SeaDaVie

The community + staff at PureXbox voted this Game of the Year ahead of Baldurs Gate 3 btw. That will never not crack me up 🤪

Looking through that list and I realise there must be like 100 marvel characters that would be good in a fighting game.

Maybe they'll port the first games in a series, like God of war(2018), Horizon: Zero Dawn, the Last of us Pt.I, to encourage people to transition to PS6 with the next gen as the only course to continue them.

There has to some angle here. When MS port games to PS5 they are increasing their reachable console market by 250%. For Sony it would be 40%. That's before addressing the fact that xbox owners are likely to buy fewer games overall.

@Dalamar on a 1080p lcd screen? OK.

Can't believe I watched that Direct 🤣🤪

Somewhat surprising because, if I recall correctly, the second game did significantly worse than the first game, despite being better.

@Toot1st Yeah, they bought Naughty Dog, whose previous games had been, prior to working with Sony, Keef the Thief, Rings of Power and Way of the Warrior.

They bought Guerilla Games whose only previous game had been Shellshock: Nam 67.

They bought Sucker Punch whose only previous game had been Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

They bought Media Molecule who’d never made a game.

They bought Insomniac who made one game before working with Sony, Disruptor.

They bought Housemarque after helping them make the big breakthrough into modern AA(A) gaming from small indie arcade games.

So when MS studios like Compulsion and Undead labs start making AAA GoTY winning games they will be getting somewhere.

@SMJ The Indiana Jones deal existed before MS bought them. MS specifically had to renegotiate the contract after the acquisition.

@SMJ From a business perspective, sure. From a creativity perspective it's an important distinction. Redistributing existing market value to yourself while not growing the overall market is good for that company but a net zero for the consumers. We're consumers here, not businessmen(presumably).

Funding and creating new games is adding value. Putting a xbox sticker on games that would exist without them is a zero sum game for the market.

@Max_the_German

I don’t understand the downplay of the 5B annual revenue for Game Pass.

It’s not exactly new information. Satya said it was almost $1b a quarter in early 2023. Now it’s almost $1.25b a quarter, but prices for GPU have increased by more than 25% in this timeframe and they also added all the Xbox Live Gold members as GP Core members.

Their subscriber numbers are still way behind their projections. They were supposed to break 60m subs about 3 quarter's ago.

@themightyant PS plus made $1.18b revenue last quarter and $1.19b the quarter before, meaning it is is also close to $5b a year revenue. I think it’s safe to assume that the costs of third party titles for them is cheaper, they don’t have the costs associated with running it on PC and the massive cloud support either.

Yet we know the exact profitability of the PS division and for the last 2 quarters it was $1.4b total. So how much exactly did PS plus contribute to that? At the same time software sales are at record high levels (~300m a year) and downloadable content is at record levels of revenue. Yet the overall profit margin across everything is still quite low.

I suspect the profitability of subscription services is not as high as many people think, and that there are a lot of hidden costs associated with them. If PS Plus is generating, let’s say, $1b in profit a year then how much of Gamepass’s equivalent profit is being eaten up by their extra costs?

@Cry_Zero That’s the joke, bro

@KillerBoy Split Fiction, 4 months ago.

@Cry_Zero well the best selling Greek game is 5.2m units and GoW(2018) sold 23m copies so I guess that game fell flat for a lot of people, including all the people on Steam where the original games are not available. Oh wait, the game is a 96% on Steam and is one of the highest rated games of all time. lmfao.

I think Microsoft thought everyone would follow them and they got caught in no mans land on their own, looking rather foolish.

@Cry_Zero you don't need to ram 6 years in! Even before the first game Kratos had been alive for decades, we didn't need to see every minute of that. See him be born and watch his whole life.

Story's start wherever you want, and can tell whatever story you want.

Star Wars starts in the middle of a galactic war. We don't need to see the entire history of it, or Luke as a baby growing up or the entire back story of Obi-Wan.

Thats how stories work.

@Oram77 Why would the franchise be dead? Literally every mainline game was financially successful and RE2 remake was already deep into production?

RE5 and RE6 might be considered poor games but they sold well. RE6 shipped 4.5m at launch and lifetime was 13.8m. RE5 sold 15.3m.

@Oram77 actually RE7 performed below sales expectations for its first year. It was the RE2 remake that turbocharged the franchise again, and a lot of people bought RE7 later.

Wow, Wilds selling 477k copies it's second quarter is absurdly bad. I guess you really can't get away with a bad launch, it always catches upto you eventually.

@PuppetMaster the best selling Greek game was GoWIII at 5.2m and GoW(2018) sold 23m+. There were 6 Greek games so the total sales are mostly just double counting the same people over and over.

@Cry_Zero He's literally the "showrunner", a role performed for decades across some of the most successful shows made in that time. It's his job to put into effect all the conditions in order to make a good show.

What exactly is your expertise? No offence but from my perspective you look like a random dude on the internet with an anime avatar, and still uses the expression "lmfao" like it's 2004 and it's not utterly embarrassing to use.

While this looks kind of funny, it mostly just highlights that very few games were released in this quarter. Expedition 33 was one of the notable games and I’m assuming that isn’t included in Circana data(Circana only gets digital sales data from companies signed up to the agreement, mostly big companies).

Just like FH5 being the best selling game of the year is interesting, but with 3m sales being the best it just highlights that no big games released this year. Big games, like Elden Rings and God of Wars etc, easily sell 3m+ in their first few days.

It looks very 7/10

How exactly are all these terrible studios just given free reign with this license? Is their some loophole allowing their use under certain circumstances or something or are they actually being licensed by the Tolkien estate?

