Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@Ralizah my thoughts exactly!

On the topic of game prices. I honestly think it's bananas people are surprised by the supposed $70 tag for next gen. I paid that for Street Fighter 2 on the SNES in the early 90s lol! That's almost what it costs to take my family of 4 to a movie for a couple hours of entertainment vs 50, 60, 100 hours with a game. Very few things stay the same price for decades at a time. And truth be told a game like God of War or even Spiderman ps4, I'd have paid 100 for those and not even felt ripped off for how much I enjoyed them. I even bought the meaningless $10 dlc for GOW after beating lol

@NEStalgia I don't think it's about value. I just think they want their games to keep selling at whatever price is necessary. More people play the games, and more people are more likely to stick to their ecosystem.

@Ralizah Most Nintendo titles aren't worth €60 to me, so I end up skipping most. On Wii U they had quite of lot titles that were only €40, but they don't do that anymore.

@redd214 Wait, did GOW have DLC???

@Octane it was just like an armor set and shield and a behind the scenes movie or something like that from what I recall. They had a deluxe edition that included it but later sold it separately. Was insignificant though, no extra real content/story or anything

EDIT: Just looked it up, nothing really impactful, for 10 bucks:

God of War Digital Soundtrack
God of War Digital Art Book
God of War PS4 Dynamic Theme
God of War Digital Comic – Issue 0
‘Exile’s Guardian’ Shield Skin
‘Death’s Vow’ Armor Set for Kratos
‘Death’s Vow’ Armor for Atreus

@redd214 In retrospect, I think HZD was worth full price, for sure, but I'm obviously not sad I waited for the price to drop as much as it did.

With that said, while I probably won't own a PS5 early enough for it to matter, I'd happily pay full price for the sequel at launch.

It'll be interesting to see if there's a decrease in sales from the MSRP price hike. I remember companies like Atlus and Capcom trying to push the $49.99 price tag for their 3DS games. It didn't... go well. Although Atlus still offered free extras and DLC with their new games, so, in retrospect, it probably wasn't that outrageous an ask on their part.

@NEStalgia LOL I'm imagining these giant piles of games boxes lying around your house, ready to teeter at any moment. Buy a shelf, ya slob.

I keep going back and forth on digital. At this point, I think I'm going to buy physical when possible and then, if the price gets hiked, sell it and buy the digital version at a discount. I'm tired of seeing games I didn't buy physically get way expensive online.

I feel like Rockstar's pricing is probably the happy, sane medium between the two companies. It took awhile for RDR2 and GTA V to drop significantly in price, but they eventually did. Not six months after launch, though, and never to crazy bargain bin prices like Sony is so fond of.

I mean, companies have been whale pricing for a long time. It has long been known that the majority of most games' sales are within the first week of launch. So you launch it at $69.99, fleece the sheep, and then drop it before long for the more patient people.

...I say that, but I'd pay $69.99 at launch for something like SMT V in a heartbeat.

@redd214 I see. Weird. I hadn't heard about it, but it seems like I didn't miss out on anything.

@redd214 prices going up on everything while wages stagnate or decline, and that's pre covid, is why pure entertainment that's not just premium luxury targeted can't, though. Technology products are supposed to drop in price over time, and generally do. And media in general (music, books, film) has gone down, not up, in price for a long time. Games technically have, too. Which is why it's silly to talk about necessary increases while profits are growing considerably.

Back with SF2, if we ignore Capcom being a factor, there's still the fact that games back then had much smarter markets, both in total consumers and total markets. The costs had to be spread among fewer purchasers. The carts themselves cost a lot per unit, especially with nintendos racketeering scheme (cheap discs are a huge reason Sony crushed N64 after all!). And there was limited variety of games to a limited market. Costs had to be high.

Today, even despite the trend of media price decrease, even despite the cost of carts, there are a LOT more game companies selling a LOT more games to a LOT more people, in a lot of additional countries. And they all want you to buy theirs. Declining price is the only way to make those goals meet. Sure they can get away with charging more for blockbusters, but that means overall reduced industry sales and now focus on handfuls of mega games. And if that were needed, we wouldn't be seeing these constant sales. As Ralizah and I were saying, its not about really raising prices at all. It's about fleecing the day 1 buyers that will buy at any price, that always buy at launch... Then normalizing price to reach the rest of the market.

That's risky and could backfire badly. It may well reduce those launch numbers, messing up internal metrics on sales predictions, and quarterly projections. And pushing more people to wait for inevitable price drops risks losing the sale entirely when their interest wanders and impulse buying is off the table. I know personally, waiting had lead to many "eh, i don't need that one anymore" cancellations.

