ThomasHL

@Bentleyma I don't think the real issue with the Wii U was the name, it was that the kind of people who bought a Wii weren't the kind of people who are interested in a Wii 2. More pixels on Wii bowling (with a less intuitive controller)?

The Switch 2 will do better because the Switch has a way more mainstream fanbase. But also my prediction is it's not going to hit Switch figures in the end because an interactive novel doesn't exactly need a beefy GPU. There will be plenty of Switch 2 games that still release on Switch, and for people in that niche they won't need to upgrade.

You can see this with other Nintendo handhelds. The GBA didn't outsell the Gameboy, and the 3DS didn't outsell the DS. If new games still work on the old console, some people won't switch over (see also sizeable base of PS4 users today)

@Dodoo ^this

The Game Science blogpost itself was barely worth paying attention to - just a bit of a funny cringey post.

Who cares whether or not someone cried at an awards show. We don't need to be swabbing their cheeks for a salt analysis

I didn't know how to side either way with this discussion - exploitative monetary practices need to be called out, but also games do need to make profits. Is this pandering or legitimate? So I looked up the price.

And this is all over £16? In an overwatch collab to get the equivalent for a single character you're starting at £20. And to get everything in the collab it's £50 to £60. And that's not close to as exploitative as pricing can get in some games

Sure if the devs feels they can push that down to £14 and still turn enough profit to keep themselves employed, kudos on them, but handing out the second one for free as an apology is seriously over the top.

If a younger mental age means "someone who needs things explained to again and again like they've been in a coma for 30 years" then I'd happily drop that part of the series.

But I think the school setting works for Persona. It might be done to death in anime, but it's fairly fresh in videogames.

Also unlike in other games, I don't particularly care about having an older or female protagonist. Persona protagonists are very bland. It's not like we're plumbing great depths of personality, where a less common take could add something

Is some poor schmuck going to have to play keeper?

What's the most successful multiplayer stealth game so far? Payday 2? That only half counts at best

I've never been very into werewolves, but vampires are always good for a spin

Coffee Talk is a fun visual novel. The concept of being a barista and memorising the orders of your regulars worked well

@romanista Its the fact that the game ends with them deciding they're going to stay together despite not really solving any of their fundamental problems that I took issue with. And they're both so instantly ready to try and make their child cry if it will solve their own problems. It makes it seem trite, and I don't think it was healthy.

I'm glad it provoked an interesting conversation for you and your daughter though.

I watch a lot of essays, but very few Let's Plays. LPs are massive time sinks - when I did watch some it's more like a podcast vibe, or some kind of incredible display of skill (speedrun etc.)

Absolutely no-one wants videogame publishers to try and monetise this space. And if they did, it would flop hard

@Fyz306903 it sounds lowest end PS6 (if it's truly PS6) is going to be a bit of a reach. I've read that shrinking the PS5 down to handheld even with lower resolution is going to be a real tech challenge. Technology isn't getting smaller as fast as it used to.

I haven't finished enough 2025 games to vote but I'm hoping Helldivers and Space Marine 2 do well.

I've been enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard (and imo, not everything SkillUp said was true) but even if I'm having fun it's not a GOTY

I'm not particularly excited.

Edgerunners was a great show because it was well written, not because of the setting. And it already has a good ending.

Another one by a different studio isn't adding anything

Better Balatro win GOTY than most of the nominations (Astrobot excepted). I still think Helldivers deserved a nomination

I'm looking forward to trying Temtem.

It Takes Two had brilliant gameplay but some of the worst writing in gaming. You spend your time with two terrible people who are not right for each other and an obnoxious unfunny mascot, and then at the last minute the story tries to rush a Hallmark ending.

Never was I convinced more that two people needed a divorce.

@ChrisDeku I don't think investors care much about what people say online either way. At the end of the day it's about what people buy.

It's an industry with a ton of talented developers but also where people are still playing and enjoying the games they were playing 5 years ago

Sony already have too much influence in the anime space. This is bad news and will hurt everyone in the long-run

When you count Game of the Year nominations since the new generation started, it's easy to see why Sony have been smashing Xbox

I thought the Sawtooth in the bottom right picture was a Thunderjaw. They must be saving a large Thunderjaw up for the right time, right??

This was one where the demo put me off more than it helped

@rjejr John Lewis is the UK's biggest high end department store chain. EE is the UK's largest phone company

One of the keys to Mass Effect's appeal is it's special forces flavour. Cena could pull that off. Just don't play Shepherd, be another N7

I went Qunari Warrior Mourn Watch. It's the first time I've enjoyed a warrior in this series

@Kraven SkillUp said his clips were representative of the whole game, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out they really aren't.

Live service games seem to need player access way earlier on than single-player games - if nothing else because the game loop has to be so rock solid and the risks are so high.

Look at Valve - by the time one of their live service games "launches" everyone has already been playing it in closed beta for months.

@Khwarezm89 Moon Channel theorises that this is entirely about Sony's partnership with Palword. He argues this is breaking some Japanese business taboos. And that whilst Sony seems hands-off, it's actually a very similar move to what Nintendo did with Game freak.

This is Nintendo signalling they'll go for the nuclear option if Sony gets on their turf.

I think they're going to struggle to pull off Mass Effect as a TV show. It really needs a high production value.

The background setting bits of Mass Effect is great for a TV show. If they can pull off the genophage in a morally neutral way, it's great material. But I don't know what I'd want from an episode to episode plot? Do I really get excited about a Shepherd action scene?

