https://www.ign.com/article...
Lol they learned the opposite lesson. They think they aren't focused enough on live service. From their point of view, Hogwarts Legacy would have sold just as well as a live service game, and then Suicide Squad's flop wouldn't have killed their revenue so much this year ...
The ones that are still open aren't very inspiring anyway. Last time I went to one was a few years ago to buy a Switch game as a gift (Mario Golf), and they didn't have it in stock (they had plenty of nonsense collectibles like Funko Pops in stock though). Their Switch game selection was pretty sad, especially considering so many people still buy physical games for it.
As others have noted, this tracks overall spending on software, not the physical/digital split of games that launch both physically and digitally.
@Cacabunga
Umm okay? Not sure how that relates to my comment. My point is that there are a lot of casual gamers who also only buy physical games, except they don't even go through the thought process of "well Sony might shut down PSN next week and keep me from redownloading." They just buy discs because that's what they have always done and they don't follow the industry enough to understand that digital is even something to consider.
I don't understand why it has to be a fight. I prefer digital but I want you all to keep buying physical. People constantly overlook how symbiotic we are. When physical was dominant (think PS3 gen), prices for games stayed stagnant. GameStop would seriously have a used copy of a three year old game for like $48 dollars and we were expected to see that as a good deal. Now where it's split, we get great digital sales on PSN and great disc sales at places like Best Buy. Prices drop in a...
What do you mean by casual? If you mean the people who spend a lot of time on their console but only play one or two free to play games, then yes, they probably spend most of their money digitally.
But there are also a lot of casual gamers who don't visit sites like this or watch gaming YouTubers who still think of buying games as walking into GameStop or Best Buy and buying a disc. Think of your friends who don't know what Dishonored is but who were super excited a...
Yep. The stats would be more useful if they would give overall digital/physical split and then the split only for the bie games that are available both physically and digitally.
I think you are seriously overestimating how much the consumers who are still on the fence about PS5 care about first party titles. People who actually know and care what a first party title is have already bought a PS5. Now they need to convince the casuals who have been hearing their friends talk about how cool College Football 25 is but who just can't quite justify the price. A price drop is going to do a lot more to win those people over than an announcement of Ghost of Tsushima 2.
Which is why they need to drop the price of the standard PS5 when they announce the Pro. That way they are appealing to the consumer who is willing to spend more for a better experience with the Pro and to the consumers who can't afford the current price. $400 for the slim with disc drive and $300-350 for the slim digital suggests itself.
No matter what they need to avoid trying to make the digital only PS5 the "cheap casual machine." Many casuals still want...
Alternate title "Gamers Say They Hate Live Service Games But Get Mad When Multiplayer Games Don't Have Constant Updates."
I would enjoy that as long as they don't add every unnecessary feature of modern gaming (progression systems, multiple currency systems, hub world, skins, etc.) like the devs did in Back 4 Blood.
I wish that too but unfortunately the audience demands multiplayer games be operated as a live service now (even though we hate the term "live service"). A studio could launch a new fps with the best gameplay of all time, but if it's just a good game without unnecessary RPG elements (i.e. guns locked behind grinding),
and constant updates, the audience will immediately start accusing the devs of "abandoning" the game or "sending it out to die." We...
@RaidenBlack
Yeah that's one of the reasons I asked. Obviously there is a lot of hate for "live service" multiplayer games, but on the other hand, one of the chief criticisms multiplayer games get nowadays is that they aren't being updated often enough. So I'm always interested to know where people draw the line between a more traditional multiplayer game and a "live service" game.
You have identified one of the problems t...
Just out of curiosity, what would you say is the last successful shooter (with both singleplayer and multiplayer components) that was not a live service/Game as a Service?
@Outside_ofthe_Box
I mean, I hope you are right. I don't think you are, but I'd like to be wrong on this point. I just know that, except on here, anytime Killzone comes up, people either have no idea what it is (sadly, even people who were active PS3 users at the time), or they assume that everyone hates Killzone and that it should just be the butt of jokes (usually it's pretty obvious these people never actually played Killzone, or they "played it at a fri...
It's also funny how many people seem to think executives and managers at these companies do absolutely nothing to contribute and just leech on the "real" devs. Were that really the case, then surely there would be examples of many large successful devs that have no executives, managers, or producers, and that just operate as worker cooperatives. But in reality there are only a few indies that operate like that (Dead Cells' developer Motion Twin being the key example, and I t...
People are constantly revealing the ways they don't understand money. They hear "2 million dollars," and think "wow, millions is a lot, you could have paid a lot of other salaries with that." But as you note, on a grand scale in terms of a large business, 2 million is nothing. They don't stop to consider that with salary and insurance and everything, the average employee probably costs Bungie over $100k a year (and that may be conservative).
Now,...
@Notellin
"This money didn't come from earlier in his career it came from the Sony deal he made with a golden parachute."
The Sony deal is based on what he had done earlier in his career. Sony didn't buy Bungie because they thought Bungie is bad; they saw Bungie as a valuable asset at that time, obviously. The people who put Bungie in a position to have that value at that time, including him, deserve credit for that.
&...
Most available numbers/estimates put the bestselling Killzone games (2, 3, and Shadow Fall) as selling between 2-3 million each. The franchise doesn't have strong name appeal; if anything, there's a huge segment of gamers/media that think they gain credibility by hating on Killzone without ever playing it (or by playing for ten minutes so they can say it sucks). If Sony were to remake/reimagine the first one (more likely than a sequel at this point), it would probably only sell a few ...
Unfortunately their takeaway is/will be that they didn't do live service right. Because they aren't going to look at their flop, they are going to look at the player counts for Naraka: Bladepoint, The First Descendant, and Once Human (all games that launched well after the established live service games like Fortnite and Apex) and think there is still a chance for them to establish a persistent source of revenue. The fact that they are talking about licensing their IP probably won'...