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I'm not sure why you refer to GOG as selling "game keys" as if it's a key reseller, when GOG is its own storefront like steam or epic. Their copies aren't limited. It's just the full game you can buy.
I have zero intension of getting the "upgraded" version. I like my post apocalyptic heroines to be realistically lean not look like they just stubbled out of a Ben a Jeri's all you can eat three week eatathon.
I used to buy a few dozen NEW games per year. Not so much anymore, as I now wait for a sale for 99% of my games before even considering a purchase. When a great new game comes out I Wishlist it and move on.
That's why it is so stupid when you see idiots cheering for Concord's failure. Where did they think the money to pay for that failure was going to come from? The same place it always does, out of our hides, or at least it will for anyone who wants to buy a AAA Sony game for the next few years. The same is true of other AAA failures. The results are never good for the end user. You either will pay a tax on other high end games in the future, or those games simply will not get made because the companies making them go up in flames taking down whatever legendary IP and associated developers along with them. Given the predatory nature of late stage capitalism and the AAA gaming industry this also means that any up and coming gaming studio that produces something amazing will get immediately snatched up and bought out by the great devouring giants of the industry who will then proceed to bleed every last drop of value and talent from that newly acquired studio before liquidating the carcass. I suppose the only silver lining here is that the big Japanese giants like Sony don't intentionally milk to death, dismantle, and sell off the pieces of their acquired IPs and studios. They actually try to keep them viable, but despite those efforts they still fail sometimes. Look at Concord for instance. The AAA gaming industry is in terrible shape, although if given a choice between two evils, I still prefer the Japanese solution of just charging an arm and a leg for even old games upfront compared to the horrible in game store and microtransaction Hell that has become so prevalent in western mega games. This is why 90% of the games I buy are smaller indie titles.
This is correct. I bought it on GOG some time ago. I downloaded the offline installer and backed it up, as I do with every game. There is no DRM, and Sony can't take it away in the future. I'm surprised they haven't de-listed it from GOG, though I'm sure they will, and I'm sure they won't sell the remastered version there. I won't be buying the remastered version. Anyone who wants the original should get it while they can.
It should be mentioned much more often, that on GoG you really 'own' your games, since you can make offline installs and keep playing when- end where ever you want.
Its great but unfortunatly im hooked on achievements. Im not sure how GOG would even implement that but I would buy their games if they could do an achievement/trophy system.
They have enough sheep around. Gaming scene was smaller in the past, and they got away with PS+ for online games on consoles back then. They're gonna get away with anything now, similar for Nintendo and Microsoft.
I think if Haven fails they will be forced to reasses their production budgets. Astro Bot is obviously an inhouse example for smaller successes that could be delivered more frequently.
@@SuperZura91to be fair, the online subscription requirement was first on xbox 360 with Gold. The ps3 didn’t require ps plus for online you just had to buy your games brand new and it came with a code. Not to say sony isnt greedy now-a-days but microsoft started all of these. Even the whole DLC should be paid thing
Tip 2: Don´t bother with HZD, if you already finished it. Due to its linearity, it´s not worth replaying. Unless you have a bad memory ofc. Mine is so good i´m cursed to only play each game once. On 2nd playthrough i already know the story well enough to be bored out of my mind.
I agree. Though more specifically, I'd say that the visuals do have room for improvement, but a simple remaster like that doesn't change the parts that actually drag the experience down. I couldn't care less about slightly sharper textures and that sort of thing. That sort of stuff that a remaster will "fix" is indeed what looks fine already. It's the character designs for all the human characters that were my problem with the visuals, and a remaster isn't gonna totally redesign/replace all characters and their models from the ground up. On the off chance that even happened, it'd be full on remake material.
@@Morpheus-pt3wq I can strangely relate to this. Once I know the story, the only reason I replay a game is because of DLC. Phantom Liberty comes to mind.
@@alexkohvaks4647It’s fascinating how different people can be. I can replay my favourite games several times before I get bored though I do tend to need 3-4 months between each replay. Not that I’m saying my way is better. I’m just noting how different gamers can be.
If they give that budget to unentitled real game developer we are enjoying a new game of the year within 2 years of development. Concord btw takes more than 8 years to make
And the somewhat lesser revenue of HZD part 2. Sony had a long and good run, but they too are now being confronted with the combined effects of diminishing returns and pushing "The Message".
As someone who has always been a PS fanboy since the PS1 era, Sony started to lost me back in the mid PS4 era and now, completely lost me in the PS5 era. There is NO reason to have Horizon ZD remastered. The original still looks good for today's standard.
The thing is these big game publishers try an idea, and if the idea works they repeat it over and over until it gets ridiculous. Case in point: they've re-released the Last of Us and Uncharted how many times now? Those re-releases obviously sell well which is why they keep doing it. So, they are going to give all their other franchises the same treatment now. Every game Sony makes is going to get re-released every 3-5 years from now on until the remasters start to flop, and only then will they stop. That's the playbook now. BTW, they basically copied this idea from Nintendo. Nintendo is the undisputed heavy weight champ of re-releasing the same games over and over again. They've been doing it since they re-released all the NES Mario games on SNES as Super Mario All-Stars. Every Zelda game from the 90s has been re-released at least 6+ times at this point.
I mean if nobody is buying it at £10, then they aren't going to pay £40, just because it looks a tiny bit better. The game is 7 years old and worth £10.
Sony is a mission to destroy their brand image: Burns $100+ million on a generic bland hero shooter, removes disc drives and stands from $700 product, inserts psn where it shouldn’t, psn shutdowns, inserts ads on their console homepage, stellar blade controversy, complete inability and indifference to prevent scalpers of 30th anniversary edition, cancel games of beloved IPs, closing studios, abandoning the psvr2, raises prices of hardware and controllers, leaks content of final shape before release, raises price of subscription just for the privilege to play multiplayer, removes games from multiple regions, remasters unnecessary games, raises prices of said remaster game, delists original from steam to force psn on remaster, ignores and holds Bloodborne hostage etc. That's just this year!
And yet people still buy them. PS5 sales are equal or above what PS4 achieved at this stage, and that is even with the chip shortages. I'm not arguing your points, Sony have been very disarranged lately, but PS5 is still as big as ever.
I honestly think Sony exists in this quantum state where, on the one hand, they acknowledge the importance of the PC market and actively pursue it, and then on the other where they seemingly disregard its existence so therefore don't understand the platform or its audience's practises
They are holding Bloodborne hostage at this point, like why even have exclusives anymore? All it does in the modern day is limit the overall potential customer base, the Helldivers PSN Account diabolical is proof enough of how it’s more a negative impact, heck even if they don’t try putting something like Zero Dawn on Xbox or Switch, but putting work on functional PC ports that don’t require you giving your mothers maiden name to Sony, it could help hold up that oh so important bottom line, lastly imagine if Eldin Ring was an Xbox Exclusive? I doubt everyone with a PlayStation would buy an Xbox or even consider it, as good as that game is
"Aggressive pricing". The PS5 Pro price in New Zealand is $1378. No disc drive. No stand. For comparison to the US market, that's approximately double the price/purchasing power per dollar ratio. The cost benefit analysis of games has to include a portion of the console cost, and for Kiwis, Playstation are so far beyond not worth it. Just wait for the game to be on PC. Patience is free.
Yep NZ here myself, my wife and I got PCs built and for the high cost of entry we are secure in our PCs outlasting consoles and with the many deep sales through steam for all my games its just more affordable longterm and with the extra stuff of my PC being useful for things other then games and getting to play games with some fucked up mods is all the better.
@@BellularNews It's pretty egregious when you take purchasing power of our currencies into account. The PS5 Pro isn't worth the price regardless of location. Add the cost of the games themselves and the cost of accessing multiplayer on the PlayStation network it's simply better value to switch to PC.
Fun fact about the PS5 disk drive: You also need to register your console in order to use the drive. Otherwise, it's just a over glorified piece of decoration.
Yep. I bought a PS5 at the end of August based on my previous experiences with Sony products (Walkman, Watchman, Discman, headphones, etc.) although I've noticed a marked decline in the build quality of their products over the last 15 years. And now they're being poopy-heads because they have a market lead.
@@JayUchiha17 PCs are pretty fun until you realise that everything's digital and you won't have a valuable physical copy that you can often buy cheaper, hold on to, or sell it in the future in the second hand market.
@@sagbag856 they aren't forced. It's more subtle than that so I fully understand it went over your head. As a matter of fact I'm pretty sure you've paid for the failed products of many businesses in your short life because you're clearly oblivious. And that's OK, little buddy : people like you need to pay, because I certainly don't, and I don't think Sony's gonna work for free just so I can pirate their crap. In a sense, I owe you. Pay me a beer if we ever meet.
Buy a used PS4 for $150 and a used physical copy of Horizon for $20. You can even buy Bloodborne as well since these bastards are not gonna remaster it anyway. That all is probably still under $200, less than half the price of the PS5 alone.
Got to love how the consumer gets saddled with the costs of stupidity and mismanagement as well as the vast over-compensation demanded by executives in the industry...
Just play an indie there are a lot of good ones out there and the dev (yes, dev as in one) are usually gamers and they get it. Some times you find one with more than one dev abut never a powerhouse.
Companies got so delusional and greedy to think the best way to make more money is to make their own products hostages that we will have to pay more to have access to, instead of providing more value with new and better games. No thanks, PC is looking better and better, and I'm not talking about Steam or AAAs. We're truly living a new industry crash
They do both. It's worked for Nintendo for Decades because their games are new and better. Sony struggles because they keep jumping IP's and a new IP is a gamble. Despite the hopes, people do just want "more of thing I like" instead of truly new games.
@@raze2012_ Nintendo has proven its competitors wrong for years, but it only became clear as of late. Their devices are not the best of their generations, and their graphics are not cutting-edge, but their games are more than often, innovative and quality-assured… unless it’s Pokemon. I’m sure those add a lot to cheaper production costs.
I’m looking forward to the industry stabilizing post crash and settling around AA game studios again. I want some innovation, but I also want a familiar, quality core gameplay loop. AAA cannot push boundaries very much and needs to cater to a lower common denominator. Its all familiarity or it fails. Indy can innovate, but often lack funding to pack that innovation in a quality texture pack. But a AA studio should be able to find somewhere in between. Hit me with that $25-$39 price range for a solid game that I can enjoy. At that price range, I can afford to buy one for a friend. Personally, I think this is what consoles need. Solid games at a decent price that are good enough graphically to feel designed for adults and so will not scare away casual gamers, fun enough for casual gamers to enjoy and on a cheap enough console that a casual gamer does not have to feel like they are making the console part of their identity. I dropped out of the console race because consoles started to become a hassle. If I need to buy a new one every couple of years, they need internet to run, they cost somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 a gaming PC, I need to choose between a limited set of games based which console I chose, and I cannot play older games… I might as well play the old console until it dies while I save up for a decent PC which can also be used to make games and explore other hobbies. My xbox 360 allows me to play casually with a friend who visits. So except for couch coop, my PC generally serves me better than consoles… and I don’t even know if they have couch coop anymore!
@@GnarledStaff I agree very much. I get the problems with AAA, I really do. (If nothing else, I am SO SICK OF BLAND, GENERIC REALISTIC ART DIRECTION. I miss back when the biggest fanciest games were also consistently stylized so much, I don't want to see more real life in my games as well.) But at the same time, the extremely low production values of most indie games don't do it for me either. If there's any hope for games with a decent balance between innovation and polish, and actual production values AND stylized aesthetics together, it's a resurgence of AA games.
@@raze2012_ It works for Nintendo because they actually deliver unique experiences that are high-quality, so they are able to run successfully with a blue ocean, vertical business model.
