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If Id rather watch a movie or a show I would watch a movie or a show. No, I just don’t like backtracking.
Or more specifically my playstyle forces me back track a lot since I tend to become a systemic explorer, trying to find every nook and cranny of a game due to fomo. I tend to prefer more railroaded experience these days, due to that but that’s not the same as wanting to be a spectator instead of a participant.
I love souls games, but other than Blasphemous and Dead Cells, I have struggled to stick with Metroidvanias a lot. I find that they are open in the worst way possible for me, because I can get lost and then spend time “progressing” only to find the way blocked and having to backtrack. These days I have low tolerance for wasting time, or more specifically to the feeling that I’m wasting time.
Honestly I only played the first one, but I do know that Black Flag is the most loved one. However when I say what I say it is not just about assassins creed, the observation which at that point was rather obvious for me was that ever Ubisoft franchise was more or less following the same template and it has only gotten worse.
The Switch 2 seems doomed to fail. “Fastest selling console yet” isn’t much to say when your loyal base is huge. But as in most things the Pareto principle applies to sales, and most sales of any product comes from casual buyers. I don’t see casual buyers putting up with this. Parents might just buy mobile games for their kids, and teenagers and adults might as well just buy a PC handheld.
If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.
The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.
I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.
All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.
The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.
Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.
Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.
Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.
It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.
Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.
It describes the budget of the game. It’s always relative to the average budget in the industry but it is a business term.
I still don’t know why you keep bringing the consumer into this. The consumer doesn’t and should not care whether Gamepass hurts sales, only that it is a good deal for them. And it is. Whether sales are affected (obviously they are) is an industry conversation, but the real question is whether it boosts profitability or not.
Quality of games etc etc is all irrelevant in this specific conversation.
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
You don’t spend 8 billion dollars on a company to then shrink their market. Microsoft was never planning on making any of these properties they bought fully exclusive. The transition to third party you’re seeing now has been in the making for 5+ years at this point. Youre all just looking at this through the old console war lense when they’ve been over that ever since Gamepass released and they realized they make more money putting that on everything (larger market) than playing the exclusives game (smaller market)
Those are all still here in one form of another. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is as strong as it’s ever been. But you do point at how this will go. Soonish there will be less overtly AI products as we realize that it is not the be all end all, and instead it will be yet another technology that we can use to achieve various goals. But moving forward it will probably be embedded in the background of most things, as it had been for almost a decade before gen ai.
I don’t think that’s true, the game ran very well on Series X on release. I know because I sunk like 90 hours on it in the first week. It ran like shit in all last Gen hardware including PC, because people with the then new 30 series Nvidia graphics cards were also reporting the game ran fine. I think CDPR just did not optimize it at all.
The ROG Xbox Ally is just a an Xbox branded PC. It can already play Helldivers 2. The Meta Quest is just a Meta Quest with a different color so no, unless it’s also playable via Xcloud (game streaming).
Re: Meta Quest, doesn’t play Xbox or Pc games natively at all. It has an Xbox app that allows you to stream from your Xbox or play through Xcloud. All Meta Headsets can do this.
That is to say that none of these Xbox branded hardware can play games that you own on your Xbox unless they are Play Anywhere titles.
Ok, so you think the mass market likes buying used stuff? Because as far as I’m aware the average consumer would rather buy a new lower end device than a used higher end device.
But yes the next Xbox has already been teased as running an AMD chip that will be sued across form factors , so you get where they are coming from. They are not about to let Valve and Linux run with the PC market, which continues to grow while the console market continues to shrink.
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I think this is possibly also the problem for me. I compulsively explore, and the more a game has to explore the higher the chances I’ll get tired of it before I even finish it.