And the Netherlands just became the 6th.

Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.

To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.

Chances are it wasn’t the barrier to entry that did that game in, is my point.

Free to play games have to reach a much larger audience to break even, so chances are it was just as doomed if it was free.

Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?

I thought it was killed by having stupid design around game objectives and not letting you tweak those rules yourself.

In fact I’ve played plenty of other fun games that released this year.

They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.

Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.

Maybe not. If that’s the case, I’ll live. They’ve brought their past PC releases to GOG until very recently, so if they see sales drop off, they might continue to do that or relax the PSN requirement. We’ll see.

Can’t wait to play this in two years when Sony lets me, as long as it doesn’t require some kind of DRM like a PSN login.

Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.

Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.

Honestly, I’m hurting more for a PvP shooter with LAN, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see the LAN tag here. If it’s got a campaign, that’s just a bonus for me, but I’d certainly like to see one.

That’s possible, but the benefit of the doubt that I’ll give them here is that they’re testing the multiplayer portion of the game right now, so if that’s all that’s in the executable that they’re distributing in beta tests, they can’t say that it’s got it a feature that they don’t have yet.

The Steam description says “single-player and multiplayer”.

With Green Hawk Platoon, we set out to create an FPS that feels larger than life, designed for both single player enthusiasts and competitive multiplayer fans.

I’m about half way through Conscript, which is essentially WW1 Resident Evil. This game has maintained its tense feeling by carefully dialing the presence of save points and ink items to use at them. I’m really enjoying it. Unfortunately, for the same reason, it makes it difficult to find a block of time that I know I’ll have to make progress in the game, so I’ve prioritized playing other stuff for the past week.

I’m coming up on the end of Dread Delusion. In fact, I believe I’m on the final mission. On a much smaller scale, this game channels the same exploration formula of something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring, paying close attention to sight lines and making sure that you can use your brain to navigate the world, explore, and find something interesting. The game is certainly wider than it is deep, but they nailed the exploration part of the game, and I’d love to see them hone in on more RPG systems in a sequel or other follow-up.

I’m also a bit more than halfway through Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Without spoilers, I got to the part where they let you make a mechanical choice, and I picked the stealth-focused one. This is more of what made The New Order great, and they even cleaned up some of the mechanical issues that I had with The New Order on a gamepad, so they must have had the same complaints that I did.

And I’m saying that if you throw in a quick deathmatch mode, it’s playable with only one friend. And when a game has LAN, that means that you can play with a gaming VPN regardless of the presence of official servers.

It’s a non zero amount of work, and there’s every chance they spend more money making that change than they would bring in.

One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.