Correction: GOG does not sell game keys, it's its own platform. GOG only sells DRM-free games, and Steam is a DRM, so it does not sell steam keys, and it never did.
@@GamingDad As far as I know, the single player games all are. Yes, there was a drama back then, with some game, where you'd still need to create a free account to play multiplayer, but other then that I cannot recall any other game with DRM.
GOG sells stand-alone games... check. GOG does NOT sell steam keys... check. Not all games on GOG are DRM free. Hmmm. I would say this is almost false, since the numbers requiring any kind of "additional checking" are tiny. But, technically this is true. There only a very few outliers that require any kind of online connection/account. And then only for multiplayer. The vast majority are not only DRM free, but have offline installers that can be downloaded (so it is yours FOREVER - as long as your storage media lasts) and install without any online verification whatsoever - not even a GOG activation is needed. This is the equivalent of the piracy option, without the piracy hassle. And if you do want the Steam experience, then GOG also provides the Galaxy client software, to manage downloads, updates, and installs, provide cloud saving, keep track of achievements, and allow some level of multiplayer. For those that want it. Galaxy is NOT compulsory. Unlike Steam, which won't let me play games I've paid to use, unless I agree to ALL of Valve's ToC demands. Personally, I'm not going to pay for software from one publisher, only to have a 3rd party like Valve tell me when and where I can play the games I've paid for. They got in my face so much, that in less than one year and five games, I had more hassle from Steam than I'd had in 20 years of DRM before that (including the dreaded Securom, that never game me a single problem. Lucky me...) Steam gave me hassle even when I'd done everything correctly. Like, switching a game to offline mode. Then being told to go back online to switch it to offline mode, when trying to launch that game. Grrrrr. Worst of all, Valve's customer support could even not understand what my problem was, or why I was angry about it. I later discovered that about 50% of Steam users had this same "offline mode not working" problem, so it wasn't like it was I was a special case exception. It was still broken 5 years later, when I last checked. Fortunately for me I quit before I was too heavily invested. I've been buying games from GOG for 15 years now (after having an early fallout with Steam), have downloaded backup copies of all my 1000+ games so I can reinstall whenever I want, and do not bother with Galaxy. Tried it once, but it did not give me what I wanted, so I went back to my usual ways - of having control of my hard drives, and where things are stored on them.
@@EvanOfTheDarkness GoG is kind enough to leave a message saying if you need to download a third party game launcher, or if you need to make an account to play the game, in the game's product page, though! ❤ The second they make a Linux version fo the GoG client, i think i'm moving to gog, and leaving steam behind. :) Steam is good, but... Not as good as DRM-free games. 🤣
Maybe Sony should start caring about their audience's dissatisfaction. They're losing exclusives that they've had for over a decade (Atlus's Persona, Square Enix's Final Fantasy). And just speaking from personal experience, this is the first generation I've skipped the new Playstation (I had bought every one from PS2 forward).
Playstation believes they're the Apple for Gaming, they should look at the Iphone 16 underwhelming launch sales figures...you can't always stay at your prime (ask Nokia and Blackberry and Sega...)
@leonhart7306 I'm in a similar boat. I bought a PS5 while waiting for FF16 and FF7 Rebirth. If both titles had launched on PC day one, I would've bought them there. Some of Sony's first party stuff has been great this generation, but it's been too few and far in between.
Frankly, if i look at majority of games for PS5, there is NOTHING there. Most of them look good. That´s it. Stories are very bad, lots of QTE events, and the "player" spends most of his "gametime" watching cutscenes. And you only get few releases per year, until they will be done with this gen and move on to "next gen". Meanwhile, if you look at PS2, the amount of games and their quality, it´s as if it were made by different company.
this is why copyright needs put back to 10 years. they excused the extensions on teh premise that copywrong is needed to protect innovation, but this just proves that copywrong is activly halting innovation.
copyright laws are ridiculous. The CREATORS of the content DON'T own the copyrights for their work. Some loser publishers usually steal copyrights and patents from the content creators. Now THAT is the real piracy. Copyright laws need to be reforms entirely to protect creator ownership or be gotten rid of completely.
It got pushed and sold to the public to protect the little guy/artists/creatives, which it did for the first people who got the benefits. Then it gets abused afterwards. This happens over and over again because people don't think about what happens after. It'll happen with AI next.
@@1ProAssassin Exactly. Here in the US, Steamboat Willy just entered the public domain. That "limited duration" copyright extended over 1/3rd the lifetime of the US itself! We have folks trying to argue that the word "militia" has a very narrow meaning and yet these bastards can take a word we use in common, everyday speech (and one they specifically use and define when they talk about "limited time modes") and warp it into this monstrosity? Nah! I'll respect your copyright for the same length as a patent; after that, piracy is fair game!
Copyright needs to work a lot like how trademark law works in the US. You could in theory keep a trademark forever, but only if you're actively protecting and profiting from that trademark. One reason companies tend to get a bug up their butt about the "Kleenex effect" because they don't want their brand to become the common name of a product. Nintendo ran full-page ads back in the NES days urging people not to call a video game system-even an NES-"a Nintendo", and LEGO similarly hates the term "LEGOs" for any stackable brick toys. As soon as a video game has gone through its sales cycle and the developer has sold as many new copies as they're ever going to sell, abandonware should be public domain. I'm even willing to concede the notion that "as long as you can buy the game legally from its publisher" (if Steam hasn't delisted it, for example), it's still copyrightable. This would also have the nice side benefit of incentivizing media companies to keep their libraries always available to be legally acquired and solve a lot of the "don't kill games" and "keep circulating the tapes" problems associated with preservation efforts. (eta: and in the case of online multiplayer games, once an MMO or a live service game goes dark, players should have the right to reverse engineer the source code and create private servers because the product at that point has no further economic value to its publisher, who has abandoned it. Think something like The Crew or, if the five people that played it want to keep at it, even Concord.)
Maximilian Dood said it best, when Sony isn't doing well, they start becoming more consumer friendly. The moment they have a solid lead arrogant Sony rears it's head. Capcom and Nintendo behave the same way. That's why I'm just not buying Sony games or media. Will I miss out on games? Sure, but PC and Nintendo screw me over less.
@@Code7Unltd Emulating currently available games is piracy. You want to emulate, go emulate F-Zero GX or Pokemon Heartgold. That's where that is game preservation. You can just go buy their games.
@@Code7UnltdTo sharpen this a bit further, this isn't a recent thing. Nintendo has been extraordinarily hostile to emulation, mods, and basically everything that wasn't just buying their games for almost 2 decades. It has nothing to do with money, as they've aggressively gone after fans for translating very old games that can't be bought today, and were never sold outside of Japan in the first place (the Mother series is the most notorious example). Nintendo are just assholes.
When space marine 2 came out a friend wanted to buy the game, on steam it was at 40 something buck, then he saw the price listed on ps5 and the game was 70bucks 30 dollar. Increase just for being on playstation and if you wanted to play online he needed to buy ps plus
SM1 used to be deep discounted, because age. When SM2 was announced, they deleted the original and replaced it with a 'complete edition' at a new-ish release price.
Yeah digital is not the way. A friend of mine buys, plays, finishes the games, then resells them off. If you're not into that, PC is much better value.
@rsilvestercellphone this is directly false, the Anniversary Edition of SM1 was released around 2021 as a 10th anniversary bonus, hence the name. It was not done because of SM2, which hadn't even been announced yet.
Sony thinking they can be like nintendo is hilarious, nintendo barely gets away with it because they are unique, sony makes movies with quicktime events
If we want to be honest, new IP's aren't as safe as an existing one. Sony has tried new IP's but nothing has hit since Ghosts. Also, no one can really define what they want anyway, so it's a fools errand trying to satisfy every comment on the internet.
@@archersterling6726 not defending billionsaires, just acknowledging the hypocrisy of gamers. If you wanted creativity, we got that with stuff like the The Midnight Walk on the State of Play. Instead people just complained aboutt "where's bloodborne remaster". While also complainnig about Horizon remaster. Y'all need to be honest with yourself and think about what you really want.
@@raze2012_LOL. You just proved how they are creatively bankrupt when they failed at multiple new game weeks pc indie and establish non douchebag dev like larian, cdpr, owlcat are hitting it out of the ball park and loved by gamers for their new franchise
@@raze2012_ Just because concord was bad doesnt mean they should stop with trying out new ideas, God you sound just like a typical corpo shill with zero creativity and unreasonable profit margins
@@roboticgentlemen1970 start demanding copywong law is rolled back on account of activly halting innovation when it was expanded under teh excuse of protecting innovation.
@@williammiller3277 Nintendo's lawyers make the corporate shark lawyers on The Simpsons look like Lionel Hutz. It is _scary_ how thorough Nintendo is about building their legal case before they swoop in, one reason I think Palworld is dead man walking (but that's a story for another day.)
Ineffective bloat, is my belief. The more cooks you have in the kitchen the more difficult it is to cook the meal. I believe that there is so much work either being thrown away, being slowed down, or simply not happening because the very act of having hundreds of people doing one thing is that they step on each others toes. You literally pay managers to manage managers. This just makes things take longer. That and they keep "remaking" systems rather than reusing them. That little bottle in the trash no one sees still had to be modeled, and that modeler makes 150k a year, to make bottles you dont notice are assets in the game. There's so much superfluous money bleed from "make it look good" that so much of the work doesn't actually contribute to the games experience as a whole.
Because Sony only wants "Hollywood blockbuster" games and also seems to over pay people that don't know what they are doing so that they have to hire another company to finish just to meet deadlines.
Even adjusted for inflation, every game that's been my personal Game of the Year since 2012 COMBINED cost less to make than one AAA blockbuster costs to make today. (Crusader Kings 2, Papers Please, Banished, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Doki Doki Literature Club, Rimworld, Dawn of Man, Super Mega Baseball 3, Medieval Dynasty, Tactics Ogre Reborn, and My Time at Sandrock, respectively, FWIW. All indie or AA titles. The last AAA game to be my GOTY was Skyrim in 2011.) Why choose between quality and quantity when if you look in the right places you can have both?
Insomniac had roughly 500 employees during development. At an assumed average wage of 90,000 a year, the wages alone for the team would be 135 million during development.
@dj2-rx on the steam page, if you own the original, a bundle appears, including the new remaster for £10, originally £9. I'm not sure how it works on other stores, however.
@@FoolShortOG i do have it. it changed now, it was 700k idr before and it's 150k idr now. i dont want to buy it either way, not without massive discount
Nintendos online pricing has more to do with their contracts to retailers. They promise not to undercut the MSRP in their contract. So if Nintendo lowers a price on their store, its because they have cut that same discount to retailers.
i dont understand this whole PSN push. "how do we make more money? i know! lets remove the ability to buy and play our games from 170 countries who previously had no problem!"
You can't buy second hand on PC, and you won't able to do when physical goes away, which will be very likely with the release of PS6. But I completely agree with you. It is just suck overall.
@@DaakkuuYRSI mean, if there's no physical ps6 games and they aren't bringing some mindbending tech in 2030: I'd rather spend 1500 on a good build than 1000 on a PS6 (which is what it looks like we're heading towards at this rate). At that level of cost I'm just paying for convinience rather than a specialized experience for my living room.
When digital distribution first appeared people claimed games will be cheaper because the physical costs will be eliminated. Now, publishers are exploiting digital distribution as a tool to keep game prices perpetually high and somehow able to milk customers as much as possible.
Likewise. Having bought the game at launch, it was cheaper to buy a used complete edition than just the digital DLC on PSN, and people STILL want digital consoles. 🤦♂️
@@dinkleding2294 Well, guess just embrace the no games future for you and find another hobby, or keep playing the same old games until you can't even find a replacement anymore.
