@Northern_munkey General consensus is FH6 is better than FH5, however the problem with this series is how similar each game is to each other. I had put hundreds of hours into the series but by the fifth entry I barely played more than 10 hours as it mostly just felt like a reskin and a new world.

It's hard to criticise too much as the game is so good, objectively so well made, but if you are returning for the umpteenth time it loses some lustre. I've seen many say the same but ymmv.

Sadly not surprised many gamers say budgets are too high and they want cheaper, faster made games... but in reality AA is more under pressure then even AAA and indie. It's REALLY hard to find yourself a large enough niche with so many games releasing.

It would be sad as I have at least enjoyed every one of their games i've played, especially Jusant. But I think that also failed financially. Sad times.

@wildcat_kickz Good faith discussion about Gen-AI?

Good luck! Too many have their stones in hand ready to be thrown before a word is uttered. It's a minefield.

@Marquez I wish people would stop comparing it to Mass Effect, it feels like they are setting is up for a fall. Let it be it's own game.

I use it almost every day, mostly in bed with PS Portal and when away.

If they nerfed it, it would be a huge kick in the balls. It will massively devalue the PS Portal for me, to the point where i'd probably sell it. At which point PS+ Premium also makes little sense.

It's certainly got the stupid Sqenix title down. But I like the look of this one.

@Max_the_German @cainhurst94 (EDIT) Jason Schreier came up with different numbers in his separate breakdown of disc costs a few months ago which worked out as:

$70 PHYSICAL THIRD PARTY SALE

• Retail - 30% - $21
• Licensing to Sony - 15% - $10.50
• Manufacturing - 5% - $3.50
• Publisher - 50% - $35

$70 DIGITAL THIRD PARTY SALE

• Sony - 30% - $21
• Publisher - 70% - $49

But he had Sony licensing and manufacturing as separate costs. Totillo may be combining both, I haven't read the full paywalled article.

And as others have said adding a second disc inside a case is likely to be MUCH much cheaper. I haven't seen any data on the cost but I imagine it would be pennies to a dollar.

Plus you can see why both publishers and Sony want to do discless.

It was OK. I had no expectations and it very slightly exceeded that low bar. Kinda hilarious seeing all the people saying things like "Awful. Sony didn't announce a new first party game." or "no Intergalactic, this sucks" etc. in the live chat. Sometimes you set yourself up for a fall.

Does it need to address it? That's like saying Sonic the Hedgehog needed to address why an anthropomorphic hedgehog can talk, and run at such speed... sometimes these things are best left unanswered. The game is charming imo and gets better over time, with a strong crescendo at the end.

I thought Keeper was excellent. It started slowly but built over it's shorter duration to be a lovely experience. At the right price, I recommend.

Insomniac aren't usually known for making overly grindy trophy lists, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until there's more info.

If it's anything like Batman Arkham's parry then you will likely get this easily.

@nessisonett Personally I'd rather have developers with a viewpoint - some of which I agree with and much of which I don't - over the current crop of "say nothing in case we offend someone somewhere".

No worries, just release it in top shape. Looking forward to it.

Why are so many so negative.

Well deserved break after 33 years in this non-stop industry.

For a third person game a 40fps mode would be welcome, but at the end of the day if it's only 30fps it is what it is.

The cynic in me thinks they won't even try a 60fps mode as they want to sell it to us again (or an upgrade) next gen.

The world looks absolutely incredible. Immersive doesn't even begin to describe it. I can't wait to live in it.

I've said for a while that we are less limited by technology / hardware and more limited by developer time, money and skill and this just shows that in spades. Absolutely unreal.

What surprised me most was the gameplay which looks much better. Can't wait. Day 1

It's a great initiative, well done Microsoft.

However personally despite owning both an XSX and XBO at launch I no longer have any discs for those consoles as team green have successfully migrated me to digital with Game Pass. Annoyingly I do have some X360 games that won't be covered, especially delisted titles like Half Life: The Orange Box these won't carry over.

However I have a lot of PlayStation discs as team blue hasn't' convinced me to go digital - personally I really wish this was a PlayStation initiative!

Visually that looks pretty spectacular, I hope they can nail the combat. But more than anything I hope it’s a full priced title and not free to play gacha as my F2P time is already overfull.

I thought that before I played it - Breath of the Waifu was the joke at launch - but other than a few early hour mechanics it’s very much its own game and cribs far less than many other games in other genres.

