bigsocrates

@ben_h: I do disagree with your overarching point but for different reasons than you've articulated (most of what you articulated in the body of your message I agree with to some degree or another, though not fully.)

Part of my disagreement is based on anecdotal experiences and part on data/logic.

Anecdotally, the kid I probably have the most contact with right now (that sounds bad; he's just my friend's kid so I see/talk to him when I'm around my friend) is obsessed with Mario. His parents don't know exactly how this happened but they think it was the Youtube algorithm. It definitely happened well before he got a Switch. Mario also led him down a path to Sonic and then, when he got a Switch, to Animal Crossing. He talks about these games with his friends at school etc... So I think most kids ARE aware that other games exist.

Other kids I'm familiar with have parents who are gamers (much more common now than when we were sprogs) or have seen the Mario movie or whatever. Gaming is mainstream and the idea that kids don't know it exists outside of what Youtube serves them is wrong. Hell even Fortnite itself has gaming crossovers. There isn't this huge discoverability problem. I can't think of a single kid/parent I know where the kid isn't aware of other games even if s/he doesn't play them.

There are lots of stories of dads and uncles trying to get kids to try other games and being rebuffed because the kids don't want to play other stuff. When my Madden loving buddy says he can't get his kids to play with him because they want to play Roblox it's not because they don't know that Madden exists. It may be because they think Madden is an uncool dad thing, but that's a different issue.

Now to get into more data/logic. Most kids who are playing these games are doing so on platforms that are invested in getting them to play numerous games. The Switch/PS5/whatever. Even if you're on PC the Epic launcher is constantly trying to get you to download and play more than JUST Fortnite. If you're playing these games you're exposed to advertising and media about other games on the dashboard of the device you're playing on and being given opportunities to play them in the form of trials or demos at the very least.

These companies also have invested a LOT of money in trying to get kids into their ecosystems. Youtube's whole purpose is to get people to watch ads and these game companies buy ads on Youtube. There are all kinds of avenues where these companies are trying to get attention.

I'd also add that as I said a lot of the players of Fortnite etc... AREN'T kids. They are people in their 20s or even 30s who grew up in a more diverse gaming environment and know about all kinds of games. They've chosen Fortnite etc... and there are reasons for it. Even games reviewers admit they love it.

Now do I think this is because Fortnite is the best game? No. I don't play it. But rather than other games not being put in front of kids I think what we're seeing here is more of a network effect. The same way that when we were kids there tended to be system clusters in schools and neighborhoods (one group was a Nintendo group one was a Sega group) because you played what the people around you played, and we saw the same in genres too. If you were in a school where everyone played fighting games you were much more likely to get into them than if you weren't. Same with Pokemon.

I think that kids are playing what their friends and the people around them are playing and Fortnite is just easy. It's also free for parents, at least outside of skins. There are lots of things pushing kids towards these games. But at the heart of them there's the fact that they're very good games (even Roblox on some level.) That's why they won the live service wars and pulled a bunch of adult gamers in.

With two AEW stars doing incredibly stupid spots that were very likely to cause injury (one not even on an AEW show) and subsequently breaking their legs doing those idiotic spots maybe someone should tell them to stop doing incredibly stupid stuff.

It's one thing when a wrestler gets injured because of terrible luck or a botch or whatever. That's part of the business. But at a certain point it stops being wrestling as an art form and you're just watching people take risks in an Evel Knievel type way, with similar results.

@chamurai:The N64 is infamous for having an incredible top end of its library and then a bunch of mediocre to junk titles. Some of the HUGE bangers are missing from this list so far, including both Zelda games and Beetle Adventure Racing, so the top end should fill out further, but I don't find the distribution shocking at all.

When you're a kid you only have a handful of games plus some rentals (even bad games can be fun for a weekend) and stuff at friends' houses so your exposure is limited. You could play like 15-20 really solid games on a system and think "THIS IS AMAZING." Plus a lot of the multiplayer games were played endlessly.