Same here. My copy of HZD was $13 shipped. I'm not the least bit interested in PS6, and I don't believe there will be a PS7 because the cost/performance benefit of consoles vs. PC won't be worth mentioning by then.
Xbox doesn't need money they funded by Microsoft which is a trillion dollars company. Ifntjey wanted to tjeu could hav3 all the money they want they just don't that's the difference Sony actually does need it.
It mind boggles me that they are investing in HZD due to the Concord fallout while they are OBVIOUSLY sitting on the golden egg-laying goose called Bloodborne that they decided to let sit and rot in their cellar.
Coles and woolworths supermarkets here in Australia are being taken to court by the ACCC for doing something similar. Would increase prices by 15-20% on goods then offer them at discount.
They will remaster Horizon Zero Dawn another half-dozen times before they remaster Bloodborne, for whatever stupid reason. It's like their brains are made out of oatmeal.
And.... that's why you buy a gaming PC. It was already a losing battle to argue that a console is a better option but it's just getting worse and worse....
So companies scam you using their complete control over digital products. And your solution is to switch to a device that ONLY has digital products? This whole video was a big argument for physical consoles and physical games.
@@dragonninja3655 I own all my games and they're playable for ever on pc. Everything I have works offline. I drop the files onto a USB stick, SD card or whatever and boom, it is physical.
The hardware cost of a gaming PC with a competent graphics card is painfully expensive. But you soon make that up in the cheaper cost of games. Plus the vast plethora of indie games not available on any other console medium, gives choice like no other. When you realise that PC is also great for web browsing, word processing, and all manner of other work-related tasks (software programming, 3D modelling, engineering analysis, CAD, machine tool programming, etc) it becomes much better value.
That's why Nintendo is the most profitable video game compagny out there with margins in the 25-30% year over year. Everyone disses exclusives, but when people want to play your games, they buy your platform.
That is how that works, and now that Sony has shown you can wait them out to get it on PC, they lost a crucial advantage. It also means Nintendo has an incentive to pay for the funding of niche games. They didn't pick up Bayonetta for the games potential itself, they picked it up because people will buy Wii Us and Switches for Bayonetta-type games. People don't like it, but 1st parties have incentives that 3rd parties don't to make games that make money, not just all of the money.
@@krspaceT1 That is not how that works. If Nintendo made good games then I'd be a bit more interested. Being hand held console is the real advantage they HAD, as well as their cult of fanboys that consume any slop they put out. Now there's finally competition in handheld market. Not even once have I've been tempted to buy a Nintendo console, ever. In not a single generation of Nintendo. Can always find better games on PC. There is a reason why Nintendo is always excluded from console wars, they are just not competing on the same market like how PC isn't part of the console wars either since it's completely different market.
but nintendo has something that playstation does not its portable so its technically its not the same as PC or console. but ps does not have that and its inferior to a PC in terms of power and versatility, the game costs more, you need to pay a sub to play online. like PS is not bringing as much to the table as the switch does. also 700 +80 +80 stand and disk drive + ps+
@@siliconhawk plus the rumored specs of Switch 2 last I heard were about Steam Deck in specs, tech wise things are equal with the benefits of exclusives and a wider market availability
@@spugelo359 From an objective (or as objective as you can make it) point of view, it does. Too this day, Nintendo is renowned for the quality and polish of their titles. They wouldn't have sold over 140 million switches otherwise. The fact that you personally, or I or anyone in particular do not like their games is irrelevant. Numbers and financial data are relevant A lot of people have a switch at home either for themselves or their children. Sure, it might gather dust from time to time but it's still the most bought platform out there, -that is- entry into people's home. There is no reason the Switch 2 will be any different. It has nothing to do with a cult, it's what happens when you cultivate your brand for over 40 years. A lot of people and parents don't have a clue about videogames (less now then when I was young, but still), however they know Nintendo and trust it. People seem to think that because they don't like something, it isn't good or successful. Don't let your personal feelings affect your judgement. PC does very much compete with console nowdays, especially thanks to the multiplatform strategy adopted by Microsoft and Sony. Without exclusives there is no reason to purchase a gaming console anymore and pay a premium for games on their platform now that even the price of hardware is in the same category.
Reasonable prices on PC and good service is the reason why piracy is kinda dead on PC. Not fully obviously, but there isn't nearly as much interest to pirate games as there used to. (When comparing % of non paying customers to paying ones)
The reason why Sony is doing all this remastered is to add the requirement of having to create a PSN account. They are not doing it to "improve games". They are doing it to force people to make a PSN account so they can inflate their account numbers for shareholders meetings. Look at all the games that didn't needed a PSN account are the ones being remastered and the old versions are being delete and removed from the stores so nobody can buy them anymore.
I get Sony's strategy, but it sounds like its just a recipe for another Concord debacle. People want interesting innovative games now, not safe mega games. Thats a big part of why Nintendo games are so valuable. What Sony's plan of pouring ridiculous amounts of cash into every sony game chasing minute visual fidelity improvements, in an environment where really barely anyone uses the performance setting for the PS5, that's what it encourages, games that are seen as safe mega games by exectutives. How long before the next big failure? How long til they turn their beloved franchises into grey goop in pursuit of this strategy?
Before anyone quips 'Pokemon', do remember every other game that Nintendo puts out. Their output this year has been everything from a visual novel revival of a dormant franchise to a 2D Zelda on a low-key year. Hell if you want to quip 'Pokemon', seeing as they experimented with the Legends format and a new one is currently set for next year...you could argue that Pokemon Co is showing more interest in innovating than Sony right now. And as a Pokemon and Nintendo fan, that is a concern. Nothing good for the game industry would come if Sony collapsed. But they set themselves up with a strategy of all the eggs in the mega game basket, tried to fix it with live services, and they are starting to pay for it.
I am a huge Insomniac fan, especially their Spider-Man games, but I cannot for the life of me see how they managed to spend all that money for Spider-Man 2. Yes, it's an amazing game, yes it has a lot of great cinematics, mocap, voice-acting, etc. But it also has so many reused assets and technology from the previous 2 games. Where did they spend all that money?!
@@krspaceT1yeah that's a part. I thought games would learn from books and movies how dangerous it is to rely on 3rd parties to keep you afloat. Especially Disney.
Next up: Sony pulls all games from Steam and releases their own PC storefront. Wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to charge uses for online services, too.
@@pixels_per_minute probably won't. That is a bit past modern trends. They’d probably stop porting to PC to emphasize exclusives if they had to do something further to anger PC guys
There's no reason for them to be so hard on the "PSN Account required" thing if they're not gonna monetize it in some way down the line. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they started asking for PS+ for "online functionality" on PC.
Solved this by not gaming for ten years and then buying all my games used for nothing and playing through the backlog, horizon on ps4 complete edition cost £4 …
That's definitely coming. There's no other reason for them to be forcing "PSN Account required" so hard if they're not gonna monetize it down the line.
That's weird. It still is on mine. Did you get your copy from a giveaway? There's been known issues in the past where if someone redeemed a code it doesn't always sync the library with the store in terms of what you own.
Funny thing is i bought Horizon Zero Dawn for like $13 during a Steam. I havent finished it because i find the characters, including Aloy really boring.
I wouldnt call it slop or mid just very boring interms of writing. Millennial writing is what i call it. Super safe and not really taking risks. @funicon3689
I will never understand people throwing money at "digital deluxe" versions. However, according to the CI Games 2025-2028 Strategy Report a whooping 47% bought the digital deluxe version of Lords of the Fallen! I have a feeling old Sony will get away with this price hike.
Sony was learning from Bethesda, who is the pioneer in re-releasing the same game over & over again with minimum changes. HZD is generally not worth more than single playthrough due to its linearity, so anyone who already played it, will very likely not play it again.
I like to remind people that Playstation wanted to have their own private Fortnite servers, and only agreed to the cross-platform servers because otherwise they just wouldn't have gotten it at all. Everyone else agreed to the cross platform, just not Sony, who consistently seems to hate money.
They have never done that to me. Once it’s off, it stays off until I manually renew. Whenever I’ve renewed and don’t want to continue the membership, I immediately cancel/turn off auto renew so that instead of renewing it just expires. Then when my membership reaches renewal time it expires instead of renewing
Spiderman 2 didn't cost 300 million to develop, producer salaries were probably 250 mil of that, we should really move away from the practice of paying producers 6 figure salaries while the devs only get 40k - 80k salary
2 месяца назад+2
The devs only get 40k-80k salaries… and fired after the game is done.
This isn't just limited to gaming. Over the last 30 years CEO pay increased 6,000% and their taxes reduced 45%. Even utility work can't pay rent plenty of places, how long until people have had enough? Who's going to keep the lights on?
When I bought in on my Wii u I NEVER hesitated for a single purchase I made. Enjoyed every one. I see SOnY or EA or Ubi or acti-bliz or so many others and the FIRST thing I do is hesitate, then add to schist of a second look warrants it then bit in only if the complete edition (inevitably incomplete given current pay now get 80% of what you were promised later) is on deep discount.
They also thought nobody would notice that they introduced planned obscolecence in order to sell repleacable sticks and new controllers. So Sony? Never again shall you have my money.
I think the reason why price retention works for Nintendo is due to Nintendo and Sony's approach in regards to games. Nintendo has always approached gaming with the intent to ensure they have cashcows appealing to everyone at all times and the intent to be their own best developer. Their strategy on the gaming front has always been to ensure their own studios are capable of making good games and to retain the value on their franchises. Sony's approach has for a long time been focused on third party courtship due to the focus of attempting to undermine Nintendo's market dominance at the time (SNES had many hits from both Nintendo and other developers; since you can't do anything about Nintendo's output, court the others over to your side instead) and so, for a long time, the Playstation has been counting on third parties for most of it's market value, with their own first party games for a long time being treated about equal to third parties and, after The Last of Us, being made with the intent of being a high-end spectacle on the line of high-end movies for people to talk about in years to come and to further entice third parties with the promise that their games "can be just as enticing if you develop your games with our console in mind." Interestingly, given that the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube were the more powerful consoles compared to their Playstation counterparts at the time, Nintendo learned early on that they couldn't rely solely on power alone to sell a console; you need to constantly invent new avenues to open new ways to playing games and thus give them further value. They also took the lesson to heart that the franchises they owned and the studios under their belt need to be further cultivated to retain their value and attraction in the eyes of the public since the importance of being their own best developer was hammered in further due to most of the third parties jumping onto the Sony ship. Sony, with their focus on placating third parties, jumped full board on the "power is power" wagon and, after The Last of Us, appears to have fully bought into it themselves. As a result, Nintendo have for years lacked the support of third parties with their only gameplan being to further the value of their own consoles and associated franchises, and Sony has for years given up opportunities to strengthen their own in-house game franchises save for a select few that fit their vision due to having the third parties' attention to fill in the other gaps. Which brings us to today. Nintendo ensures price retention by ensuring that the value of their games are kept and/or heightened, but makes sure not to price themselves out of their intended customer range, while Sony's focus on power has burned a lot of money and they are now desperately attempting to find a way to quell or, in a worst-case scenario, control the flame.
I so sick of these companies ripping everyone off. I only play on PC and to be honest I think I'm done with Sony games, there's plenty of other great games out there from companies that are way more consumer friendly.
The issue with Sony right now is that they completely ignored their foundation and its slowly chipping away. Astrobot reminded a lot of people of that. The sheer amount of abandoned ip's with fan bases that are still active today is ridiculous. This gen its even worse, because they put all their eggs into the live service basket and the new heads of Sony, from way back in last gen, are finally reaping what they sowed. The games that were being made/released were started by the previous leaders, now all thats left is their live service games and a trikling of AAA games by Sony owned studios, maybe one or two new games a year.
