It would make sense for XBox to try and get a head start. They forwent a mid-gen 'pro' model this time, so don't have a model on the market which is the new-hotness. But if they do launch something next year, it won't be meaningfully different from the PS5 Pro without being dramatically more expensive (assuming they don't want to make it a loss leader).
With millions more PS5s on the market, one has to wonder to what extent developers would support any higher-end features that the NeXtBox would offer, or whether PS5 would remain the standard SKU targeted by developers looking to release on console.
@Th3solution Brotato is a fairly decent little roguelike autoshooter actually. Don't throw it in with the likes of "The Jumping Pizza" and all those single button easy platinum games.
The Arkane Collection - everything they’ve released from Dishonored to Deathloop - for £32.50 is a huge saving and is well worth picking up for any fan of immersive sims.
I played Worlds and got hopelessly addicted. Sleep, then work and relationships suffered. So I’m staying away from Wilds for my own good… but that siren’s song is calling…
One of my eyebrows became firmly cocked when I saw the list of who they consider to be 'experts'. No one who's tastes I'd trust, and several who I know do not align with my own tastes.
But good luck to the project. I agree there's a big problem with game discovery so it's good to see someone trying to take that on.
@Markatron84 It depends on what they were trained on. For instance, ask ChatGPT to produce an image of a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim. It can't do it, because the vast, vast majority of images of wine glasses are either completely empty, or only filled to a normal-drinking amount. ChatGPT will even tell you that the image shows a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim when getting this wrong.
In the case of hands, it's because hands are very complicated bits of anatomy, with lots of variation in poses among the training data and individual elements. These models don't understand what a 'hand' is, they just know they look sort of like this. But they have no concept of how many fingers a hand should have, or where the bones go and how they function, that the fingers typically only bend in one direction, etc.
But this is EA so you just know that, while they'll let you play with whoever you want for free, they're looking into ways to make you pay a subscription just to have friends.
I love PlayStation's Japanese ads. That actually did a better job at getting me hyped than the recent State of Play. What wonders a soundtrack can achieve.
What's the difference, to the players, between AA and indie any more?
Sifu, Hades, Kunitsu Gami, PoP: The Lost Crown, Stray, Kena, Hollow Knight, Concrete Genie... I'd put all these in the same bucket of "smaller but still substantial titles". I think Shuhei is right that, from the consumer's perspective, there is not really a difference between a good indie game and a smaller project from a large scale publisher.
And from Sony's perspective, they don't just think "will we make a profit if we spend our development dollars here?", they also have to think "... but would we make more profit with the same development dollars if we put them over here?". And when you ask that second question, being in the "AA" space doesn't really make sense these days.
I suspected Colin would get Shuhei on the show given how profligate the latter has been with giving interviews since leaving PlayStation, and their old friendship. Looking forward to listening.
Ew, yuk. Fingers crossed that they removed this information from Steam because it is out of date and doesn't reflect long term plans to gouge their fans, but something tells me that's not the case.
It had pacing issues, but I enjoyed Days Gone. The hordes were great once it got going. Might pay the upgrade tax to try and convince Sony there was something here worth building from.
Not my bag. I liked the traditional AC. Played Mirage last year and really enjoyed it. (The story was forgettable nonsense, but the old-school AC gameplay was there in spades. No stupid enemy levels, and a paired down weapon and armour upgrade system with transmog, plenty of cool outfits. Highly recommend.)
Some of those will be people who bought the game on separate console generations. But even assuming (for the sake of argument) that everyone who is interested in GTAV has triple dipped on the 7th, 8th and 9th generation versions of the game, that would still be something like 70 million unique players.
How big this behemoth of a franchise is truly boggles the mind.
Leave Batman to rest for a while, IMO. They nailed it with the Arkham games, and those are still very playable on modern hardware.
Explore some other DC characters. Green Arrow has some name recognition after the TV series. Cyborg was in the JL movies, and provides an obvious route into RPG upgrade mechanics.
Or just move away from the traditional superheroes. Go more adult. Preacher is a DC imprint, and has a wider fanbase thanks to the TV show. John Constantine is another (albeit it's been a while since that movie). The Sandman is probably a no-go given the allegations against Gaiman... Watchmen is pretty well known at this point too.
Ideally, let the Rocksteady that exists today take some time to brainstorm and pick what they want to work on next. If that's Batman, then so be it, but I'd personally see that as a missed opportunity.
