viktorcode

I find that interesting that if a publisher earns less than a million a year (think of it like small indie) they have 85 / 15 split on Apple and Goole stores both. So Epic's offer of 88 / 12 is not that appealing to them, because the audience is much smaller.

Another thing is having the store means nothing. Steam dominates on Windows. Google on Android. And if Apple allowed third party everywhere and not just in EU it would've been the same: you have to be present in the store where all the people are, or risk bankrupcy

I've never played any AC games. This one looks interesting but I keep thinking that I'm missing something others know. From what I see in the video in terms of combat and visuals the game takes back seat in comparison to Ghost of Tsushima. And that makes me pause.

Can someone enlighten me what else is there that makes AC games click?

With each passing year hardware sales charts becoming less and less relevant.

I'd suggest everyone, press included, to just ignore loud mouth misogynists on Twitter (and other social media). They do not represent people who play games.

It's naive for a market analyst to predict Nintendo's future success as given. That was not the case before Switch. That will inevitable change again.

Having said that, as long as making consoles profitable, no one has to exit the market. Not everyone wants to become a monopoly platform. And speaking of market share, one could predict that console market is done for, thanks to mobile.

The direction for future development in graphics for next PlayStation is clear. And I don't like it a single bit. Sounds arrogant, but I do disagree with Cerny's claim that GPU rasterization speed hit the limit. There are still ways for it to be massively improved, at the cost of effortless backwards compatibility.

So instead PlayStation is set to render at ever decreasing resolution while boosting upscaling AI. But there's a natural limit to that approach: reconstructing too few pixels won't produce expected image.

That's a shame. The only good thing to it is that raytracing coverage will improve, thanks to lower rendering resolution. Yay.

@Oram77 Social media s a good thing. The problem is the amount of stupid people readily taking anonymously posted stuff at face value.

@Dalamar Not commercially. And this is how a game life and death is decided.

I watch more than I play. Due to life with kids. Until they are out in beds I can't really play my stuff. But by then most of the days I'm too tired. So, here's my pitiful existence: watch 2001 Dark Shouls walkthroughs and play just a bit of the game I own.

My backlog stretches to the Moon.

People without kids: please enjoy your gaming opportunity. It may not be always present.

@Digit2021 Those can't be resolved in a week in any case. It doesn't really matter for the project of this scale. But it matters a lot from marketing perspective.

I don't believe in a common hardware to rule them all. x86 seemed impenetrable, but look at Apple now. Look at Qualcomm bringing their stuff to Windows laptops - and that's just the first step. In the future the story will repeat itself, with RISC V or other architecture to undermine the next dominance.

@DennisReynolds One week won't solve a lot of problems in a complex project like this one. Would like to think that the state will be good, but if not, we know it will be fixed.

This is a very smart move.

Switch-like — maybe, depends on what games are there, and what the battery lifetime is. Steam Deck-like — hell, no. It's ugly.

@Perturbator For Sony maybe, but look at Apple. They own the biggest game store on the planet by monetary measure. Far surpassing PSN, Xbox, Steam. For them phone + games really does equal profit.

Hear me out.

As it is known Sony ventures into smartphone market ended badly from the business perspective. What's left? Well, in corporate parlance "mobile" may mean more general "portable". More than one rumor suggest next gen consoles will be two in one devices: one you can carry with you, and another connected to your TV.

Here's what I think heads of mobile are doing: designing next gen Sony's portable offering.

But this is the reason they cut the jobs in the first place! It's only us learning about poor sales now; Embracer knew all along and they cut the jobs to compensate.

Thanks for that hands-on! I got tired of listening to DF's praising on how mind-boggling, clear, and very-very good every game they tried on PS5 Pro looks.

The way it's achieved is lowering rendering resolution below that of the baseline PS5, and then upscaling to 4K.

This makes me sad. Instead of optimising their code the developers will just follow that path of using hardware to solve their software problems 😒

I think I know the meaning of that emotional post. It's about usable real time ray tracing.

From what was published so far, it seems that PS5 Pro allows to just turn on ray tracing for reflections, shadows and global illumination by lowering rendering resolution in comparison to base PS5. But then upscaling kicks in and produces very good final result.

I fully expect "ray tracing" or "path tracing" to be the major marketing point in next gen consoles. And that's a big deal. It has the potential to tremendously simplify the work of artists.

Also, mad respect to engine programmers at Hello games. Those guys made the impossible, possible, all on a penny budget.

@KundaliniRising333 I think China has reduced regional prices, so it's not 59.90 everywhere

It's good that those "gamers" are being called out, even if only on Twitter.

@species It might not be a weird decision though. How many people do you think decided to skip the game they were interested in because it required them to log in? I bet it's negligible.

As long as there are enough players who buy games from Sony, the porting will continue

@Northern_munkey I guess the relevance here is that maybe Sony should stop waisting their resources on trying to service people who put protesting about games above games themselves.

Maybe those money will better serve when invested into their studios?

To all the people thinking that PSN sign in is a prerequisite for data harvesting: time to wake up and face reality. Any game if it wishes so will phone home with any amount of information it can lift from your PC. And many been doing that for years. They don't need any kind of sign-in.

@nessisonett I guess that's for PSN achievements and maybe save game sync

I switched to consoles in 2014 and never looked back. Before I spent enormous amount of resources and experienced a lot of frustration with PC gaming (mainly due to how Windows works).