Its almost like maybe they should not keep making bigger, and bigger, and bigger games. They've set themselves up for failure with this approach to game design.
Sony could never follow the path of Ninte do. Love them or hate them, but Nintendo's IP can back it up. None of Sony's franchise comes close the Zelda or Mario's Legacy. ( I love Sony, but Big N had 10 years to establish legacies. )
Sony had plenty of time, but the unfortunate thing is they never spent much of it establishing their own IP, their early consoles got so many exclusives either by default or by paying that I think they took it for granted. They've got Naughty Dog & God of War, & everything else is niche. Does anyone even remember what an Ape Escape, Jak & Daxter, Gravity Rush, Wild Arms etc. are? On PS2, Capcom, Konami, SEGA, SquareSoft, Enix, Namco, Atlus, NIS, even western studios like Rockstar all had Playstation exclusives despite Sony not owning their games. That's gone now, no one wants to do that exclusivity shit, even Square Enix despite being paid graciously has decided it's not worth crippling sales numbers. Microsoft was ahead of the curve on this snapping up studios with notable IP, and Nintendo is in their own league entirely. It's no wonder they so desperately wanted Concord to be a new blockbuster franchise.
@@John_1-1_in_Japanese You can have a franchise explode up into Nintendo's top tiers quickly, Splatoon proves that. However that really does take time. Nintendo's done enough with franchises that, to use an example, Ash Ketchum winning a league or having that big final battle with Leon gets the sort of publicity in the tier of Superman and Goku. And that's Ash. The protagonist of 20 years of a Pokemon spinoff. Its most important spinoff, but Sony can't really match that. Sony built itself up with 3rd parties, shifting towards 1st in the PS3 era. But they haven't managed to create something that hits that territory. Probably not helped by the fact their characters are too realistic. Realism doesn't really set itself up for iconic appearances IMO. Also I do believe Sony didn't keep their prices fixed early on in the PS4. If they had maybe they'd have gotten somewhere, but they didn't
@@John_1-1_in_Japaneseyeah, they also don't really invest much on their IP's. I'm surprised Ratchet is still getting games 20 years later. His brethren haven't faired so well. It has its upsides too. But you're not gonna compete with Pokemon or Smash if you try to make one game and drop it because it didn't sell 10M copies.
@@lycanwarrior2137 because Nintendo is long term in its mindset more than most of the industry it seems. Though that is a coin flip if that is Nintendo being good at it or all other companies sucking at it
I hate when they put the digital deluxe only sale. I don't care about extra cosmetics. They know what they are doing, and its annoying for customers. If we are going all digital, we are gonna be stuck at the mercy of these companies controlling the prices.
The immediate flaw in Sony’s plan that I see is the type of games they sell. Nintendo’s catalogue is aimed kids and families. They can keep their prices high because it’s the parents and older family members buying them for the kids and there’s always pester power working at the other end. The Last Of Us is for adults. Adults can wait for, or refuse to buy games for themselves, as they can with Ghost Of Tsushima and its sequel. Even the Spider Man games are for older kids and not for family play. The market pressures are different. But, what do I know? If it’s working it’s working. But will it last?
Sony needs to get some very talented Japanese studios and make some smaller games to round out their single player game lineup. Nintendo has done this internally extremely well.
I just don't really give a damn about Sony. There's been little to no reason for me to buy any of the games mentioned. Used to like their games and consoles when I was younger but everyone I know has moved on from it.
I don't get religious about platforms. Stellar Blade sold the PS5 to me. If it'd been a different game on another platform, I would've bought that instead.
I have no idea how game development works, but if it works anywhere remotely like other industries then I would bet money that game development is incredibly bloated with redundant and totally unnecessary positions. Positions which add nothing to the games but a payroll entry. Has anyone beaten a game recently and sat through the entire credits? The last game I beat was Spiderman and the credits was like 15 minutes straight of scrolling names with similar sounding positions over and over and over. Something seems off when indie companies, or sometimes even "one man shows" can produce fully functional, and sometimes even good games, but these companies need 15 min + non-stop scrolling worth of people to make a similar, and most times buggy and unfinished game? The math isn't mathing somewhere imo.
It's not just bloat, it's intentional bloat. There's a certain percentage of people that should never be in the game development industry, but they have infested it and just make money off of it. And, unfortunately I'm not talking about the obvious directors and producers that have no idea how to manage such massive projects.
Couldn't care less. With the shift to digital, no mod support, and lack of backwards compatibility, the only thing consoles have to offer is rumble functionality, which was pretty much nonexistent on the PS4. I'm out.
Not even that. The ultra-fast loading times and the haptics of the controller are all available on PC, so long as developers bother to implement them (which most don't AFAIK)
@@HellDuke-big downside of cross platform. No one's gonna make an Astrobot for everyone when most people on PC and none on Xbox will feel half the game.
@@AndyTheWatchdog you definitely could. Most will never have a Dualsense (nor joycons) to begin with, though. Physical games would get around this by including the controller with the game, but we lost that easy bundle when PC moved online. Even Then Xbox is screwed over. Would devs work on a feature only 75% of their player base would feel?
@@alaeriia01 The only reason I haven't bought it is because, and this is a good problem to have, I have too many time-sink games already and I couldn't really get the most out of it unless I quit my job. And I like things like a full stomach and a warm, safe bed to sleep in at night, and so does my cat.
2 месяца назад+1
@@skiadrum9029 They're czech, right out of Prague, the capital.
Only reason Nintendo can actually get away with never having a sale is because no one makes any real competition for nintendo on other platforms. Playstation, Xbox, and Steam all have numerous games competing over the exact same genres by and large so sales have to happen to stick out. I dont remember the last time i saw anyone try and make a game like the legenda of zelda that wasnt nintendo itself.
I really hope Microsoft doesn't let the Xbox brand because we need competition to keep Sony in check in the console race. Sure Nintendo is still here but it's kinda doing its own thing. There's also the PC and mobile games market too. Xbox and PC are Sony's biggest rivals in the mid to higher end gaming market share.
This $70 BS is finally catching on... but oh wait those are mostly Sony games at 70 price tag. I guess just avoid games priced at 70 and be good. Stalker 2 for example is a $60 kind of game... maybe not on consoles but at least is not PC.
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I'm not sure why you refer to GOG as selling "game keys" as if it's a key reseller, when GOG is its own storefront like steam or epic. Their copies aren't limited. It's just the full game you can buy.
Thank you for digging into these shady practices. Man it feels like these companies really HATE their users.
Oh no!... Now I have to set sail on the Ethernet seas to get a copy....
I have zero intension of getting the "upgraded" version. I like my post apocalyptic heroines to be realistically lean not look like they just stubbled out of a Ben a Jeri's all you can eat three week eatathon.
It’s a Chinese brand
I used to buy a few dozen NEW games per year. Not so much anymore, as I now wait for a sale for 99% of my games before even considering a purchase. When a great new game comes out I Wishlist it and move on.
This is what you should do. The only reason I break that rule is if I want to support the company
@@johndawn6951
This, but I don't think I'm ever doing that again tbh. I trust none of them now.
Smart.
This is the way
You might also not be in your teens and not have that amount of free time anymore 😅
Ah, yes. The Concord tax.
Just like the 'Rings of Power tax' required Amazon to jack up Prime subscription prices and put ads into Prime movies.
That's why it is so stupid when you see idiots cheering for Concord's failure. Where did they think the money to pay for that failure was going to come from? The same place it always does, out of our hides, or at least it will for anyone who wants to buy a AAA Sony game for the next few years.
The same is true of other AAA failures. The results are never good for the end user. You either will pay a tax on other high end games in the future, or those games simply will not get made because the companies making them go up in flames taking down whatever legendary IP and associated developers along with them.
Given the predatory nature of late stage capitalism and the AAA gaming industry this also means that any up and coming gaming studio that produces something amazing will get immediately snatched up and bought out by the great devouring giants of the industry who will then proceed to bleed every last drop of value and talent from that newly acquired studio before liquidating the carcass.
I suppose the only silver lining here is that the big Japanese giants like Sony don't intentionally milk to death, dismantle, and sell off the pieces of their acquired IPs and studios. They actually try to keep them viable, but despite those efforts they still fail sometimes. Look at Concord for instance.
The AAA gaming industry is in terrible shape, although if given a choice between two evils, I still prefer the Japanese solution of just charging an arm and a leg for even old games upfront compared to the horrible in game store and microtransaction Hell that has become so prevalent in western mega games.
This is why 90% of the games I buy are smaller indie titles.
Concord tax will haunt us for at least five years, probably more
It’s Microsoft incompetence tax. This is what happens when you don’t have competition.
Whales got their asses covered. Not me tho.
GOG isn't selling keys. It's a full-blown game you can download from them, and it even has an offline installer so you make a permanent backup.
This is correct. I bought it on GOG some time ago. I downloaded the offline installer and backed it up, as I do with every game. There is no DRM, and Sony can't take it away in the future. I'm surprised they haven't de-listed it from GOG, though I'm sure they will, and I'm sure they won't sell the remastered version there. I won't be buying the remastered version. Anyone who wants the original should get it while they can.
@@heatherharrison264This is the way (said with full irony).
It should be mentioned much more often, that on GoG you really 'own' your games, since you can make offline installs and keep playing when- end where ever you want.
Its great but unfortunatly im hooked on achievements. Im not sure how GOG would even implement that but I would buy their games if they could do an achievement/trophy system.
@@SpuddMacgyver Don't even need that, just have cdpr and valve make an agreement to allow gog games to show on steam
Sony is the next Disney. They will price themselves out of existence with unsustainable production costs.
Not for a little while yet, their audience will buy it anyway lol
They have enough sheep around. Gaming scene was smaller in the past, and they got away with PS+ for online games on consoles back then. They're gonna get away with anything now, similar for Nintendo and Microsoft.
I think if Haven fails they will be forced to reasses their production budgets. Astro Bot is obviously an inhouse example for smaller successes that could be delivered more frequently.
@@SuperZura91to be fair, the online subscription requirement was first on xbox 360 with Gold. The ps3 didn’t require ps plus for online you just had to buy your games brand new and it came with a code. Not to say sony isnt greedy now-a-days but microsoft started all of these. Even the whole DLC should be paid thing
@@SuperZura91 that was microsoft's idea
Here's a tip; Don't bother with the H:ZD remaster if you own the game already.
It looks just fine already.
Tip 2: Don´t bother with HZD, if you already finished it. Due to its linearity, it´s not worth replaying.
Unless you have a bad memory ofc. Mine is so good i´m cursed to only play each game once. On 2nd playthrough i already know the story well enough to be bored out of my mind.
And don't bother with the H:ZD remaster if you DON'T own the game already.
The price is being gouged, you can get better games for less.
I agree. Though more specifically, I'd say that the visuals do have room for improvement, but a simple remaster like that doesn't change the parts that actually drag the experience down.
I couldn't care less about slightly sharper textures and that sort of thing. That sort of stuff that a remaster will "fix" is indeed what looks fine already. It's the character designs for all the human characters that were my problem with the visuals, and a remaster isn't gonna totally redesign/replace all characters and their models from the ground up. On the off chance that even happened, it'd be full on remake material.
@@Morpheus-pt3wq I can strangely relate to this. Once I know the story, the only reason I replay a game is because of DLC. Phantom Liberty comes to mind.
@@alexkohvaks4647It’s fascinating how different people can be. I can replay my favourite games several times before I get bored though I do tend to need 3-4 months between each replay.
