Evolution Studios has been known for World Rally Chapionship and the Motorstorm series now Evolution Studios is creating the upcoming Driveclub game but will they ever return to the Motorstorm series?
Former Xbox executive Ed Fries comments on the early days of Xbox, the opinion of Japanese game companies, and more.
Replies(2)I dont think that'll ever happen. But i must say back in the day, they were definitely trying because they were more cash rich than their competitors.
I think MS were and still are the richer company. They tried to acquire Sega back in the day (and considered doing so again more recently), they obviously bought exclusivity to Halo which was originally shown as a Mac title. I don’t think as a company MS can claim the moral high ground here. It’s a wilful lack of self awareness.
Of course Sony would try exactly the same if they had the resources, but when the PS2 dominated the industry was in a much healthier place with an abundance of great third parties.
This has been a depressing generation as far as first party decisions are concerned. The fact we are debating business plans rather than which game is better is a sad reflection of the state of things.
There was Nintendo as well, Sony wouldn't have had a monopoly. In fact, the world would be better today if Xbox never existed in the first place. They pretty much brought all bad practices we have today. We might have gotten all of it either way, but not this early. In term of franchises, I don't think there is anything Microsoft released that would actually be missed if it didn't exist. Even Halo the world wouldn't notice if Halo didn't exist.
I think almost everyone will agree that a monopoly is not good for the industry. But that being said, the competition needs to be smart and strategic with their business. Simply buying up publishers and traditional third-party studios just to keep them out of the other companies reach is not a sustainable practice. That goes for all parties so don't think I'm just referring to Xbox.
I'm no business guru by any stretch of the imagination but I firmly believe that the best way to drive consumers to your software and hardware is to invest smart in your first-party studios. Give them full support and guidance in making unique, fun games that are only available to play in your ecosystem and the gamers will come.
But first party studios aren't enough. They only make up a small portion of the industry. Without 3rd party there would be no industry for Microsoft or sony.Developing games take time and money and sometimes you gotta make moves to stay competitive.
Nah, I never said first-party was enough. I said it’s the ‘best way’ to drive gamers to your platform. 3rd-party is a free-for-all and there’s no guarantee that gamers will use your hardware to play the game. If you want to push your own software and/or hardware you need first-party, or at least exclusive deals with third-party studios.
Then why be so emotional and continue to talk about it. Xbox will never die be ause it stays in so many people's head.
How can you even see him being "emotional" in that comment?
If anything, you're the emotional one, constantly trying to go at anyone that says anything against Microsoft. So when you call him emotional, it comes off as deflection
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In this day and age, it’s rare we experience a warm fuzzy feeling when we boot up X (formerly known as Twitter, of course).
But the past few days have been lovely: our feed is full of people talking about DriveClub again.
The discussion started when someone posted a clip of the game and its infamous rain effects. The caption reads: “Still can’t believe this is a 12 year old game.”
This was one I was hoping would have some kind of boost from the PS5. The devs locked that sucker so tight...
I play the PSVR one even though it doesn't look as good, because that one is 60fps.
I interviewed them twice back in my gaming journalist days... Once at E3 2006 and again on a podcast about a year later. Really nice folks.
The guy we interviewed both times' name was Simon, I can't remember his last name, it was 20 years ago, but he was a really nice guy, and was very passionate about his job. It broke my heart when I saw Sony shuttered Evolution. I do hope they bring some of those folks back, but I remember another studio ended up hiring most of them back in those days, and they've been releasing new games since under that studio... Codemasters, maybe? I forgot which....
But the amount of talent that Sony has shut down over the years, it's disturbing. Psygnosis, Evolution, Zipper... just those three studios produced some of the most innovative games that PlayStation has ever seen... and those games need to be brought back.
If they were to release that game on the PlayStation 5, there would be absolutely no need for a remaster or a remake. The whole appeal of the original game was that it consistently exceeded people's expectations.
Higher rendering res and textures, higher framerate, maybe toss in some global illumination/ray tracing, but other than that, they could keep every polygon the same and it would still look absolutely incredible as a current gen title.
Sony should reassemble the team and make Driveclub 2. Driveclub was so ahead of its time it’s crazy.
This is what I hate about gamers sometimes
There is a segment of gaming communities that always want an old game to come back. But when the game(s) were in their prime, nobody supported them or not enough people supported them. Driveclub, Killzone, Resistance, etc all fit that profile.
