I think there are some things to maybe not advocate so strongly for in gaming. Or at least to have a sophisticated conversation about full of cautionary tales rather than stumping for corpos, as that often drives you in the direction of campaigning against your own self-interests.
“We need to get back to industry growth” Do we? Maybe follow that thread to certain possible conclusions, rather than being a mouth-piece for members of the C-suite who will be vacationing on a beach in Tahiti long after their ruinous acts and decisions have left behind a broken industry.
Who exactly are we inviting in for that growth? Lapsed gamers who came in during the pandemic? Ok. That works. But that’s a finite pool. What happens after that? Oh, all of these nextgen “gamers” who…as Brendan Sinclair recently said on The Game Business Show…need a “feed bag of content hooked up directly to their mouths and content shoved down their throat”?
That notion gives me goosebumps. Is that who we want in the pool? Ostensibly lazier gamers who can’t stomach anything other than push-button on-demand experiences with zero effort via tablets and phones? You do realize what demographic you’re describing, right? Casuals. Extreme casuals. But even more so, entirely non-discriminating consumers. Who do not want today’s gaming entertainment experiences. But just want the gacha game touch-control teddy-pickers. Those are not gamers; those are glorified TV watchers. They engage their brains less. They are mindless. Aimless. Idle fidget-spinner “I-listen-to-music-as-background-noise” drones who consume from two or three screens at a time because they literally DO NOT CARE about the content on at least one of those screens at any one moment in time.
And once “game developers” realize that the market has just become a bunch of drones just seeking escapes from idle hands so they don’t bite their fingernails or rub on their private places every 5 minutes, they will care less about the content they make. It will become a commodity. And the race to the bottom will have culminated.
We often lump the Roblox people and the Minecraft people into the same pool, demographic, and addressable market as the people who want to play the next Assassin’s Creed, Forza Motorsport, and Intergalactic. But these are actually not the same, exact markets.
Has investment in Roblox led to more money to spread around to feed the wants of those other demographics? Absolutely not. That “growth” has not benefited the rest of us. It has been adjacent and concurrent, but I would argue it is almost a mutually exclusive bolt-on.
Is lowering prices the way to get back to growth? Free-to-play did an absolute nose-dive past any notion of there being a barrier based on cost. Everyone who wants to play today absolutely has an access path to do so.
I do not necessarily have answers for these things. But the point is to say that it is absolutely more complicated than “the future generations aren’t interested in consoles” (which is actually untrue + gaming on mobile is actually not frictionless) or “I’m not the target audience anymore”. Maybe it’s just a fact that those people voicing those perspectives actually just care less about gaming. Which is fine. But maybe they just don’t have the skin in the game to accurately address the market dynamic holistically.
I’m not going to advocate for the future of Wall-E, where, in order to show some positive percentage of growth, we invite in a demographic of people who are unwilling to lift a finger, figure out how to connect a RF switch-box to their TV (an analogy), make deliberate choices about their games, care nothing about gaming other than what is the lowest-cost-of-access, so they can float around on a hover chair and be beamed mindless blank screens. That evolution has been evolving in a creeping tide and it has absolutely harmed the industry and the hobby.
Industry growth should not come at the expense of industry extinction. But should allow it to evolve and progress by encouraging investment without leading to a race to the bottom.
I have some very austere philosophies on the Game of The Year discussion. First and foremost of which is that no one should be having this conversation until December of the release calendar. Amongst other reasons why, I feel it is actually denigrating and demeaning to the creatives and to the devs of studios whose games have yet to actually even come out yet.
But on Friday, Polygon decided they needed to be one who fired first. And there seems to have been a host of several articles across the internets concerning “what are your current picks for GoTY”?
We need to give games room to breathe. And to live in their own space. We’re not all game reviewers and we do not need to process the impact of games on us in the same 1 to 2-week crucible of crunch trying to meet a deadline.
Drinking deeply of games should be in the same manner in which you try to imbibe a good wine. You’ll never be able to tell whether there are hints of chocolates, citrus, oak, and other flavors unless you hold the game in your mouth, let it splash over all parts of your tongue, give yourself time for the flavors to hit and change and change you as it is ingested.
