PSP World writes:
"It is likely that some large publishers, spurned by high levels of piracy and relatively paltry sales figures, decided early on to shift development away from the handheld (EA is not alone in this - where is Activision in the top-ten sales list?) Sony itself became frustrated with poor performance of the machine in 2006, and pointed the finger partly at developers like EA, who were churning out quick and dirty ports of popular franchises without doing sufficient quality assurance. It is hard to sell a gaming device to consumers when most of its new releases are bad, expensive versions of titles that look and play better on consoles. "
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.
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" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
EA hasn't done that well on the Wii either. But that's OK, because they make scads of money on the other systems. Some publishers are better at certain niches, and we can't expect them to dominate every single platform.