Chained Echoes is brilliant!

Crypt Custodian was great, thanks for the heads up.

I am away on holidays so inadvertently will be participating.

While not ideal 40fps is good enough for this sort of third person game.

I can only think of a handful of games without a 60fps mode… especially on Pro. Feels like they should be able to optimise it better.

Lack of actual hard data only leads to even more speculation imo. Law of unintended consequences backfires for Microsoft.

Perhaps it will bomb but… removing the live service elements makes me potentially MUCH more interested in the title personally

Having been on holiday I feel I missed all the aggro around this. But it does highlight how toxic a lot of discourse has become. Perhaps we are better off just discussing games less and playing them more. Not that this would help the good folk here at Push Square and elsewhere I frequent.

Either way @LiamCroft this was a solid write up. Looking forward to playing this eventually, but I am slow and behind and the next few months are stacked!

Bit disappointed TBH. I wanted to get this day 1 to support the studio but also wanted to get it on disc. Will probably wait, but that puts it behind a lot of other games I want to play b4 GTA6.

You are of course assuming that is the whole core team. It’s entirely possible they have lots of WFH colleagues either globally or located all over the the globe, and that’s before outsourcing.

For reference Google puts the entire studio at just shy of 400 people, though of course some will likely be working on other projects.

So sad, far, far too young. She was wonderful in everything I saw her in from Heroes to Nashville, Until Dawn to Kingdom Hearts.

@somnambulance Roblox is a perfect example. Many games on there we might deem trash / shovelware but get the sort of high player numbers many full time games studios would die for. Who decides what gets a pass?

For me it should be up to the people to decide.

Will keep making noise until they at least address it. While I expect it to come to nothing Sony management need knocking down a peg or two and realising it’s their customers that make them money. For those of us that have bought hundreds of thousands of discs they’ve treated us like dirt.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

One of the oldest satirical questions roughly meaning "Who will guard the guards, themselves?" or "Who watches the watchers?"

Similarly who decides what is shovelware? If thousands of people enjoy Flappy Bird, or the Watermelon game or other exceedingly basic games is that still shovelware?

Sadly this was inevitable. One man’s chalk is another man’s cheese - and many other idioms.

Personally I would rather let the market decide and still sell them, BUT I would hide them away on the store and not have them promoted up the lists as they have in the past unless the free market decides they sell.

Always good to have choice. However Steam Deck isn't ideal for playing PS5, the 16:10 aspect ratio means you get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. This means the screen, already around 35% smaller than PS Portal, ends up even losing even more screen real estate. It's OK but text becomes very hard to read and there are better options imo.

I was a little disappointed in Brand New Day. It wasn't bad, I had fun, but it felt a bit like a filler film, a bridge to future content.

@Krlozgod actually the sample size is usually mush smaller than this even when predicting the whole of America.

As survey monkey puts it:

A statistically significant sample size depends on four key factors: confidence level, margin of error, statistical power, and effect size.

For a standard survey with a large population, an industry-standard 95% confidence level and a 5% margin of error require a sample size of 385 respondents

Very few polls or studies have as many as 3,200, it just isn’t feasible unless it’s part of some larger governmental initiative or mass social experiment. But as I said I don’t know their methodology or confidence level so can’t comment on if it’s accurate. But it is interesting.

@RoomWithaMoose I think when you include EVERYONE most of which would consider themselves non-gamers this makes more sense sense. There were a lot of Wii’s and Wii Fits sold I know some people that’s still use that form exercise.

Contrary to what others have said 3,200 is actually quite a large sample size for a study of this type, often it’s in the hundreds. It’s not like you are going to poll tens of thousands of people, that’s not how this is usually done.

But rather than the raw number of people polled the methodology of who is polled, and how, to try and get a reasonable cross section is far more important.

Usually studies will suggest they believe it’s accurate within a threshold e.g. 5% or 10% and adding more people to the sample size will only increase its accuracy but not change the general trend.

But without knowing anything about their methodology it’s impossible to know if this study was conducted well or not, and if in turn it’s statistically accurate.

There are still some people complaining

And there always will be, you can't please everyone!

But this is such a mountain out of a molehill. It's not a big deal unlike:

_{(whispers it) discs}

@XenonKnight who mentioned Hulu? Was comparing YouTube and Netflix and YouTube’s compression and bitrate is pretty bad by comparison. It doesn’t show off high fidelity games - like GTA6 - at their best.

