@CWill97 Limited episode runs is the bane of the modern streaming environment, anime or live action. I miss when a season of a show meant 20-25 weekly episodes. Now 10 episodes feels generous.
It changes the decisions over how you build a story, how you develop the characters, how you flesh out the situation. We're left with shallower stories as a result.
The grind of putting together a new episode every single week for broadcast television led to its own issues which wore on actors and writers and staff, but it gave a lot more room for a lot more storytelling.
@Hyena_socks Churn is definitely the way to go. Subscribe to a service, watch everything on it that interests you. When you start struggling to find something, cancel and try another. Costs way too much to keep everything active all the time.
Whenever this is finally announced, I expect we'll see two things in rapid succession. No matter what the price finally is, no matter what the specs turn out to be, I predict these results.
First, a thousand posts saying "for that price, I'll just buy a PC."
Second, a few dozen comparisons showing that a comparably priced PC will be half as powerful, while a similarly-powerful PC will cost twice as much.
What am I paying $1,000 for? How does it compare to a PC with similar specs? Nobody knows yet.
If the PS6 hardware compares favorably to a $2,000 PC, then why not? If it compares favorably to a $1,000 PC, then maybe not.
If there's any chance I could take the Blu-Ray player from my PS5 Pro, plug it into the PS6, and play most PS1/2/3/4/5 games, plus UHD movie discs with DolbyVision support, then that's an enormous bonus which might make it look more attractive.
But mostly it's just too early to know what is a fair value.
Remember when you're looking at hardware sales, in particular, that just as sales revenue is not the same as units sold, revenue is not the same as profit. Lower revenue with a 10% profit margin is a lot different than double the revenue with a 1% profit margin, at least as far as the health of the company is concerned.
As someone who loved Burnout Paradise and Motorstorm, this feels right up my alley.
I rarely buy on PC, but I picked this up on Steam. I've seen there are already some rudimentary VR mods for it, and I hope to eventually play this on my PSVR2 on my PC. This is one where mods might make it even better. I hope I don't regret it...I guess I'll find out.
If it's as good as it sounds, I wouldn't be surprised if I also pick it up on PS5 some day down the road on a good sale.
I don't really care much what my friends are playing, and I'd rather have a slimmer app that strips out all the social media stuff, personally. But so long as I can turn things off and it doesn't spam me with notifications, I don't care that much.
What's the point of "shows" like this, over just dropping your trailer on YouTube? Seems to me the need for these types of things are dropping.
Is it just the hope that people will tune in to the show and see your trailer when YouTube wouldn't necessarily put it in someone's feed? Do these really deliver more views?
Forget about the timing, forget about what else is coming out and when, and just focus on finishing the game so you don't spend the first weeks after release in damage control mode, desperately racing to patch things which should have patched before launch.
I share this advice freely with every single studio for every single game.
I know sometimes the cash is running out and they need to get it out the door for the burst of sales revenue to keep them afloat, but releasing a game before it's really truly ready is bad for everyone, every time.
Meh. Nothing for me. I'm not an F1 fan, though I might give it a shot just because I can. The other two games I've never heard of, but neither sounds interesting.
I just hope they don't overhype it. Tell me it's going to blow my mind, and it darn well better blow my mind - otherwise, you turn even a very, very good game into a disappointment.
To be clear, a mind-blowing number of bugs and glitches does not count.
I bet this is just a way to get around regulations (and bad PR) around dynamic pricing.
Instead of changing the price based on who you are, they offer "wallet credit" based on who you are. If they think you're willing to pay full price all the time, you'll just never see any "wallet credit" offers, while us cheapskates who only buy on sale may see a lot more.
At the end of a day, it's a business. How much money do you want Sony to spend to keep Kojima? One million? Ten million? Fifty million? One hundred million? One billion? At some point, it's more money than you can possibly make back.
I have no idea where Sony is on that spread, or how big a loss they think they'll be looking at if they financed the rest of development. But nobody else in this forum knows either, and we're well over 250 posts in, so who cares?