I wonder what would happen if WB Games just let their studios come up with something original, rather than having to stick to established intellectual properties. There's no reason these days why their cross-media strategy couldn't go both ways.
@Rangers420 Oh mate, Blood and Wine was fantastic. Shorter than Witcher 3 overall, but on its own is comparable to many RPG-action games that release as a full game.
Over 300 hours into the character I have got furthest with in BG3. I'm in Act 3, but only the lower city. Just cleaning up everything there before I move on, in case I push the story forward by progressing the main quest and lock things off.
And then I got a bit tired of it and have yet to return. I have something like 900 hours in total in that game. I keep making new characters to see how things go differently and I really should just see that one character through to the end before I do anything else.
This game seems right up my alley... if I had the time. Perhaps if I could convince my Mrs to take a long holiday and find some way to offload some toddlers... hrmmm.
I had several completed playthroughs of DA:O and DA2 on my 360.
Dragon Age used to have a dark, gritty, fantasy setting, with compelling characters. That's what I liked about it. From what I can see online, they've been moving away from what I enjoyed by trying to make it more saccharine and mainstream.
IMO, that's why DA lost its 'core' audience - it failed to understand who those people were and went after a different audience. Fine, if they're there.
What Wilson doesn't seem to understand about the 'connected world' crowd is that they have found their games already. You have to do something truly amazing to drag people away from Fortnite and the like these days, where they have probably sunk thousands of hours, hundreds of dollars, and made friends with whom they interact regularly. Go after those people if you want, but they'll only ever be temporary visitors to your game (if they come across at all).
@Cornpop76 Agree with you to an extent. Abby being muscly didn't break my immersion, personally, but like I say I had to come up with some plausible head-canon to explain it. It seems plausible to me that she would take anabolic steroids if she found some to prepare herself to achieve her goal. The only unexplained thing is where she got them, but finding something overlooked in a medical facility isn't totally out of the question in a world where people have apparently left the odd bullets and weapons lying around even years after the apocalypse.
I'd be getting into spoilers, and off topic, and probably start a whole thing if I mention what did break my immersion, so I'll leave things there.
@LifeGirl I always assumed that Abby (in the game) got her physique from a combination of working out and abusing some supply of anabolic steroids. Her physique is that of an enhanced female. (Having lifted very heavy weights myself for two decades as a non-enhanced powerlifter, and meeting non-enhanced female powerlifters, I can tell the difference between who is and is not abusing steroids.) I took it as implied that Abby did this to herself after she decided she would be taking vengeance, which seemed believable in the context of her story.
If Naughty Dog has said anywhere that Abby is not enhanced then I'd say they should have consulted with a sports physician or something if they were going for realism.
I was quite excited for Hot Pursuit until I booted it up and realised I was actually thinking of NfS: Most Wanted as being the game from two generations ago that I really gelled with and wanted to play again. As I already had Stanley Parable, January was a bit of a bust for me. (But if you didn't already have Stanley Parable, then you should play it and it was a decent month.)
@Kenobi42
I think there still will be competition for Sony, but not in the narrow category of consoles. I think that the fact that Sony has started measuring and reporting their MAUs and player engagement metrics in their financial statements shows that they're already thinking beyond the console device itself. It's why they've created a device like the Portal - a way to keep you on the platform when the TV is being used by someone else in your household (and, latterly, to allow you to play your games while not even at home).
Microsoft's incentive will be to maximise the amount of time people spend within it's ecosystem, spending money via XBL. They're choosing to run with a loss-leader like Gamepass to try and get you in the door, and making every device into an XBox via cloud streaming. And sure, if you want to buy their games on your PlayStation, that's cool too, MS gets your money that way.
Sony will want to attract and keep people on PSN. Sony will do so via having a top-of-the-line dedicated device that sits under your TV, and by having tentpole, best-in-class game experiences that can't be played first anywhere else.
Both those options have their merits, downsides and risks. But one thing they have in common is that you need to be creating great games that get people into your ecosystem.
It's a very interesting time for the industry but I don't think its fair to say that Sony won't be feeling the pressure and will stop thinking about the competition.
@get2sammyb On the second question on the survey, there's no difference between "They should be exclusive to PS5 for at least a year" and "They should be exclusive to PS5 for longer than a year". Both options would be satisfied with a hypothetical release on PC 366 days after a PS5 release.
