AppAdvice.com writes:
"First off, I want to make it clear that Homerun Battle 3D is one of my all-time favorite pick-up-and-play games for my iPhone. It is well worth every penny, but Com2uS may have gone a bit overboard with their recent update to the game, which adds some extremely expensive in-app purchase items that seem to give players an unfair advantage.
Homerun Battle 3D was recently updated to v1.3, which according to the App Store description, adds over 100 new items and new complete uniform sets. They even went the extra mile and included officially licensed DeMarini equipment sets. Like I stated before, I really enjoy the game and have played my fair share of it, so I simply assumed all of these new items were merely going to cost me a lot more of my time collecting enough gold balls to obtain them. But instead, upon launching the game this morning, I found out that these new items weren't going to cost me time, they were going to cost me real money."
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" -
Supercell has released its new squad-building action game Squad Busters in Spain, Mexico, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and Singapore. This game features characters from different Supercell titles, such as Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, Hay Day, Clash Royale, and Boom Beach.
I feel it will really start to get exploited. In-App purchases will turn into the same huge profit / greed market as XBLM add-ons.
It's like the horse armor fiasco all over again, but worse since it actually affects gameplay. Hopefully this doesn't become the norm.