The fact that they're being stupid and losing money in other areas (live service money pits) isn't an excuse to lose money in EVERY area. While I hope he gets his game finished and I look forward to giving it a try, I can understand Sony not wanting to spend a fortune on it - I'm not going to want to spend $100 to play it, myself, no matter how good it turns out.
It's an imperfect metric, but according to ps-timetracker, Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft are three of the top 5 games with the most hours played on a Playstation this month. They're pretty much in the top 5 year round. So tell me how many players who are primarily playing those three games care about the choices Sony has been making? They don't care about disks going away, because they don't have a disk. They don't care about lack of first-party exclusives, because they're playing multiplatform games anyway.
Remember, the population of Playstation owners who come to sites like this are not representative of the entire population of Playstation owners.
Honestly, I think the inevitable high price of the PS6 and the lack of PS6-exclusive titles will do more to hurt the sales of the PS6 than the bad PR over the demise of physical media. I do think there's a chance that if they don't offer a drive for backwards-compatibility, it will hurt sales a bit more, but that's minor compared to the costs of the next generation.
@TensuraFan7 - You're assuming your friends are representative of the entire PS5 install base. I suspect they're not.
@SodaPop6548 Loved the show. My wife started the first book, and didn't get very far. How much of the content of the books are politics? I think that's what turned her off, though I might enjoy it if it's not too hard to keep track of who is who.
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).
Comments 1,077
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for November 2026 Announced
Not a bad month at all. Not the best, but solid.
Re: TV Show Review: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 - Slick Night City Sequel Struggles to Match Its Predecessor
@CWill97 Limited episode runs is the bane of the modern streaming environment, anime or live action. I miss when a season of a show meant 20-25 weekly episodes. Now 10 episodes feels generous.
It changes the decisions over how you build a story, how you develop the characters, how you flesh out the situation. We're left with shallower stories as a result.
The grind of putting together a new episode every single week for broadcast television led to its own issues which wore on actors and writers and staff, but it gave a lot more room for a lot more storytelling.
@Hyena_socks Churn is definitely the way to go. Subscribe to a service, watch everything on it that interests you. When you start struggling to find something, cancel and try another. Costs way too much to keep everything active all the time.
Re: PS6 Costs $200 Less to Make Than Xbox Helix, Snoop Claims
Whenever this is finally announced, I expect we'll see two things in rapid succession. No matter what the price finally is, no matter what the specs turn out to be, I predict these results.
First, a thousand posts saying "for that price, I'll just buy a PC."
Second, a few dozen comparisons showing that a comparably priced PC will be half as powerful, while a similarly-powerful PC will cost twice as much.
Re: Poll: Would You Pay $1,000 for a PS6?
Sorry, but this is an awful survey.
What am I paying $1,000 for? How does it compare to a PC with similar specs? Nobody knows yet.
If the PS6 hardware compares favorably to a $2,000 PC, then why not? If it compares favorably to a $1,000 PC, then maybe not.
If there's any chance I could take the Blu-Ray player from my PS5 Pro, plug it into the PS6, and play most PS1/2/3/4/5 games, plus UHD movie discs with DolbyVision support, then that's an enormous bonus which might make it look more attractive.
But mostly it's just too early to know what is a fair value.
Re: Marvel Tokon Far Exceeds Expectations in US Sales Charts, PS5 Dollar Spend Up
Remember when you're looking at hardware sales, in particular, that just as sales revenue is not the same as units sold, revenue is not the same as profit. Lower revenue with a 10% profit margin is a lot different than double the revenue with a 1% profit margin, at least as far as the health of the company is concerned.
Re: Out Today: Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the Highest-Rated Star Wars Game in Over 20 Years
As someone who loved Burnout Paradise and Motorstorm, this feels right up my alley.
I rarely buy on PC, but I picked this up on Steam. I've seen there are already some rudimentary VR mods for it, and I hope to eventually play this on my PSVR2 on my PC. This is one where mods might make it even better. I hope I don't regret it...I guess I'll find out.
If it's as good as it sounds, I wouldn't be surprised if I also pick it up on PS5 some day down the road on a good sale.
Re: Sony Prepping Improved PS App with Expanded Social Features
I don't really care much what my friends are playing, and I'd rather have a slimmer app that strips out all the social media stuff, personally. But so long as I can turn things off and it doesn't spam me with notifications, I don't care that much.