Too often we allow our commentary on games to be encapsulated in the social media cycle of clout chasing and the need to be seen instead of saying what we really think and feel. Games will hit you once upon the experience and then that experience will change and shift over time as you get further from it, as you take more things into consideration in interpreting its experience as you allow yourself time to think about it from all sides. I’m not saying you need to wait two decades until you’ve had more life experiences to be able to speak on how you felt about a game when it came out vs when you are an older, different being.
Those conversations are important ones to have too. Ones that we also do not allow enough space for in the gaming community. But by pushing the narrative of “what is my GoTY right now/so far”, we actually eke value out of the term.
And it should mean something. In our effort to “take back GoTY” from the media, we’ve already bastardized a once vaunted label and diluted it to just mean “my favorite game of the year”. In the application of the GoTY label, I feel we are often trying to overly laude a game’s merits by bestowing on it some transitory label, that is also simply transactional; because most pundits and influencers who use it are just trading a disingenuous critical opinion for attention. It is a transaction that is both fleeting and inconsequential. It means nothing until a game is actually held in regard in comparison to that year’s graduating class of games, and so nominating it to that year’s Hall of Fame means little when the full competitive field has not been delivered yet.
You can fully say that a game is your favorite so far this year. That makes sense. And it makes sense when something comes out that supersedes it. GoTY should be a gem held in reverence. It should also be possible for you to intellectually separate the notion of GoTY as a matter of critical acclaim from “favorite game of the year”, or “most fun game of the year”, as is our Superlative category on E2KG. Because sometimes we have more fun playing a game, and there is game with high replayability, a gaming world that we live in, a do-loop that is so satisfactory to us, that that may exceed what we want to anoint as the critical darling of Game of the Year.
Simply put, GoTY has become a label that has become weaponized. Either in the platform war, the dogmatic war between AAA, AA, and indie games, the design war of Western v Eastern, the genre war, or any other minor skirmish or regional Low-Intensity Conflict that dusts up in the ongoing battle of gamer hypocrisy and disingenuity. The guerrilla tactic of declaring an interstitial GoTY every time a major release drops, every month, every quarter…the engagement farming tactic of an influencer asking “what is your game of the year so far?”…is just that. Efforts to spool people up, invite either outrage or hyperbolic game-gushing for the sake of fanning flames.
Just play games. Imbibe them. Live them. Drink deeply of them. Breathe them in. And isolate the conversation that makes you choose one above all to the only time in which it is warranted for such a conversation to exist. Once. At the end of the year. Anything else is just super-lame.
I wrote at length on BlueSky this morning about all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth I have been doing over the Nintendo Switch 2. The hand-wringing. Agonizing. It is much the same as I have done over the iPad Pro. And again two times over now about GPUs. And I realized this afternoon in an epiphany…this is the sort of thing that people do when they are priced out of the market.
It has led to a reorganizing of the natural order of things. That being the sequence of things on my Major Purchase Planning List. There are things that have dropped off. Things that have been substituted. Things where I have had to re-orient my target to a SKU decidedly downscale.
In GPU-land, over the last two generations, I had become an RTX XX70 Ti and above consumer. Chancing to grab a 3080 Ti and a 4080 to-boot along the way. I am now looking firmly at the vanilla 5070 and maybe even the 5060 Ti and/or 5060. These are the times; they are a-changing.
It’s funny when the pundits crow their own misbegotten and claimed forewarnings that “the gaming industry is changing”. Funny how they never add that perfunctory stamp to that claim “…and as a result, you may be priced out of things you would have normally enjoyed.” Funny that they try to walk this line that everything is getting more expensive for the supplier, but you, the buyer, should somehow miraculously expect prices to remain the same. And if they don’t, then you are entitled to yell and scream about it. This is in strict, clinical, academic opposition to the laws of economics we all learn as children.
I prefer to dwell in reality. And to make decisions. Often those decisions are hard. Unpleasant. Uncomfortable. Difficult. Unfair. I find, however, that when I unchain my mind from past paradigms to think beyond entitlements, I often stumble upon unique solutions that I hadn’t allowed myself to consider before when things were easy. To consider technical paths that I had previously thought too onerous or inconvenient.