Is there much point to these articles anymore? My expectation is that everything will make its way over sooner or later. The pattern seems to be that new games will receive a day-and-date (or only a few months delay, depending on developer capacity) release on PlayStation, while older stuff will be staggered not to hurt their own sales by flooding PlayStation with too much at once and competing with themselves.
Smart moves by MS. They'd sell multiple millions of copies almost immediately, I reckon. With ABK, MS is already the biggest third party publisher on PlayStation. Why would MS leave money on the table? I hope MS' commitment to maintain a hardware division lasts. Sure, I doubt PlayStation would ever publish there, but by continuing to be in the space it would at least give PlayStation some reason to try. One thought I've had is whether MS could make the XBox platform itself open, so that other companies could make an XBox, in the same way that they can make a PC running windows. Imagine a range of XBoxes being offered by Dell, HP, Microsoft itself, Samsung, etc, at different specs and price points. Microsoft has an edge with its cloud tech and compatibility of its games across its devices on the back-end, so its possible that it would be able to find a way that building games for multiple SKUs of XBoxes isn't too burdensome on developers.
@nomither6 Don't worry about that; sometimes I feel like I'm the only person not hyped for GTA6. I enjoyed GTAV and Red Dead 2 a lot (though the latter was too long and everything after the trip away from the main setting felt like a slog). I'm sure I'll get it at some point down the line, but I'm still waiting to hear what kind of experience it's going to deliver that iterates on Rockstar's formula. Same old Rockstar is fine by me, just nothing to get particularly excited about.
The more pressing question for me is whether Rockstar has done anything with its game design. Failing missions because I stepped one toe out of the narrow and invisible confines of what the mission designer intended the experience to be is tedious. I hope reviews touch on this aspect of the game in due course.
I’ve been playing a couple hours of SM2 almost daily since mid-November and I’m nowhere near unlocking and upgrading all the weapons, unlocking all the cosmetics, etc. I think the issue is the most engaged and hardcore fans are the ones that join the official discord server and sub the the Reddit, and they talk to one another and think that they are the whole community of players.
Hello Games' strategy seems to be paying off. NMS is certainly the most significant asset in their portfolio. The company generated £28m in revenue (£22m profit!) in the year ending October 2023, according to their corporate filings. This was down from almost £40m in the YE Oct 22.
It'd have been nicer if Murray had made clearer what was ambition and what was going to ship with NMS at launch, or launch in early access, but at least the message this success sends is "fix it, and fix it for free".
I can see the logic behind how Ubisoft got into this position of having so many staff. It essentially decided it was going to minimise the extent to which it outsourced work, so hired people internationally to try and keep almost all stages of the game-production pipeline in-house. The risk in that approach is that you need to be a very well oiled machine so that deadlines are met and one stage of the pipeline can begin just as another is winding down and moving on to the next project. Interruptions leads to waste due to staff not having things to do. It requires a hell of a lot of co-ordination and planning. With that in mind, the comparison with PS Studios may not be the most apt. Yes, it is less than a quarter of Ubisoft's headcount, but PS Studios will outsource work where they need to.
@djlard I'd have thought that Underworlds would be a great setting for a roguelike given the lore that the various warbands are continuously fighting and being resurrected when they fall.
Has a squad-based roguelike been done before? Could be interesting, finding upgrades and having to choose which member of the warband should get the item or perk.
Weird sub-headline and comment at the end of the article. When a publicly traded company's share price falls, that money isn't "gone". The shareholders who sold got money for selling their shares.
Comments 914
Re: Rumour: Gears of War's PS5 Debut May Be Missing Multiplayer Modes
Fine by me, as long as the campaign co-op still works.
Re: Could the Next Xbox Get a Head Start on PS6?
It would make sense for XBox to try and get a head start. They forwent a mid-gen 'pro' model this time, so don't have a model on the market which is the new-hotness. But if they do launch something next year, it won't be meaningfully different from the PS5 Pro without being dramatically more expensive (assuming they don't want to make it a loss leader).
With millions more PS5s on the market, one has to wonder to what extent developers would support any higher-end features that the NeXtBox would offer, or whether PS5 would remain the standard SKU targeted by developers looking to release on console.
Re: Random: Streamer Rides Through the Fire and the Flames to Eternal Guitar Hero Glory
The unblinking eyes...
The creepy writing on the wall...