I want Driveclub, Killzone, Resistence, and etc all back too. But I say that as someone that bought into, played, and own those games.
Too many people like to talk but not put up the money to support when it's needed. I even lump two of my own personal friends into that. I remember how one of them constantly said "I always wanted to play the Resistance games", yet never made an effort to buy any of them. No way that's an isolated event.
There are certainly games that fit that description, but I'm not sure these are a good fit:
- Driveclub infamously launched in a truly terrible state. It had a central focus on online & social features, and those were broken for about 6+ months before people could reliably play it as intended. It was so bad that the PS Plus Edition was delayed, along with its companion app. It also released less than a year after the PS4 launch, so it had to deal with a smaller total of launch PS4 owners to sell to, and Driveclub's rough launch certainly did it no favors.
- Resistance got 3 main console entries, and one handheld title for the PSP and PS Vita. Killzone got 5 main console entries across 3 generations, and one handheld title for PSP and PS Vita. This was also the era of millions of shooters, especially of the First Person variety, & genre fatigue was getting heavier by the year. So I feel these did pretty good at 5 and 7 titles respectively, pointing to enough people showing up for at least a while.
I'm not saying people don't exist who fit that criteria for these games, but I also don't think they were the primary issue. I think after a solid break from the IPs, as well as a lessening of shooter oversaturation, these titles could find healthy audiences if they came out with new entries at this point.
Killzone on the PS4 had the graphics, but the gameplay was tragic, I only rated Killzone 3, although the first game on the PS2 was decent. The Getaway was another game Sony canned, the sequel was so bad. Plenty of games need a sequel, the likes of Ridge Racer, Wipeout, Project Gotham, Wave Race and F-Zero have been retired. The racing genre these days, I'm sick of Turismo and Forza due to the same tracks and any other clones.
I think the original Motorstorm was the game that convinced me to buy a ps3. Way ahead of its time.
Surprised Sony didn't release a collectio, but all they seem to do these days is release God of War and Uncharted collections. It kills me that I no longer have a PS3, so a collection would be awesome.
PlayStation PC revenue reached $300 million in 2023, but despite this success, it appears Sony may be pulling back from PC releases.
It's not a success unless we know the profit. It's the same reason I get on Xbox when they mention revenue.
If Sony is considering keeping their single player games exclusive to the PS systems despite the 300 million PC revenue, that means they didn't profit from the venture.
You are correct. Making 300 million doesn't mean anything if you have 299 million in operating costs. Clearly they are making some profit if they want to keep their multiplayer games on PC but what of their single player games?
How could they possibly not make a profit with $300M in revenue?
Nixxis only has about 90 employees. Let's go high and say each person on the payroll makes $200k per year; payroll would only be $18M. I believe the development time to port a game from PlayStation to PC is only about a year, so unless Sony is giving out Bentleys and 5 bedroom houses to each employee with payroll, they should be making a sizable profit.
See, the problem with what you said is we don't know what their operating costs were. So everything you're saying there is just speculation. What we do know is reported revenue and the rumored reporting that Sony is taking first party single player games out of the PC release cycle.
Not saying you're wrong, but we need to work with what we're given.
Here’s another angle of the argument. What if they saw a concerning decline in console sales and/or game sales on PS during this window of PC releases? It may be a crazy success on pc we don’t know but eating your own market share scare PlayStation for sure especially when they are trying to sell every new gen.
Ok, THIS makes sense. I don't know how I didn't think about that. And we know they'll want those PS6 sales to be off the charts. It's harder to do that if their in-house made blockbusters are shared with PC.
Given the recent price increase for their hardware... Sony should really rethink things. Having an additional revenue stream, even if the games come to PC a year after, is still money coming in. Those who wanted a 5 likely already got one, but that doesn't mean Sony should turn their backs on those who may still want to play their software on a PC.
Honestly, I think they are worried about PC piracy.... Getting their games on PC for free is... well its not hard at all. They have to know that and I am sure that goes into their calculus.
thats bogus. Early 2000's a lot of things got pirated sure, but most piracy that currently exists is because the companies themselves sell an inferior product than when you pirate it, denuvo, bad quality on movies/shows etc. It's not much anymore and other companies have been releasing their games on pc since the beginning of time and are doing fine and given the quality of sony's 1st party games they should have no issue making profit at all. Adding shit like having to log in to psn in order to play single players games because they wanna harvest your data, yes that's when I say people are in their right to pirate and sony can go suck a fatty.