I’m not sure where this will take me. But the options I am juggling right now…let’s just say that things could get very exciting.
The GPU market at retail is a mess right now. And the answer that “MicroCenter has the RX 9070 XT in stock every day until 3pm” is a disingenuous take that everything is ok for everyone else in the global market who CAN’t get to a MicroCenter. Anything that is in stock tends to be overpriced. RTX 5080’s are going for $2100 and up. That for a card with a $999 MSRP.
Tech Spot Ran a story today about a retailer selling cards at MSRP but only via lottery.
Lottery.
I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry. I need a GPU. I’m trying hard to convince myself that I don’t need three. I had an RTX 4070 Super crap the bed last week. I don’t really want to replace it with another GeForce card. But good luck nabbing an RX 9070 XT. The only MicroCenter within striking distance only has the RX 7800 XT in sufficient stock that I’d be willing to get in a car and drive the 1.5 hours to get there without fear that they would be out of stock by the time I got there. At the end of the day, that might still need to be the move. The only other time things were this bad was during the pandemic. When no RTX 3000-series card could be easily obtained, I opted to go Red for the first time and got two RX 5700 XTs. It was a wondrous brief moment in time that allowed me to stave off stepping up to 3000-series cards until they were readily available at retail.
I’ve temporarily replaced the RTX 4070 Super with a Radeon RX 6700 XT. But Avowed is giving that card fits. And in my box with a RTX 3080 Ti, Monster Hunter Wilds is also making that card feel like it’s in a hallway fight with Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. In my box with an RTX 3070 Ti, which is only connected to 240Hz 1080p displays, things are copacetic. But of course if I were to upgrade the other two, I probably wouldn’t want that to be the only RTX 3000-series card loping along.
Somewhere in here I’ll make a decision. Right now trying to upgrade my Apple ecosystem to the latest M4 announcements that came out last week has me preoccupied. But anytime I have to fire up Avowed or Monster Hunter Wilds I am reminded of this itch.
Admittedly I need to do enough testing to reassure myself that this is solely a symptom of those two games not being well-optimized. I know that’s the going conventional wisdom. But I always like to reinforce that with actual metrics I take in the lab. And I just haven’t had enough time to run different performance checks; multiple games on the 6700 XT that have known good performance envelopes. And then other titles on the 3080 Ti that are recent releases in the last six months.
The thing is I do not expect this issue to be rectified until well into May / early summer. And by then we’ll be hearing about nVidia’s mid-cycle refreshes of Supers and additional Ti’s. It’s enough to make me think about just going back to 1080p gaming and not worry about 1440p. I prefer frames over res, hands down no doubt.
But another very serious consideration is to start gaming on MacOS. I have a Mac mini M4, and my MacBook Air M4 shows up tomorrow. Both should be pretty capable of gaming, no? I’ve given myself an easy checkpoint by downloading and installing Steam on the Mac mini M4 and Civilization VII. More to follow.
PC World reported last week that nVidia’s newest GPUs are having a problem playing games from the early 2000s that use the PhysX API. While I agree with the author’s main takeaway, that this is not the ELE that many YouTubers proclaim it to be, it did make me reminisce about how much I play older games.
A bit on that first part. The article attributed PhysX to nVidia. Even the Wikipeia entry says this in its first line. But they bypass the actual origin of PhysX (the Wikipedia getds it right further down). It came out of a small startup called Ageia in the early 2000s (it went retail in 2004), who sold PhysX cards as an add-in card to go into a short-length PCI slot and run alongside your GPU. When Ageia need to close-up shop after the bubble burst and after the industry suffered mass consolidation or outright dissolution of the GPU, SoundCard, and add-in card PC market, Ageia sold its IP to nVidia. I couldn’t afford the Ageia card at the time and was happy to see it get absorbed into the GeForce stack. Also gobbled up by consolidation were S3’s API, S3TC, which went into DirectX and OpenGL, as well as elements from the 3Dfx stack (Voodoo technologies and the Glide API) when nVidia also laid claim to them.