As someone who was a teen when N64 came out my impression of the console (which I did own) was that it was worth it for a few specific game but didn't have nearly the breadth of games that PlayStation did. Entire genres like 2D platformers and non-Smash fighting games were essentially missing, and other genres were extremely hampered by the cartridge format (anything with voice or licensed music, for example.)

The N64 is kind of a bad system that was buoyed by having some of the greatest games of all time (and certainly some of the greatest games OF the time) on it.

Sony announced its Days of Play promotion and in addition to some cool stuff and discounts the buried lede for me is that PS2 games appear to be making their debut on PS4/5. While the PS3 had a lot of PS2 classics available (there were also about 50 released on PS4 before that was silently dropped) and they were announced as being in the mix when Sony started rolling out PS1 and PSP games for PS4/5 as part of their revamp as plus, it has taken 2 years for us to actually get to the point where they're ready to be released. The first slate includes Tomb Raider Legend, Sly Cooper 1 and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

I love Sly Cooper but I own the HD trilogy on PS3 and I platinumed the first game several years ago so I doubt I'll play it again immediately. Tomb Raider Legend I have the 360 version of. Star Wars: The Clone Wars appears to be a middling game and the PS2 version is not the best. So a little bit of an underwhelming slate of first games TBH.

But I'm hoping that this portends more PS2 games in the future because it's truly one of the greatest catalogs of games of all time. Unlike PS1 games a lot of PS2 games hold up exceptionally well and the catalog is super deep.

Yes I know that these things are trivial to emulate but I prefer to play things legit and this also has the potential to get some forgotten gems additional attention and love. Plus trophy support, which is nice.

Even if this first slate of games doesn't have anything I'm itching to play right away I'm hopeful that some interesting stuff will be re-released recently. I've had a good time with several of the PS1 on PS4/5 releases like Ape Escape and Wild Arms, so it'd be nice to add one of the best libraries of all time into the mix.

Personally I'd really like to see the Ape Escape and Shadow Hearts games, among others.

In the latest sales on Xbox live the price got cut to $27. So they're dropping it steadily. Physical is going to probably hit the magical $10 pretty soon I'd guess because what retailers want to keep copies of this around?

If I were them and were serious about the game I'd do a flash sale blowout at $10 on Steam/PSN/Xbox and see if they can drum up a player base of people who are curious and waiting. Maybe time it with a content drop. But instead it looks like they're going to try and wring out any remaining juice with progressive cuts (which may maximize revenue if you're not worried about momentum).

@mellotronrules: The platform holders at least have a lot of information about who their players are and especially their behavior at this point. Trophies and Achievements are cute and fun but they're also clearly intended as data tracking, and they also monitor how much time you spend with each software. What they share with other companies is less obvious but I'd be surprised if a long time partner like Square didn't have significant data from Sony.

As I said this guy is clearly going to be at least somewhat self-serving so take what he says with a grain of salt, but I think a lot of people who play traditional games also play Fortnite or some equivalent (he is clear he is not talking about Fortnite specifically but also games like Call of Duty Warzone or Apex Legends or Overwatch 2 etc...) And the underperformance issue isn't specific to Final Fantasy, though that's the franchise he's talking about. Everything seems to be underperforming unless it's a megahit.

I think his general point that players just aren't "moving on" to the next $70 experience holds true and we've seen a lot of corroborating data about it, like how only 8% of gametime was spent in new games that aren't annual releases last year. And also just the kinds of games companies are releasing and when. A lot of people have PS5s so I don't think it's necessarily about platform install base. You can certainly argue with the quality of Final Fantasy recently (FF VII: Rebirth did very well critically but as I said there may be FF VII fatigue and sequels are always harder sells) but this is an industry wide issue. As the thread says even Alan Wake II did not recoup immediately (though it probably will over time.)

@junkerman: Everyone thinks that the time they grew up was the best. Those kids 30 years from now are going to talk about how they were glad they grew up when you could play as Taylor Swift with a french fry gun. I tend to be with Vinny that now is the best time to be playing games, especially since many of those games you rented are still available should the kids want to play them. They'd just rather play Fortnite. Which shows that there must be something to Fortnite.