Not that I’m saying my way is better. I’m just noting how different gamers can be.
They need to make up for that half billion they wasted on Concord
@superslayerguy Wasting*. They're still paying the salaries of the employees that are sitting on their hands at that studio right now.
If they give that budget to unentitled real game developer we are enjoying a new game of the year within 2 years of development. Concord btw takes more than 8 years to make
@@leediaz5690 I don't think we're ever gonna see a $500M game with =< 2 years of development. And if we did I'd be highly dubious of it being good.
And the somewhat lesser revenue of HZD part 2. Sony had a long and good run, but they too are now being confronted with the combined effects of diminishing returns and pushing "The Message".
It wasn't that Sony thought nobody would notice, it was that they didn't care. And they were right not to care, because people will buy it anyway lmao
As someone who has always been a PS fanboy since the PS1 era, Sony started to lost me back in the mid PS4 era and now, completely lost me in the PS5 era. There is NO reason to have Horizon ZD remastered. The original still looks good for today's standard.
This was my thought. The game isn't old enough to justify a remaster, the graphics still look excellent
Looks good and runs on anything. They have to fix that and make it run poorly on anything else than most expensive hardware!
@@kylebaryonyx9478 it also already has NG+, so even less reason for a remaster
Not to mention there are mods that already did that for them.
The thing is these big game publishers try an idea, and if the idea works they repeat it over and over until it gets ridiculous. Case in point: they've re-released the Last of Us and Uncharted how many times now? Those re-releases obviously sell well which is why they keep doing it. So, they are going to give all their other franchises the same treatment now. Every game Sony makes is going to get re-released every 3-5 years from now on until the remasters start to flop, and only then will they stop. That's the playbook now.
BTW, they basically copied this idea from Nintendo. Nintendo is the undisputed heavy weight champ of re-releasing the same games over and over again. They've been doing it since they re-released all the NES Mario games on SNES as Super Mario All-Stars. Every Zelda game from the 90s has been re-released at least 6+ times at this point.
I mean if nobody is buying it at £10, then they aren't going to pay £40, just because it looks a tiny bit better. The game is 7 years old and worth £10.
Idk i paid $12 on steam for it and still felt it was worth the money. 😂
I got the PC game for free on PC 2 years ago and it was a fucking disaster at launch
I mean wube never go sales and Factorio definitely cost it price
@@Callingcascade Me, too!! Got it in a Steam sale, and less than 24 hrs later they announced the remaster. Yeeess.
@@erfarkrasnobay?
"Must. Maximize. Shareholder. Value." Sorry Sony, but I'm going to have to get used to not owning any of YOUR games.
Sony is a mission to destroy their brand image:
Burns $100+ million on a generic bland hero shooter, removes disc drives and stands from $700 product, inserts psn where it shouldn’t, psn shutdowns, inserts ads on their console homepage, stellar blade controversy, complete inability and indifference to prevent scalpers of 30th anniversary edition, cancel games of beloved IPs, closing studios, abandoning the psvr2, raises prices of hardware and controllers, leaks content of final shape before release, raises price of subscription just for the privilege to play multiplayer, removes games from multiple regions, remasters unnecessary games, raises prices of said remaster game, delists original from steam to force psn on remaster, ignores and holds Bloodborne hostage etc.
That's just this year!
And yet people still buy them. PS5 sales are equal or above what PS4 achieved at this stage, and that is even with the chip shortages. I'm not arguing your points, Sony have been very disarranged lately, but PS5 is still as big as ever.
Sony just doesn't get the pc audience. Hard to mod games, shifty sale practices, required psn accounts. Whats next?
Releasing only on their own store?
Big companies have a worrying tendency of not learning from each other mistakes.
They haven't figured out DRM yet either... Everything is cracked on Day 1.
I honestly think Sony exists in this quantum state where, on the one hand, they acknowledge the importance of the PC market and actively pursue it, and then on the other where they seemingly disregard its existence so therefore don't understand the platform or its audience's practises
our souls?
They are holding Bloodborne hostage at this point, like why even have exclusives anymore? All it does in the modern day is limit the overall potential customer base, the Helldivers PSN Account diabolical is proof enough of how it’s more a negative impact, heck even if they don’t try putting something like Zero Dawn on Xbox or Switch, but putting work on functional PC ports that don’t require you giving your mothers maiden name to Sony, it could help hold up that oh so important bottom line, lastly imagine if Eldin Ring was an Xbox Exclusive? I doubt everyone with a PlayStation would buy an Xbox or even consider it, as good as that game is
"Aggressive pricing". The PS5 Pro price in New Zealand is $1378. No disc drive. No stand. For comparison to the US market, that's approximately double the price/purchasing power per dollar ratio. The cost benefit analysis of games has to include a portion of the console cost, and for Kiwis, Playstation are so far beyond not worth it. Just wait for the game to be on PC. Patience is free.
Damn, you guys have it worse than UK (and it still stings over here)
that is wild. ps5 has turned into a vanity/luxury item.
Yep NZ here myself, my wife and I got PCs built and for the high cost of entry we are secure in our PCs outlasting consoles and with the many deep sales through steam for all my games its just more affordable longterm and with the extra stuff of my PC being useful for things other then games and getting to play games with some fucked up mods is all the better.
@@BellularNews It's pretty egregious when you take purchasing power of our currencies into account. The PS5 Pro isn't worth the price regardless of location. Add the cost of the games themselves and the cost of accessing multiplayer on the PlayStation network it's simply better value to switch to PC.
@@Halcyon_games Not gonna lie the "Capybara Island" mod for Elden Ring may have been a factor in my decision. 😂😂😂
Fun fact about the PS5 disk drive: You also need to register your console in order to use the drive. Otherwise, it's just a over glorified piece of decoration.
Wow, just wow...
I'm very curious what happens, if these servers are down but those aren't registered...
Another reason to not buy playstation.
Sony is doing a speedrun on losing respect from the public
Moving their HQ to California is their hack for speedrunning that
Yep. I bought a PS5 at the end of August based on my previous experiences with Sony products (Walkman, Watchman, Discman, headphones, etc.) although I've noticed a marked decline in the build quality of their products over the last 15 years. And now they're being poopy-heads because they have a market lead.
No corporation deserves respect
@GearFr0st unplugged my ps5. I bought parts and build a pc. I simply moved on
@@JayUchiha17 PCs are pretty fun until you realise that everything's digital and you won't have a valuable physical copy that you can often buy cheaper, hold on to, or sell it in the future in the second hand market.
Honestly, Sony not selling games in my country just tells me that I won't be stealing their games when I pirate them.
Lemme guess... Sony is trying to make its clients pay the Concord tax.
lemme guess. people are being forced to buy. sony evil as hell
@@sagbag856 they aren't forced. It's more subtle than that so I fully understand it went over your head. As a matter of fact I'm pretty sure you've paid for the failed products of many businesses in your short life because you're clearly oblivious. And that's OK, little buddy : people like you need to pay, because I certainly don't, and I don't think Sony's gonna work for free just so I can pirate their crap. In a sense, I owe you. Pay me a beer if we ever meet.
@@TheNefastor I doubt they can rush something like this
@krspaceT1 if you think they won't try, you don't know how corporations work.
Simple Solution.
Stop buying anything PlayStation.
Concord wasn't our fault.
Buy a used PS4 for $150 and a used physical copy of Horizon for $20. You can even buy Bloodborne as well since these bastards are not gonna remaster it anyway. That all is probably still under $200, less than half the price of the PS5 alone.
Got to love how the consumer gets saddled with the costs of stupidity and mismanagement as well as the vast over-compensation demanded by executives in the industry...
what do you mean over compensation? If you want the best executives , you gotta pay UP!! !!! !! for the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BUSINEZZ ZKULZ
Just play an indie there are a lot of good ones out there and the dev (yes, dev as in one) are usually gamers and they get it. Some times you find one with more than one dev abut never a powerhouse.
Meanwhile, Warhorse got ready for the launch of Kingdom come: Deliverance 2 by putting the previous title at a 90% discount sale
This is a prime example of why digital media is inferior to physical media.
@@ninjason57 you got it
And it’s not even a sale it’s a long term rental.
Companies got so delusional and greedy to think the best way to make more money is to make their own products hostages that we will have to pay more to have access to, instead of providing more value with new and better games.
No thanks, PC is looking better and better, and I'm not talking about Steam or AAAs. We're truly living a new industry crash
They do both. It's worked for Nintendo for Decades because their games are new and better.
Sony struggles because they keep jumping IP's and a new IP is a gamble. Despite the hopes, people do just want "more of thing I like" instead of truly new games.
@@raze2012_ Nintendo has proven its competitors wrong for years, but it only became clear as of late. Their devices are not the best of their generations, and their graphics are not cutting-edge, but their games are more than often, innovative and quality-assured… unless it’s Pokemon. I’m sure those add a lot to cheaper production costs.
I’m looking forward to the industry stabilizing post crash and settling around AA game studios again. I want some innovation, but I also want a familiar, quality core gameplay loop. AAA cannot push boundaries very much and needs to cater to a lower common denominator. Its all familiarity or it fails.
Indy can innovate, but often lack funding to pack that innovation in a quality texture pack. But a AA studio should be able to find somewhere in between.
Hit me with that $25-$39 price range for a solid game that I can enjoy.
At that price range, I can afford to buy one for a friend.
Personally, I think this is what consoles need. Solid games at a decent price that are good enough graphically to feel designed for adults and so will not scare away casual gamers, fun enough for casual gamers to enjoy and on a cheap enough console that a casual gamer does not have to feel like they are making the console part of their identity.
I dropped out of the console race because consoles started to become a hassle. If I need to buy a new one every couple of years, they need internet to run, they cost somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 a gaming PC, I need to choose between a limited set of games based which console I chose, and I cannot play older games… I might as well play the old console until it dies while I save up for a decent PC which can also be used to make games and explore other hobbies.
My xbox 360 allows me to play casually with a friend who visits. So except for couch coop, my PC generally serves me better than consoles… and I don’t even know if they have couch coop anymore!
@@GnarledStaff I agree very much. I get the problems with AAA, I really do. (If nothing else, I am SO SICK OF BLAND, GENERIC REALISTIC ART DIRECTION. I miss back when the biggest fanciest games were also consistently stylized so much, I don't want to see more real life in my games as well.) But at the same time, the extremely low production values of most indie games don't do it for me either. If there's any hope for games with a decent balance between innovation and polish, and actual production values AND stylized aesthetics together, it's a resurgence of AA games.
@@raze2012_ It works for Nintendo because they actually deliver unique experiences that are high-quality, so they are able to run successfully with a blue ocean, vertical business model.
Correction: GOG does not sell game keys, it's its own platform. GOG only sells DRM-free games, and Steam is a DRM, so it does not sell steam keys, and it never did.
Not all games on gog are DRM free.
@@GamingDad As far as I know, the single player games all are. Yes, there was a drama back then, with some game, where you'd still need to create a free account to play multiplayer, but other then that I cannot recall any other game with DRM.
GOG sells stand-alone games... check. GOG does NOT sell steam keys... check.
Not all games on GOG are DRM free. Hmmm. I would say this is almost false, since the numbers requiring any kind of "additional checking" are tiny. But, technically this is true.
There only a very few outliers that require any kind of online connection/account. And then only for multiplayer. The vast majority are not only DRM free, but have offline installers that can be downloaded (so it is yours FOREVER - as long as your storage media lasts) and install without any online verification whatsoever - not even a GOG activation is needed.
This is the equivalent of the piracy option, without the piracy hassle.
