Jaffe is a perfect example of what I find to be an interesting phenomenon in which the person/group who creates something later seems to be unable to understand why people connected with it in the first place. You see it happen in music too when an artist says they are going to go back to the style of an earlier popular album and when you hear the new material it's obvious they didn't understand why people liked the earlier stuff. The same thing seems to happen sometimes with movie di...
The problem with that perspective is that enough of them end up succeeding for Pubs/Devs to keep trying. Suicide Squad flopped, and we all said "see, no one wants another live service co-op shooter in this oversaturated market." But then at the same time, Helldivers 2 became a megahit, without even being FTP (which some people will insist is needed for a live service game to succeed). Then when Concord flopped, we all said the live service hero shooter market was oversaturated and w...
Obviously Highguard as a live service was a terrible idea, but let's not pretend that every single player (or single player focused) game can replicate Clair Obscur's success. Had Highguard been a single player game, it would have been much more likely to perform like Immortals of Aveum than Clair: Obscur.
"sometimes things sell because they are in the right time and place"
In a way it feels like that is true for Horizon (particularly the second one), but the series is also notorious for launching near major competition. The first one launched right before BOTW (different platform, but it still resulted in a ton of comparisons), and the second one launched at almost the same time as Elden Ring.
It's weird to think about, but the gap between God of War: Ascension and the 2018 Reboot was basically the same as the gap between the first two Horizon games (five years). I guess the fact that most people (including me) stopped at GOW 3 made it seem longer.
Exactly. Sony seems to be getting things exactly wrong with Horizon. It's the type of IP that needs to disappear for a few years and then come back with a third game that really feels like an evolution from 2, rather than just an iterative sequel, like 2 was from 1. It isn't the type of franchise that is going to support a ton of spinoffs.
The problem is that a Killzone game, while basically guaranteed to sell a few million copies, has basically no chance of being a huge hit and creating recurring revenue through micro transactions. Whereas a game like this theoretically has that possibility, even if it is far more likely to flop. Unfortunately it seems like Sony is still more willing to risk the very likely flop for the small chance of getting another money printing machine than they are to play it safe for moderate successes....
Basically it seems like if you have a live service that can avoid hate from core gamers and actually reach the mainstream casual audience that all these companies are actually trying to appeal to, you can make a lot of money (Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals, Arc Raiders). But if you make a bad first impression with gamers and never reach the casual audience, you are probably going to take a huge loss (Concord is the extreme example, but others like XDefiant and Suicide Squad also fit, and Highgua...
You didn't even mention the split screen co-op in Chaos Theory, which was a really nice bonus.
Unfortunately, any remake would probably omit the multiplayer and the co-op.
I'm hoping a side effect of the RAM shortage will be that devs are forced to optimize better.
"$60 for 12 hours of gameplay? Very mid."
Yet in all the earlier gens that people point back to as the "good old days" it was pretty common to have 10-15 hour games sold at full price. There were 50 and 100 hour games too but people didn't expect every game to be like that.
Yeah that isn't getting as much attention because everyone knows COD sales were down this year, but 7th is pretty far down the list. From glancing over past charts it seems like the yearly COD has really only been behind big sports games (FIFA/FC, NBA2k) or huge tentpole games (Hogwarts Legacy, etc.). I didn't see a prior instance where the newest COD came in lower than 3rd, but I didn't go back as far as you did.
"Can you imagine how arse games like GTA, Baldurs Gate, Clair Obscur, Cyberpunk, Disco Elysium, Last of US etc would be if they didn't have social commentary?"
It's almost like if the social commentary is written into the game's story and setting in a way that feels authentic rather than forced, people are less likely to think it's a "political" message. TLOU 2 might be an exception to that, because it was well written and still got hate,...
More evidence that if the agenda feels legitimate within the story's world, people don't even notice that it is an agenda and they don't complain.
As ever, this is a misguided expression of the speaker's issue. While of course there are some games (pure puzzle games, etc) that have no agenda, any game with a narrative is conveying some type of message. What people who say they don't like "woke" or "politics in games" actually mean is that they don't like hamfisted, poorly written narratives/characters that are thin veneers for modern political messages that feel out of place in the game's universe. It...
The difference is that creatives are being threatened by AI, and people actually care about them. Earlier waves of automation primarily affected blue collar workers, and no one cares about their jobs being made obsolete.
Glad to see someone else express this. I'm happy for the game's success, but in the community's rush to champion this game, we have arguably turned into something far different than what it was initially perceived to be (not in terms of gameplay obviously, but I mean in terms of its place within the industry).
Pretty sure it's one person with a bunch of alts.
The nice thing is that none of the rest of us are you.
Does this reasoning apply to discs that have a full playable version of the game, but there are major glitches and performance issues without the day one patch? I think that's almost as bad as not having the full game on disc (though it's still better for people trying to get around data caps).