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Jurassic larks
At first, I thought all the talk of a video game crash and the end of console gaming was just fearmongering but having look into things in more detail I can see where the concerns are coming from. I don’t think consoles are going to disappear tomorrow, but I do think they are very much on the way out, because publishers have just made it so that they make no sense economically.

The number of people buying consoles hasn’t increased since the PlayStation 2 era and yet now games are more expensive than ever and focused on an increasingly small number of franchises. I’m not surprised they’re not attracting more customers, but what’s the alternative? Make cheaper games that don’t look as good? I don’t think that will go down well with existing gamers.

Nintendo were right to get out of the graphics rat race a long time ago and I hope they’re not silly enough to make the Switch 2 too powerful. The problem for people that like console style games is that there is already an alternative in mobile games and companies are going to find that increasingly tempting.

You can’t get the same sort of games on mobile simply because you can’t charge £70 for them but if they can bring in more money with free-to-play rubbish why wouldn’t you, if you were a business? I genuinely think we could see the industry start to go backwards next gen, in terms of the number of people playing and the number of companies involved.

It’s sad but modern gaming has become a dinosaur and because it’s not evolving there’s only one other thing that could happen to it…
Casper

One reason
I assume the deal for the rumoured digital only Xbox Series X is that Microsoft will be able to sell it for £50 or so cheaper than the PlayStation 5 but I really don’t see that making any difference. On paper it’s a decent price cut but if you’ve got your heart set on a PlayStation 5 it’s not going to be enough to change your mind, not given how expensive it still is.

Considering how Christmas last year went, and how bad the publicity has been so far this year, I think Xbox is going to be inventing new panic buttons to press by this time next year. There’s no evidence at the moment that they’ve got anything other than Hellblade 2 and Avowed lined up for release before 2025 and I think we can all imagine they’re not going to make much difference.

I don’t say this as a PlayStation fanboy, because that’s still two games more than Sony, but pretty soon these two companies are going to realise that games are all people really care about as motivation for buying hardware. Why this isn’t obvious to them already I don’t know but I think it will be soon.
Focus

Lost in translation
Interesting report about the Switch 2 coming out in March, not so much because of the news, which had already been leaked, but because it shows once again how bad some of the Japanese translations are for these stories. I looked at the original article and from my layman’s point of view it seems the Google Translate version is more accurate.

The official English one seems to have purposefully made the wording vaguer, to the point where it barely makes any sense. I don’t know how many English viewers the Japanese version of The Financial Times (which is what it is, as far as I understand) gets but I would imagine it’s enough to have a proper translator.

But the same thing happened the other week with the official translation of Sony’s discussion about multiformat games, which seemed to be completely different to what was actually said. Call me crazy, but if I was the head of PlayStation I’d like to get details about whether we’ll be publishing on Xbox right. And if everyone was getting confused I’d probably issue some sort of clarification. But maybe that’s just me.
Sykes

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Going 2:1
After reading Lampton’s Reader’s Feature it got me thinking: why don’t Sony and Xbox just get together and do a console together? It’s going to mean one console for the whole world if they both went 50/50 on it. They wouldn’t lose money on the console itself and their exclusives would be on one console and the money the game makes, whoever it is keeps the money.

Would make perfect sense because the only way budgets would be fine at $300 million is a price increase and I’m not willing to pay any more than £70. It wasn’t long ago people were saying that games need to go up. I remember one writing in to say £100 on a game would be fine for them, then when Sony put the price up by just £10 everyone was saying how dare they raise the price of a game.

Trust me, the only way gaming is going to stay around is if Sony and Xbox work together. Only problem is I can’t see that happening in the next 10 years or maybe not ever.
David

GC: PlayStation has much more market share than Xbox, so they’d be giving that up to go 50/50.

Call of Splatoon
Whatever Nintendo do next with Splatoon, I really hope it’s not just another low-effort sequel. Splatoon 3 made most Call Of Duty games look like a complete reboot. I was actually kind of shocked that Nintendo would put out a game with so few new ideas, even if the game was still good overall.

I wonder if they just thought that that’s how other shooter sequels are, from their perspective, so it was basically expected. Whatever they do it’s obviously going to be huge in Japan but hopefully they’ll try and do more to push it in the West as well. It seems strange to be hoping Nintendo will make an effort, and not being sure they will, but here we are.
Dr Foster

Secret success
I do find it odd how companies are always keeping the success of their games a secret and Baldur’s Gate 3 is an especially odd example. Like GC said, there seems no reason you wouldn’t want to show off how well it’s done, because that’s only going to make more people interested in trying it out. Instead, the best we can guess is somewhere between 11 and 30 million? That’s a hell of a range.

I don’t believe the Wikipedia list everyone uses is accurate, which basically means we have no idea what are the best-sellers, outside of GTA 5 being the top.

People will say it doesn’t matter but we’re talking about video games here, none of it matters. Personally I’d like to see what was successful and what wasn’t. And I’d especially be interested in Baldur’s Gate 3 because it was made outside the usual publisher system and yet has been a massive hit… probably.

As far as I’m concerned there should be weekly sales figures including digital every week, just to make things clear and get an impression of what people are buying. I really don’t see why not.
Leaner

80s remake
Big thanks to phil303 for pointing out that Rainbow Islands is available on the Switch eShop. I absolutely loved this game on the C64, along with Turrican, Dizzy, and Flimbo’s Quest, to name a few.

Possible Hot Topic suggestion, as we are used to remakes/remasters, what would your dream remake/remaster from the that era of gaming be?
Stew

Strange reactions
I downloaded the PS Plus three hour trial for Alan Wake 2 and, well, let’s just say I didn’t think very much of it. I like Twin Peaks and am a big fan of abstract narratives, but you really need to add a certain amount of believable dialogue and human reaction to surreal events occurring around the characters. In the Bright Falls police morgue we have an FBI agent performing a gloves free search of a foul chest cavity where DNA evidence could be found, when suddenly the sheriff literally switches dimensions and disappears.

‘Oh… he’s disappeared and look here at this bloated corpse sans heart. It just got up, despite being dead. Guess I had better shoot it and then ask my uncanny valley partner to respond in a flat detached manner as if this happens all the time’.

When you then pass a dead cop slumped against the door, whilst two others just take the story about a disappearing sheriff and a reanimated corpse at face value, you go into the waiting room and I literally couldn’t believe how stupid it all felt. No-one seemed to be shocked or stunned or reacting to anything in a remotely believable way. Alex just says ‘Meet you at the car’ and trots off.

I think if this would’ve gone down the Deadly Premonition route of being completely out there and full of so-bad-it’s-good moments then I might be tempted to purchase it and enjoy the nonsense but by all accounts, it’s meant to have this tone throughout the run time. For a story based game it feels incredibly weak. Am I missing something with the review scores or does it actually get better than the opening?
Wonk

GC: We’re with you. The game has its moments but not nearly enough of them to justify the higher review scores.

Inbox also-rans
Very glad to finally have some hints about NieR 3, it’s been absolutely ages since Automata. I know the last few weeks has been all about how long it takes to make games now, but I never expected that NieR would be the one to prove it.
Austin

If Metroid Prime 4 coming out this Christmas is the silver lining for the Switch 2 being delayed I am going to be completely okay with that. Can’t wait, to be honest.
Bronzefo

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