Random News II

[one-armed dwarf]

Somewhere was a post saying that 80 percent of UK game sales were digital in a certain period, I dunno. But this seems indicative of that kinda shift

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/tesco-to-drop-boxed-video-games

 

Still don't expect PS6 to have a disc drive

[AndyKurosaki]

It’ll be a sad day if/when game consoles go digital only. Because prices would have to significantly change to make getting games digitally justifiable.

 

At the moment, I’ll only get games digitally either on sale, or if I’ve got a ton of store credit to make it cheaper. Because, at least on PS5, the price of day one digital games is an absolute piss take. 
Physical copy: about £50ish.

Digital: £65/£70, for no justifiable reason.

Also, I like either trading games in once finished, or renting from Boomerang.

 

Then you’ve got the download size. A lot of games these days are at least 50/60 gb. FF16 is nearly 100gb. Takes bloody ages to download games like that.

 

 

[shinymcshine]

In a few more years I bet it won't even be digital downloads - just cloud streamed content....

[one-armed dwarf]

I mean if that does happen I will truly just not bother with new releases anymore.

 

Too many games feel like shit on cloud, that's not really going to change (DMC, fighting games, FPS with mouse control. The latter of which is vomit town, that fucking camera delay 🤮)

[shinymcshine]

Sadly the industry has shown (eg by releasing broken games) that the customer's money is often more important than the customer's experience.

 

I suppose that the saving grace might be that the infrastructure to support digital download will be cheaper than to sustain cloud steaming for all, so that bottom line difference might save it for a while.

[Nag]

I'd like to believe that as long as there's dedicated consoles those console's will be able to download games and play them natively but streaming is definitely going to become a bigger thing... I'd like to see given time how many xbox one owners will stream Series X exclusives and such.

[Maryokutai]

  

25 minutes ago, shinymcshine said:

Sadly the industry has shown (eg by releasing broken games) that the customer's money is often more important than the customer's experience.

 

The thing is that they won't make more money by only offering streaming though. It's just too bad of an experience all-around, downright inaccessible to some people, and overall has very little to no potential of actually increasing the customer base and interest in the gaming space.

 

As for the comparison with "broken" games, those can theoretically be patched, whereas a cloud game will never get past that input lag barrier no matter how good the infrastructure. I think Cloud gaming is destined to be a temporary alternative and nothing more. As in, when you have Gamepass and want to try out a game without downloading the entirety of its 100GB, you can just stream it for an hour and see if you like it.

[mfnick]

I don’t know why but for some reason I can see the Switch 2 being heavy into cloud gaming. Nintendo make those strange jumps sometimes and it stops the underpowered argument for them. They’ve already tested the waters with some Switch games. It’ll still have hardware to ply games natively - but I can see Cloud gaming being incorporated into it far more at a system level. Maybe we’ll even get a version of Game Pass on it then. 
 

I don’t want this BTW. I detest the input latency it introduces in the types of games I like. But I can see it happening. 

[DANGERMAN]

Personally I think we're nowhere near the point where a streaming console is viable, but who knows where we'll be in 5-6 years (not sure I see new consoles much earlier than that, maybe 4-5). But I also couldn't see an underpowered discless machine being viable (it isn't on its own), nor would I say it makes sense for Sony to move to an external drive, but here we are 

[shinymcshine]

I think the industry would probably prefer we all moved to a monthly subscription based model, as guaranteed regular income seems preferable that the boom & bust of individual releases and one off sales.

 

As Gamepass seems to show, that doesn't always give the devs the best deal, but feels like it's the direction of travel that MS & Sony (and to a lesser degrees Nintendo) are all moving towards.

[Maryokutai]

8 hours ago, mfnick said:

I don’t know why but for some reason I can see the Switch 2 being heavy into cloud gaming. Nintendo make those strange jumps sometimes and it stops the underpowered argument for them. They’ve already tested the waters with some Switch games.

 

Those were all third-party though. I think Nintendo themselves might be the last player to adopt the idea, they're historically extremely far behind in terms of online infrastructure and it would also completely clash with the idea of Switch being a hybrid (= portable) machine if a significant bunch of your portfolio only works when having a stable online connection. 

 

I wish we had some numbers about how those third-party cloud releases did on Switch. I doubt they're even remotely impressive. 