And if you do want the Steam experience, then GOG also provides the Galaxy client software, to manage downloads, updates, and installs, provide cloud saving, keep track of achievements, and allow some level of multiplayer. For those that want it.
Galaxy is NOT compulsory. Unlike Steam, which won't let me play games I've paid to use, unless I agree to ALL of Valve's ToC demands. Personally, I'm not going to pay for software from one publisher, only to have a 3rd party like Valve tell me when and where I can play the games I've paid for. They got in my face so much, that in less than one year and five games, I had more hassle from Steam than I'd had in 20 years of DRM before that (including the dreaded Securom, that never game me a single problem. Lucky me...) Steam gave me hassle even when I'd done everything correctly. Like, switching a game to offline mode. Then being told to go back online to switch it to offline mode, when trying to launch that game. Grrrrr.
Worst of all, Valve's customer support could even not understand what my problem was, or why I was angry about it.
I later discovered that about 50% of Steam users had this same "offline mode not working" problem, so it wasn't like it was I was a special case exception. It was still broken 5 years later, when I last checked. Fortunately for me I quit before I was too heavily invested.
I've been buying games from GOG for 15 years now (after having an early fallout with Steam), have downloaded backup copies of all my 1000+ games so I can reinstall whenever I want, and do not bother with Galaxy. Tried it once, but it did not give me what I wanted, so I went back to my usual ways - of having control of my hard drives, and where things are stored on them.
@@EvanOfTheDarkness GoG is kind enough to leave a message saying if you need to download a third party game launcher, or if you need to make an account to play the game, in the game's product page, though! ❤
The second they make a Linux version fo the GoG client, i think i'm moving to gog, and leaving steam behind. :)
Steam is good, but... Not as good as DRM-free games. 🤣
Reject triple A games.
Embrace Dorf Fortress. (The free download with ASCII graphics.)
Maybe Sony should start caring about their audience's dissatisfaction. They're losing exclusives that they've had for over a decade (Atlus's Persona, Square Enix's Final Fantasy). And just speaking from personal experience, this is the first generation I've skipped the new Playstation (I had bought every one from PS2 forward).
Playstation believes they're the Apple for Gaming, they should look at the Iphone 16 underwhelming launch sales figures...you can't always stay at your prime (ask Nokia and Blackberry and Sega...)
Xbox is no competition
@leonhart7306 I'm in a similar boat. I bought a PS5 while waiting for FF16 and FF7 Rebirth. If both titles had launched on PC day one, I would've bought them there. Some of Sony's first party stuff has been great this generation, but it's been too few and far in between.
Frankly, if i look at majority of games for PS5, there is NOTHING there. Most of them look good. That´s it. Stories are very bad, lots of QTE events, and the "player" spends most of his "gametime" watching cutscenes. And you only get few releases per year, until they will be done with this gen and move on to "next gen".
Meanwhile, if you look at PS2, the amount of games and their quality, it´s as if it were made by different company.
the only real competition PS5 has is PS4
this is why copyright needs put back to 10 years. they excused the extensions on teh premise that copywrong is needed to protect innovation, but this just proves that copywrong is activly halting innovation.
copyright laws are ridiculous. The CREATORS of the content DON'T own the copyrights for their work. Some loser publishers usually steal copyrights and patents from the content creators. Now THAT is the real piracy. Copyright laws need to be reforms entirely to protect creator ownership or be gotten rid of completely.
@@MrJay_White 1. You get 1 year.
It got pushed and sold to the public to protect the little guy/artists/creatives, which it did for the first people who got the benefits. Then it gets abused afterwards. This happens over and over again because people don't think about what happens after. It'll happen with AI next.
@@1ProAssassin Exactly. Here in the US, Steamboat Willy just entered the public domain. That "limited duration" copyright extended over 1/3rd the lifetime of the US itself! We have folks trying to argue that the word "militia" has a very narrow meaning and yet these bastards can take a word we use in common, everyday speech (and one they specifically use and define when they talk about "limited time modes") and warp it into this monstrosity? Nah! I'll respect your copyright for the same length as a patent; after that, piracy is fair game!
Copyright needs to work a lot like how trademark law works in the US. You could in theory keep a trademark forever, but only if you're actively protecting and profiting from that trademark. One reason companies tend to get a bug up their butt about the "Kleenex effect" because they don't want their brand to become the common name of a product. Nintendo ran full-page ads back in the NES days urging people not to call a video game system-even an NES-"a Nintendo", and LEGO similarly hates the term "LEGOs" for any stackable brick toys.
As soon as a video game has gone through its sales cycle and the developer has sold as many new copies as they're ever going to sell, abandonware should be public domain. I'm even willing to concede the notion that "as long as you can buy the game legally from its publisher" (if Steam hasn't delisted it, for example), it's still copyrightable.
This would also have the nice side benefit of incentivizing media companies to keep their libraries always available to be legally acquired and solve a lot of the "don't kill games" and "keep circulating the tapes" problems associated with preservation efforts.
(eta: and in the case of online multiplayer games, once an MMO or a live service game goes dark, players should have the right to reverse engineer the source code and create private servers because the product at that point has no further economic value to its publisher, who has abandoned it. Think something like The Crew or, if the five people that played it want to keep at it, even Concord.)
Maximilian Dood said it best, when Sony isn't doing well, they start becoming more consumer friendly. The moment they have a solid lead arrogant Sony rears it's head. Capcom and Nintendo behave the same way. That's why I'm just not buying Sony games or media.
Will I miss out on games? Sure, but PC and Nintendo screw me over less.
>Nintendo
>screw me over less
Have you, or have you not, been looking at the state of emulation this very moment?
@@Code7Unltd Emulating currently available games is piracy. You want to emulate, go emulate F-Zero GX or Pokemon Heartgold. That's where that is game preservation. You can just go buy their games.
@@krspaceT1 The problem is that Nintendo is cracking down on people emulating their old games *and even clean-room emulators.*
@@Code7UnltdTo sharpen this a bit further, this isn't a recent thing. Nintendo has been extraordinarily hostile to emulation, mods, and basically everything that wasn't just buying their games for almost 2 decades. It has nothing to do with money, as they've aggressively gone after fans for translating very old games that can't be bought today, and were never sold outside of Japan in the first place (the Mother series is the most notorious example). Nintendo are just assholes.
@@Code7Unltdshould we really count "screwing me over" as "not allowing me to pirate their games"?
When space marine 2 came out a friend wanted to buy the game, on steam it was at 40 something buck, then he saw the price listed on ps5 and the game was 70bucks 30 dollar. Increase just for being on playstation and if you wanted to play online he needed to buy ps plus
SM1 used to be deep discounted, because age. When SM2 was announced, they deleted the original and replaced it with a 'complete edition' at a new-ish release price.
The barrier to entry this console generation is just not worth it.
Yeah digital is not the way. A friend of mine buys, plays, finishes the games, then resells them off. If you're not into that, PC is much better value.
@rsilvestercellphone this is directly false, the Anniversary Edition of SM1 was released around 2021 as a 10th anniversary bonus, hence the name. It was not done because of SM2, which hadn't even been announced yet.
Buying a console is like saying "I love monopolies".
Sony thinking they can be like nintendo is hilarious, nintendo barely gets away with it because they are unique, sony makes movies with quicktime events
If you think God of War is just a movie with quick-time events that's just sad.
They are too creatively bankrupt to actually create a new game instead of remastering old ones or copying already saturated formulas.
If we want to be honest, new IP's aren't as safe as an existing one. Sony has tried new IP's but nothing has hit since Ghosts.
Also, no one can really define what they want anyway, so it's a fools errand trying to satisfy every comment on the internet.
@@raze2012_Do not defend the billionaire company
@@archersterling6726 not defending billionsaires, just acknowledging the hypocrisy of gamers. If you wanted creativity, we got that with stuff like the The Midnight Walk on the State of Play. Instead people just complained aboutt "where's bloodborne remaster". While also complainnig about Horizon remaster.
Y'all need to be honest with yourself and think about what you really want.
@@raze2012_LOL. You just proved how they are creatively bankrupt when they failed at multiple new game weeks pc indie and establish non douchebag dev like larian, cdpr, owlcat are hitting it out of the ball park and loved by gamers for their new franchise
@@raze2012_ Just because concord was bad doesnt mean they should stop with trying out new ideas, God you sound just like a typical corpo shill with zero creativity and unreasonable profit margins
Taking glamor shots of Aloy by far is the most hilarious thing I've seen in a while.
HINT: watch a longplay.
Sony will care when they see us all playing Bloodborne on our PCs via the emulation mod.
Naw I'm waiting on the Sony Lawyers to swoop in
@@roboticgentlemen1970 at least we know Sony has second rate lawyers. Nintendo pays for all the best ones.
@@roboticgentlemen1970 start demanding copywong law is rolled back on account of activly halting innovation when it was expanded under teh excuse of protecting innovation.
@@williammiller3277 Nintendo's lawyers make the corporate shark lawyers on The Simpsons look like Lionel Hutz. It is _scary_ how thorough Nintendo is about building their legal case before they swoop in, one reason I think Palworld is dead man walking (but that's a story for another day.)
@@landonl958 All Hail ShadPS4.
What I don't understand is why games like spiderman 2 cost so much to make. I understand inflation plays a role but surely it can't be just that.
Ineffective bloat, is my belief. The more cooks you have in the kitchen the more difficult it is to cook the meal. I believe that there is so much work either being thrown away, being slowed down, or simply not happening because the very act of having hundreds of people doing one thing is that they step on each others toes. You literally pay managers to manage managers. This just makes things take longer. That and they keep "remaking" systems rather than reusing them. That little bottle in the trash no one sees still had to be modeled, and that modeler makes 150k a year, to make bottles you dont notice are assets in the game. There's so much superfluous money bleed from "make it look good" that so much of the work doesn't actually contribute to the games experience as a whole.
Because Sony only wants "Hollywood blockbuster" games and also seems to over pay people that don't know what they are doing so that they have to hire another company to finish just to meet deadlines.
Even adjusted for inflation, every game that's been my personal Game of the Year since 2012 COMBINED cost less to make than one AAA blockbuster costs to make today.
(Crusader Kings 2, Papers Please, Banished, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Doki Doki Literature Club, Rimworld, Dawn of Man, Super Mega Baseball 3, Medieval Dynasty, Tactics Ogre Reborn, and My Time at Sandrock, respectively, FWIW. All indie or AA titles. The last AAA game to be my GOTY was Skyrim in 2011.)
Why choose between quality and quantity when if you look in the right places you can have both?
Graphics. Realistic is expensive.
Insomniac had roughly 500 employees during development. At an assumed average wage of 90,000 a year, the wages alone for the team would be 135 million during development.
They even raised the price of the upgrade. When first available, it was £9, now it's £10. They seemingly can't help themselves, much like Nintendo.
Meanwhile Xbox:
Auto upgrades the one version to the series version for free.
@@FoolShortOG what upgrade? I have "old" game and it still full price in steam page
@@dj2-rx Your mistake is comapring the steam store and looking at the Xbox store.
@dj2-rx on the steam page, if you own the original, a bundle appears, including the new remaster for £10, originally £9. I'm not sure how it works on other stores, however.
@@FoolShortOG i do have it. it changed now, it was 700k idr before and it's 150k idr now. i dont want to buy it either way, not without massive discount
I already own the original game on steam. I'm gonna pirate the hell out of the new looking one just to see the differences
Nintendos online pricing has more to do with their contracts to retailers. They promise not to undercut the MSRP in their contract. So if Nintendo lowers a price on their store, its because they have cut that same discount to retailers.
Economics are fun, aren't they?
