy that Sony will stop publishing game disks. I bought two during the June Amazon Prime sale.
Second, I think this was inevitable, and not at all a surprise. To those predicting Sony's impending doom, I point to smart phones without removable batteries, SD slots, or headphone jacks, to laptops without DVD drives, and to Steam (and GOG and Epic). People get used to the new normal and their outrage flames out - I'm sure that's what Sony is expecting to happen here. And I think they're right.
Third, I disagree that they should say anything more UNLESS they have something meaningful to say. If they don't have a plan for some sort of disk-to-digital option already worked out, they shouldn't talk about now, because anything they say will be seen as a promise. And nothing else they can say would temper the resentment right now - unless they decide to reverse the decision, and I very much doubt that's possible. If you can't make it better, stay silent and don't make it worse.
Re: Obsidian Is Officially Making a New Fallout Game
They said it's a new Fallout project. No word on what kind of project it is. If it wasn't strictly a game studio they were partnering with, I'd be warning to be prepared for a new Fallout comic or something.
But...mobile game? Live service? SP? MP? No hints yet.
Re: Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush Is Drifting onto PS5 Earlier Than Expected
Fair enough, "hundreds" of tracks is a bit of hyperbole, though not so much if you combine the two titles. And maybe some people feel a difference between the cars - for me, any difference in the handling or speed or acceleration were always vastly overwhelmed by the difference in boost. It quickly felt like that was the ONLY stat to pay any attention to, and to figure out which boost type you worked with best.
As for the playable for young kids, I suppose some of that depends on how young you're talking about. I do appreciate there are some harder difficulties for a challenge for older players like me, but I also felt the track designs were too often too hard to play until you memorized what was around each corner - there was just very little reaction time available. The first time through a new track was often a nightmare.
To each his own - it's been a popular series, so clearly a lot of people enjoy it more than I have. I hope they take the new one with an open world in places that improve the playability and make it more enjoyable for me, personally.
Re: Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush Is Drifting onto PS5 Earlier Than Expected
@MFTWrecks The first two can be fun if you're good at racing (or more realistically, kart-racing style) games. But even if you are, don't expect to go into a new track and do well - the signposting is awful, you can end up off the track like you said, many tracks have shortcuts that at higher difficulties you simply MUST use to do well (but they may be hidden and you have to watch another racer take them or explore for ages to discover them yourself).
And once you master one track, there's mostly one or two races at that track, and then it's off to learn a new one. Great for hours and hours and hours and hours of content, awful for pick-up-and-play progression, or for kids.
And that cool new car you unlocked (Snoopy on the sopwith camel doghouse!!!) is probably garbage in a race so if you play with it for fun you're going to lose.
Re: Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush Is Drifting onto PS5 Earlier Than Expected
If it has more of a Burnout Paradise feel, I'm in. But I tend to doubt it will go that far - I hope they prove me wrong.
I got tired too quickly of the previous Hot Wheels games - you had to learn and master hundreds of individual racetracks to win consistently, and the choice of car was almost always which had the most boost - nothing else mattered most of the time. It was fun for what it was, but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
Re: 'Millions of Gamers Value True Ownership': PS5, PS4 Represented Half of All UK Physical Game Revenue in 2025
On a side note - I think this tells me the PS6 won't release until the 2028 holiday season at the earliest, after the demise of disks has blown over at least a little and a disk-less PS6 will be expected. That gives Sony time to announce some sort of disk-to-digital plan before an official PS6 announcement, too.
Re: 'Millions of Gamers Value True Ownership': PS5, PS4 Represented Half of All UK Physical Game Revenue in 2025
@Th3solution The problem with asking "why is Sony forcing this when it will happen naturally?" is that the long tail will be cut off at some point. Do they stop making disks when disk sales are 20% of sales? 10%? 5%? Even if they wait until they're 1% of sales, they're going to upset the people who make up that 1% - and by then, the cost of supporting that 1% of sales probably means they're losing money on it.
So they're cutting it off before it gets so low that they lose significant money supporting the sales. If you're part of the minority still buying physical disks (I am), then you're not happy with the decision, but it's a decision that's been coming for years, and a decision we'll never be happy with whether it's today or 10 years from now.
So Sony is ripping of the bandaid.
Re: 'Millions of Gamers Value True Ownership': PS5, PS4 Represented Half of All UK Physical Game Revenue in 2025
The statistic "Nielsen data says 45% of all physical games sold in the UK last year were for the PS5 and PS4, representing almost half of the revenue generated." tells me almost nothing. That same statistic would be true if there were a total of 9 playsation physical games sold in all the UK, and another 11 total divided between XBox and Nintendo. It's meaningless.