@Octane yeah you didn't miss much really, I just enjoyed the game so much I figured why not throw them some extra bucks. Was my game of the generation by a wide margin!

@Ralizah It's the first day this week that isn't scorching hot outside, so I felt safe to turn on my PS4 and I tried out the gyro aiming in TLOU2.

Maybe to no surprise, but it comes with a bunch of sliders that allows you to change the sensitivity to your liking. It's very similar to Splatoon in that regard; allowing you to change the sensitivity between the X and Y axis. You can turn them off individually, or even invert them (which is separate from the regular inverted controls). I don't know why anyone would invert the axes for gyro, but it's possible

It feels good as well. I think I prefer it with the sensitivity turned up a little, since it gives you a bigger range of freedom. And the gyro is responsive, so that's not a problem.

Got a couple of headshots, but I've played the game without gyro and I've gotten a lot better at stick controls in recent years, so I don't know how much the gyro contributed to that. But when I do go back for the remaining collectibles, I definitely plan on playing with gyro enabled.

@Ralizah LOL, there's far too much for a shelf! I had a big book shelf that held maybe 1/5 of them all which collapsed years ago (cheap MDF shelving!) so then I went with stackable crates, but they only hold so much so t here's piles adopt the crates and boxes stacked on that. Including launch P5 TYH Edition in shrink wrap, Detroit, NNK2, Tearaway and all kinds of unopened PS4 games that I re-bought digitally. I love my physical collections, and I love "ownership" but at some point, digital starts looking reeeeeeally attractive With Switch I've still done a lot of physical collection (in no small part because storage space on Switch is so premium....and that will become a big consideration in PS5/XSeX as well.....) but its still losing on the convenience factor. I looked at W101 which is like 20% cheaper physical because, of course, but that game especially isn't one I'd go run and pick up the cartridge to play for 10 min, I'd want to just pick it out of my list briefly. And I recall trying to play it on the GamePad and hating it....not sure why I'd subject myself to that again on Switch.

Price hikes are kind of cynical since it's so clear they can't really do that and grow the market like they want, and that even the $60 pricing is really just whale pricing and always was. Of all the major publishers, the same ones that are whining about $70, how many do you know you can get that big new $60/$110 deluxe edition game for $20-25 bucks in a year, even digitally? It's an industry you get lost in the noise the moment the spotlight isn't on you. Its pricing not designed for $70 sales but to gouge the day one preorderers (a lot of which are teens), and then to have a larger range of numbers to take discount sales off. It's not a need to recover more money, it's a need for a new price strategy, and you're coming along for the ride.

It can and does backfire though. Back in the Wii and 3DS era, I'd give almost anything a try...it was only $40-50.....so I preordered tons of stuff to throw on the backlog. Some of it I never opened.. Some of that fell on me yesterday (Ohai Legend of Legacy and Stella Glow! Forgot about you....completely...!) With PSXBox I was more conservative with what I'd buy. The price difference just made me pause more. During the BB GCU and Amazon discount era it brought me back to that pricing. I was preordering more stuff I wasn't even sure about because it was priced well enough that I might enjoy it and it's worth it. Then the discounts ended and it all seemed so much more expensive again....around the same time I went digital and short of Nintendo 1P titles just started buying mostly older games for $20-40 and have a backlog miles long as a result. Raise prices to $70? My spending crashes. I'll buy those few things that I really loved and wait for the rest for the bargain basement. I have 6 years of backlog already anyway. It's a good way to shrink market.....especially when the people targeted by the price hike is mostly the hardcore gamer who only has a finite amount to spend in the industry total but makes up most of that early launch revenue, they're going to just cut back and buy less. EA and Ubi stand to win from that in the short term, but an industry contraction isn't going to benefit ESA overall. In my case each time they raise it it makes me consider the purchase with more gravity and buy on less of a whim. What often happens is then outside that launch window, the hype dies or the cracks show, or attention just wanders to new hype, and that old shiny gets a little dull. I end up never buying or waiting for years until I see it truly bargain basement to buy it. So where the industry wants to get another $100 from me by nickel and diming $10 per game, they end up losing $1000 from me for games I'd have bought for the backlog but end up skipping entirely as once I consider and delay it I tend to just move onto something else and never buy it. Or buy it for $20-30 years later.

Rockstar can get away with avoiding the bin because Rockstar makes like 2.5 games per decade and spend more on marketing than development. Personally I think it's madness that GTAV hasn't gone bargain basement yet. I'm all for preserving value, but at some point the product is just ancient and irrelevant.

"Hold L2 to Fleece Customer."