OK. With that settled…again, I don’t think there is much ado about this. As a technologist, despite all this ongoing hubbub about game preservation, some level-setting needs to be done. Just how long should a game be playable? Many will assert that a game should be playable forever.
This mostly from the outrage bandits and engagement merchants. But that just isn’t practical. We have a hard enough time keeping things working from OS to OS upgrade. A game working into perpetuity is preposterous. It is also ridiculous to think that we will be able to set some standard, like “20 years” and apply that to all games as a rubric. Every game is different. Of different scope and scale. To say nothing about all of the technical elements that are beyond any one developer’s or publisher’s sphere of control. Things like APIs get broken every day. And so any effort in that vein will eventually fall apart.
But I do like playing me some older games. A lot, really. I’m that quintessential gamer who has started dozens of games and will play through the first 50% of the game but not finish it. And yet that will not keep me from coming back to it. Usually because I get distracted and do not want to stick with any 1 game for a single sitting when there are so many other games constantly passing by my windshield. But those beginnings, those openings…can still be like a warm blanket on a freezing cold night. Comfort food. I will often go back and revisit games that are 20 years old or more. And often re-start a game several times before finally embarking in a run to actually finish it. And, yes, I have often come up against the game I was trying to go back to once again and begin again and finally hit that magical point in the timeline when it was broken.
But in a lot of ways, while I lament this missed opportunity, I just chalk that up to the unfortunate reality of the passage of time. I also quickly get over it when I am reminded, once again…I now have time to get to the other 300 things in my backlog. Sometimes being a gamer is both a blessing and a curse.
But mostly, it is just a blessing that there are so many games to play.
The excitement for a new console. There isn’t much anything quite like it. I’ve only nabbed a few precious machines on actual launch day in my almost 50+ years of gaming. I stood in line for the Nintendo Wii and walked away with one in my proud hands on launch day. It was at a Toys R’Us. So that makes it even more special. I pre-ordered the Nintendo Switch from Game Stop and received it on launch day. I also pre-ordered the Xbox One Scorpio and did not receive mine on launch day, even though it shipped that day. The UPS guy didn’t deliver it that night, although he claimed he did. A quick routing through the concierge-level service I receive from Amazon got me my unit the second day. I also received the emergency backup I ordered when the UPS driver tried his scam. And obtained a third on my drive home from work the day after launch.
Did I ever mention just how much of an Xbox fan I was?
I also bought my original Xbox from Game Stop on launch day.
Did I ever mention just how much of an Xbox fan I was?
Yesterday, Eurogamer reported on the intended Nintendo plan for further marketing its inbound device, the Nintendo Switch 2, beyond its initial Direct on 02 April 2025. It’s a bit startling, actually. Four hour slots for people.
Yes, sure, there’s a whole pre-sign-up process and a 60 minute arrival window for you to be there. But a four hour time-block for going hands-on with a device prior to release is unpredecendented in the tech industry. Much less the gaming industry which has been inundated by SKU shortages and scalpers since the PlayStation 2 launched. Those time blocks will only up to 2.5 hours in the US I believe, so we Americans, likely due to our unruly behavior and inability to be civilized about anything, are being put on a much shorter leash. Still. This windows are bonga.
What’s weird to me is that Nintendo, with all of its market share and most, feels the need to market its product so strongly. That the Switch 2 is going to sell like Taylor Swift tickets is no secret. And it’s not like we don’t know or understand what the device is going to do and who it is for. This is no Apple Vision Pro, or PlayStation Portal. No one is asking “Who is this for?” So why the need for such a wind-up?
I’m not sure. One possibility is that this thing is not going to be in the ballpark of the price people are predicting. If it goes for north of $349.99, then, yeah, maybe there is a need to put it in the hands of real customers in order for them to get their hands wrapped around the price once you announce it. To be able to justify and rationalize it. In a year when GTA6 is coming out and the Nintendo Switch 2 won’t be able to play it, it might be a tougher row to hoe. To present to a gamer the need to pay $399.99 for a console that can’t play GTA6 when they already have an XBox or a PlayStation that can’t play GTA6.
