Spider-Man seems like it would be a great start to a video game Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there are probably too many barriers for this to happen.
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.
you should apply in MS PR team buddy, I think you will do a great job in my humble opinion :)
MS: "Xbox services and content without AB up 1%, with AB up 62%. Hardware down 31%. In total a loss of 350 mill."
darthv72: "Seems about right."
MS: "Excuse m ..."
darthv72: "I don't hardly play on my consoles directly."
MS:
What he said was facts. How he plays games is no concern of you. Don't get too mad about it.
I can tell people like you are an absolute minority..
If service is up means their fans and fanboys accepted this model and subscribed to it. The near future you will see a big decline because the service is saturated.
But that's been ms for years. When things aren't going their way they try to change the way things are said. For instance console sales are down, they stop telling how many sold instead telling us how many hours spent in halo or headshots. So it makes sense console sales down just say people are playing on more devices then previous. What they won't say is how many xbox players jumped ship to ps5.
Hardware sales are so bad that Sony and Nintendo are blowing the sales off the water with their hardware.
If Xbox are losers, others aren’t..
Xbox already tried everything with Xbox live then subscriptions went down so much that they had to find something else. Their fans subscribed then reached saturation rather quickly.
Hardware and exclusive games is where it’s at! Keep gamers excited, announce decent software and people will support you
@shin
Well keep it simple Sony 's operating income is down 26% and Microsoft's is up 32%. No MS spin there, just facts. 😉
Cheers
Odd that a company that touts you dont need the hardware to play is already touting another console in the works.
They are not reliant on the HW but still want to maintain a presence (no matter how small) is a good thing. It shows commitment to the craft. It reminds me of SNK and how they made games for their own hardware (Neo Geo) while also making them for others because they knew there was a market to do so. They knew they would sell more to others but also sell to their own niche fan base.
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.
Activision: "we gonna need a bigger rucksack/backpack please"
Microsoft: "why's that"
Activision: "to carry yo' weak ass'
Top brass have also wanted to start seeing returns on the 100 billion they have put into various Xbox related moves so seeing more multiplatform games is highly likely especially from abk
It's basically saying that PlayStation is the reason Xbox is afloat right now thinks to Ps5 versions of COD
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.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
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" -
GL compiles a list of some of the most mind-blowing video game narrative twists in recent memory, from The Last of Us to Outer Wilds
With articles like these cant you tag the games mentioned so that we can know ahead of time if there’s a spoiler to avoid?
Not clicking on your article otherwise.
Why would anybody even think that such a concept was plausible.
“We have Spider-Man, made by Insomniac games, a PS4 exclusive because Sony still retains the rights to Spidey even if they’re sharing him with Disney for the MCU.”
Sony only owns the movie license for Spider-Man. Those rights don’t overlap in other mediums. Sony had to acquire the license to make a Marvel game just like Capcom, Telltale, & Square Enix did when the rights were up for grabs. That doesn’t mean that they own the license for Spider-Man as a whole in the gaming medium since you’ll still see Spider-Man appear in other games.
“But Marvel properties are currently incredibly spread out across a number of different developers right now.”
Not only that but various incarnations of the same character can appear in multiple titles. That doesn’t make for a coherent for the basic audience. In the movies when you see a character nowadays, it’s usually in one continuity unless it’s Quicksilver. And since characters aren’t off limits for anyone who applies for the license like they are in the movies with all that legal minefield on who can appear in what, there’s no reason for developers to limit their creativity by trying to maintain an ongoing narrative on what happens in conjunction with something else. We already saw how that could negatively impact a game like Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and that game wasn’t even in the same continuity as the MCU, yet its adherence to limit itself to that universe didn’t gel with the gamers who expected an unrestricted lineup of Marvel’s best characters.
Not only that but with the gaming medium you have to account for the different gameplay styles that each character would have, meaning a crossover between them would be unwieldy with different gameplay styles needing to be put in one game to actually validate why you’d do a connected universe in the first place. It’s far more practical to have a crossover with a uniform gameplay system like you see with Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Lego Marvel, Lego DC, Super Smash Bros, Jump Force, Marvel vs Capcom, Injustice, and the upcoming Avengers game. Not to mention that such gaming crossovers don’t need buildup to have the characters interact with one another like they often do in other mediums.
“We also have the entire concept of video game development, where games are mapped out for release at a certain time, but then delayed for months or even years, depending on what happens during production, something that happens less with the kinds of blockbusters that Disney produces like clockwork.”
People need to realize that a game like this latest Spider-Man took 4 years to develop. That development cycle is enough to cultivate a Spider-Man based game series, not a universe that would require more timely releases on different characters.
Plus such an ambitious idea would require your full attention, not something you can do on the side. Insomniac isn’t going to push aside their future original games to only work on licensed properties, and Sony isn’t going to want to maintain an ongoing universe at the expense of commissioning developers to make original games for themselves, & other developers wouldn’t to want to go through the hassle of maintaining of collaborating with one another on an ambitious project that doesn’t seem very practical in that medium.
You can do far more in one game than you can in a movie so that really doesn’t make much sense to ape the MCU when it could very well fall flat on its face. What would take Spider-Man more than 3 movies can be done in this one PS4 exclusive, no buildup required.
Well, I don't see a videogame universe happening overnight, but it's possible. The cinematic universe has the benefit of time as when it started it was really just a series of Iron Man films, and Marvel decided to use that as the point from which to expand. It took a while for it to get where it is now.
Of course if Insomniac hypothetically wishes to make its own Marvel universe, they've already taken the first step. They also didn't have to start at square one (or if you want to be pedantic were at least able to leap from square one to where the game kicks off) as they made the smart decision to set the game eight years after Peter Parker became Spider-Man, treading on the fact that even those of us (myself included) aren't that familiar with the actual comics at least know the basics of his origin story and the series of events that led to him swinging through Manhattan solving crime and fighting villains, so we don't need that explained again in minute detail. Heck, even if we didn't know all that, all that's really important is he became Spider-Man by being bitten by a spider and he has since been a superhero.
Having a time skip also means there has been plenty of time for Peter to become a competent veteran superhero. This is important not just in the context of this game, because if any other hero or group of heroes gets a game in the same universe, there's justification to skip ahead to the point where they're already established. Some heroes would need more time devoted to explaining their backstory than others, and I think Spider-Man's is perhaps the most well-known, but then a skip to when they're in full-swing would actually be mandatory from a story standpoint. Heck, the game that just came out includes references to other heroes so it's definitely not treated as an isolated Spider-Man only world.
I'm not saying establishing a Marvel game universe would be super easy, nor am I saying it has to happen. I'm just saying it's possible and plausible.