I read several reviewers say the enemies get very sponge-y. So I'm hoping for a balance up date that changes health a little (and increases danger) rather than having to manually do that

@LifeGirl they did choose a real person - Yasuke is a real historical figure (unlike most AC protagonists)

It's also not the first time a protagonist wasn't from the setting of the game (that was Ezio in Assassin's Creed: Revelations)

This isn't even his first videogame. He appeared in both Niohs and Samurai Warriors 5

@Flaming_Kaiser it's sarcasm

@The_Wailing_Doom ah thanks, that makes sense. Well not sense sense, but I can understand what they thought they were doing

That's the key issue of monopolies: Them reducing how much influence they have over other markets

Glad someone is finally ready to fight the real fight

@ATaco Uncover Kira by spamming X and deducing his FACE with your FISTS in this spectacular action-packed adaptation of DEATH NOTE

@Waluigi451 if nothing else, making it free to play and let it roll on for a while without much dev support would at least give some people a chance to find a niche. It would make it less a joke, and respect the time the devs put into making a game.

The craziest thing is it's not even like the developers made the worst game in the world. They made a decent game in genre that had no space for 'decent' and was priced in a way which would never work.

The fault is all on Sony's side. For trying to chase a bad genre, for way overbudgeting the game, and for putting it out at a price point that kills it immediately.

@get2sammyb biggest flop in entertainment ever?

The biggest film flops are the John Carter, The Lone Ranger and The Marvels, but all of them made ~$200 million on budgets of $200-300 million (the loss was all in marketing, and ticket sharing with cinemas). The biggest film to make basically nothing back was Eddie Murphie's The Adventure of Pluto Nash on a budget of $100 million.

Spiderman: Turn off the Dark is the biggest Broadway flop, only a budget of $75 million.

Nothing in music is ever going to come close.

Marco Polo, the Netflix show was apparently a $200 million loss, but that's probably the entire budget and doesn't count views, because it's streaming.

None of that comes close to Concord.

The only thing that might beat it is Lord of the Rings (Amazon) cost around $450 million for one season, which is a stupid budget. But LOTR's actual viewing figures were pretty decent, if not compared to the amount they paid.

It'll be fascinating if CoD really can't drive much gamepass adoption.

Although gamepass isn't necessarily a particularly good deal for your typical COD player. Many CoD players only play CoD (and maybe FIFA), and they'll play it year round until the new one.

If you do that, gamepass ultimate will cost you £20 more than just buying the game outright (although PS+ will wipe out the savings). And yeah you get a lot of extras on top, but what's the point of having access to a load of games if you'll never play them ()

() How I mostly feel about game subscription services anyway. Games take up time, I'd like to spend that playing the best games

@nessisonett I'd be happy with more games just picking a canon version and going from there - or even better deliberately going for a third option that fits none of the original pathways exactly. I think some old games and films used to do that.

@ShogunRok thanks! These answers are tipping me into the purchase camp

How well does it fulfill the excitement of the sequel hook? If it was still called Dreadwolf, how much would it really earn that name?

In terms of interacting with your companions, what is it like on a scale of ME1 (a few set conversations that you can progress as you advance through the game) to ME3 (dedicated companion missions, random companion interactions back at the base, companions interacting with each other back at the base)?

@get2sammyb I'd argue it's normal for a company the size of Microsoft to not know what's it's doing, and that matches their history.

They have so many different people, so many different interests and directions and incentives, and inertia and plans that they get pulled in one direction and another constantly, and they don't have the focus to truly know what they're doing at any one moment.

Did Google know what it was doing when it built 13 separate messaging apps, often competing with each other, and then closed most of them down? Not really.

They had three or four different divisions within Google that independently made decisions to make messaging apps all based on different motives, and the overall direction was created by whichever division the exec on top had happened to be promoted from this time.

Microsoft are free styling it. Nadella himself couldn't tell you what's going to come to PS5 in three years time, because by then he might have changed his mind again

No harm in it, very much doubt that it would come to anything though

@Medic_alert something like a steam deck seems like the way to go for the next generation. If Sony don't have competition they'll get greedier.

And if most sales are taking place digitally, and the PS6 doesn't ship with a mandatory disc drive, you're entirely in Sony's hands when it comes to game prices and game preservation.

PCs these days get more games, they get indie games much earlier, they've got mods, and they've got multiple store fronts. With Steam decks they even play well on a TV with a controller now.

@DennisReynolds if you only ever buff and never need you end up with silly Time To Kills where everything dies (or kills) faster and faster.

There has never been more options and more creativity in the AA / indie space than today.

I've been on an indie binge recently and played games so good or beautiful that they'd have been all anyone talked about 10 years ago, and yet I'd never even heard of them.

If the industry is collapsing (outside of AAA) it's because there are way way more good games than the playerbase can support, not the other way round.

I like the art style from what I've seen, I hope the bad CGI bits aren't too frequent.

If it's got online co-op, I'm in

@Yagami yet the overall story works. And that's because they fit the linear story structure around the choose 5 mission structure. You get continual updates to the story that trigger after certain numbers of missions of complete.

Another game with the same "choose 5" mission structure that is also considered an all time great is Fallout: New Vegas, which they hide even more cleverly. Each story path will require you to do 3/5 big story events, they tell you to do them in a linear order, differing depending on choices, but this isn't actually necessary - you can still do each region mission in the order you want.

EDIT: Another example of a classic RPG using this structure: Alpha Protocol. Most Obsidian and Bioware games use this structure in some way, in some cases more obscured than others.