crispy4000

The indie(-ish) stuff is where it's at this year, for me. It's absurd how many great looking games are coming. Solar Ash The Gunk Lost in Random Tunic Hollow Knight: Silksong Little Devil Inside Psyconauts 2 Kena: Bridge of Spirits It Takes Two Black Myth: Wu Kong Gestalt: Steam and Cinder Stray 12 Minutes Sable Anno:Mutationem Edge of Eternity (gotta fix those facial animations though) Knuckle Sandwich F.I.S.T. Tchia ... Doesn't even scratch the surface of what's out there. If even half of these pan out, it's going to be an amazing year.

Hollow Knight feels like my pandemic game... but I finished it right before lockdown. Otherwise, I beat a ton more games since the pandemic started than I normally would. It's been a virtual tourism thing for me. Hellblade, Undertale, Spyro 1, Broken Age, FF7R, Uncharted series, Inside, Flower, Pyre, Hades, etc.

@Fizzzzle BK Origins is a must play if you liked it. It's better in pretty much every way: the voice acting, pacing, story, battle system, card management, etc. It's a prequel, but you'll have benefit of knowing what happens later from the first game. It's much less cliched where it counts as well. BKO's battle system is easily my favorite ever in an RPG. It's glorious. You do get turn orders. But it's also a real time system now. They streamlined a bunch of things to make it feel much faster too, all for the better. It's feels very different at first, granted.

Console manufactures have a vested interest in keeping cheaters at bay for the same reasons they do piracy. If someone's able to cheat online in a console game beyond what the game itself allows, they're likely running a modded system that's able to run illegitimate code. The manufactures do have recourse to ban consoles though, unless they totally screwed up on that or hackers win the day. So I can understand an argument for wanting to play online on consoles if you're concerned about cheating. But it's completely backwards to think console manufacturers deserve a subscription fee for giving us the privilege to play in their garden. The decision to keep their platforms closed isn't losing them money. It's quite literally the opposite. And remains true with or without online paywalls.

XBL Gold really isn’t compared to the rest of the gaming landscape these days. PS+, your mileage will vary on if you were into Sony’s games this gen and own a PS5 or not. That’s just looking at them from the ‘giveaway’ perspective. Which EGS easily challenges them on for actual free. Or Games Pass for the library and cost. The online multiplayer aspect meanwhile will always be a farce. It tries to add value with artificial barriers that aren’t even consistent across platforms.

Preach. I remember when Sony announced that the PS4 was $399, and so many people were amped at them sticking it to Microsoft for their issues. That same day, in the same presentation, Sony announced they were imposing an online paywall. And now we even have Nintendo doing it. The corporate cheerleaders looked past all of it because of the pricing war. Sony fans just brushed it off as an inevitably, an argument that still makes no sense. Console war shit matters more to gamers than being treated well.

I don’t doubt you enjoy it and you think I’m wrong. But if someone’s only using GPU on PC and no cloud stuff, they’re paying too much and should downgrade to the standard plan. Its how the math works.

EA Play is currently $30 a year. You’d save money if you subscribe separately. On PC that’s the smarter route. On consoles, there’s still the online paywall to jump over.

Literally no one would complain, so long as redeemed games stayed in your library. It’s not even value competitive with Sony anymore, because of their persistent PS+ collection on top of the standard monthly redeems. There’s no benefit to having Ultimate on PC outside of the cloud stuff. If you’re not going to use that, it’s worthless. Pay the $10 monthly instead. I remember they tried making closed beta access a thing with Ultimate, for Gears 5. Haven’t heard of any other game doing that.

None of which excuses this stunt, to be fair. They don’t get a gold star for walking it back quickly, just like EA didn’t for Battlefront 2. I don’t think there’s any argument that Games Pass isn’t a great deal at this point. Even more with folding in EA and buying Bethesda. They could raise the price there without too much pushback. Their ecosystem is still fundamentally split between those who do and don’t need to pay to jump over the online paywall. If they were doing everything possible to make their ecosystem the best deal for gamers, they’d drop Gold and make Games Pass Ultimate entirely about the cloud.

Yup. It’s just the reality of game dev now. We cheerlead for these console manufacturers for their supposed fair practice AAA stuff when in reality they’re just subsidizing it through 30% royalties and layered subscription plans.

We’ve had those forms of monetization for most of the past two generations. The publishers who could successfully fight inflation an additional gen without a sticker price hike are those who are successful at doing the most of what you hate. It’s not sustainable for the ‘good guys.’ Not that this is even something avoidable with CoD going for $70. Its possible Microsoft was trying to leverage Gold as a way to keep the price of their 1st party games static. And not rely as much on the shit you’re complaining about. Gold subscribers (without Games Pass) would have been the true whales in that scenario. To be blunt about it, they already have been in prior gens, along with PS+ subscribers.

You don't just attempt double the price of something without taking a hard look at the market factors and numbers. We might never know what pressured 'Sam.' Hopefully the press does its job and asks Phil what he hoped to accomplish with it.

Never said they were. It's always better to respond sooner to flubs like this quickly, and they deserve credit for that. Not everything can turn on a dime like this. It's surprising it did, given that the cards were already printed.

It was poor sales due to the price tag and launch library. They dropped the price and gave a ton of free Virtual Console games to initial buyers in response. Nintendo execs also took pay cuts. Sony did a mia culpa on the E3 stage if I remember correctly. Fixed the problem in addition to giving away free games. You can’t say that’s not admitting their mistakes.

I feel like we need more context for the decision. Maybe they were planning on keeping their first party games to $60 for the entire gen. Or not price hiking Games Pass for a couple of years. Something prompted them to say that in this one area, they needed to go there. Probably should have put their eggs in more baskets.

They’re all willing to backtrack when they fuck up enough. 3DS’s launch price. PSN getting hacked. Etc. It just depends on the magnitude of the mistake.

Well, they reversed course now. I was wrong about the PR not getting to them. I am surprised, but glad, this was all it took. Thought that some F2P publisher backlash would have been needed first. Could still be there was behind the scenes.

That's really disappointing. They'll never do anything with Crash or Tony Hawk again, when they just found their groove with both. I could only mildly approve of this if it meant Warcraft 4 or Starcraft 3. At least Toys for Bob is still safe for now.

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold price increase feels like manipulation VENTUREBEAT.COM Xbox Live Gold is getting a price hike that only makes sense if Microsft wants subscribers to shift to Xbox Game Pass instead. An interesting take. But given most people won't stick to F2P, it's probably better to look at it as $420 for Series S, or $460 for PS5 with a prior gen subscription library. Plus all the years of follow up payments for either to retain full online functionality.

Maybe it's a coincidence one of those games is being given away on Epic next week...

Sure, but it's not like that's going to change anything. Everyone will go back to remembering that it's just another silly fee. I don't think it's a mind boggling decision at all. They have all the leverage they need to test consumer tolerance on this. After all, they already convinced enough of us that it shouldn't be free to begin with. The only thing that could wake them up is F2P game delistings.

Gold's not going away when they can still make extra money off it and leverage it to inflate pricing. That $5 upgrade wouldn't actually be a no-brainer if, as on PC, the multiplayer paywall was absent. Why can't they just make Ultimate principally a cloud gaming add-on? Because they realize the lost opportunity to price gouge.

Grubb was the guy spreading previous rumors that Gold would be dropped.