But even then we have NO details. Some retailers already sell digital PS4/PS5 codes on a very limited number of games, is this going to expand or still be a minority.

Will ALL games be available at many different retailers so there is a chance we have a choice of where to buy, and a range of prices.

I'm not pretending there wouldn't have been a stink about the end of discs had they communicated it better - there would, quite understandably, not least people don't like change - but had they communicated it well, which frankly wouldn't have been that hard, they would have had an easier time of it. Instead tumbleweeds.

Frankly I haven't seen a gaming company commit such PR delf own since Xbox One or Unity's licensing debacle. I only wish the market would respond as strongly to make them about turn.

@JustMyOpinion Just an FYI that the stats Sony provide are misleading because they include the vast majority of indie and AA games that ONLY release digitally, heavily skewing that number. When looked at like-for-like on games that have both a digital and physical release the numbers seem much less one sided.

@LogicStrikesAgain Excellent post, I completely agree with all you have said.... but... it's not mutually exclusive for them to worry about next gen, try and make things more affordable AND communicate with their playerbase.

I've said before if Sony came out and gave solid reasons for giving up discs early - they do exist - if they made the point that games could be slower to increase in price, that consoles could be further subsidised then many people would feel placated.

More over what a lot of us want is just to know our existing library of games (on disc) will continue to be backwards compatible next gen. They have talked around PS6 already without officially announcing it in the Cerny x AMD and future of ML/PSSR discussions, there's no reason they can't do similar with discs on PS6 without actually announcing it officially.

Their silence is maddening and only prolonging the agony. Awful communication.

Looks great. But best looking game?

Should have gone to Specsavers!

@get2sammyb I wonder if it's on Netflix...

1. Because the quality is a lot better than YouTube
2. Because someone seems to have a backdoor to YouTube and keeps leaking details from trailers on there
3. Because they have a marketing deal

#3 probably most likely but could be all three!

@ElPenitente That was an investor call with answers aimed at investors not consumers.

As players there are many questions we don't know the answer to:

• Will our existing PlayStation discs work next gen? e.g.
  If I buy Wolverine PS5 on disc will it work on PS6?
  I'm not going to buy it from them until this is answered.
• Will there be some sort of Disc to digital exchange?
• Alternatively would we be able to authenticate a disc another way?

To be clear I am not expecting them to reverse their decision, discs are sadly done, but I do want some information about my library of hundreds of PS games. I don't think that is unreasonable. Do you?

@AdamNovice The trouble is Sony haven't created a place where it can be discussed. They have effectively run into the room, dropped an information grenade, and run back out, leaving everything in a mess. That is on them and their weak communication.

Until they address it properly, answering valid questions about our long established physical libraries, then this won't go away, not should it. It's entirely a problem of their own making.

Look across at Xbox and we are getting rumours and leaks about a disc to digital exchange BEFORE they inevitably take away discs. If you want to calm users fears then information is key. At the moment we don't have any other than they are stopping making discs in 2028. That's it.

I hadn't actually considered that it might be due to the inevitable, and frankly justified, backlash. When will Sony learn that just being silent won't shut everyone up? They have to address it at some point... or ir will keep going.

Why would Capcom be bothered? Only around 17% of their consoles sales are physical and even if they lost half of that they stand to make about 50% more per sale digitally than on disc, so the books would balance. Plus they cut out the second hand and lending market, ultimately they will likely make more money.

TLDR:
It won't affect them at all, the only people this affects is consumers.

I have quite a few

• Skyrim. Especially in VR.
• Dishonored. The world is just so immersive.
• As is Rapture in Bioshock.
• Grand Theft Auto has to be up there.
• As does Hyrule / Zelda
• Genshin Impact I can play the GeoGuesr like game and get scarily close to the locations.

@get2sammyb I do wonder how sales of games like Wolverine might be affected. I know many people who ONLY buy full priced AAA games on disc (I'm one of them) and I'm not willing to start buying digitally at full price yet.

But more importantly I am not going to buy day 1 on disc until Sony confirms that discs will be supported in some way next gen. Frankly for most games i'd rather wait until they do.

For GTA6 I'll just get a code in a box just to show support for physical, plus get a box to put on the shelf, and maybe retailers will compete on price nearer release.

In future i'm more likely to wait for a sale, it's not like i'm in much of a hurry to play most games already. I have over 10 years of games on my backlog already.