Penny Arcade - Comic - The Opposite

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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Opposite

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Lttlefoot

The hero shooter genre has been dead since they killed overwatch esports league

Lucascraft

Panel 3: It's punishment for consumers enabling the corpos for the last 10+ years with poor spending habits. Activision/EA/Ubisoft/2K/Sony/Riot/Bethesda wouldn't be selling skins for $25 up through $500 or more if they weren't getting away with it. But they are getting away with it because consumers have completely given up control. It's easy. Stop spending ludicrous amounts of money on digital dressup and they will be forced to stop charging that.

Tofystedeth

I feel like Tycho either forgot a comma in the second paragraph or changed his mind halfway through the sentence and forgot to remove the first version.

v2micca

I was unfamiliar with the game Concord. This was the first time I had even heard any one mention it. And if the Penny-Arcade guys are willing to crap on it, that generally means its going to get pretty universal hate. So, I had a look at the trailer and.......wow. This looks like a game that should have come out in 2016. It was the most generic looking 5x5 hero shooter I have every seen. The character designs were embarrassingly bland and uninspired. The voice work all sounded like it came from actors too broken and desperate to feel shame anymore. It was so completely soulless, like to point that I wondered if it was part of an AI initiative to see if they are capable of digesting game design from a decade ago and then regurgitating it.

dennis

They seem to be crapping on the cinematic, not the gameplay. And personally, the cinematic doesn't seem that bad to me. At least, compared to every other videogame of this type's cinematic. It sticks out as neither great nor terrible. Just like a big shrug from me.

Hevach

Lucascraft wrote: »

Panel 3: It's punishment for consumers enabling the corpos for the last 10+ years with poor spending habits. Activision/EA/Ubisoft/2K/Sony/Riot/Bethesda wouldn't be selling skins for $25 up through $500 or more if they weren't getting away with it. But they are getting away with it because consumers have completely given up control. It's easy. Stop spending ludicrous amounts of money on digital dressup and they will be forced to stop charging that.

WoW's $15 "sparkle pony" made Blizzard more money off a reskinned model than Starcraft II Wings of Liberty did in primary sales. And EA makes so much off microtransactions in sports games alone that they could give everything else away for free and still break even.

Those chickens are starting to come home to roost, but until the bloodbath among studios actually starts costing executives some big bonuses it's only users that will suffer.

Ringo

Well people actually wanted the sparkle pony, unlike Starcraft 2

Lttlefoot

Whaling makes sense in third world countries with lots of people too poor to buy the game upfront and a few rich people who can afford to pay more to make the peasants look at their shiny skin

It’s not the only industry where the rich subsidize the poor. In clothing, tech and medicine you pay more to be an early adopter, covering the cost of R&D, but if you’re ten years behind the curve you only have to cover the cost of manufacturing

I guess there is an overlap between people who think fashion is dumb and people who think freemium games are dumb and refuse to get involved, regardless of the price issue. But it won’t stop the industry selling to people who care

LtPowers

Wait, I'm out of the loop I guess. What the heck is "State of Play"? Tycho doesn't even provide a link in the newspost.


Powers &8^]

Lucascraft

"State of Play" is Sony's Playstation showcase event that they do every so often. The State of Play that they ran last week was the first of many game showcases coming this summer from the industry, as part of "Summer Games Fest" which is the replacement for E3. But whereas E3 was a unified meeting at a convention hall, with lots of awkward keynotes, the idea of Summer Games Fest is that everybody does their own thing in a much more sanitized and controlled manner. The spirit of E3 lives on in the early June game announcement timeframe, is just isn't called E3 anymore, and it has been de-centralized.

Sony has State of Play.
Microsoft has Xbox Showcase.
Nintendo has Nintendo Direct.
Ubisoft has Ubisoft Forward.

All of these are synonymous with "digital game showcase."

Djiem

Lttlefoot wrote: »

Whaling makes sense in third world countries with lots of people too poor to buy the game upfront and a few rich people who can afford to pay more to make the peasants look at their shiny skin

With the insane, ever-increasing disparity between poor and rich everywhere in the world, it makes sense in first world countries as well. The cult-like worship of capitalism has us thinking that wealth is the masure of success and that money equals wealth; this makes expensive skins a way to show your wealth and success over others. The only difference is that here, the small fishes are also able to buy the cheaper skins, and they do it to feel richer than those who truly can't afford anything.

T-Danger

I was astounded by just how blatantly Concord was trying to be Guardians of the Galaxy, right down to the witty alien pirate who looks like Michael Rooker.

I'm curious as to how long Concord's been in development for, because it really looks like they're trying to cash in on the popularity of Guardians long after it, and the MCU in general, stopping being a hot property.

Lucascraft

That's the problem with the ever-increasing scale of AAA games. They take so long to make that by the time they actually come out, the thing they were trying to mimic or emulate is no longer passé.

With Concord, it's a double-whammy. The setting and cast look like they're trying to be the Guardians of the Galaxy. And the gameplay looks like it's trying to be Overwatch. Neither of those things are particularly popular anymore. All of Marvel is in sharp decline. And the hero-shooter space is definitely oversaturated at this point.

It just took them too long to get this thing to market, and everything it is trying to be feels outdated. This game looks like it belongs in 2016, not 2024.

Hevach

Ringo wrote: »

Well people actually wanted the sparkle pony, unlike Starcraft 2

Starcraft 2 was, at the time, Blizzard's best selling game other than WoW since Starcraft itself. Wings of Liberty alone, not counting the two expansions, outsold Warcraft 3 and its expansion combined. People wanted it, and the numbers reflect that.

But Starcraft 2 was expensive to develop. The sparkle pony was cut content, though, so pure profit on the books.

dennis

Just to tag onto that: it's a problem with AAA games that are jumping on someone else's bandwagon. It's not a problem if you're making something unique and innovative. One would hope that would mean we'd see more of the latter, but I'm far too cynical to believe that.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

'group of miscreants on a caper' wasn't exactly new ground when guardians of the galaxy broke it, so I wouldn't so much be worried about that. The main problem these games (e.g. anthem, suicide squad, etc) run into is that they need to come out of the pipe hot and good enough to compete with all the existing live service properties that're basically doing the same thing, and that's hard to do

ed: it does seem a little lazy that they've got a guy who looks like Green Yondu, though

Showsni

I was also surprised to find that Nikki game was the fifth in a franchise I'd never heard of, but it made more sense when I realised the other four were all mobile games.