And while being able to rent games was great, deep digital sales and subscriptions are arguably better. I mean you can get PS+ or Gamepass for the price of a couple rentals a month and have access to more games than you could ever play.

This was legitimately a guess at this point. I think it's pretty funny how they lined up the platform hint with what is almost certainly a screenshot from another version of the game.

#GuessTheGame #745

🎮 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟩 ⬜ ⬜

#MasterGamer

https://GuessThe.Game/p/745

They would be insane to continue developing this. Avengers did it for quite some time and despite being a bigger license and a better received game it did nothing for that game. Now I think they persisted as long as they did because of contractual obligations, but while Suicide Squad has been datamined and has a bunch of characters planned...what would be the point? From a player standpoint it would be cool, but it's clear that virtually nobody wants to play this game and it's not well monetized so...

I don't think they'll delist it. They promised an offline mode and depending on how far along in development that is it may be worth finishing. They also haven't done massive price drops yet, only by 50%, and I'd bet there are a fair number of people who would be willing to bite at $10-20 to the point where they could wring a little extra juice out there. I'm interested enough to try it at that price point. They might also put it on Game Pass or PS+. I doubt they'd get a TON of money for it, but it was economically worthwhile for Avengers. These days there's stuff you can do even with a flop to try to recoup some money. They could also go free to play, but nobody wants their cosmetics...

Fundamentally this game's design did not work. It was a "live service" game where the basic loop was not fun enough for people to want to repeat it. I have no idea what they were thinking. Redfall has the same fundamental issue. If you want people to play your game forever you need to give them a reason to. Just taking a multiplayer shooter and saying "uhh...it's live service now I guess...here are some paltry content updates and things for you to buy. Keep playing even though you're already super bored of it!" never works.

Most successful live service games have a PVP element and those that don't (Diablo does but it's not the focus of the game) have a number of gameplay hooks. Suicide Squad is just a four person co-op campaign with some stuff nobody wants bolted on. It's not even as compelling as the literal tack on horde modes that the Gears games had in the Xbox 360 era. Continuing to develop this thing for 1,000 players would be nice, I guess, but surely Rocksteady will have a better chance of survival if it moves on to a project that someone actually wants.

@zombiepie: Yes, though that plays a relatively minor role in the thread, and there are a good number of big Square Enix games that have been multiplatform and have underperformed.

There are reasons to be skeptical of this explanation beyond that. For one thing he links the issue to Fortnite and yet Square was notorious for its "everything underperformed" rhetoric at least as far back as the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex reboot series, both of which predated Fortnite. For another there are reasons why recent Final Fantasy games might have underperformed outside of market trends. The Final Fantasy brand might be overexposed, FF VII in particular, and certain people (*ahem ahem*) weren't super happy with the direction FF XV and FF XVI took in terms of making the games much more action focused with a lot fewer RPG elements.

But while skepticism is always warranted when former executives talk in self-serving ways I think that his breakdown of just how many copies you need to sell just to make a project worth investing in at this point is sobering.

One thing that I think we underrate is that games take so long to make these days that your capital gets tied up for a long time. Because of opportunity costs that also means that returns need to be higher. When a game took 2 years to make a 150% ROI might be good enough, but if it takes 6 years that calculation changes along with the budget, greatly increasing sales targets.

@av_gamer: We have different ideas of "funny," my friend.

The Fortnite story truly is fascinating but from my perspective the death of AAA games would be a really bad thing. They're certainly not the only games I like to play, but I do really enjoy them. I don't actually think the AAA space will fully collapse, but I do think that we're going to see a contraction and I think that we'll see more monetization in ways I hate and fewer big new bets.

Which is what the pattern has been so far.

Of course it's not really about Fortnite. The live service revolution was driven by a number of games and was perhaps inevitable. If anything I think that Minecraft may be patient 0 for widespread adoption rather than Fortnite.