General Gaming News

[DjchunKfunK]

Yeah they have generally struggled to make big sales. The sell well enough but not to the standard most publishers want.

[Animalmother]

Which is a real shame. Prey and especially Dishonored 2 are some of my favourite games that game out in the past few years. Now that I think of it I probably got them on a sale pretty quickly after release.

[Sly Boots]

Hopefully we'll start to see a bit of a rethink around suitable scale and budgets of games of certain genres, and rather than see things like immersive sims disappear we'll instead see proper labours of love being produced (ie not Redfall) by teams of an appropriate size using sustainable resources, and leave all the triple-A shite to the multinational publishers.

I think there's the space and demand for AA size studios to make the sort of game they want to make and that enough people want to play, that don't cost £70 minimum and are loaded with live service and MTX bollocks in a misguided attempt to justify the bloated cost of production.

[Wrathbone]

Hopefully we'll start to see a bit of a rethink around suitable scale and budgets of games of certain genres, and rather than see things like immersive sims disappear we'll instead see proper labours of love being produced (ie not Redfall) by teams of an appropriate size using sustainable resources, and leave all the triple-A shite to the multinational publishers.

God, if only. If the major publishers had an ounce of sense, they'd realise that creating games to current hardware capabilities and development resources rather than shooting for the stars means fewer delays, fewer performance issues and gamers that are more willing to put their hand in their pocket. I can only imagine what a resounding success Xbox Series S and X might have been if Microsoft had focused on creating far more games on the scale of Grounded. That was a very well received game by Obsidian, as was Pentiment, whereas Avowed seems to have been cursed with overambition that their team had no realistic means of achieveing, and the result is they've scaled back to something that's taken far longer than it should have and looks like a disappointment in waiting. If Microsoft had managed it better so that they'd set an achievable standard from the beginning, I expect we'd already have it and it'd be better than what we're going to get now.

[Raid]

Yeah, I can't say I really see the obsession with AAA games. I suppose it probably just comes down to marketing. Better looking game = better looking trailers and screenshots = more sales, and better looking game = better reputation for the hardware. I have no issue with flagship games, tentpole-titles that really show off what a console is capable of and things that Sony does extremely well (your Gods of War, Spidermen etc.), but it feels like every game from major publishers is vying for that same market. They're all spending phenomenal amounts of money to produce them, and we're now at the point where £70 is the starting price for one and we're in the middle of an era of mass inflation and reduced spending power where they're increasingly difficult to justify. I cannot think of a single videogame I've ever played that would justify that cost with my current spending power.

I really hope publishers are taking note of what Helldivers 2 has achieved; an absolute blast of an experience that maybe doesn't look quite as good as other games, but that has sold extremely well because of how much fun it is to actually play. I know they very nearly destroyed that goodwill last week, but that was an easily reversed decision.

[Alan]

I actually think Arrowhead cemented the goodwill. They basically encouraged review bombing and when Sony removed the requirement they put a cape in the game that has a graph showing the review bomb timeline. It takes people that know how to play the meta and that seem to really care to pull that off.

[DjchunKfunK]

Hopefully we'll start to see a bit of a rethink around suitable scale and budgets of games of certain genres, and rather than see things like immersive sims disappear we'll instead see proper labours of love being produced (ie not Redfall) by teams of an appropriate size using sustainable resources, and leave all the triple-A shite to the multinational publishers.

I think there's the space and demand for AA size studios to make the sort of game they want to make and that enough people want to play, that don't cost £70 minimum and are loaded with live service and MTX bollocks in a misguided attempt to justify the bloated cost of production.

This is basically what Embracer was/is trying to do but unfortunately they have made some poor decisions along the way so I don't know how things will pan out there. Time will tell as to whether the economics of these types of games works out. It's a tricky needle to thread because of the growth of indie games which I think has lessened people's desire to play £40+ for something that doesn't look the best and is an imperfect product when they could pay £10-£20 for something fairly similar.

They basically encouraged review bombing

The social media person who did this was nearly fired over it, so I'm not sure how much credit Arrowhead in general deserve for that.

[Sly Boots]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry ... -a-sequel/

[Raid]

*sigh*

[Lenny Solidus]

The gaming industry has become so shambolic it's difficult to even begin to try and judge just what the fuck is going on behind the scenes, all in all it feels like there's a level of sheer recklessness at large that anyone regardless of if they are typically inside or outside the industry would have ever thought possible in the year 2024. And yet here we are. An industry that's on track to make something in the region of $700 billion by the turn of 2030 acting like a preliminary start-up company fucking up hand over fist almost on the daily.

It's all so bloody moronic...
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-game ... t-says-ceo

[Drarok]

Not sure anyone else will know the names involved here, but…

https://esports-news.co.uk/2024/05/14/p ... -insomnia/

[Hatredsheart]

[Snowy]

Having enjoyed Shogun recently and with Ghost of Tsushima on order and out tomorrow, this is a very distant third place for me.

On the one hand, having one black and one female protagonist will have the gammons up in arms which is always a good thing. In this case though and with zero prejudice, a black protagonist feels an odd choice - surely this is a title that would benefit from having entirely Asian leads acted by Japanese actors. It is a fantasy of feudal Japan after all.

[DjchunKfunK]

Having enjoyed Shogun recently and with Ghost of Tsushima on order and out tomorrow, this is a very distant third place for me.

On the one hand, having one black and one female protagonist will have the gammons up in arms which is always a good thing. In this case though and with zero prejudice, a black protagonist feels an odd choice - surely this is a title that would benefit from having entirely Asian leads acted by Japanese actors. It is a fantasy of feudal Japan after all.

The character is meant to be the first non-Japanese samurai Ysauke, so it is pulling from history.

[Snowy]

I wasn't aware of that, but still feel it is an odd choice.