The number that would mean more is how many are being sold AND for what profit for the publisher? A related piece of information this statistic ignores is that Nintendo is not offering as many true physical sales as they used to - you may buy a box in a store, but it's just a code, so is that a physical sale or a digital one?
Look, I'll miss disks when they're gone, and I sure hope they still make UHD movies on disk (because there the quality often is truly better than streaming - not the identical experience, just with or without a disk and, at least theoretically, with more protections having a physical copy). I'll join in the outrage if the outrage really helps - but I don't think it will. Macs haven't supported drives in what...a decade? PCs don't often ship with physical media drives of any kind, unless you count an SD slot. The industry is speaking.
If you really REALLY want to make a difference, go talk to the stores that sell disks and get them on your side. In the US, get Best Buy and Walmart up in arms over the loss of sales, and you might get somewhere. But don't get your hopes up.
Re: Sony's FlexStrike PS5 Fight Stick Delayed Indefinitely, Now Launches After Marvel Tokon
"unexpected production delays" can mean a lot of things. Maybe a quality assurance check found a defect that they need to fix. Maybe one of the components didn't get delivered on time and held up manufacturing. Maybe there was a strike at a manufacturing plant...or a fire (a fire that damaged products ready to ship delayed a kickstarter I bought into once). SO MANY options.
Re: July 2026 PS Plus Premium Game Has Already Been Confirmed
I kind of hope they abandon the idea of releasing games scattershot all month - if they're waiting until Wednesday to announce them, just release them all the following Tuesday.
If they're going to release them on different dates, announce them on different dates. Don't hold onto them and draw it out - there's no benefit to that at all.
As for Premium vs Extra...I only upgraded to Premium beause of a sale, and because of the streaming. I didn't have a PS1 or PS2, so most of the games of that era hold no nostalgia for me (or if they do, it's PC nostalgia). And let's be honest - most of them don't translate well to modern gameplay if you're just emulating them and not rebuilding them.
Re: PS5's Call of Duty: Black Ops Port Reportedly Riddled with Hackers
Two things can be true at once.
You can be upset at how the modern gaming industry has changed "buying" a game into a somewhat long-term "rental" of a game, as they can disable their games at any time without warning and face almost no consequences.
And people who buy a game can be legitimately bothered by people actively interfering with their ability to enjoy the game they bought.
Both things can be true at the same time - I don't understand why that would be controversial, or why you'd attack anybody over buying a game you wouldn't buy. I wouldn't touch either of these games, they're just not my thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's okay that they're being hacked and made unplayable.
Re: PS5's Physical Disc Debacle Will Attract More Anger if This Xbox Rumour Is True
@Oram77 I'm willing to bet that Sony CAN'T copy this. XBox has unique codes on each disk to identify it individually - that was part of the whole fiasco when they announced how XBox One was going to restrict sharing/selling disks, which is only possible if each disk has a unique identifier.
I'm not sure Sony does the same thing for Playstation disks - does anybody know for sure? If they don't, and it would be a lot cheaper if they don't since each disk could be identical, then they wouldn't have a way to implement an identical feature. If they did something similar, it would probably require you to mail your disk to them, so they can destroy it when they give you digital access.
Re: 'Sony Knows a $1,000 PS6 Won't Sell as Much': Analyst on Manufacturer's Plan to Maximise Revenue
@get2sammyb It will be interesting to see if the PS6 offers a drive at all, and if it does what formats it supports for movies. I picked up a separate UHD player for my system, because the PS5 doesn't support DolbyVision on movie disks, which was disappointing.
I suspect if they offer a disk at all, it will be like the Slim and Pro - an add-on (maybe even the same add-on, if they can make it work) for an extra price. Availability will be another question, as well as features.
Honestly, I think it's more likely that if Microsoft's idea of mailing in disks works well, they'll copy that idea - ship them your disks so they can be destroyed, and get a code for a digital copy (that they can never ever take away, pinky promise!).
Re: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Remake Studio Faced with Layoffs Despite Successful Launch
While I won't touch the discussion of the working conditions, as I don't know enough about them for my comment to be useful, I do think the layoffs after releasing a game are going to be trend that continues for everything that isn't a live service game. The developer needs all hands on deck to wrap it up and get it out the door, and maybe for the first patch post release, but at some point that full staff you had to finish the game no longer has work to do. Some studios may be able to switch people over to the next game rather seamlessly, but that requires excellent management that has games staged and ready at the right time. That's hard to pull off.
Jobs aren't there for the sole benefit of the employee - they're there to provide something the employer needs, too. If the next project isn't at the stage they need all hands on deck, then it's time to lay off some of those hands until you have work for them to do and need to start hiring again. It can be brutal, but it's still a better career than hunting wild animals with a sharpened stick to get food for dinner.