It’s almost as if Nintendo is going to have to have some electrifying exclusives to justify the cost of the Nintendo Switch 2.
Regardless, it’s still an exciting time to be a gamer. In the year of the launch of a new console which will tip the industry dynamic and make some things change. I’m not the target demographic or audience for the Nintendo Switch 2 as a PC-only gamer. But I’m still excited for the changes, for the potential. And to see my fellow gamers who it is for be made happy.
Admittedly, I toe-dip too much. I get a new game. I play it long enough to gain initial impressions and describe the bulk of the systems that I believe the game holds. Talk about it a bit with friends. After a few discussions, I may keep playing it on the regular for another week or so. But soon enough, something else new comes along. Or maybe even an old classic comes along that I’ve been jonesing for. Or I feel the yen to hit the skies or the black again in a flight sim or space sim. The need to burn donuts with my Thrustmaster Wheel and Pedals sets in the latest racing sim. The short of it is, there are too many genres and game types I like…that I find addictive…that cause me to rabbit. And over the past few years I’ve become worse and worse about getting back to the new titles I procure in a steady, disciplined backlog rotation and in a timely manner.
That’s to say nothing of the hardware reviewer lifestyle I continue to perpetuate despite giving up the cape on writing reviews years ago. So when a new piece of kit comes into the studio, I also get distracted by the need to test it. And the best use-case for that test may not be the latest title that just came off the presses. To put it mildly, I’m a mess.
I used to pride myself on some pretty extreme levels of discipline. I used to be disciplined about gaming. About livestreaming. Making let’s plays. Blogging. As I’ve gained more responsibilities at work, or just as commuting has become more and more of a burden, I’ve dropped off of regular repetitions of many of those things.
But especially in gaming is where that loss of traction can be seen most plainly. I want to change that in 2025.
And in fact I’ve gotten a pretty decent start here in December? The new algorithm is nothing groundbreaking. Look, I’m never going to be the type of gamer who only plays one game. I am still doing a rotation. If I am lucky, I get in a max of 18 hours of gaming in a week. In order for me to complete most games, I’d have to hit that metric with ace precision, and stay on 1 game for two weeks straight. That would mean no Call of Duty sessions. No World of Warships. Limiting my freedom to go back to a title on a whim. But mainly, it crimps my ability to play live service games or the games I call my forever games. Like Forza, Civ, Age of Wonders…anything in that vein. So I won’t be going cold turkey on playing multiple games.
But I am trying to keep that sprawl to a minimum. Since I started this new paradigm, I’ve been playing the following games:
Monster Hunter: World
Batman: Arkham Knight
No Man’s Sky
Call of Duty: Black OPS 6
Metaphor ReFantazio
My plan is to keep the rotation that tight until mid-January. Or maybe until Spider-Man 2 comes out on PC. And I’ve been fine so far. No multi-game sprawl (beyond those five) FOMO. It’s giving me enough variety. I’ve probably played more Batman, No Man’s Sky, and Metaphor than Monster Hunter. And I am playing BLOPS6 more frequently than the others, as well. While this list misses a few things that cause me to normally kick out of any limited playlist….a racing sim, a flight sim, and a 4X game….I’ve decided to work hard at being ok with that. “Drinking deep draughts of a game” is what I call it, when I am going back to the well on one particular title more than I would have in the past. We’ll see how things go and I’ll update this theme when we’re down the road a bit.
As I prepare to take off on this new writing arc (or at least claim that I am) one of the things that I am struggling with is direction. I’ve long told myself that I want to get out of the “I told you so” articles that have become my norm over the past four years. I’ve very much returned to my pre-COVID state of mind, where I am content to let people believe what they want to believe. The lifestyle of being persistently and maliciously and intentionally uninformed while concurrently insistent that what you believe is the unassailable truth is a way to be. I’ve never allowed myself to be weighed down by those forces who prescribe to that way of life prior to the isolation and increased digital social immersion of the pandemic and I am very happy that I have found my way out of that darkness.
