Dave Walsh of Explosion.com takes a look at the recent trend in episodic gaming and how it could change the industry as we know it.
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Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
Too expensive hardware when others offer the same or more for less? Good work, Green Team.
"Despite some early successes for Xbox games on rival platforms, Xbox hardware is down by a massive 31 percent this quarter."
"Without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue would have actually declined this quarter."
"Xbox content and services would have only been up a single percent without Activision Blizzard..."
"It looks like next quarter is going to be a similar story for gaming at Microsoft, too."
That is crazy... so A/B/K is carrying the whole Xbox gaming.
Oh and Microsoft will be fine. Windows, Office and Cloud are growing with each pc purchase.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
Please do not let this happen.
Halp Life Ep 3 proved that this is not a good idea.
Also I can see this being something like DLC were developers charge what they want instead of what its worth.
Eh, It looks good on paper, but the level of commitment and the rush to meet deadlines. I think valve has shown how poorly this can go, heck episodic gaming invented "valve time"
I kinda like the idea of being able to buy little couple our segments at a time and see it as a way to save money in the long run for me but I can see the bad in this as well. It would be nice if the prices for the episodes stayed stable across all games and also this would work only if the full game was completed by the devs before they release it episodically. I wouldn't want a game not being finished and many buyers that were enjoying a game not being able to finish it just because it wasn't selling well, therefore not worth the devs time to finish making the game.
I can't say I'm overly fond of episodic content. Not unless we're talking Xenosaga-style episodes, where each one is a full game.
Otherwise, I don't like the idea of playing part of a game, then waiting weeks before the next part is even available. Just gimme the whole thing at once; gimme a full game and let ME decide how much of it I wanna play.