Are we sure this guy doesn't have dead bodies in his basement?
Re: Sony Makes Push for Cloud Gaming Crown with Almost 400 More Games Whitelisted for PS Plus Premium
@Th3solution Brotato is a fairly decent little roguelike autoshooter actually. Don't throw it in with the likes of "The Jumping Pizza" and all those single button easy platinum games.
Re: 12 Great PS5, PS4 Games At Their Lowest Ever Prices This Weekend
The Arkane Collection - everything they’ve released from Dishonored to Deathloop - for £32.50 is a huge saving and is well worth picking up for any fan of immersive sims.
Re: Poll: Are You Playing Monster Hunter Wilds?
I played Worlds and got hopelessly addicted. Sleep, then work and relationships suffered. So I’m staying away from Wilds for my own good… but that siren’s song is calling…
Re: Find Your Next PS Plus Game with Innovative Discovery App
One of my eyebrows became firmly cocked when I saw the list of who they consider to be 'experts'. No one who's tastes I'd trust, and several who I know do not align with my own tastes.
But good luck to the project. I agree there's a big problem with game discovery so it's good to see someone trying to take that on.
Re: The Spiritual Successor to a Japan Studio Hall of Famer Looks Chaotic in PS5, PS4 Trailer
I have no experience with Patapon and found this hard to follow... It looks cute!
Re: Call of Duty Confirms Use of Generative AI in Blockbuster PS5, PS4 Franchise
@Markatron84 It depends on what they were trained on. For instance, ask ChatGPT to produce an image of a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim. It can't do it, because the vast, vast majority of images of wine glasses are either completely empty, or only filled to a normal-drinking amount. ChatGPT will even tell you that the image shows a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim when getting this wrong.
In the case of hands, it's because hands are very complicated bits of anatomy, with lots of variation in poses among the training data and individual elements. These models don't understand what a 'hand' is, they just know they look sort of like this. But they have no concept of how many fingers a hand should have, or where the bones go and how they function, that the fingers typically only bend in one direction, etc.
Re: Monster Hunter-Like, Live Service Action Game Dauntless Is Shutting Down This May
Didn’t this studio sell itself to some weird NFT outfit, only then to monetise the game out of the wazoo and kill player sentiment?
I hope the devs walked away happy with whatever they sold the studio for and it was all worth it.
Re: Xbox Plots a Catalogue of AI Games, And It'll Probably Use Tech on PS5
Generative AI is just a tool. What will separate good developers from bad ones is how that tool is utilised.
Re: Co-Op Game Split Fiction's Friend's Pass Will Work Across Consoles
But this is EA so you just know that, while they'll let you play with whoever you want for free, they're looking into ways to make you pay a subscription just to have friends.
Re: Sony Clarifies the Difference Between First-Party, Second-Party, and So On
I look forward to future comments sections becoming flame wars over the correct use of these terms now. XD
Re: PS5 Prepares for a Massive Month in Japan with Montage Video
I love PlayStation's Japanese ads. That actually did a better job at getting me hyped than the recent State of Play. What wonders a soundtrack can achieve.
Re: Talking Point: Has the Market for AA Games on PS5 Really Disappeared?
What's the difference, to the players, between AA and indie any more?
Sifu, Hades, Kunitsu Gami, PoP: The Lost Crown, Stray, Kena, Hollow Knight, Concrete Genie... I'd put all these in the same bucket of "smaller but still substantial titles". I think Shuhei is right that, from the consumer's perspective, there is not really a difference between a good indie game and a smaller project from a large scale publisher.
And from Sony's perspective, they don't just think "will we make a profit if we spend our development dollars here?", they also have to think "... but would we make more profit with the same development dollars if we put them over here?". And when you ask that second question, being in the "AA" space doesn't really make sense these days.
Re: Shuhei Yoshida 'Really Appreciated' Indie Game Role Created by Jim Ryan
I suspected Colin would get Shuhei on the show given how profligate the latter has been with giving interviews since leaving PlayStation, and their old friendship. Looking forward to listening.
Re: FromSoftware Plans to Flog Characters, Bosses as Elden Ring Nightreign DLC
Ew, yuk. Fingers crossed that they removed this information from Steam because it is out of date and doesn't reflect long term plans to gouge their fans, but something tells me that's not the case.
