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Penny Arcade - Comic - Alternative Sourcing
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Alternative Sourcing
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I did it for Destiny 1 and 2, but both were multiplayer games that I had a full crew of RL friends to play with. And a good deal after the system launch time. At last it was for the PS3. Don't remember exactly for the 4, but by then there were other games on the horizon I was interested in (HZD, KH3, FFXV).
Hmm. Criminal underworld or Twitter. That's a tough call.
-Tycho Brahe
Was it maybe suppose to be:
"I feel like launching a system selling exclusive games when you aren't selling systems is sick, twisted behavior on Sony's part." ?
It's a very clunky wordplay and hard to parse
Well, it is wordplay in the way he flipped "system selling" and "selling systems". But yeah, a hyphen would have helped the line read better.
It's not like Sony is running the PS5 as some sort of exclusivity thing, there just aren't enough consoles to meet demand due to chip shortages and scalpers. Not entirely Sony's fault, it's not like they don't want to sell the console, they're making them as fast as they can to tap into that profitable market. So their choice is to either not have any system exclusives for the people who do own the PS5 and leave them playing upscaled PS4 games, or sell the games they contracted years ago when they thought they'd have enough consoles to meet demand.
If only there were OTHER systems that were in the same generation as PS5...
I know, it's kind of a glib answer. At the point where they found out Sony had dropped the ball on keeping up with demand, it was probably too late for them to port to Xbox/PC. And Housemarque has a pretty thin record of supporting platforms other than PS.
Being an exclusive can be a real relief to a developer, as it drastically cuts down on the amount of annoying crap you have to do to keep your game working and not-as-buggy. Hopefully Housemarque got enough compensation from Sony to make up for any lost sales.
I can imagine that developers also get deals from the console manufacturers for agreeing to only port to their console. Probably stuff like "We'll give you a bigger cut of royalties[or whatever technical term they use] and also a fat commission if you publish your next three games to our console only" and so on. I suspect this is probably the biggest reason Atlus hasn't put Persona 5 on the Switch.
Oh, they definitely do. I'm just saying I hope it goes a bit above and beyond the normal if it's causing them to lose the sales because there's not enough consoles.
My impression was that the supply side was leaving a lot of the people who would normally buy the console unable to buy it. Maybe that's a bad impression. But look at someone like Jerry, who is unable to buy it. That seems a bit out of the ordinary. But who knows, maybe because of the pandemic a lot of people who wouldn't ordinarily would buy it bought it. It's hard to believe the scalping could be solely responsible for not just an inability to meet demands of all buyers, but buyers who would normally have bought this console just like they bought all the others. I know there's also a chip shortage, but they claim they've sold way more systems than expected. I still wonder how those translate into expected sales of something like Returnal.
Exactly. I've seen that happen any time a company is having supply problems. That's why I'm a bit skeptical.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-04-17-ps5-the-fastest-selling-console-in-us-history
From that article: (emphasis added)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4#Sales
Okay, so we can compare pretty easily here, since both the PS4 and PS5 were released in November, just 3 days apart (PS5 was three days earlier).
So the PS4 sold 4.2m units in the same period the PS5 sold 4.5m units. That's a 7% bump. It might be worth noting that the global population increased 8.3% from 2013 to 2020.
From the same source, global PS4 sales numbers:
That's 3 total more days of sales time than the same period for the PS5 since the PS5 started 3 days earlier. That makes an 8.5% bump. Again, global population increased 8.3%. Of course, you could also factor in that the PS5 released in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America, Singapore and South Korea on November 12, but the PS4 released in North America on November 15, Europe, South America and Australia on November 29, and Japan in February 22. PS5 got a big head start for these numbers.
All in all, I'm not sure the numbers are quite as mind-blowing as is being described. It doesn't seem to be selling that much better than the PS4, if you adjust for population inflation. Yeah, that's not a perfect scale because it doesn't say if more population grew in poorer areas that couldn't afford a console. But North America (by which I mean not including Central America) grew by about 5%.
What really seems to be the bigger factor now is the scalpers making it hard to find systems, and the supply shortages making it hard to get replacements to the market (thus giving incentive to scalpers).
Scalpers having an effect on software sales:
PS5 Scalpers Are Hurting Software Sales (emphasis added)
That was written in December. I can't find anything to say it's turned around since then. Sony released great software sales numbers, but they lumped PS4 and PS5 together, which could be to hide weakness in sales. When scalpers hold PS5s, they don't buy any software. When scalpers sell PS5s at hundreds of dollars more, actual game buyers have hundreds of dollars less so spend on games. The whole reason consoles sell at a loss is to make it up in software sales. The scalpers are negating that loss-leader strategy.
I've already said enough, so I'll end with this:
Can Returnal Sales Figures Be Blamed on PS5 Shortages?
No easy answer there, just a lot of guesses. But it's possible that the PS5 shortage, combined with the pocketbook-draining scalpers could be affecting games that are further from release. There just might not be nearly as much leftover cash at this point. And the longer Returnal fails to take off in sales, the more competition it will have from the new hot games that are released later. One thing is for certain: they'll never be fewer PS5 games for it to compete with.
Yeah this. I already worked hard to earn the money for a video card or whatever. I am not willing to put in the almost the same amount of work to spend it. Not when there are other things I can get instead.