@Octane Nice, thanks. This definitely makes me want to play the game sooner. I'm shocked ND is one of the only PS developers to properly implement gyro aim.

@NEStalgia Well, considering GTA V is somehow still somehow charting in the top 10 every week in the UK (and probably other Western countries as well), I don't know that I'd call it irrelevant. I actually think they could have gotten away with Nintendo pricing for GTA V. It's crazy.

Do you buy LRG releases, btw? I'm torn on them: they're usually more expensive than the digital versions of games by quite a bit. But, at the same time, their limited status make their value as a product explode.

@Ralizah The game is riddled with accessibility options, so I was kinda surprised it wasn't there at launch. Still good to see more devs are starting to support it.

@Ralizah And I STILL do not understand the appeal, at all, of GTAV. I just don't get it. I played it. It was "ok"....nothing special. Too short. The heists were cool, but there were too few. The psycho hero was just obnoxious and irritating....I guess great humor for middle schoolers that want to be edgelords. It seems like a wholly disposable game to me that could have had annual releases. Watch_Dogs had less personality and more fun. I really don't understand how that is the pole upon which the entire video game market hangs it's tent....for a decade. I thought GTA Cowboy would replace it, at least, but no....that wave crested and fell and GTAV remains atop.

I'm not a big LRG fan. Their model appeals to the irrational collector in me, and I collect everything I get my hands on....but I just can't quite get myself to spend more for the less convenient version of a product just to get the physical thing that ends up in a box untouched for decades. I suppose it's a much better "investment" than any other physical game, so I'm really "doing it wrong", but.....I just can't quite bite on it. I've bought a few limited runs from other publishers....but then always felt dirty when the same game is like half that price or less, digitally, and it's usually for games I'd rather have available in my digital library than grabbing a disc/cart for. Disc/cart works for big epic RPGs I'll be playing for 2 months straight. The bite size games are more fun to just rotate through them on a whim.

Heck, even the big games I'm wondering, for my personal preference. I ended up with 3 copies of FE3H. One digital with the vouchers, one physical, because I needed physical, and another physical I was supposed to get for someone else who decided they didn't want it, and I forgot to cancel and ended up stuck with it.......but after I dropped the game last year I'd probably never have gone back to the boxes to get the carts to play again because I was kind of "over that" - but browsing through my digital collection the other day trying out various games and not finding what I was 'in the mood" for (Okami...want to save that still, Oninaki - very pleased with the game, but not in the mood for the sombre tone, DQ - can't decide if I want to play the PS4 pretty or the enhanced version still. TCS3....into it, but not at the moment.....Poke Mystery....too grindy, not in the mood..... So I picked FE3H as a big game I had put down and forgot about....and got hooked again. If I didn't have it digital that almost certainly wouldn't have happened despite owning 2 physical copies still in plastic.

In some ways it almost makes me wish MattriXBox, and the identical PS program they reversed after Mattrick imploded had happened....physical box and disc collection, digital licenses. At the time I was grateful it didn't....but there's actually a cool part of that in hindsight. It's not like the discs are worth much without the patches anyway.....

I seriously need someone to explain how that game is still selling. Who's buying it at this point? It's gotta be getting pretty close to 1 copy per console

@NEStalgia I admit I have not played GTA V but I played GTA 1, 2, 3 and a little of IV.

But for me GTA is to be played to cause mayhem. I mean driving crazy and beating hookers with a bat.

Never really cared about any of the stories inside. Aren't they all about generic gangster is stuff like that?

@Zuljaras Pure sandbox, make your own fun? Maybe that's the appeal.... Though I'd think they're are better sandboxes.

I never really like empty sandboxes. I need structure and purpose. That could explain why i don't "get it"

Wow, Days Gone is dragging for way too long. Ooh my goodness, it's been 20 plus hours, and it's still going, and there are 20 more hours to go(I checked). Why did the developers think to add so many side storylines in this game? I will never know. I am going to take a break from this and finish Doom 64.

@MsJubilee Can't you just ignore them and focus on the main quest? I think I quit after 5 hours or so.

@Octane No, those are all main quests, the only ones that are not are the Marauder camps, bounty hunter, and finding missing people quests you get from the three main camps. Everything else is mandatory. Oh, and the hordes, nest infestations, Nero Checkpoints, and ambush camps are optional as well.

The generic gangster stuff is fine by itself but it takes it's self too seriously now compared to the earlier games. It's why I prefer Saints Row, just over the top stupid fun even if GTA is the better sandbox. I also rate Saints Row as the better mayhem and destruction simulator over Crackdown too.

@jump IMO Saint's Row actually has more story and missions.

And Nolan North.