Yesterday's openly salvo of GameTrailers.com's "E3 Business & Media Summit Awards" offered up nominations and winners across various categories, such as Best Racer, Best Action Adventure, Best PSP Game, and Best DS Game. And, to be honest, the winners and loses didn't really throw up many surprises.
However, today's second round of E3 Awards coverage may well stoke the fires of fervent fanboy fanaticism. And why?
Oh, because the Best First-Person Shooter category does not include nominations for Halo 3 and Killzone 2, because Sony comes under fire on various fronts in terms of Most Disappointing, and neither Mass Effect nor Assassin's Creed is given a nomination nod for Best Graphics – while a revamped PC port of Gears of War certainly is.
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
The fourth game in the ‘BioShock’ series has been in development for more than a decade
Bioshock is one of my favourites franchises. I love all 3 games and have played each several times. I even have a room in my house that is loosely decorated around the theme of Bioshock (with a Lighthouse, coral models and postcards styled as though they are from both Rapture and Columbus).
And yet I am going to find it extremely difficult to get even remotely excited about any future episode in the series after all the problems this has had in its development cycle.
Leave the franchise alone. Remaster them again if you have to. Then put whatever talent you have to use on something brand new.
Since ken levine isn't involved i'm not surprised what's going on. i'm more excited for his next game which looks like bioshock. Yet he still works under take2 and they are making bioshock 4 without him, strange situation.
Yes. Judas. Looks brilliant, but it's one of those games that seems to never have had a release date. Instead it's had release windows that keep getting pushed back.
Once it's ready, I'll be there for it though. Ken Levine is an excellent developer.
I get the feeling he dissolved Irrational Games simply so that 2k couldn't tell him what to do. It seems it will pay off, but I feel sorry for those who worked as part of Irrational before it was dissolved, who hadn't independently made a name for themselves.
"Remaster them again if you have to"
Well apparently they were doing a remake but that got cancelled
It sucks this game is in development hell because I love BioShock and would love a 4th game. I hope it turns out great, but I guess we'll see.
It's been in development hell since 2014. This is nothing new. It saddens me because it's one of my favorite series. At this point, Judas may end up releasing first.
Bioshock 4 (if it ever comes out) will probably still look and play like a Bioshock game, but without Kevin, it might miss that spark that made the originals so special. Honestly, Judas might end up feeling more like the real spiritual successor.
Gears of War's creator has spoken out against the trend of turning established franchises into live services, urging developers to focus on single-player experiences.
Too bad he didn't have this opinion when he chased trends with Lawbreakers. Or when he chased trends with Radical Heights.
He learned from the mistake or he wouldn’t be advocating for more single player experiences. I find this refreshing in a world where we often see people so stubborn that they tend to double down on a mistake which results in making things even worse. Seriously, good for him!
@Popsicle
Oh for sure, better late than never. And better to somewhat own up to your mistakes, rather than just blaming your release window, or advertising partners, or gamers lol.
@Popsicle
Of course we will never know his intentions, but it's hard to believe he is just a naive agent that is learning from his mistakes.
He could have done one himself after Gears of War but he did Lawbreakers…look how that turned out.
Jawbreakers would have been a better name! Heck, I might just go and trademark that right now.
You're missing the point. His studio's short lifespan is what *inspired* him to make this comment in the first place.
Oh I know the point...I'm just stating the obvious and how stupid he was in the beginning to jump on a trend he had no real experience in. A first person hero shooter with heavy GaaS elements is a lot different than the multiplayer in Gears of War.
He'd have been better creating something like Gears of War again, a great single player story and a good online mode.
-"A first person hero shooter with heavy GaaS elements is a lot different than the multiplayer in Gears of War."
I mean... you're kinda muddying terms when Gears has always had a strong multiplayer component. Even if I grant you that, Cliffy B started cementing himself at Epic with Unreal Tournament, which was among the earliest shooter series to have "proto-GaaS elements" (downloadable maps, cosmetics, special editions that bundle stuff together). Lawbreakers and Radical Heights (were it finished) weren't major career shifts to him like they would be for, say, Fumito Ueda.
Regardless of that, it's still kinda useless to state the obvious when CliffyB himself made his comments with the benefit of hindsight already.
Look, these a-hole publishers can do this, in fact I want them to, so they can f*ck around and find out and fail hard scaring away everyone else from doing this live service push.
This industry is run by some of the dumbest corporate pieces of sh*t I’ve ever seen. They spend stupid amount of money with literally nothing that stands out from games from the previous generation (look at Arkham Knight to the $200 mill Suicide Squad comparison vids), you’re overpaying devs, and you focus on games as a service to milk consumers that a lot of them grew up off traditional games. We’re not idiots, we sniff this sh*t out and won’t touch it.
So, what’s your answer to not getting a ROI? Raise game prices and double down on GaaS so you can suck your consumers dry. That model only works for some games and even then how in hell do you expect it to work with multiple games!? They’re ruining the damn hobby with this corporate greed.
Cut back on dev budgets, cut back on how much your staff is getting paid, until sales for games bring in a profit. That’s the answer and make some games that feel like there’s passion behind them, not some cookie cut up game that feels like the entire existence behind it is to offer as little as it can with repetitive bullsh*t and selling off all this content throughout its life. It’s gross.
Games do bring in a profit, it's the greed that is killing the industry. Here is a fact, live service games overall make more, significantly more money than single player games
What you should be asking is executives not wanting continuous growth or firing them. Saying devs should be fired when those who are fitting the bills and setting unrealistic expectations would make things worse. What do y9u think would happen if they released say, 30 single player games and over half of them fail? You are going after the wrong crowd.
About time he learned. I guess he finally stopped blaming everyone else and took accountability for his mistakes and realized that people really don't care that much for trends or live service.
Fock all the fanboys. shut the fock up. stupid fockers
(sorry for the foul language)
Of all awards, the ones that I really liked and agree with GameTrailers are Racing (Burnout Paradise) & Action/Adventure (Assassin's Creed).