@SMJ Thats a specific Law term that just means something that can't be fixed once it's happened. Like if you stole a million dollars, that can be fixed by repaying it. If you release a cheap knockoff that ruined the brand then that can never be fixed, you can remove it from sale but the harm would already be done.

It's a key term for application of an injunction. It is not a descriptor of the severity of the action.

I’d be shocked if this is anything but completely exceptional

@Oram77 I mean, it's still the most popular game in the world, but, yeah, people don't really take a shot at that market anymore, not primarily anyway.

@naruball At least Pedro Pascal's a good human being.

@Cry_Zero

When will these fking clowns learn

Ron Moore was the showrunner and lead writer for shows like Battlestar Galactica and For all Mankind. I suspect he knows a thing or two about making a tv series.

Yeah, the story of the Greek games is pretty bad, so it makes sense. Through flashbacks you can pick out the key moments and leave a lot up to the imagination and let people imagine the story was deep, nuanced and interesting.

It costs too much but Sony seems very inflexible in pricing. It's £35 for the live service games, £70 for the premium games and £60 if they're slightly less premium.

@Shad361

In terms of actual console sales, they still never surpassed their peak.

Consoles don't get as cheap as they used to. In regards to software sales the PS is currently shifting ~300m units a year, which is by far the best of any company in the history of video games. That's with downloadable content doing even more revenue than the entire combined digital+physical game sales.

So the current market is complex, looking at hardware sales will not paint a very clear picture of the actual market health. PlayStation makes more profit than ever, this much is clear, but as with all things, no amount of profit is enough profit for some.

I doubt much will come of this, maybe Tokon gets a Switch 2 and Xbox release. Marathon is already multi platform day one. They might test the switch waters with something like Astro Bot.

The outfits kind of bring down the tone a bit, but I'll be happy to ignore their existence if the game is good, which seems somewhat unlikely as things stand.

It's currently one of the lowest rated games on Steam with almost everyone complaining about technical issues and almost everyone being like "i don't remember anyone in reviews mentioning any of these issues".

Just saying.

This is a lot of comments for a, checks notes, 6/10 game

@species Are you trolling, didn’t MK8 have like dozens of tracks locked behind paid DLC and Smash Brothers was like a dozen fighters?

What does this mean exactly? That they had the most recent code, i.e. the War of the Lion code that had overwritten the original code? Yet, they chose to recreate the game from scratch? I’m not really getting this, as it doesn’t seem to make sense at all…

The funny thing about the whole open world checklist discussion is that no one ever mentions Yakuza games, presumably because they are too beloved for criticism. Here's the thing though, the games have literal giant checklists, pages and pages of them, and you need to complete all of them for the platinum. They're the literal definition of open world checklist games and I'm pretty sure they invented the genre, not Ubisoft.

A lot of people like to claim that AA games are what audiences actually want to buy, but the reality is that if you're not part of that 1% that magically takes off then you're part of the 99% that people didn't know existed/didn't know was released yet.

If you like above average generic Soulslikes then boy is China going to have you covered for the next 20 years.

@Oram77 Ghost of Tsushima sold 1m+ in Japan. That actually makes it one of the best selling western developed games of all time, and one of the best selling PS4 games of the generation.

@Shigurui It’s the third best selling game in the US of 2025 and 2nd best selling game in Europe. If that is tanking financially then the entire industry is dead.

Also, according to Guillemot at a recent investor call the game cost “over €100m”. If it isn’t significantly over that number, which seems a reasonable assumption, then the game is already into profitability. It will easily sell another 5-10m units too, mostly discounted ones, and then a ton of DLC.

So it made decent money, but it’s not a mega hit. Ghost of Tsushima cost $60m and sold 2.4m units in 3 days and 13m+ units in 4 years. That was as a new IP; that’s a mega hit.

It’s dead, Jim

(Message too short)

MH:Wilds will be closer to 5m, which brings into question their methodology. Whatever they are doing I’m pretty sure it can’t account for MH:Wilds Asian skew.

@Noone2025 Their last game was Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Steam data is very useful when taken within the correct context, but some people use it as an absolute and it leads to completely skewed conclusions.

Assassins creed Shadows didn't have big numbers on Steam but we now know that it is currently the third best selling game in the USA this year and is No. 2 for the year in Europe according to recently published H1 results by GfK.

For example on Steam Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had about 3x the peak user count of AC:Shadows but it looks like AC outsold it on consoles by like 6 or 7:1

@RoomWithaMoose he literally claimed the game is dated, which is veering strongly into objective territory. The majority of people who reviewed and played the game within the last 12 months do not appear to agree, by the publicly available metrics.

He's entitled to not like the game if he wants.

I would also point out that he went out of his way to preemptively criticise the opinions of others that don't agree with him using pretty poor language

Despite all the glazing that will occur from Sony stans

@themightyant they all have creative roles though, on top of producer roles, especially Kojima and Takahashi, who have Director credits across games. Igarashi is more of a producer but he also has creative credits in writing, scenario designer and Co-director(also directed a game Ive never heard of).

Kobayashi had 2 programming credits from 30 years ago and has only worked as a producer since. That doesn't fill me with confidence.

Just to clarify, he’s a producer, i.e. he had no role in the actual game design, story or art etc. He’s like a project manager. Not to diss his role or anything but producers tend not to be able to recreate high quality games when removed from specific creative teams they worked with.

Examples of Producers moving onto new work:

Leslie Benzies - GTA -> Mindseye
Jade Raymond - Assassin’s Creed -> Lots of things that didn’t work out
Glen Schofield - Dead Space -> Callisto Protocol