Re: Reaction: Xbox Publishing More Games on PS5 Than Sony Is Not a Gotcha, It's Just a Sign of the Times
Hrmmmm, reads to me like @get2sammyb wrote this on his XBox.
Re: Days Gone Remastered Is Real, Out for PS5 This April
It had pacing issues, but I enjoyed Days Gone. The hordes were great once it got going. Might pay the upgrade tax to try and convince Sony there was something here worth building from.
Re: Assassin's Creed Shadows Character Swapping Explained, Loyal Players Won't 'Miss Out'
Not my bag. I liked the traditional AC. Played Mirage last year and really enjoyed it. (The story was forgettable nonsense, but the old-school AC gameplay was there in spades. No stupid enemy levels, and a paired down weapon and armour upgrade system with transmog, plenty of cool outfits. Highly recommend.)
Re: GTA 5 Sells an Utterly Ludicrous 210 Million Copies
Some of those will be people who bought the game on separate console generations. But even assuming (for the sake of argument) that everyone who is interested in GTAV has triple dipped on the 7th, 8th and 9th generation versions of the game, that would still be something like 70 million unique players.
How big this behemoth of a franchise is truly boggles the mind.
Re: Rocksteady Lining Up New Single Player Batman Game After Suicide Squad Disaster, It's Claimed
Leave Batman to rest for a while, IMO. They nailed it with the Arkham games, and those are still very playable on modern hardware.
Explore some other DC characters. Green Arrow has some name recognition after the TV series. Cyborg was in the JL movies, and provides an obvious route into RPG upgrade mechanics.
Or just move away from the traditional superheroes. Go more adult. Preacher is a DC imprint, and has a wider fanbase thanks to the TV show. John Constantine is another (albeit it's been a while since that movie). The Sandman is probably a no-go given the allegations against Gaiman... Watchmen is pretty well known at this point too.
Ideally, let the Rocksteady that exists today take some time to brainstorm and pick what they want to work on next. If that's Batman, then so be it, but I'd personally see that as a missed opportunity.
Re: Wonder Woman Game in Turmoil, Is Still 'Years Away from Release', New Report Claims
I wonder what would happen if WB Games just let their studios come up with something original, rather than having to stick to established intellectual properties. There's no reason these days why their cross-media strategy couldn't go both ways.
Re: How Well Do You Know Ratchet & Clank?
I don't think 8 is too bad when I've only played the 2016 Remake and Rift Apart.
Re: Poll: How Long Does It Take You to Beat a Big RPG?
@Rangers420 Oh mate, Blood and Wine was fantastic. Shorter than Witcher 3 overall, but on its own is comparable to many RPG-action games that release as a full game.
Re: Poll: How Long Does It Take You to Beat a Big RPG?
Over 300 hours into the character I have got furthest with in BG3. I'm in Act 3, but only the lower city. Just cleaning up everything there before I move on, in case I push the story forward by progressing the main quest and lock things off.
And then I got a bit tired of it and have yet to return. I have something like 900 hours in total in that game. I keep making new characters to see how things go differently and I really should just see that one character through to the end before I do anything else.
Re: Almost 2,000 PS5, PS4 Games Discounted in Behemoth Sale
Lots of my PSN Wishlist is on sale this time. But I already have so much in my backlog I think I'll hold onto my money for the time being.
Re: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Immediately Sells 1 Million Copies
This game seems right up my alley... if I had the time. Perhaps if I could convince my Mrs to take a long holiday and find some way to offload some toddlers... hrmmm.
Re: Dragon Age: The Veilguard Failed Because It Wasn't Live Service, EA CEO Seems to Suggest
I had several completed playthroughs of DA:O and DA2 on my 360.
Dragon Age used to have a dark, gritty, fantasy setting, with compelling characters. That's what I liked about it. From what I can see online, they've been moving away from what I enjoyed by trying to make it more saccharine and mainstream.
IMO, that's why DA lost its 'core' audience - it failed to understand who those people were and went after a different audience. Fine, if they're there.
What Wilson doesn't seem to understand about the 'connected world' crowd is that they have found their games already. You have to do something truly amazing to drag people away from Fortnite and the like these days, where they have probably sunk thousands of hours, hundreds of dollars, and made friends with whom they interact regularly. Go after those people if you want, but they'll only ever be temporary visitors to your game (if they come across at all).
