As jaded as gamers are with things, I'm always shocked at the lack of backlash for this kind of stuff. It's an obvious cash grab for extremely minimal effort, and almost always priced higher than standard editions.
But as I always argue, the market ultimately dictates the direction of the corporations. They make this junk because people lap it up. Just don't be upset when products/games/etc are eliminated when they don't make money.
You are one of few.
That’s fair. It’s called the open market. If $80 is too much for you, you don’t have to buy. But if the demand curve supports $80, the MSRP of new titles will be $80. If $80 is a bust and the market doesn’t support it, you’ll see a redaction of this strategy. If not…. Buckle up buckaroos.
It’s less about saving money and more about trimming the fat so that they can invest that money into something that can make more.
Businesses are not charities. History is filled with corporate empires that fail to stay lean, optimize, adapt, and die. And then armchair quarterbacks talk about, “they should have done this, should have done that, they failed to change with the times, etc”. MS, like it or not, is a machine. It is a machine that is keenly aware that if you get complacent, the next competitor is hungry to knock you off the hill. Like it or not, businesses have to constantly scan their portfolios and make hard...
Consumerism drives business behavior. It's not so much "blaming" as it is observing behavior. The point I'm making is that the direction that games have gone are driven by the spending. Consumers are spending on DLC and they are driving the expectation of more glitz and padded out (lengthier) games. If they continue to pay, they will continue to drive that direction until a threshold is reached that forces a change in behavior.
I think the reality that we don't want to convince ourselves of is that without the rise of "horse armor" and DLC, game budgets would have essentially stagnated (smaller teams/smaller games), or game prices would have risen much more dramatically than they have. There was an incessant drive for bigger worlds, infinite detail, and hundreds of hours of "gameplay" over the last two decades, that while perhaps a natural evolution of things, needed a suitable funding strea...
It's not just about "maintenance". Business is about "opportunity cost". What one decision is costing you versus another one. Case in point, let's take CoD. If CoD could have sold 30M copies on the XBox platform, that could have been $2.1B in revenue (30,000,000 * $70 = $2,100,000,000). So if you're giving up $2.1B on just one game for $4B overall in subscription revenue, it makes you wonder what the other games were earning. If it was more than the remai...
“343 studios was the halo killer”
No truer words have ever been spoken.
Which one is it - Income or Revenue? Those are two very different principles in business.
Indeed.
I personally don't feel like this is a compliment. If the initial vision was so small, I get the impression that they decided to pump up the small vision just so that they could come up with a full-priced game.
Good riddance. I could do with fewer trivial "digital trinkets" and fake achievements compelling me to increase gamer "engagement".
To each their own. The validity of opinions will be proven in due time.
I find it somewhat ironic that there is little gamer outrage for a never-ending stream of overpriced “limited edition” controller shells that no one is forced to buy, but if there is an optional “Pro” console released for a premium, it’s the complete opposite reaction.
Limited edition controllers are the definition of a cash grab.
They did that to Killzone and Resistance as well. After Killzone 2, we got the PSP games, parts 3, 4, and the Vita game all in the span of like 5 years. The series was never that popular to begin with, and unless there is something to spark new excitement in the series, the audience drops off gradually after each entry.
Horizon had its fans, but I never felt that it had mega franchise potential. And so here we are.
I’m one of this old school gamers that use to be elated at the thought of a game lasting a long time. But I also enjoyed the shorter titles of the 8/16/ and some 32-bit generations that were just a couple of hours long and could be replayed numerous times.
I still enjoy short burst games that can be wrapped up quickly but am still compelled to play over again because the entire concept hasn’t been worn out over the initial play. On the other hand, by the time I reach the en...
Exactly. There are most likely a dozen issues why games are released in buggy or unoptimized states, but I doubt that “laziness” is one of them. Making ambitious games, even if they are full of issues, is the farthest thing from lazy. You can lament the state of the game and the fact that it’s not in a perfect state, but the lack of insight you display by throwing around such an ignorant claim is evident.
You gotta be more than a “shareholder” to get that kind of information.
Why do "realistic graphics and real cars" make a game play any better than something without those attributes?