I’ve been wanting to embody the writing ethos of Peter Egan. Celebrated author of columns in both Cycle Word and Road & Track, Egan became my favorite writer during my peak motorcyclist years and has remained so. But I often struggle to find my own heart, pathway, and philosophy in his style. I can’t hook the same embodiment of the things that I love. And so I’ve been spending much reflection (really wailing and gnashing of teeth), trying to figure out why. Or just to even figure out what “it” is and where “it” comes from.
I won’t recant the stories of how I came to discover tech and gaming. I think those have been recited enough. The chronology of the events is well documented. What my id is struggling with now is the mental pathology of the love. What led to me falling in love with tech. How? And why am I still here trying to write about it?
When I look at Egan’s writings, I don’t have those experiences. I don’t have a childhood friend with a history of us tearing things down and building things in garage. Mainly because neither of our families could afford a house with a garage. I have some stories of weekend road trips to San Jose and times in San Diego going to Fry’s to hunt down prize components to build the next gaming PC. But those few stories are quickly superseded by the age of Amazon, Tiger Direct, and Newegg and stories of shopping online just don’t resonate as well.
So if there are no stories to tell…with an understanding that storytelling is THE primary way humans revisit themselves and their own history…storytelling being a key way that we dive into and embed ourselves in the notion of things that we love and how we came to love them…our way of conveying to others why we enjoy a thing, why we consider it important…I struggle.
But I think I have found the inkling of an answer. In writing a long-form post on BlueSky this weekend. I will repeat some of that here.
Peter Egan, Columnist
I’ve been trying to get back to writing a regular column and I realize that in trying to talk to people this thing is so much the wall. It’s hard to find people to talk to about games or tech because 98% of the discussion is about being judgmental rather than being curious. I didn’t get into games and I didn’t stick with games because I loved Sega, or loved Xbox, or loved PlayStation. I didn’t fall in love with Windows Phone or the Microsoft Band or TabletPC out of some corporate sense of loyalty to Steve Balmer or Gates.
I fell in love with gaming and tech out of a love for curiosity. Exploration. New experiences both in art but also in the discovery of humanity in the immersion of these experiences. In incorporating them into our fabric and pattern of life. In seeking out the questions to be asked, not simply for answers to pre-ordained ones. That curiosity…that discovery is what keeps me in love with gaming and technology. Not punditry. Not people’s judgements. Those things may be let to rot on the vine.
And so there, I think, it is. I fell in love with gaming and tech simply for the curiosity. Because, quite frankly, lacking the ability to go to space at the time, and given the much better mortality rate of being a gamer and a technoratti than space exploration, I am excited by the constant discovery of the new. In art. In the application of technology to life. In discovering new ways to experience a thing. Through the application layer of newly developed technologies. It may not be much. But that’s what I will try to write about. That is my new creative journey.
I only buy two brands of sneakers. Jordan’s. And New Balance. I have a lot of them. But only those two types. My approach to most things in my regular life is pretty simple. Not so much so in my digital life. As I sit here and type this out on a Chuwi Gemibook that shipped with Windows on it but I have since wiped and installed Ubuntu. The phone here within arms reach is a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5. The nearby tablet also a Samsung, the Galaxy Tab S7. But an iPad lies nearby. As well as a Kindle. There are PCs, mp3 players, headphones and all sorts of other gadgetry within this 10′ by 10′ cube. All of multiple makes, brands, and models. Nothing like my approach to sneakers.
But I recently decided that I would get my digital life much more like my clothing one. I’ve decided that I am only going to play games on PC and have since gotten rid of all of my consoles. 3 of 4 are now gone, with only the XBox Series X left to take flight. I’ve settled on using Sennheiser as my brand for wired headphones. And today, I made probably one of the more significant down-selects that were on my list of down-selects.
I made moves in the direction of getting Android out of my life for good. I don’t say this with malice. It’s not like I’ve been thoroughly disappointed with Android. Years ago, while the iPhone was only on AT&T and I was a Verizon customer, I went with the Motorola Droid. And I’ve stuck with Android ever since. Oh, I’ve owned iPhones. Five different models. But that pales in comparison to all of the Android handsets I’ve owned. Mind you, a lot of this came out of the stint I did as a smartphone & tablet reviewer. And then from the years after said stint that I continued living my life as if I was still a smartphone & tablet reviewer.