We know exactly why they wouldn't want it, because they can't get people into their ecosystem and profit more off of them if they buy it for pc. Nothing more nothing less as with any other company it's only about money.
We buy more games than console gamers BTW. We have over 132 million users on steam so out of that if 2% pirate how can we all be labeled as pirates?
Real reason is sony probably didn't see the big benefits and that's on them because games come out a year later and costs full price
I disagree I think it's strategically in their best interest to remove PC as a pathway to access you need to encourage people to buy the console to play the games otherwise they won't
As soon as Xbox started putting games day one on PC sales of their consoles dropped off a cliff and piracy of their games went sky high
@michiel not true piracy exists because people want to play a game but don't want to pay for it. Piracy may have started really in the 80s but it's still going strong today if you look at any torrent and it's seed count you'll see just how strong the scene is
i specifically said "most piracy that currently exists", not all piracy that has ever existed.
I'm not believing that gamepass story, it's so counterintuitive. They didn't remove the option to be able to purchase a game and for short term they gave people a cheaper way to play it and THEN suddenly they started mass pirating them? yeah I'm not buying that.
Just took a look at GoW Ragnarok and the seed counts are either single or double digits, with 3 out of like 30 having triple digits, 2 of those being basically double digits cause they're so close and the other one a bit above 200. So strong........
Pc sucks and xbox is dead because they stupidly put games on pc and game pass. You like this dumb idea because you want sony down to xbox pathetic level.
Error the price hike effects hardware as well. By all accounts ps6 is designed to be able to be made as cheap as possible. Which should mean it's cheaper than ps5 pro at the very least. Pc parts are effected by increased hardware costs too so they have an obvious market position as the more affordable alternative and once people are in their ecosystem they are unlikely to abandon libraries and switch
And people think they’re going to give that up 🤣🤣
And it’ll be way more than 300m by now
If they make billions in sales on the actual console sure this isn't gross profit either
The value to the brand is significantly more important. Plus is this before or after steam takes their cut?
@Jammit
Majority of the sales is more than like from live service games, so it makes sense why they're pulling away their single player games. Which is honestly a good idea for those games and the brand. Also, if the 300M is revenue, steam taking a 30% cut means Sony is only getting around 210M. Now take aways how much they spent to bring those games to PC and you're looking at less than 200M. With majority of the money coming from live service games.
So easy to spot I wonder HOW YOU GUYS keep falling for his first almost sensible comment then keep getting more and more deranged 🤦🏿 😩.
Death Stranding is owned by Kojima (he purchased the rights back from sony.) Hence the eventual xbox port of the original. Not exactly a good example. Lets see if/when Yotei comes to pc, as that should have been announced already if going by their last first party developed titles ps5 release to pc announce timeline. It's looking more and more like the rumors are correct and Helix has has Sony rethinking pc releases. And why wouldn't they when it would guarantee a competing "console" has access to all their games without their say so.
I'd argue that 300 mill revenue without even considering what part is profit, is not nearly enough money to risk giving xbox access to PlayStation games.
Thats not a lot but still successful,when you consider some games costs over 100 million. But I still think Helix has something to do with them pulling back too.
They’re definitely panicked by helix
Helix also marks the end of their party PS exclusives - Sony can’t afford to keep 3rd party games off PC
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
Panicked by Helix? You probably also believed Xbox Games would never come to Playstation or Nintendo.
“They’re definitely panicked by helix” - 🤡🤡 I know you are a dumb little troll hurt by the demise of Xbox and the continued success of Playstation, but that is still a hell of a clown statement to make after Xbox series got whipped by Nex Playground in December… in 2026 Xbox doesn’t even show up as a skid mark next to PlayStation😬
Also, tech wise PlayStation is ahead of Xbox with PSSR. I can’t see Xbox coming up with anything that matches it. Ps6 is already WAY ahead of Helix
I hope so, but I am glad they took a break from the series to make DriveClub. Hopefully they rotate between MotorStorm and DriveClub for making new installments
Gonna try DriveClub but Motorstorm is more my type of racer.
Hope it comes back.
The last one crashed and burnt in terms of sales and was no critical darling either. They have to make another one so not to leave the MotorStorm legacy forever tarnished.
imagine motorstorm on the ps4!
I sure hope so!
Although MotorStorm Apocalypse didn't have a massive success(Sony fault!), it's the one I enjoyed the most.
Unfortunately, I think if Driveclub doesn't succeed, MotorStorm won't came back. Maybe Sony even close the studio.