Welcome to a Daily Reaction special by Dan Oravasaari and Sebastian Moss where we bring on an established developer to come interview us. With the growing success of the daily feature, and the overwhelming response from fans, developers have now started to join in with the discussion and pose your favorite critics some hard hitting questions.
Ted Price, Founder and CEO of Insomniac Games – the studio behind the PlayStation exclusive Resistance and Ratchet & Clank franchises, as well as the upcoming multiplatform game Fuse – asks:
Marvel's Spider-Man villain DLC potentially spotted via the debug menu that surfaced from the New Game+ title update released recently.
Ahmed from eXputer writes "Video game leaks have become a major cause of concern for Triple-A studios, as they're becoming increasingly malicious and dangerous."
In a leaked Sony Interactive Entertainment presentation, the company declares that including first-party games on PS Plus has had a “big” effect on “traditional sales.” As an example, the company mentioned that Horizon Forbidden West‘s sales “flat-lined” immediately after being added to PS Plus.
They are just stating the obvious. Of course a game is not gonna sell as much when gamers can get it for a fraction of the cost because of subscription service. On the other hand, a subscription service can extend the life of a game by making it available to gamers who want to play it but not necessarily willing to pay full price.
What works for Microsoft doesn't necessarily have to work for Sony and vice-versa. I'm glad we have some variety. Personally, I don't want 2 consoles who are doing the exact same thing.
Price cuts do the same thing your describing. Subscriptions aren't bringing anything new to the table.
It's not that smart. In fact...it's not smart at all. A dumbass could figure that out. If you give a game for free or for peanuts...why would anyone pay a lot for it instead?
It's like if you had the whopper menu at 7.99 and then the whopper menu at 1.99
Same damn whopper! What item you think most will choose?
The only ones that will choose 7.99 option are those oblivious to the 1.99 option.
Yea! And to make more money if you are selling the 1.99 whooper you will have to lower the quality and make the ingredients as cheap as possible and take away the sallad and cheese. But you could pay extra to get that.
How much does Sony or Xbox pay the devolpers to put the games on the services? Do they take that into account for profit, I don't know just asking. If we pay for online giving out some games is cool either platform. The companies must think it helps in some sort of capacity for accepting the deal I would think.
Oh dam
I even commented on someone who said it wasn’t.
Load of hallabaloo on the site indeed
To add to you're point, this is what I don't understand about the MS subscription service. If you're getting all the day one released games for next to nothing by using thier service how on earth are the developers supposed to make enough money back to create their next game/s?
Myself, and I might be of the few, but I prefer to purchase a game from a store or digital store at the recommended price, or wait for a discount if not completely sold on what I've seen of a game so far and get what I paid for than pay monthly, yearly etc subscription & get everything while the games themselves become less in all aspects due to less funds/resources. (Not sure if I've explained that properly or not)
If every company goes down the subscription based path in the future I see gaming overall dying to some degree for the non diehards I mean. Putting up older games etc that are inc in the service fees I agree with but not day one releases. Again, just an opinion.
@REDGUM
You lower the quality of the games to make the process of making them as cheap as possible. You make them like f2p games with season passes and microtransactions. And over time you will make subscription more and more expensive.
Also really interesting to see through to one of the sites they link to (Resetera) that the 2 cross gen titles in Miles Morales and Ghosts of Tsushima sold over 40% each of their first year in year 2, almost double what even the best performing games like GOW 2018 and Spider-Man did. Kinda seeing the cold hard numbers makes it really clear why they did cross gen games and remastered some of the later PS4 games to PS5 Directors Cuts.
"“In year 1, Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were very comparable,” the presentation reads. “HFW was included into PS Plus at the start of Year 2. HFW saw an enormous influx of PS Plus players, but at the cost of flat-lining the game activations from retail sales.”"
So, the data shows there were fewer traditional sales, but it doesn't show us anything about how many people joined PS+? It does say there was an influx of HFW players, but it doesn't state how many of these players owned PS+ to begin with.
To conclude that it negatively sales is correct, but it doesn't mean less money is made. We cannot draw that conclusion until we know how many more people joined PS+ because of HFW.
Well each ps plus account is only good for what? $15 per month max if they go monthly? There are a lot of reasons why even if a million new signups happened loosing out on the $60 gamesales is a worse.
I think that's a good assumption, but that's what I was referring to. It's an assumption. If someone comes with hard data, we need the complete picture. The way it sits now we might draw the right conclusions, but we've proven nothing.
If sales flat lines and subscriptions don't equal the same as said purchasable game then no matter how you spin it...less money is made on that game per player
MS's bet is that although it lowers traditional sales, it makes the services more appealing and millions of new people will subscribe if they see that good games are added to the service. And in the end, the subscription profit (not revenue) will outpace that of the traditional sales.
However even after 6 years they still haven't reached that point lmao
Sadly it's just Netflix of gaming. They saturate the service with garbage just to keep releases on a regular basis and to keep players hooked to the service. It won't be sustainable in the long run.
There are some really good games on gamepass. That's the problem with you guys who only think one way. I'm playing Remnant 2, Dead space remake, Tomb Raider, Forza, Far cry 5, Gears Judgement, Mass Effect 3 and MLB The Show. Now please tell me which one of those are garbage?
You sound like a hater or is it you are jealous at the success of Mictosoft with gamepass.
Netflix is the ONLY streaming service that is making a profit right now. In fact others are back to licensing their content to Netflix because that's a great revenue stream for them.
Except that works for MS because most of their games barely break 1 million in sales ... They know this and try to throw shade and brag about how great subscriptions are because they were already not making much money at all.
Nah, that's not true. Their games do sell. Games are getting more expensive to make and sometimes selling millions still don't make up for losses. Services like gamepass can be good for developers and the publishers. Games do sell on gamepass.
@reaper
Nope. It is true. Just look at estimated sales for lots of their games across the board. Except for major titles like GTA most games barely sell on Xbox. At least back when physical was the majority...now with mostly digital maybe it has changed but their audience hasn't gotten bigger.
A few outliers but the majority barely sold.
If they didn't put their games on PC and Gamepass day 1 their games would be on the charts like the 360 days, but they don't want to do that and that's okay.
Oh god, so many things.
Side note: Anyone else want Ted Price to host a chat show?
Ok... just me then.
Hah and people still dont think cod is bad for the industry.
Pretty cool of Ted to break from Fuse and interact with the fans.
doctorstrange is the biggest problem facing the games industry. well, that and a fear of rocking the boat that gives us an endless stream of the same games over and over. But mostly doctorstrange.
Lets see...Compared to 10+ years ago... Games are dummbed down... you can regen health by standing still, DLC abuse, I can go on and on.