DebatableRaccoon

For those who’ve been paying attention, this has been known a long time. Remember when Nintendo would falsely claim gaming videos on YT and take all of the earnings just because one of their games made an appearance?

Azrael was in City and Knight.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

I think (see: hope) this is a stop-gap solution. It’s at least better than the current implication of buying something and being able to keep it despite these companies knowing full well that the game will be gone in a much more permanent way the moment they flick the switch on the servers.

To paraphrase Ross Scott, it may be a bare minimum but it’s at least nice to have it in writing just how fucked we consumers are.

Even among a lot of SW fans it’s a “Wait for a sale”

I’m sure that’s not totally a bad sign or anything…

You mean triple ehh?

They’ve only got themselves to blame if they did.

Yup. Sadly it’s always the same old song and dance. Death by a thousand cuts because basic consumer rights don’t actually exist.

Oh man, I’d forgotten the verification can thing. There’s a blast from the impending dystopian past

It’s not because “it could be worse” that it shouldn’t be better. There’s no good reason to force players to sign into a dedicated account to play a singleplayer game. It’s not because other publishers are worse that this isn’t a gaming sin. Pointing the finger to less green pastures only gives the current one a chance to match the landscape.

I’ve been playing it post malware removal and it plays well. Fairly certain it was still buggy until then though.

Let’s see if they can somehow manage to make it even more of a performance train wreck than the last one.

Bad expectations and probably a lack of understanding of how launching expensive games as platform exclusives can hurt sales numbers. They were likely expecting the kind of numbers a game can only get from launching on the big 3.

I will admit it’s not only the price that is a deterrent, even if that’s now competing with a perfectly capable gaming PC that can do significantly more, doesn’t have an additional charge to play online, doesn’t have to deal with increasingly standardised subpar controller longevity, commonly have cheaper games, better sales, and will have a longer shelf life. I already thought the PS5 was a bit pricy at launch, at a time when I was still considering buying one. That time has been and gone, I’ve spent the money on upgrading my already decent computer into an absolute beast because I figured “why not?” and I still have yet to see a reason to buy the PS5. It’s no secret that consoles are commonly loss leaders for the manufacturers while the exclusives are the money-makers. It’s a way of doing business, that’s fine, but to this day, I can only claim to have seen them release maybe 4 exclusives that I’d deem worth playing. That’s already a bad deal. No-one in their right mind can justify paying full price for a console to play 4 games. On top of that, 1 already got ported to PC, one’s got a release date, one’s already had public response from the developer to be working on the port, and the last has really strong odds of getting ported too. 4 is my number, and I don’t doubt other players would swap my own picks for something more their taste, or maybe even bolster the numbers, but I don’t think anyone could make it as high as 10 without naming a game that was also released for the PS4 and/or got ported. So unless Sony gets their shit together, the PS5 tells us that the PS6 will be a bad deal.

My regards to Sony, the pricing makes it easier to not even consider buying one.

And if devs are smart, they won’t return anyway. They’ve tried it once and I’m fairly certain they’d be more than happy to try it again. The gaming market is all about death by a thousand cuts these days.

They didn’t exactly get a warm welcome when they first launched the poorly performing pile of excrement, which they never fixed so it’s honestly a surprise they’ve clung on even this long.

It doesn’t invalidate what they’re doing in a karmic way, no. As for any legal precedent way, I’m genuinely concerned that it’ll very much be a “too little, too late” scenario. Many of us who have come from the school of Jim Fucking Sterling Son, or even those with their eyes open, saw how bad this could get a decade ago. It got bad enough to go to court where companies like EA produced pathetic stand-in excuses about “lootboxes” that manipulate the young, ill and weak-willed into spending insane amounts of money are actually “surprise mechanics” and thus totally different. Some countries were smart enough to put some amount of age limit on such things, others were even smarter and outright banned them but many just let it happen. It has kept happening and the biggest gaming corpos are now more than big enough to hire all of the lawyers in the world collectively and fight any claims off through the sheer force of printing money.

Yes, I’m possibly embellishing a little in that lot but after witnessing the gaming market slip further and further down the sinkhole the way it has with excuses of “it’s only cosmetic”, “it’s optional” and “it’s not required to experience the game”, I have every reason to think we’re not coming back from this.