[DisturbedSwan]

18 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Somewhere was a post saying that 80 percent of UK game sales were digital in a certain period, I dunno. But this seems indicative of that kinda shift

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/tesco-to-drop-boxed-video-games

 

Still don't expect PS6 to have a disc drive

 

Yeah that's right. Pretty much all the 'big' games released the last few months have skewed 80% digital, I think it's only gone up year-by-year really, the Pandemic probably shifted more folks to digital quicker than they otherwise would've done as well.

 

 

I used to be pretty much 100% against digital games on consoles, I'd buy low, finish them quickly (lol) and then sell them on eBay to fund my next purchase. Nowadays though it takes me too long to complete stuff that it doesn't make as much sense doing that as it used to, so I've gone digital more and more the past year or so where I realised I just don't have the time to do it anymore.

 

Obviously the big downside of digital is that you still can't sell or trade in once your done and prices (on the storefronts at least) are often still way higher than you can buy at retail. Lately though, I have found better and better deals on new digital games through gift cards, often only costing a couple of £ more than a physical version of that game or in the case of Jedi Survivor, I actually saved £12 by getting the digital edition via the gift card method from ShopTo.

 

Another factor for me is that I tend to have less faith in the postal service than I used to, so for the very big, super hyped games (TLOUP2, Hogwarts Legacy, RDR2, Jedi Survivor etc.) that I want to play straight away on the day of release without worrying about whether they'll turn up or not, I'll tend to go digital, but only if I can find a gift card deal, I would never pay full whack storefront prices on digital games, even smaller titles a £ or two can be saved by getting a gift card. 

[shinymcshine]

Change of direction on Loot Boxes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65855157

 

"Ukie has published principles that it believes will allow the industry to self-regulate the use of loot boxes."

 

Erm, not sure that's a solution TBH - sounds like they'll get away with adding small print in T&Cs and carry on much as it was:

 

"Ukie says games companies will disclose the presence of loot boxes before someone chooses to buy a title, and games will have to show clear probabilities before the purchase of a loot box."

[radiofloyd]

Blizzard games coming to Steam.

 

https://www.gematsu.com/2023/07/blizzard-entertainment-games-coming-to-steam-starting-with-overwatch-2-on-august-10

 

Hopefully this means Diablo IV will come to Steam.

[one-armed dwarf]

It's interesting to me when a company announces they are putting their games on steam, but you still need to run their own launcher within steam. So in a sense, it's jumping through an additional hoop

 

On the other hand it helps a lot with running that same game on a steam deck. Well, some of the time, some launcher integrations just don't work at all on deck. Battle.net works fine tho last I checked when I ran WoW on a linux laptop

[DANGERMAN]

it'd be nice if this was a way to remove some of their DRM, but yeah, it's actually another layer. Shame, I'd play Diablo if they removed it

[Sly Reflex]

If it requires me to install more shite, it's not getting bought.

 

Also I hate that all games sort of have their own mini launchers now. Why is this an acceptable thing? I'm not talking about a window with some settings things in or whatever, but actual shit that's like here's all our other games and sign into our accounts. Fucking miss me with that. It's a right piss take. 

[radiofloyd]

It doesn’t bother me so much but I noticed it with Divinity and Cyberpunk.

[one-armed dwarf]

It mainly only annoys me when the launcher tries to provide for something that's already pretty well integrated into steam

 

Like cloud saves, with the mass effect legendary edition. Cloud saves work mostly fine on steam (sometimes I have to resync, not sure why). But EA did it within this launcher thing, which was very annoying for my PC->Steam Deck playthrough. Sometimes I would shut the game down and I guess the launcher crashed in the background cause it's on linux or whatever, and doesn't exit as gracefully. Have to start up the deck again just to confirm the origin client syncs the files across to PC.

 

There's worse examples though like when Bioshock had a launcher added to it which straight up breaks the game entirely on steam deck.

 

I don't use my deck as often these days, but when I do it's for these kinds of old games so adding in stuff like that gets my goat. It's just friction, and sometimes blocks use entirely

[Sly Reflex]

I genuinely thing that if you are sold something through a store front, that should be the only point of check in. We all know they install this shit for data gathering and store fronts so you might buy there instead of the place you are, but it's intrusive bloat.

 

I mean sure, have your EA, EGS and Ubi sign ins, and the game goes off those, but there should be no need for more software on top.

 

APEX Legends gets it right. You download it, put in your EA nonsense and then you can just play. You don't need any Origin or whatever it's called now.

 

It makes me wonder how much population these games lose because people cannot be bothered to fuck about.

 

I understand it's sort of the same on console now with many EGS log ins. I don't know how obtrusive that is though, I only have stories of what people have told me.