Re: Galaxies Game Showcase Returns Later This Month, Over 40 Companies Taking Part
What's the point of "shows" like this, over just dropping your trailer on YouTube? Seems to me the need for these types of things are dropping.
Is it just the hope that people will tune in to the show and see your trailer when YouTube wouldn't necessarily put it in someone's feed? Do these really deliver more views?
Re: PS5's Kena: Scars of Kosmora Officially Delayed into 2027, New Details Revealed
Forget about the timing, forget about what else is coming out and when, and just focus on finishing the game so you don't spend the first weeks after release in damage control mode, desperately racing to patch things which should have patched before launch.
I share this advice freely with every single studio for every single game.
I know sometimes the cash is running out and they need to get it out the door for the burst of sales revenue to keep them afloat, but releasing a game before it's really truly ready is bad for everyone, every time.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for October 2026 Announced
Meh. Nothing for me. I'm not an F1 fan, though I might give it a shot just because I can. The other two games I've never heard of, but neither sounds interesting.
Hope somebody is happy with these.
Re: 'You Guys Are Gonna Have Your Minds Blown': Troy Baker Says We're Not Ready for Intergalactic
I just hope they don't overhype it. Tell me it's going to blow my mind, and it darn well better blow my mind - otherwise, you turn even a very, very good game into a disappointment.
To be clear, a mind-blowing number of bugs and glitches does not count.
Re: PS5's Welcome Hub Adds Animated The Last of Us Wallpaper
The screen I see on booting my PS5 is the player selection screen.
The Welcome Screen is the screen I see on my PS5 after logging in.
Re: Sony Seemingly Incentivising Digital PS5 Purchases with Cashback
I bet this is just a way to get around regulations (and bad PR) around dynamic pricing.
Instead of changing the price based on who you are, they offer "wallet credit" based on who you are. If they think you're willing to pay full price all the time, you'll just never see any "wallet credit" offers, while us cheapskates who only buy on sale may see a lot more.
Re: Sony Stopped Physint Development Over Budget, Exclusivity Concerns
At the end of a day, it's a business. How much money do you want Sony to spend to keep Kojima? One million? Ten million? Fifty million? One hundred million? One billion? At some point, it's more money than you can possibly make back.
I have no idea where Sony is on that spread, or how big a loss they think they'll be looking at if they financed the rest of development. But nobody else in this forum knows either, and we're well over 250 posts in, so who cares?
The fact that they're being stupid and losing money in other areas (live service money pits) isn't an excuse to lose money in EVERY area. While I hope he gets his game finished and I look forward to giving it a try, I can understand Sony not wanting to spend a fortune on it - I'm not going to want to spend $100 to play it, myself, no matter how good it turns out.
Re: PS5 Blackout Protest Made 'No Significant Change at All' to Player Counts, Says US Data
It's an imperfect metric, but according to ps-timetracker, Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft are three of the top 5 games with the most hours played on a Playstation this month. They're pretty much in the top 5 year round. So tell me how many players who are primarily playing those three games care about the choices Sony has been making? They don't care about disks going away, because they don't have a disk. They don't care about lack of first-party exclusives, because they're playing multiplatform games anyway.
Remember, the population of Playstation owners who come to sites like this are not representative of the entire population of Playstation owners.
Re: PS5 Blackout Protest Made 'No Significant Change at All' to Player Counts, Says US Data
Honestly, I think the inevitable high price of the PS6 and the lack of PS6-exclusive titles will do more to hurt the sales of the PS6 than the bad PR over the demise of physical media. I do think there's a chance that if they don't offer a drive for backwards-compatibility, it will hurt sales a bit more, but that's minor compared to the costs of the next generation.
@TensuraFan7 - You're assuming your friends are representative of the entire PS5 install base. I suspect they're not.
Re: The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Is What Fans of the Books and Show Have Been Waiting For
@SodaPop6548 Loved the show. My wife started the first book, and didn't get very far. How much of the content of the books are politics? I think that's what turned her off, though I might enjoy it if it's not too hard to keep track of who is who.
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).