For instance, I wanted games to have custom colour correction for my display instead of just ignoring it (due to a specific DX issue) and I could force them to do that with the couple of utilities, one of which forced borderless windowed mode for any game. I wanted performance to stay consistent across a game, but Skyrim on Windows tanked in Markath for like 1/5th of FPS I had in any other part of the game.

And so on, and so forth. I don't believe the problems like that can ever be finally fixed, due to too many unknowns on a PC. Developers can't optimise for unknowns.

@HonestHick There's an option to replace motion controls with left stick

@elfoam You are confusing reaction time with motion perception. Majority of people do discern difference between 60 and 120 FPS, given the large object is moving on the screen.

Reaction time has nothing to do with that. It is the time between human seeing something and performing an action, like catching a falling ruler between the fingers, after it started moving. As I said, 200 ms is the human norm.

Input lag in games is noticeable for another reason: in physical world every action provides immediate feedback. Not so in games, where a control input will always have some delay before the eye will see the result. It is very unnatural, and everyone hates it.

However, cutting down input lag by a meagre amount of 16ms will not improve reaction time in any noticeable way, despite feeling nicer.

What about haptics?

I'll be waiting for PS5 performance mode fix + VRR support

Technically speaking, at most the input lag penalty between 60 FPS and 30 FPS would constitute just 16.7 milliseconds - not something human brain can register (do yourself a favour, measure you reaction time with a ruler dropped between your fingers. The normal result is about 200 ms). So, it must be something else happening in the frames between the input and rendering that eats up additional time to make it noticeable.

I hope that they will change that. Otherwise I'll skipping the game, sadly

Wow! That looks very intriguing

I'm waiting for your review still! Not purchasing it until then.

I'll hold off for the full review. No red flags so far, though deep in my heart I was hoping for perfect 10/10 game. Seems it's not the one, which is okay.

1. Returnal. Very good balance.
2. Hades. Good, addictive, but gets grindy fast

It's always been a mistake. It was done under investors' pressure looking at Microsoft buying spree. They didn't know better back then. Even accounting for that, purchasing a studio with the single game past its prime as the sole revenue source coupled with insane headcount is a recipe for financial disaster.

Sony is best at acquisitions when they buy small(ish) teams rising to glory, not overblown companies with delusions of grandeur

My wife was a backer. But I'm sure she paid less than the amount necessary for the freebie.

I’m sure same as the last time many gamers will make up a lot of those emojis and then inevitably become enraged because the company hasn’t delivered what they had imagined.

I’m not hyped. But I will check it out. I loved No Man’s Sky at launch. Maybe because I knew there’s no way there will be multiplayer, main reason being the game was advertised differently, like a chill exploration of generated universe, and multiplayer games all have this feature put front and centre. So, there was no reason for me to feel duped.

Hello Games dedication to polishing the experience became a nice bonus for me.

Everyone knows the quality level Astrobot will have. We all been through its "demo". And it was just an appetiser for a big cake! Other games are mostly unknowns.

I guess I'll be in a disappearing minority if I say that I don't care about game shows at all. I care about actual game releases, that happened, not were promised somewhere in the future. I don't need a console to watch trailers on YouTube. Sure, some trailers make me feel excited for some games, but I don't believe in promises and when a game I'm interested in finally comes out I'm always waiting for review scores and never preorder.

Having said that, I'm very happy with what Sony delivered. If I were an Xbox owner instead, I would have to switch.

There's no reason for this game to exist, because there are original games this one is cloned off. Why would anyone prefer that to the original?

Of course it is doomed to fail. Differentiate or die.

I'm voting with my wallet and buying neither the DLC, nor Dragon Dogma 2

@get2sammyb In game development 20% market share you can enter is a mandatory market share. I saw game designs being altered for something like 5% share.

@Sequel I think judging by Bungie's history with Destiny, this is why concord will fail.

When they released PvE focused game heavy on coop with PvP bolted on, it became a massive success. When they shifted the focus towards competitive PvP and released Destiny 2, it tanked. Yes, there still some loyal player base there after millions of fixes and adjustments, but it's too low to pay off for a new game.

My prediction: it will suck.

@DarianStarfrog And you have the source saying Yasuke wasn't a samurai?

@Giophieudu268 Ubisoft doesn't understand European and American culture either, if you take it from AC games.

@ReadySlayerOne You seem to be implying that I stated the game is about the most known figure of the time period in Japan, which I did not. Whatever parade you've rained on wasn't mine 😊

As I said, Yasuke is a famous figure in Japan. The amount of media about him produced in the country is the testament to that. Also, the amount of reactions coming from white dudes with fragile egos outraged that a samurai can be a non-ethnic Japanese will surely bring more attention to the game in mainstream media, which can lead to more sales.

@Ambassador_Kong Representation of a minority is not the cause for outrage. The thinking among those crowds goes like this: "they add a black man as the central character in a game set in Japan to satisfy the pressure from minority rights activists that want to put black people in every media product regardless of the historical setting. They want to ruing our games!"

Those people don't see Yasuke — a very famous figure in Japan. Instead, they see a samurai which is black. But samurais supposed to be native Japanese.

This is blatantly racist. And that racism is not a secret to anyone who reads comments in different gaming-related publications and reddit threads. I won't even mention Discord.

I take it as a thinly veiled outburst of racism from the people who consider themselves "gaming community", trying to hide behind appeals to historical accuracy which has never been the case in any AC game, besides providing the setting.