I’ll champion the death of any live service game, especially one that does it as egregiously bad as Destiny, but there are 20k concurrent players on Steam alone. If a fireteam is only 3 people, and you can’t fill it with that many people online, it’s just their matchmaking algorithm that needs to be adjusted.

They got a sizable percentage of them. More than half. Due to how late Krafton came in for the rescue, they couldn’t save everyone.

Prototyping and design documentation was likely started a decade ago, but they wouldn’t have fully ramped up to a larger team size that’s more expensive to sustain for a full decade. In the interim, they put out Anthem, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and remastered the original Mass Effect trilogy. So there is a world where they didn’t spend $200M on it, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if they hit that number either; and if they did, they’d have to sell about 5M copies to break even (assuming a 70% cut and that not every copy sold is at $70).

This deadline was set once the money was coming in more slowly than it was going out.

I’m now significantly into Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and I’m having a great time. Unfortunately, while you can get it working in Proton, it’s a compromised experience. It might work better with a different set of AMD drivers, but I don’t want to mess with my system on that level, so I was putting up with a lot of lighting artifacts, even with some command line launch parameters that improve the situation. For the time being, I’m just playing it on Windows. It’s been great so far. It’s a fairly light immersive sim, puzzle game, and action game, but the confluence of those things satisfies the Indiana Jones itch better than Uncharted or Tomb Raider ever have. I’ve now finished the first two major areas, and the biggest disappointment thus far is that I kind of know what to expect ahead of me, because so much of it was in the trailers. It would have been nice if they could have front loaded some of those moments at the beginning so that the marketing didn’t take any wind out of my sails.

It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.

There are pros and cons to everything. You get to play before the game gets spoiled in GOTY podcasts. You can play a multiplayer game when the most people are playing, before the game has been “solved”.

Alan Wake 2 took an upfront buyout in exchange for appearing on a less popular platform. That would be an exception to the normal use case. A thousand companies will go bankrupt trying to make Candy Crush even though someone already made Candy Crush. And you can replace Candy Crush with Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, Destiny, or whatever you like. Those games take up all of your time by design rather than allowing and encouraging you to move on to another game.

For all we know, there may be no way this sci-fi future Porsche gets damaged, because it may not even be part of the game’s loop, as opposed to a driving game where we know for a fact you’re going to drive. When the appeal to a driving game is to be able to drive whatever brand of car you want, the car brand has the power in the negotiation. This is a game that takes place in retro future 80s sci-fi and doesn’t feature the actual real world car.

The way Kojima was probably able to get Monster to pay him was either he has a friend at the company/ a friend is a shareholder or he was somehow able to convince them that the deal was film product placement, which is a different kind of license and comes with different rules, but often means the brand does pay the prodution studio. I am going to assume he just has a friend that works at or owns stake in Monster.

Does he also have friends at CalorieMate, PlayBoy, and Apple? Sure, we know he has at least one friend at AMC, but this is a long line of product placement in Kojima games, and they do it for the same reason they do it in film; it’s an advertisement. I think it would be pretty absurd for an already expensive production to then license Porsche for their story when they could have easily, in 20 seconds or less, established a fictional car brand to plaster on the back on their space ship.

If the problem was a woman lead, how come The Witcher 4 also didn’t get brigaded?

It did.

Even if what you are implying is true, the same thing happened to Concord, people brigading it for being “woke,” and we both know how that ended.

People did the same for The Last of Us II, and that game sold over 10 million copies. A lot of its negative reaction was even pre-release from people who hadn’t played it but read the script. Concord was a game no one wanted from frame 1, before we even saw pronouns in a character select screen.

Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.

Titan Quest II is around the corner too.

I’m expecting the licenses resulted in the money flowing in the other direction. Monster paid Kojima for Death Stranding, not the other way around.

Dislike ratios are fake these days, as it just polls people who use the browser extension. Don’t put too much stock into it. Some segment of people get told that the game is woke because it stars a woman who shaves her head in the opening seconds, so they brigade the video and mash dislike.

I’m not underestimating how much Naughty Dog spends on their games. That stuff all leaked, so we can put an exact number on Last of Us 2. People dig the games that they make though.

Concord selling themselves as having developers who worked on Destiny reminds me of a trend I’ve observed though, though maybe there are outliers that have slipped through the cracks that would prove me wrong. When a new studio pitches its inaugural game as being from developers of X, Y, or Z, it pretty much never goes well, especially if it’s aiming for AAA. Maybe there are difficulties building a game and scaling up to that team size simultaneously. Any of a number of things can be the case, but at this point, it’s a red flag for me. The difference between that and “from the makers of The Last of Us” is that Naughty Dog is still Naughty Dog, and that’s more or less the same band sticking together. The Last of Us didn’t do it for me, and neither did Uncharted 4 honestly, but their games keep seeing the same levels of acclaim and success release after release.

You’re inferring a whole lot from a mock-up of gameplay that isn’t actually gameplay. A single player Naughty Dog game has a huge leg up over Concord in that you can play it regardless of how many other people bought it. Just saying “from the makers of The Last of Us” buys a few million copies sold where Concord didn’t clear 50k. If you want actual candidates for the next Concord, it’s going to be Marathon and, even more likely, Fairgame$.

Elden Ring, the game continuing a long-standing legacy of player messaging, “jolly cooperation”, invasions, and duels, is a multiplayer game that people play primarily online. I’d rather never use Windows again in any use case, but it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s not functional as a handheld, when it quite provably functions on several handhelds available today.

I’m not disputing that subscriptions for Game Pass is how Microsoft wants to make money off of a handheld, but that doesn’t seem to support your argument. Gears of War isn’t really built for the mobile use case. I don’t really see cloud gaming taking off the way these companies pitch it to their investors. I think Microsoft’s on the right track with making it a value add rather than mandatory, but Stadia didn’t take with the market for a reason. I don’t see the author’s vision for cross-pollination between “traditional mobile games” like King’s output and what we think of as Xbox games; I feel like those markets have thoroughly evolved into pushing out the customers that don’t like what they offer. I don’t want touch buttons on my screen, nor do I want to be nagged by microtransaction prompts, and I don’t think mobile gamers want to pay $70 for a challenging prestige story experience up front.

Ralph does a very good job of letting you know why he likes something and showing evidence to support his opinion, but man, I was bored just watching this footage that he felt spoke for itself.

That’s a lot of exaggeration. Windows sucks handheld, but once you get into a game, it’s invisible which OS you’re on. Looking at the top 10 games on Steam Deck right now, Path of Exile 2, Marvel Rivals, and Elden Ring are all extremely popular multiplayer games that you can play on Linux without a subscription, and Stardew Valley is in there too (though primarily played single player, I’m sure) and #11 is Helldivers 2. Luigi’s Mansion 3 sold 14 million copies, which is more than the vast majority of games released, and yet you never hear people talk about it in circles like ours. That’s from children. Nintendo has that market on lock.

You feel confident about a handheld PS4; I disagree. It’s a bit moot though because Sony’s working on a handheld PS5.

I mean, the supply side of things is very different now though. Neither Nintendo nor Sony can really afford to make “handheld games” separate from “console games”. It splits their resources too much. The #1 most played game on Steam Deck is Balatro, and #4 is Stardew Valley; both are immensely popular and available on the Switch, but they’re disproportionately popular on Steam Deck compared to Steam at large, and that’s what I mean by some games just naturally floating to the top. I don’t think it’s enough of a hindrance to the customer to figure that out themselves such that it makes sense to spend time, money, and effort on making games specifically for handheld.