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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Trepidator
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The Trepidator
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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You know, instead of treating it like a closed ecosystem that they can dickwolf and pillage at will and cannibalizing their future revenue for bigger numbers right now.
Even moreso now in the era of handheld PCs. For the first time there's a whole class of widespread gaming PCs with specs falling within a reasonably narrow range. It's not quite the uniformity of consoles but it's close, especially with the last console generation being split down the middle, and that green check in steam counts for something.
Or buy a game and be playing it thirty years later.
In the Playstation One era, Sony's mascot was Crash Bandicoot. And the first three Crash games were created by Naughty Dog, the darlings of Sony. And somehow, all these years later, Crash is on XBox, and the IP is in fact owned by Microsoft.
Filter the steam store by "Great On Deck" and it's effectively a console experience with their handheld.
I've had a console since NES but at this point the only reason I have to buy another console is software exclusives. Which more and more often are only timed exclusives anyway.
This is at least the second time I've seen you invoke dickwolves and I gotta say, it's pretty distasteful
Which makes it especially stupid that these companies keep doubling down on the GaaS cancer on consoles. GabeN keeps getting proven right about things not being a pricing problem, they're a service problem. And it applies to more than just piracy. If someone gets less ownership over their system by virtue of it being a console, maybe one should offer a superior service to compensate instead of a *worse* one like what happens in a lot of GaaS design where you have even less convenience and even less freedom.
There is a reason why most of my gaming is on PC over the last 10-15 years. They keep adding deleterious BS to the console experience.
That was before Master Chief became the Xbox Mascot and Halo their one Killer app, though.
Halo on Playstation these days would be like if Sonic 2 released on SNES back in the 90s. That is "Sure, if you're not planning to sell consoles". As MasterChef point out in the strip.
Minecraft being multi-platform make sense since it already was by the time Microsoft got it.
Final Fantasy going multi-platform would make a bit more sense, in that while strongly associated with Playstation since FF7, FF is not actually a Sony brand. They have no obligation to stick to PS beyond Japanese business loyalty, and possibly a deal with Sony.
Though, FF7R 2 struggles have more to do with video games budgets becoming too big for their own good. (first part had the advantage of also being on ps4, a console that by this point was cheap enough that probably every FF fan in the world owned one.)
Halo was the killer app for Xboxes between 10 and 20 years ago. The number of exclusives has shrunk dramatically and there are various Halos on PCs as well.
What about John Hodgman? They could have him reprise his role as "I'm a PC" guy.
MacOS of all places, actually. The original was literally Bungee's previous series Marathon with the serial numbers filed off and puzzles cut out in favor of bigger action set pieces. To the point that Marathon had Mjolnir super soldiers wearing green Spartan space armor, fighting for the UESC against a vaguely religious collective of alien slave races, aided by holographic AIs. It was rare at the time for shooters to have narrative storylines but Marathon laid the groundwork Halo followed with, and Halo's fingerprints are still all over the FPS space to this day.
So yeah, Halo was only an Xbox exclusive in the first place because Microsoft paid some major bucks for it to be, and if the line goes up for multiplatform then line gotta go up.
One problem is that players are now used to games being updated regularly and complain if their game doesn't get any updates. But you don't want to be spending money on a game that's not bringing in any more revenue
Another problem is that you don't want to waste the experience of your dev team. As an analogy, cars were not a service. But someone buying a new car in 2006 might get a 2006 Corolla while someone buying a new car in 2007 might buy a 2007 Corolla. You still need to make new versions of the product, but you can use the experience of whoever designed the last model to design the new model which is going to be similar. Prior to GaaS the only way to do this was with sequels, but unlike with cars, if there are sequels people want to own each one (and complain if there are too many sequels or they're too similar)
He is still the one brand associated with Xbox (and notably, XBOX isn't considered that current these days).
But Sega wasn't still trying to pretend they competed with Nintendo when the GBC and Wii came out. Sonic on GBC was explicitely Sega stopping making consoles and focus on selling games (well, focusing on making pachinko machines in Japan with a side business of making games on the side)
PC is a different thing. Microsoft also have interest in people playing on PC while Sony doesn't (and even then that arguably did weaken the Xbox, I have seen dunno how many people pass on buying a Xbone or Serie since they can just play on PC).
I'm not saying Microsoft shouldn't ever put Halo on Ps4, since it's not like Halo alone is going to sell Xbox these days, athey're already so far along the line already (with most of their stuff already being available outside of Xbox), that they could just throw the towel and transition to being a publisher. But that would be it, throwing the towel. If there's nothing to do on Xbox that you cannot do on Sony, there is no reason for the Xbox to be here. (which, again, might not be a bad idea for Microsoft)
It feels like some companies have already figured out that oh, we can have a season pass three or four times a year and players will buy a couple of them and the economics of that work out pretty well.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Repeat of the same cycle that we had with WoW and MMO's in general, really. The market's (over)saturated as is, so to keep using that model they have either offer a better product than someone already established or create a new niche somehow, neither of which are strengths of most shareholder ran conglomerations.
Publishers want the money for ten years but they don't want to provide value in the exchange.
And then they shut down the servers.