(No they are not)
i dont understand this whole PSN push. "how do we make more money? i know! lets remove the ability to buy and play our games from 170 countries who previously had no problem!"
It’s about the ability to sell user data.
None of this is a problem when you buy second hand. Support physical.
You can't buy second hand on PC, and you won't able to do when physical goes away, which will be very likely with the release of PS6. But I completely agree with you. It is just suck overall.
@@DaakkuuYRSI mean, if there's no physical ps6 games and they aren't bringing some mindbending tech in 2030: I'd rather spend 1500 on a good build than 1000 on a PS6 (which is what it looks like we're heading towards at this rate). At that level of cost I'm just paying for convinience rather than a specialized experience for my living room.
When digital distribution first appeared people claimed games will be cheaper because the physical costs will be eliminated.
Now, publishers are exploiting digital distribution as a tool to keep game prices perpetually high and somehow able to milk customers as much as possible.
I bought a used copy of horizon for the ps4 for about 7 bucks. I can play this game too, Sony
At that point I guess it'll be back to youtube walk-through for me, 😁I just don't buy digital games, not even on steam😅
Likewise. Having bought the game at launch, it was cheaper to buy a used complete edition than just the digital DLC on PSN, and people STILL want digital consoles. 🤦♂️
@@DeadPhoenix86DP I won't be buying a PS6, it won't have any games worth a damn anyway
@@dinkleding2294 Well, guess just embrace the no games future for you and find another hobby, or keep playing the same old games until you can't even find a replacement anymore.
Same here. My copy of HZD was $13 shipped. I'm not the least bit interested in PS6, and I don't believe there will be a PS7 because the cost/performance benefit of consoles vs. PC won't be worth mentioning by then.
"Why Sony needs money?"
Concord $400mil in the red.
tax writeoff.
Why Xbox needs money?
The Spencer Tax
Xbox doesn't need money they funded by Microsoft which is a trillion dollars company. Ifntjey wanted to tjeu could hav3 all the money they want they just don't that's the difference Sony actually does need it.
@@Shikaitsu Yeah, that’s why Satya has put your games on PlayStation!🤡
It mind boggles me that they are investing in HZD due to the Concord fallout while they are OBVIOUSLY sitting on the golden egg-laying goose called Bloodborne that they decided to let sit and rot in their cellar.
Coles and woolworths supermarkets here in Australia are being taken to court by the ACCC for doing something similar. Would increase prices by 15-20% on goods then offer them at discount.
They will remaster Horizon Zero Dawn another half-dozen times before they remaster Bloodborne, for whatever stupid reason. It's like their brains are made out of oatmeal.
Shout out to Nintendo for rarely giving out discounts and people blindly still believe Nintendo is consumer friendly over Sony and MS.
I just miss the treasure trove of AA Japanese games we used to get on PlayStation
And.... that's why you buy a gaming PC. It was already a losing battle to argue that a console is a better option but it's just getting worse and worse....
So companies scam you using their complete control over digital products. And your solution is to switch to a device that ONLY has digital products? This whole video was a big argument for physical consoles and physical games.
@@dragonninja3655 Piracy and emulators.
@@dragonninja3655 It is very possible to have physical games on PC. Sellers just don't want to provide them
@@dragonninja3655 I own all my games and they're playable for ever on pc. Everything I have works offline. I drop the files onto a USB stick, SD card or whatever and boom, it is physical.
The hardware cost of a gaming PC with a competent graphics card is painfully expensive.
But you soon make that up in the cheaper cost of games. Plus the vast plethora of indie games not available on any other console medium, gives choice like no other.
When you realise that PC is also great for web browsing, word processing, and all manner of other work-related tasks (software programming, 3D modelling, engineering analysis, CAD, machine tool programming, etc) it becomes much better value.
That's why Nintendo is the most profitable video game compagny out there with margins in the 25-30% year over year. Everyone disses exclusives, but when people want to play your games, they buy your platform.
That is how that works, and now that Sony has shown you can wait them out to get it on PC, they lost a crucial advantage. It also means Nintendo has an incentive to pay for the funding of niche games. They didn't pick up Bayonetta for the games potential itself, they picked it up because people will buy Wii Us and Switches for Bayonetta-type games.
People don't like it, but 1st parties have incentives that 3rd parties don't to make games that make money, not just all of the money.
@@krspaceT1 That is not how that works. If Nintendo made good games then I'd be a bit more interested. Being hand held console is the real advantage they HAD, as well as their cult of fanboys that consume any slop they put out. Now there's finally competition in handheld market. Not even once have I've been tempted to buy a Nintendo console, ever. In not a single generation of Nintendo. Can always find better games on PC. There is a reason why Nintendo is always excluded from console wars, they are just not competing on the same market like how PC isn't part of the console wars either since it's completely different market.
but nintendo has something that playstation does not
its portable so its technically its not the same as PC or console. but ps does not have that and its inferior to a PC in terms of power and versatility, the game costs more, you need to pay a sub to play online. like PS is not bringing as much to the table as the switch does.
also 700 +80 +80 stand and disk drive + ps+
@@siliconhawk plus the rumored specs of Switch 2 last I heard were about Steam Deck in specs, tech wise things are equal with the benefits of exclusives and a wider market availability
@@spugelo359 From an objective (or as objective as you can make it) point of view, it does. Too this day, Nintendo is renowned for the quality and polish of their titles. They wouldn't have sold over 140 million switches otherwise. The fact that you personally, or I or anyone in particular do not like their games is irrelevant. Numbers and financial data are relevant A lot of people have a switch at home either for themselves or their children. Sure, it might gather dust from time to time but it's still the most bought platform out there, -that is- entry into people's home. There is no reason the Switch 2 will be any different. It has nothing to do with a cult, it's what happens when you cultivate your brand for over 40 years. A lot of people and parents don't have a clue about videogames (less now then when I was young, but still), however they know Nintendo and trust it. People seem to think that because they don't like something, it isn't good or successful. Don't let your personal feelings affect your judgement. PC does very much compete with console nowdays, especially thanks to the multiplatform strategy adopted by Microsoft and Sony. Without exclusives there is no reason to purchase a gaming console anymore and pay a premium for games on their platform now that even the price of hardware is in the same category.
Answer to Sony's tactic... just pirate the games.
Reasonable prices on PC and good service is the reason why piracy is kinda dead on PC. Not fully obviously, but there isn't nearly as much interest to pirate games as there used to. (When comparing % of non paying customers to paying ones)
The reason why Sony is doing all this remastered is to add the requirement of having to create a PSN account. They are not doing it to "improve games". They are doing it to force people to make a PSN account so they can inflate their account numbers for shareholders meetings.
Look at all the games that didn't needed a PSN account are the ones being remastered and the old versions are being delete and removed from the stores so nobody can buy them anymore.
I get Sony's strategy, but it sounds like its just a recipe for another Concord debacle.
People want interesting innovative games now, not safe mega games. Thats a big part of why Nintendo games are so valuable.
What Sony's plan of pouring ridiculous amounts of cash into every sony game chasing minute visual fidelity improvements, in an environment where really barely anyone uses the performance setting for the PS5, that's what it encourages, games that are seen as safe mega games by exectutives.
How long before the next big failure? How long til they turn their beloved franchises into grey goop in pursuit of this strategy?
Before anyone quips 'Pokemon', do remember every other game that Nintendo puts out. Their output this year has been everything from a visual novel revival of a dormant franchise to a 2D Zelda on a low-key year. Hell if you want to quip 'Pokemon', seeing as they experimented with the Legends format and a new one is currently set for next year...you could argue that Pokemon Co is showing more interest in innovating than Sony right now. And as a Pokemon and Nintendo fan, that is a concern.
Nothing good for the game industry would come if Sony collapsed. But they set themselves up with a strategy of all the eggs in the mega game basket, tried to fix it with live services, and they are starting to pay for it.
I am a huge Insomniac fan, especially their Spider-Man games, but I cannot for the life of me see how they managed to spend all that money for Spider-Man 2. Yes, it's an amazing game, yes it has a lot of great cinematics, mocap, voice-acting, etc. But it also has so many reused assets and technology from the previous 2 games. Where did they spend all that money?!
To Marvel in part
@@krspaceT1yeah that's a part. I thought games would learn from books and movies how dangerous it is to rely on 3rd parties to keep you afloat. Especially Disney.
Next up: Sony pulls all games from Steam and releases their own PC storefront.
Wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to charge uses for online services, too.
@@pixels_per_minute probably won't. That is a bit past modern trends. They’d probably stop porting to PC to emphasize exclusives if they had to do something further to anger PC guys
There's no reason for them to be so hard on the "PSN Account required" thing if they're not gonna monetize it in some way down the line. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they started asking for PS+ for "online functionality" on PC.
Solved this by not gaming for ten years and then buying all my games used for nothing and playing through the backlog, horizon on ps4 complete edition cost £4 …
I will not be surprised if Sony tries to force you to buy a Playstation Plus subscription to play their games online for PC games.
That's definitely coming. There's no other reason for them to be forcing "PSN Account required" so hard if they're not gonna monetize it down the line.
Weirdly, my GOG copy of HZD doesn't have a store page anymore. There *is* an HZD page, but it's not connected to my game.
That's weird. It still is on mine.
Did you get your copy from a giveaway?
There's been known issues in the past where if someone redeemed a code it doesn't always sync the library with the store in terms of what you own.
"Of course you'll buy it at whatever price we set. We're Sony." - Sony
Funny thing is i bought Horizon Zero Dawn for like $13 during a Steam. I havent finished it because i find the characters, including Aloy really boring.
it looks like slop and the female MC looks very mid
I wouldnt call it slop or mid just very boring interms of writing. Millennial writing is what i call it. Super safe and not really taking risks. @funicon3689
Same! Got it a few months back and have practically been forcing myself to play it 😂
@@IzzeTim I can't even force myself to play it. However it certainly has been taking up space on my SSD for like 6 months. 😐
Aloy is one of the most boring video game protagonists ever made IMO. And I don't remember any of the other characters aside from Rost.
I will never understand people throwing money at "digital deluxe" versions. However, according to the CI Games 2025-2028 Strategy Report a whooping 47% bought the digital deluxe version of Lords of the Fallen! I have a feeling old Sony will get away with this price hike.
I like the way that if you already own horizon, you can now pay sony 10 just to force psn log ins on you. A steal at triple the price!
HZD does not need a remaster whatsoever. They'll just make PSN Accounts mandatory and collect Data from PC users.
Sony was learning from Bethesda, who is the pioneer in re-releasing the same game over & over again with minimum changes. HZD is generally not worth more than single playthrough due to its linearity, so anyone who already played it, will very likely not play it again.
I like to remind people that Playstation wanted to have their own private Fortnite servers, and only agreed to the cross-platform servers because otherwise they just wouldn't have gotten it at all. Everyone else agreed to the cross platform, just not Sony, who consistently seems to hate money.
12:35 HOW did a glorified expand-alone cost 3 times as much as the base game that created all the systems ots based upon???
If you turn off auto-renewing psn they will reactivate it the next year and use your card without permission.
They have never done that to me. Once it’s off, it stays off until I manually renew. Whenever I’ve renewed and don’t want to continue the membership, I immediately cancel/turn off auto renew so that instead of renewing it just expires. Then when my membership reaches renewal time it expires instead of renewing
Spiderman 2 didn't cost 300 million to develop, producer salaries were probably 250 mil of that, we should really move away from the practice of paying producers 6 figure salaries while the devs only get 40k - 80k salary
The devs only get 40k-80k salaries… and fired after the game is done.
This isn't just limited to gaming.
Over the last 30 years CEO pay increased 6,000% and their taxes reduced 45%.
