Ummm---that's a game, not a publisher...
I emailed Larian and asked after I couldn't find any physical preorder at Best Buy or Amazon. I asked them to reconsider, suggesting a preorder window with limited print-run. I asserted that I and others would even pay a reasonable premium.
Very very disappointing that Larian is not producing physical copies for the PS5...
Tacoboto: Nope on either count. You can decimate any revenue stream (down to per-quarter or per-deum units). Also, the long-term vision for MS is everything as software-as-a-service. They'd love nothing more than to have GamePass become the only option for consumption.
Are you forgetting the payments that have to be made for the hundreds of other games made available on/produced for such a service?
Sony makes most of their money from 3rd-party royalties and microtransactions, with a small amount coming from Plus subscriptions.
And... $44-55M/year/AAA game. Sony's AAA release cadence is ~2-4 AAA games per year.
Giovanni: an important correction: Blockbuster paid many times the retail price for each redistributable copy.
FYI: Xbox One X only supports ~50 OG Xbox games via BC.
Agreed. I don't think people understand that capital (or financing) is generally required upfront to fund the development of all these games. Funding in support of a large portion of their portfolio would be very expensive. That's a lot of risk and therefore difficult to come by. It's the same reason Konami doesn't just mobilize all their treasured IP. If these companies were sitting on $1B+ war-chests, they would be more capable.
No physical release --> no purchase---especially for a AAA title!
"We're so close to forcing upon you our revenue-stream vision. We've been drooling over this possibility for years. Even if you don't subscribe to GamePass, you'll soon have to subscribe to all of your gaming franchises. Should we call it 'Games 365'? We meant it when we said we would stop physical ownership and resalability. As we buy up more of the industry, we hope to make our software-as-a-service business model the new norm in gaming. Have we cloaked it well...
"We're so close to forcing upon you our revenue-stream vision. We've been drooling over this possibility for years. Even if you don't subscribe to GamePass, you'll soon have to subscribe to all of your gaming franchises. Should we call it 'Games 365'? We meant it when we said we would stop physical ownership and resalability. As we buy up more of the industry, we hope to make our software-as-a-service business model the new norm."
Framerate is not, itself, a measure of animation "smoothness". Animation of any average framerate can run smoothly or unsmoothly. To assess smoothness, one has to measure the time-rate-of-change (time-derivative) of the framerate.
How many of them will be playable off the disc for current gen, without any required download or patching? I'm guessing ~10%. SmartDelivery is only smart for MS; it screws the consumer. I'll buy all of these games for the PS5 because I want to support the principle of physical ownership and resalability of console games.
porkChop: Do you recall the Microsoft Zune? If not, or if it was before your time, let me illustrate my point through its example. The Zune was an early portable digital music player that Microsoft developed to rival the iPod and iTunes. It came with a digital storefront. Why do you think MS got into that business? Was it to produce the music? To nurture the music industry? What ever became of the Zune? Why wasn't/isn't MS producing content in the music industry?
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I think he said this to lower the bar for future expectations. I've said it time and time again: Microsoft has ZERO long-term interest in being a hardware or game developer. They want only to be a subscription/streaming storefront, siphoning their 30% from everyone else's effort. They're doing as little as possible every step of the way, hoping eventually to meet a critical mass of subscribers. They are not a gaming or entertainment company; they are a software-as-a-service cong...
Sony and Nintendo already hold their releases to a much higher standard; they release complete products on physical media that are very playable from Day 1.
What really confirmed my suspicions about the Xbox business model was Spencer's matter-of-fact statement that he considered Redfall (and suggesting future games as well) ready for retail release once its "creative effort had been more-or-less realized", not because development had finished. He basically said that a buggy mess would (may?) be addressed in a manner similar to service games such as Sea of Thieves (patching over a period of time). It is abundantly clear that it is...
"Most of you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about."
OP then proceeds to demonstrate complete ignorance about a major socioeconomic topic such as communism.
OP then proceeds to oversimplify and disentangle market competition from market health, as though the ends justify the means, regardless of the collateral damage.
Microsoft is bad for this industry because they long ago abandoned any role in nurturing and culti...
It exists to sell GamePass. MS doesn't really care about anything else.