A lot of this stems from my decision to go PC-only with gaming. I thought “Why stop there?”. And I was originally planning on keeping Android around. I was going to use iPads as my choice of tablet, Android for phones. Then I started haranguing myself for not just picking one of either iOS or Android for both. As I thought more and more about pulling the trigger on a tablet upgrade, and looked only at the Galaxy Tab as it was really the only viable option for high-end, I felt limited. The iPad had more options at better price-points. The increased demand for the iPads over the Samsung Tabs just allows them to get down to a lower price. I felt like it gave me more options. And so I broke. While I am still vacillating over a Mini, Air, or Pro, I went ahead and pulled the trigger on an iPhone Pro Max and an iPhone Pro; one for me, one for the job.
And an Apple Watch Series 10. It’s funny when I think about this being my last weekend with any Android devices for a long time. I was buying Android tablets before Google even made Android support for the tablet form-factor official. I was there for the Xoom. I eyed ChromeOS as the younger brother Momma’s Boy that got all of the doting and attention even though it was the older brother Android that protected the younger one and made sure he got through school. While I look forward to my new life with a simplified set of digital options, I take no pride in bidding Android, XBox, PlayStation, and Nintendo adieu. Or the myriad others that are soon to be shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s been a great ride. And I wish these brands the best of luck in their endeavors.
It is no consumers job to make sure that Concord is a good video game. And it is not up to any gamer to speak well of Concord. It’s not my job to “find at least one good thing to say about every game”. Anyone who has spent some time listening to me knows that one of my clichés is “Make your game, test your game, put your game up for sale on the market. If it sticks the landing, garners good buzz, then I’ll gladly pay to check your game out. I get paid to test software. I am not going to pay you to test your game for you.”
But, the opposite is also the case. It is no one’s job…no one elected any influencer…YouTuber, Live-Streamer, Twitter account…to tell you that you should be disinterested in a game because, by their oh-so-wizened analysis, they predict Concord will be a failure. So don’t even bother. Going so far as to say “I’m having a great time playing this game; not gonna pay for it though”. And so here is the case on why everyone who is in that end of the pool is wrong nine ways to Sunday.
Concord is not going to do Fortnite, Warzone, and Overwatch numbers. That statement is not the gotcha moment everyone thinks it is. Concord is not a flagship title. It does not occupy that position of prestige within the PlayStation portfolio. That development team is ~170 people.
People talk as if the entire fate of the PlayStation brand rests on the shoulders of Concord. It doesn’t. PlayStation’s portfolio outlook is that if Concord fails, it will be 1 of the 12 live-service titles that they have in development that does not work out. That’s WHY they have 12 of them in development. They expect that some of them will not catch fire. And success for those titles is not expected to be Fortnite, Warzone, Overwatch. The dev team is roughly twice the size of Battlestate Games. And Escape From Tarkov has a player-base of about 2 million players. Concord is only going to the PlayStation 5 on console. That and PC. The monthly active player count for Overwatch 2 is just now cresting close to 7mn, after years spent languishing between 1.6 and 3 million. I would say that if Concord captures and retains a player-count of 4 – 6 million active players, across both PC and PS5, it will be ok. Because that means that at an asking price of $40, the game will have made $160 – 240 million. And with a team that size there is no way it is even a $200 million budget game. And if it doesn’t do that, then the other 11 games that are in active development (including the ongoing work on Helldivers 2) will have a case-study to learn from. Which is another reason why businesses will sometimes take risks, prototype, launch new product lines, and see what there is to be learned.
The game should be free-to-play. Weird to me that they didn’t have that same energy for Palworld and Helldivers 2. Here we have two examples this year of games that asked for their money up front. And both have, to-date, been bonga successes that no one predicted. No one saw coming. In fact, many of the pundits who are projecting the failure of Concord were also equally pessimistic of Helldivers 2. But in the wake of that, most sane people agree that both of these games have achieved a level of success that must be acknowledged, even if it only lasts for a couple of years. Huh. By the way, also funny that the people who yammer on about how Helldivers 2 should be multi-platform (“Who does it help?”) have not also kept that same energy for Palworld . More on that later when we swing back to visit the causality of all of this Concord Sturm und Drang.
