Dragon Age producer and ex-BioWare game developer Mark Darrah believes Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard is 'probably a bad thing in the long run'
Mass Damage & Consumer Foundation in the Netherlands has filed a class action against Sony for inflating PlayStation Store prices.
My personal opinion:
Manufacturers and publishers have indeed inflated the industry.
From $700 million development costs for games like Call of Duty, to digital (store) prices for games and DLCs, online multiplayer fees on consoles (why can you play Helldivers 2 online for free on PC but not consoles?) or still preventing sell/lend digitally purchased games.
Sometime in the future, this bubble will collapse.
They should know better, but they just can't help themselves and suck even the last penny out of our wallets.
Because Sony knows people will be forced to pay those prices for single player and multiplayer games, not everyone prefers PC gaming. Sony also has a monopoly on PlayStation digital games. In 2019, they stopped allowing retailers and game key sellers to sell PlayStation digital games, making them available only through the official PlayStation Store
They should be suing the individual publishers increasing the prices to $80 instead of suing the store. There are plenty of publishers still selling game for like $50 with much success (like E33). But this proves that the publishers are the ones setting the prices.... so again nothing changes because they aren't even going after the main offender. How is suing Sony going to make Microsoft not charge $80 for the next COD? Sony being the number one store in the market doesn't mean that publisher have to charge us an arm and a leg. Again the industry is laughing at us because consumers never get real representation. Just these fake platitudes that are meaningless.
"How is suing Sony going to make Microsoft not charge $80 for the next COD"
Because Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly, I can purchase Call of Duty at a huge discount from CDKeys or other gaming retailers. The only way to purchase digital PlayStation games is through the PlayStation Store.
About time. There is zero fair reason why digitally distributed products that you cannot recoup any value when you want to dispose of them, should be priced higher than that of physical copies that entail all of the costs and the benefits of owning.
"Project Sabbath" was a cancelled Batman game by WB Games Montreal where Damien Wayne was set to take on the mantle of the Bat.
Its time Damian ...and his mother too & how his son came to be will be a big part in a background story of a Batman movie, series or game.
I'd have rather seen Terry than Damian especially to see what they could have done with Terry in the Arkhamverse
No, WB doesn't want anything fun since suits want live service garbage for max revenue. LOL!
Shame. If we are getting any Batman games like these, it'll be years away.
I’m not a big superhero fan but I do enjoy the Batman and SpiderMan games. Too bad this one got cancelled. WB has been mostly shite live service.
Undead Citadel, a medieval-era VR action game, arrives next week on PlayStation VR2.
"I can say that consolidation is probably a bad thing in the long run. Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard hopefully is a good thing in the short term because it seems like culturally Activision-Blizzard needs someone to go in there with a leaf blower and clean out the dark corners of the thing,"
"But long-term consolidation is usually a bad thing because once you have sufficient control, you start wanting to control costs, and it means typically creativity goes down, risk-taking goes down."
So his concern is cutting corners with regard to production costs/budget, leading to creativity being impacted. We haven't really seen Xbox trying to cut costs. If anything they've been trying to give devs more time and bigger budgets to do whatever they want. But obviously anything can change in business.
I am In the same mindset bud.
It's all good tho.
As soon as MS takes over those properties, the IP's will go to shit.
Other studios will make better games following this.
Regardless of anyone's thoughts on this acquisition, if MS doesn't get them, someone will. ABK wants to be bought. They are the ones who went looking to sell originally.
I understand his concern and i agree fully, however, things in that that house are bad already so i hope MS take this note and make the best out of it. In my opinion the best recipe for sucess is to make good fun games skimmed from all the political bs, you know, like they used to be.