Re: Abby's Muscles Less Relevant to HBO's The Last of Us Adaption
@Cornpop76 Agree with you to an extent. Abby being muscly didn't break my immersion, personally, but like I say I had to come up with some plausible head-canon to explain it. It seems plausible to me that she would take anabolic steroids if she found some to prepare herself to achieve her goal. The only unexplained thing is where she got them, but finding something overlooked in a medical facility isn't totally out of the question in a world where people have apparently left the odd bullets and weapons lying around even years after the apocalypse.
I'd be getting into spoilers, and off topic, and probably start a whole thing if I mention what did break my immersion, so I'll leave things there.
Re: Abby's Muscles Less Relevant to HBO's The Last of Us Adaption
@LifeGirl I always assumed that Abby (in the game) got her physique from a combination of working out and abusing some supply of anabolic steroids. Her physique is that of an enhanced female. (Having lifted very heavy weights myself for two decades as a non-enhanced powerlifter, and meeting non-enhanced female powerlifters, I can tell the difference between who is and is not abusing steroids.) I took it as implied that Abby did this to herself after she decided she would be taking vengeance, which seemed believable in the context of her story.
If Naughty Dog has said anywhere that Abby is not enhanced then I'd say they should have consulted with a sports physician or something if they were going for realism.
Re: Reminder: Redeem These 3 PS Plus Games Before They're Gone
I was quite excited for Hot Pursuit until I booted it up and realised I was actually thinking of NfS: Most Wanted as being the game from two generations ago that I really gelled with and wanted to play again. As I already had Stanley Parable, January was a bit of a bust for me. (But if you didn't already have Stanley Parable, then you should play it and it was a decent month.)
Re: Ex-Sony Boss Says Xbox Can Find Multiplatform Software Success, Just Like SEGA
@Kenobi42
I think there still will be competition for Sony, but not in the narrow category of consoles. I think that the fact that Sony has started measuring and reporting their MAUs and player engagement metrics in their financial statements shows that they're already thinking beyond the console device itself. It's why they've created a device like the Portal - a way to keep you on the platform when the TV is being used by someone else in your household (and, latterly, to allow you to play your games while not even at home).
Microsoft's incentive will be to maximise the amount of time people spend within it's ecosystem, spending money via XBL. They're choosing to run with a loss-leader like Gamepass to try and get you in the door, and making every device into an XBox via cloud streaming. And sure, if you want to buy their games on your PlayStation, that's cool too, MS gets your money that way.
Sony will want to attract and keep people on PSN. Sony will do so via having a top-of-the-line dedicated device that sits under your TV, and by having tentpole, best-in-class game experiences that can't be played first anywhere else.
Both those options have their merits, downsides and risks. But one thing they have in common is that you need to be creating great games that get people into your ecosystem.
It's a very interesting time for the industry but I don't think its fair to say that Sony won't be feeling the pressure and will stop thinking about the competition.
Re: Spider-Man 2's Looking Like Another PC Own Goal from Sony
@get2sammyb On the second question on the survey, there's no difference between "They should be exclusive to PS5 for at least a year" and "They should be exclusive to PS5 for longer than a year". Both options would be satisfied with a hypothetical release on PC 366 days after a PS5 release.
Re: Rumour: Gears of War to Make PS5 Debut with Full Crossplay in Trilogy Collection
Nice, this was the rumour I was waiting for.
Re: Rumour: Xbox's Fable, Killer Instinct, More to Join Forza Horizon 5 on PS5
Is there much point to these articles anymore? My expectation is that everything will make its way over sooner or later. The pattern seems to be that new games will receive a day-and-date (or only a few months delay, depending on developer capacity) release on PlayStation, while older stuff will be staggered not to hurt their own sales by flooding PlayStation with too much at once and competing with themselves.
Re: Halo PS5 Rumours Intensify in Aftermath of Forza Horizon 5 Reveal
Smart moves by MS. They'd sell multiple millions of copies almost immediately, I reckon. With ABK, MS is already the biggest third party publisher on PlayStation. Why would MS leave money on the table?
I hope MS' commitment to maintain a hardware division lasts. Sure, I doubt PlayStation would ever publish there, but by continuing to be in the space it would at least give PlayStation some reason to try.