Regardless, the game should be free-to-play. Overwatch was. No, Overwatch wasn’t. In fact, Overwatch was a paid title that launched at $40 on PC, $60 on console. And then there was a Collector’s Edition for $130. And it remained paid until 2022. Overwatch was retired, Overwatch 2 took over, and THAT game is free-to-play.
Under the paid regime of 2016 – 2022, Overwatch had a player-base of as much as 40 million worldwide. And an active player count in excess of 10 million monthly. Overwatch had earned $1 billion by 2017. They made that money by not only selling you the game up-front, but by also selling you loot-boxes. Remember those? You pay money, you get something random back in return, with no idea if it would be valuable or not. But…I know. That was then, this is now. Free-to-play is the way to go. Overwatch 2, under the free-to-play regime has struggled to retain favorable metrics and KPIs. Blizzard employees on the Overwatch 2 team have had their bonuses slashed, the game no longer occupies as prominent a place in the Activision portfolio. In its Q2 2023 earnings report, Overwatch 2 was referred to as being “not financially material for the company, with its emphasis and focus in investment then turning to ‘executing on the content roadmaps for larger core titles.’ (Active.io)
The Beta Player Counts were low. Therefore the game will be a failure. Maybe? Helldivers 2 didn’t have a beta and it did just fine. While here can be some corollary drawn between games with high player counts in beta, there is no clear negative corollary. In other words, it is not always the case that when a game has low player beta numbers it is not successful, which is the square the detractors are standing on. Neither Titanfall 2 or Gears of War 4 had beta player numbers that put them in the leading beta numbers for that year. And yet they charted at 18th and 20th of the best-selling games for that year in the US.
My argument here is not a proclamation that the game will be “successful”. But that people are applying their own notion of success to what the game has to do. And doing so on the basis of revisionist history at best, and at worst on things that are just plain wrong, false, and made-up. Concord does not need to be a bonga success. It does not need to be Helldivers 2, which no one expected. It does not need to be Destiny 2; the dev team is 1/3 of the size of the Destiny 2 dev team at peak, and that’s a very deferential percentage for those taking the opposing side of this argument. Concord needs to grab the attention of a core player-base and hold on to that, growing it slightly over the next few years. I’m also not arguing that it won’t ever go free-to-play. But it’s a stretch to assert that the game HAS to be free-to-play at launch off of the argument that everyone else in the market is. Because Rainbow Six Siege, the very definition of a hero shooter, is STILL charging a cover-charge, 9 years since its release.
There are hundreds of successful games that never get into the Game of the Year discussion. And never do bonga numbers the likes of Fortnite, Warzone, and Overwatch. And they are fine; they bring some money in, expend some via further dewvelopment investment, and the studio remains financially solvent. There is one reason that Concord is getting the Sour-Patch treatment on social media, and that is because it is PlayStation 1st party. Because if this game were 3rd party, we would not be having this discussion. And maybe that’s appropriate. Part of it is driven by PlayStation being mostly quiet on 1st party for a very long time. But it is also true that the result of their derived causality is that people are just talking to talk…to fill the air left empty . And their incorrect weighting of the importance of Concord and where it sits in the PlayStation portfolio will likely lead to incorrect predictions.
Let me end with an additional suggestion that we have to look at what Concord is trying to do in its appeal to the PlayStation install base . Knowing that there is a percentage of that demographic that finds story, creative narrative, and character evolution as a big get, Firewalk’s effort is to target that base. It’s week-to-week unfolding of an ongoing plot, reinforced by short video content, will harken the PlayStation user-base to pay attention to yet another franchise narrative that is evolving; that will lead to them falling in love with the game’s effort towards world-building. Only time will tell if this effort to use deep story to encapsulate a hero shooter and hope that it captures the tastes of the PlayStation user-base is successful or not.
Editor’s note: I did not have time to proof-read and do much editing, as I’m running to get to a podcast. I’ll swing back and do another once-over later
Rounding Off Infinity 