Even utility work can't pay rent plenty of places, how long until people have had enough? Who's going to keep the lights on?
$40k - $80k for a game developer is absurd. A PHP website developer can make that much.
Well, Ghost of Tsushima was the last Sony's game I've bought, and I have no intentions of buying any new one in the future.
When I bought in on my Wii u I NEVER hesitated for a single purchase I made. Enjoyed every one. I see SOnY or EA or Ubi or acti-bliz or so many others and the FIRST thing I do is hesitate, then add to schist of a second look warrants it then bit in only if the complete edition (inevitably incomplete given current pay now get 80% of what you were promised later) is on deep discount.
Sorry, but Nintendo's just as bad. It's vile.
They also thought nobody would notice that they introduced planned obscolecence in order to sell repleacable sticks and new controllers. So Sony? Never again shall you have my money.
I think the reason why price retention works for Nintendo is due to Nintendo and Sony's approach in regards to games. Nintendo has always approached gaming with the intent to ensure they have cashcows appealing to everyone at all times and the intent to be their own best developer. Their strategy on the gaming front has always been to ensure their own studios are capable of making good games and to retain the value on their franchises. Sony's approach has for a long time been focused on third party courtship due to the focus of attempting to undermine Nintendo's market dominance at the time (SNES had many hits from both Nintendo and other developers; since you can't do anything about Nintendo's output, court the others over to your side instead) and so, for a long time, the Playstation has been counting on third parties for most of it's market value, with their own first party games for a long time being treated about equal to third parties and, after The Last of Us, being made with the intent of being a high-end spectacle on the line of high-end movies for people to talk about in years to come and to further entice third parties with the promise that their games "can be just as enticing if you develop your games with our console in mind."
Interestingly, given that the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube were the more powerful consoles compared to their Playstation counterparts at the time, Nintendo learned early on that they couldn't rely solely on power alone to sell a console; you need to constantly invent new avenues to open new ways to playing games and thus give them further value. They also took the lesson to heart that the franchises they owned and the studios under their belt need to be further cultivated to retain their value and attraction in the eyes of the public since the importance of being their own best developer was hammered in further due to most of the third parties jumping onto the Sony ship. Sony, with their focus on placating third parties, jumped full board on the "power is power" wagon and, after The Last of Us, appears to have fully bought into it themselves. As a result, Nintendo have for years lacked the support of third parties with their only gameplan being to further the value of their own consoles and associated franchises, and Sony has for years given up opportunities to strengthen their own in-house game franchises save for a select few that fit their vision due to having the third parties' attention to fill in the other gaps.
Which brings us to today. Nintendo ensures price retention by ensuring that the value of their games are kept and/or heightened, but makes sure not to price themselves out of their intended customer range, while Sony's focus on power has burned a lot of money and they are now desperately attempting to find a way to quell or, in a worst-case scenario, control the flame.
Consumers have no memory. Was going to call them "sheep", but sheep still fight back when you try to sheer them.
They're so incapable of making new games they just keep remastering old ones for a quick buck.
Sony is doing tick damage to their brand. Hubris has destroyed empires.
Nintendo value retention is beyond Sony's abilities.
So.... Everyone is looking to have a monopoly on their own products? Not surprising. That's literally the dream of any company. Only laws stop them.
And ironically, laws are what would make it possible to begin with. xD
I so sick of these companies ripping everyone off. I only play on PC and to be honest I think I'm done with Sony games, there's plenty of other great games out there from companies that are way more consumer friendly.
Sony is about to have it's GFWL moment with it's arrogance.
That explains why i havent bought a nintendo or sony game in years. If the game never goes on sale, then ive never seen it on my wishlists.
I sincerely see no purpose of purchasing the remastered of horizon Zero Dawn. Not even for a review purposes.
The issue with Sony right now is that they completely ignored their foundation and its slowly chipping away. Astrobot reminded a lot of people of that. The sheer amount of abandoned ip's with fan bases that are still active today is ridiculous.
This gen its even worse, because they put all their eggs into the live service basket and the new heads of Sony, from way back in last gen, are finally reaping what they sowed. The games that were being made/released were started by the previous leaders, now all thats left is their live service games and a trikling of AAA games by Sony owned studios, maybe one or two new games a year.
Its not the customers job to pay for your big companies incapabilities.
I still can't wrap my head around why, when they need 10M units sold to break even, they felt the need to restrict the availability of their games.
Its almost like maybe they should not keep making bigger, and bigger, and bigger games. They've set themselves up for failure with this approach to game design.
Sony could never follow the path of Ninte do. Love them or hate them, but Nintendo's IP can back it up. None of Sony's franchise comes close the Zelda or Mario's Legacy. ( I love Sony, but Big N had 10 years to establish legacies. )
Sony had plenty of time, but the unfortunate thing is they never spent much of it establishing their own IP, their early consoles got so many exclusives either by default or by paying that I think they took it for granted. They've got Naughty Dog & God of War, & everything else is niche. Does anyone even remember what an Ape Escape, Jak & Daxter, Gravity Rush, Wild Arms etc. are? On PS2, Capcom, Konami, SEGA, SquareSoft, Enix, Namco, Atlus, NIS, even western studios like Rockstar all had Playstation exclusives despite Sony not owning their games. That's gone now, no one wants to do that exclusivity shit, even Square Enix despite being paid graciously has decided it's not worth crippling sales numbers. Microsoft was ahead of the curve on this snapping up studios with notable IP, and Nintendo is in their own league entirely. It's no wonder they so desperately wanted Concord to be a new blockbuster franchise.
@@John_1-1_in_Japanese You can have a franchise explode up into Nintendo's top tiers quickly, Splatoon proves that. However that really does take time. Nintendo's done enough with franchises that, to use an example, Ash Ketchum winning a league or having that big final battle with Leon gets the sort of publicity in the tier of Superman and Goku. And that's Ash. The protagonist of 20 years of a Pokemon spinoff. Its most important spinoff, but Sony can't really match that.
Sony built itself up with 3rd parties, shifting towards 1st in the PS3 era. But they haven't managed to create something that hits that territory. Probably not helped by the fact their characters are too realistic. Realism doesn't really set itself up for iconic appearances IMO.
Also I do believe Sony didn't keep their prices fixed early on in the PS4. If they had maybe they'd have gotten somewhere, but they didn't
@@John_1-1_in_Japaneseyeah, they also don't really invest much on their IP's. I'm surprised Ratchet is still getting games 20 years later. His brethren haven't faired so well.
It has its upsides too. But you're not gonna compete with Pokemon or Smash if you try to make one game and drop it because it didn't sell 10M copies.
Nobody else in the industry could do what Nintendo does.
@@lycanwarrior2137 because Nintendo is long term in its mindset more than most of the industry it seems. Though that is a coin flip if that is Nintendo being good at it or all other companies sucking at it
Most new PlayStation games aren’t worth buying.
I hate when they put the digital deluxe only sale. I don't care about extra cosmetics. They know what they are doing, and its annoying for customers. If we are going all digital, we are gonna be stuck at the mercy of these companies controlling the prices.
The immediate flaw in Sony’s plan that I see is the type of games they sell. Nintendo’s catalogue is aimed kids and families. They can keep their prices high because it’s the parents and older family members buying them for the kids and there’s always pester power working at the other end. The Last Of Us is for adults. Adults can wait for, or refuse to buy games for themselves, as they can with Ghost Of Tsushima and its sequel. Even the Spider Man games are for older kids and not for family play.
The market pressures are different. But, what do I know? If it’s working it’s working. But will it last?
Sony needs to get some very talented Japanese studios and make some smaller games to round out their single player game lineup. Nintendo has done this internally extremely well.
Like Wario Ware. The switch tittles probably only cost 1-2 million to make and made their profit in no time.
I just don't really give a damn about Sony. There's been little to no reason for me to buy any of the games mentioned. Used to like their games and consoles when I was younger but everyone I know has moved on from it.
I don't get religious about platforms. Stellar Blade sold the PS5 to me. If it'd been a different game on another platform, I would've bought that instead.
I have no idea how game development works, but if it works anywhere remotely like other industries then I would bet money that game development is incredibly bloated with redundant and totally unnecessary positions. Positions which add nothing to the games but a payroll entry. Has anyone beaten a game recently and sat through the entire credits? The last game I beat was Spiderman and the credits was like 15 minutes straight of scrolling names with similar sounding positions over and over and over. Something seems off when indie companies, or sometimes even "one man shows" can produce fully functional, and sometimes even good games, but these companies need 15 min + non-stop scrolling worth of people to make a similar, and most times buggy and unfinished game? The math isn't mathing somewhere imo.
It's not just bloat, it's intentional bloat. There's a certain percentage of people that should never be in the game development industry, but they have infested it and just make money off of it. And, unfortunately I'm not talking about the obvious directors and producers that have no idea how to manage such massive projects.
I went from buying 5-10 new games a year to maybe 1. Steam sales have changed me permanently.
7:51 so they spent like almost 350 million, developing Spiderman only to make 400 million dollars in return honestly a huge lost
Couldn't care less. With the shift to digital, no mod support, and lack of backwards compatibility, the only thing consoles have to offer is rumble functionality, which was pretty much nonexistent on the PS4. I'm out.
Perfectly said!
Not even that. The ultra-fast loading times and the haptics of the controller are all available on PC, so long as developers bother to implement them (which most don't AFAIK)
@@HellDuke-big downside of cross platform. No one's gonna make an Astrobot for everyone when most people on PC and none on Xbox will feel half the game.
@@raze2012_ But the rumble is felt through the controller, can't you connect it to a pc through bluetooth and get same effect?
@@AndyTheWatchdog you definitely could. Most will never have a Dualsense (nor joycons) to begin with, though. Physical games would get around this by including the controller with the game, but we lost that easy bundle when PC moved online.
Even Then Xbox is screwed over. Would devs work on a feature only 75% of their player base would feel?
Did you notice that, unlike the Complete Edition and the Forbidden West Complete Edition, you HAVE to have a Sony account...... F that.
"Sales on PC are a race to the bottom."
Unless you're Factorio.
@@SimuLord our swedish overlords know they are selling digital crack so why bother
I paid $25 for Factorio and got a few thousand hours out of it. It's not too big a deal to pay $35 or even $50.
@@alaeriia01 The only reason I haven't bought it is because, and this is a good problem to have, I have too many time-sink games already and I couldn't really get the most out of it unless I quit my job. And I like things like a full stomach and a warm, safe bed to sleep in at night, and so does my cat.
@@skiadrum9029 They're czech, right out of Prague, the capital.
@@SimuLordFor real, Factorio is an incredible game but it's just way too big of a commitment time wise
Only reason Nintendo can actually get away with never having a sale is because no one makes any real competition for nintendo on other platforms.
Playstation, Xbox, and Steam all have numerous games competing over the exact same genres by and large so sales have to happen to stick out.
I dont remember the last time i saw anyone try and make a game like the legenda of zelda that wasnt nintendo itself.
Partially because if anybody tried, their lawyers would be on them
I really hope Microsoft doesn't let the Xbox brand because we need competition to keep Sony in check in the console race. Sure Nintendo is still here but it's kinda doing its own thing. There's also the PC and mobile games market too. Xbox and PC are Sony's biggest rivals in the mid to higher end gaming market share.
Never claimed to be a "real gamer" but now I am a potential customer that they have alienated.
I've started buying pre-owned games instead. The cost of games on PS5 are stupidly expensive.
This $70 BS is finally catching on... but oh wait those are mostly Sony games at 70 price tag. I guess just avoid games priced at 70 and be good. Stalker 2 for example is a $60 kind of game... maybe not on consoles but at least is not PC.