One thought I've had is whether MS could make the XBox platform itself open, so that other companies could make an XBox, in the same way that they can make a PC running windows. Imagine a range of XBoxes being offered by Dell, HP, Microsoft itself, Samsung, etc, at different specs and price points. Microsoft has an edge with its cloud tech and compatibility of its games across its devices on the back-end, so its possible that it would be able to find a way that building games for multiple SKUs of XBoxes isn't too burdensome on developers.
Re: Former Rockstar Animator Doubtful GTA 6 Will Run at 60fps on PS5
@nomither6 Don't worry about that; sometimes I feel like I'm the only person not hyped for GTA6. I enjoyed GTAV and Red Dead 2 a lot (though the latter was too long and everything after the trip away from the main setting felt like a slog). I'm sure I'll get it at some point down the line, but I'm still waiting to hear what kind of experience it's going to deliver that iterates on Rockstar's formula. Same old Rockstar is fine by me, just nothing to get particularly excited about.
Re: Former Rockstar Animator Doubtful GTA 6 Will Run at 60fps on PS5
The more pressing question for me is whether Rockstar has done anything with its game design. Failing missions because I stepped one toe out of the narrow and invisible confines of what the mission designer intended the experience to be is tedious. I hope reviews touch on this aspect of the game in due course.
Re: Space Marine 2 Publisher Attempts to Placate Fans Hungry for Content
I’ve been playing a couple hours of SM2 almost daily since mid-November and I’m nowhere near unlocking and upgrading all the weapons, unlocking all the cosmetics, etc. I think the issue is the most engaged and hardcore fans are the ones that join the official discord server and sub the the Reddit, and they talk to one another and think that they are the whole community of players.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for February 2025 Announced
High on Life sounds like a fun little addition, will probably even go as far as actually downloading it rather than just adding it to my library!
Re: No Man's Sky Gets Another Huge, Game-Changing Update with Worlds Part II
Hello Games' strategy seems to be paying off. NMS is certainly the most significant asset in their portfolio. The company generated £28m in revenue (£22m profit!) in the year ending October 2023, according to their corporate filings. This was down from almost £40m in the YE Oct 22.
It'd have been nicer if Murray had made clearer what was ambition and what was going to ship with NMS at launch, or launch in early access, but at least the message this success sends is "fix it, and fix it for free".
Re: Live a Life Medieval in Hype-Building Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Trailer
Nice to have part of the first game spoiled for me without warning.
Re: Rumour: God of War Will Tackle Egyptian Mythology in Next Game
@ChrisDeku And the rest of the Super Best Friends to give us some mini-bosses to fight. Kratos vrs Joseph Smith, make it happen Santa Monica.
Re: Studio Closure, Layoffs at Ubisoft in 'Targeted Restructuring'
I can see the logic behind how Ubisoft got into this position of having so many staff. It essentially decided it was going to minimise the extent to which it outsourced work, so hired people internationally to try and keep almost all stages of the game-production pipeline in-house. The risk in that approach is that you need to be a very well oiled machine so that deadlines are met and one stage of the pipeline can begin just as another is winding down and moving on to the next project. Interruptions leads to waste due to staff not having things to do. It requires a hell of a lot of co-ordination and planning.
With that in mind, the comparison with PS Studios may not be the most apt. Yes, it is less than a quarter of Ubisoft's headcount, but PS Studios will outsource work where they need to.
Re: Games Workshop, Nexon's Cancelled Game an Age of Sigmar RPG
@djlard I'd have thought that Underworlds would be a great setting for a roguelike given the lore that the various warbands are continuously fighting and being resurrected when they fall.
Has a squad-based roguelike been done before? Could be interesting, finding upgrades and having to choose which member of the warband should get the item or perk.
Re: Mini Review: Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter (PS5) - A Simple Tail of Bigger and Better
I started Tails of Iron 1 last night and can already see that I'm in for a treat. Looking forward to picking this up after I'm done with that.
Re: Mailbox: The Joy of Astro Bot, Ciri in The Witcher 4, and Terrible Trophy Lists
Letters must be 300 words or fewer!!!!!
Good selection of letters though! A good start to this initiative. Kudos.
Re: Assassin's Creed Shadows' Now 'Super Fluid' Parkour Was the Reason for Its Second Delay
Reminds me I should go back and plat Unity at some point...
Re: EA Stock Price Plummets After Dragon Age: The Veilguard, FC 25 Disappointments
Weird sub-headline and comment at the end of the article. When a publicly traded company's share price falls, that money isn't "gone". The shareholders who sold got money for selling their shares.