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The Thursday letters page doesn’t think there’s any point in making a PlayStation 6, as a reader has an apparently obvious idea for Mario Kart 9.
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Familiar problem
Very sad to see even more jobs lost in what is very much beginning to seem like a sick and broken video games industry. That said… how were there 277 people working on XDefiant? I played it a bit, and it was okay, but it was basically just a generic first person shooter. It seemed like the sort of thing a fairly small team could make with existing graphics and know-how, since it didn’t do anything new or unusual.
I don’t know how many people were working on Concord but I’m going to guess it’s a similar number. The were apparently working on it for eight years and that it is a long time to be paying for hundreds of employees, none of which are generating any profit.
The amount of people, money, and time needed to make these games is extreme even by modern standards and I do not understand why Ubisoft and Sony keep banging their head against the wall, trying to do the same thing again and again and failing again and again.
But the biggest issue, to my mind, is that not only are these things monstrously expensive but that is causing the publishers to be ultra conservative about their designs, which means they turn out to be super generic and not appealing to anyone. XDefiant is just Call Of Duty but not as good, while Concord is Overwatch but not as good.
It’s a Catch-22 situation: live service games are too expensive and risky to make, so the publisher insists on something as familiar as possible, and then no one plays it because they’ve seen it all too many times before. Ubisoft should just give up.
Taylor Moon
Nobody’s listening
I’m beginning to think the reason that PlayStation is in a slump at the moment is because Shawn Layden isn’t working there anymore. I never paid any attention to him at the time but everything he’s said since has been 100% accurate and I can sense his frustration that he knows nobody is ever going to take his advice.
There is no point in a PlayStation 6 or a next gen Xbox. You’d need a two hour Digital Foundry video to even tell the difference in the graphics and ordinary people are not going to care at all, just like he says.
I can just imagine that Hermen Hulst reading why Layden has been saying and thinking he must be full of it, but I know who’s making more sense at the moment and it ain’t him, not after that bizarre AI ‘explanation’.
Koffee
The latest buzzword
I really do not understand what Sony is trying to achieve by talking about AI. As GC points out, nothing they say seems to make any kind of sense, to the point where you genuinely don’t know what they’re talking about. How is AI going to ‘innovate’ anything? All AI can do is copy, that’s the whole point of it. Do they mean they’re just going to have it put random ideas in a blender and come up with whatever combination? If they’re thinking of something that wacky, I really think they should’ve explained it better.
All the really mean, I assume, is that they’re going to sack a bunch of low-level developers and make games with as few people as possible, until they realise that it was all a terrible mistake and they have to go back to doing things the way they did originally, back when everything worked.
We’ve seen it with NFTs, we’ve seen it with live service games, and I’m sure it’ll be something else again after AI. I get it, they have to use buzzwords to attract investment money but at least with NFTs you weren’t constantly slashing your staff numbers in a way that’s going to be very difficult to reverse if you ever feel you need people, and not robots, to make your games again.
Cranston
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Campaign for change
A lot of interesting speculation about Mario Kart 9 recently but I’m surprised that no one has mentioned what seems to me to be the most obvious solution of what to do next: a story mode. It was the one thing that Diddy Kong Racing did better than Mario Kart and yet Nintendo has never tried to do something similar.
At this point, given modern tech, it wouldn’t be hard to do it better on the Switch 2, so I’d be surprised they don’t go that route. It’ll seem so different and new that they can then get away with the multiplayer not changing that much, apart from whatever new gimmick they add.
I’m going to be honestly surprised and disappointed if this is not what happens.
Zeucker
Judgment Day
I’m not sure where this sits in the spectrum of legally grey areas, and I have no appetite for upsetting Nintendo’s famous army of IP protectors. However, I found this AI generated (I know), 1950s style movie trailer for a fake Super Mario Bros. film fascinating.
I actually like the retro style it’s going for – not too lifelike and with a mix of people and puppetry – and some of the character designs are great. Well, if you can see past the objectification of every female role. Although perhaps that just makes the trailer authentic to the general video game industry.
With AI in its infancy it’s easy to see how creative types across all forms of the arts would be concerned about where AI could go in just 5 to 10 years.
retro_gaming_san (PSN ID)
GC: One thing you can say for AI is that it’s going to keep Nintendo’s lawyers in gainful employment for the foreseeable future.
Low priority
I didn’t realise that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 still isn’t working properly, that is shameful. I guess we’ve always known it, but publishers didn’t learn a thing from Cyberpunk 2077 and nothing has changed. Everything has to be pushed out when the deadline says and whether it works is always secondary.
A lot of the blame for this falls on us gamers, as we buy the games anyway (often pre-ordering them, for no reason) and seem to forgive failures a bit too quick for my liking. Everyone accepts Cyberpunk 2077 as a classic now and I have seen some fans get quite angry when the failures of its launch are brought up, as if it’s unfair to mention it.
If the problems from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch didn’t make publishers think twice then I don’t think anything will. Maybe it would have been better for the games industry as a whole if CD Projekt had gone under as a result of the problems.
Beyond something of that scale happening I think publishers will aways take it as worth the risk of a game not working as long as they get it out in whatever financial quarter they’re aiming for.
It’s sad that whether a game is finished or not, and whether it works, is such a minor consideration but unfortunately that never seems like it’s ever going to change.
Pinky
Nostradamus writes…
I emailed in a few times saying I can’t see Nintendo changing much about the Switch 2, I’ve got a feeling they will pretty much keep everything the same, just a bit more power. It’s not going to be a Switch 2, it’s going 2 be a Switch 2.5 and judging by the leaks I was right.
Nothing much will change, and I’ve got a feeling everyone is going to be let down by it its going to basically be a Switch Pro and if that’s the case I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a massive flop.
David
GC: Do you also have a feeling what the lottery numbers are going to be this week? Asking for a friend.
Dynamic duo
So another live service game (another first person shooter at that) has crashed and burned and the first thing Ubisoft thinks to say is: ‘Don’t worry, we’re still going to make more!’ This was exactly what Sony did after Concord was shut down, but who are they talking to? Certainly not us gamers, who made it very clear exactly how interested we are in such games.
It’s investors, I guess, but surely if they’re only interested in money the one thing they wouldn’t want more of is live service games, because they know how difficult they are to make profitable. Not unless you want to wait another 20 years for the law of averages to give Sony and Ubisoft a hit.
These two really do seem the outliers at the moment, with everyone else having got the memo that live service games are too unpredictable to spend vast amounts of money. You don’t see more financially sensible companies like EA or Take-Two doing them. Heck, not even Microsoft has got involved.
If even the people that have brought Xbox to its knees have worked out it’s not a good idea to waste time and money on a game that’s going to cease to exist in just a few weeks or months then you know you’re doing badly. Wake up Sony!
Sousball
Inbox also-rans
Just a quick thing that popped into my mind, why no Strontium Dog film? Series? Jonny Alpha. It screams out for the treatment, then Rebellion can make a game of it because they bought 2000 A.D. Oh my god, I’m having a fit imagining it. Also, VC Troopers and Halo Jones. I don’t ask for much. Calm down.
Zombiekicker
I’m an older gamer and I’ve never known or even just met anyone in real life that owned a 3DO.
P.Ella
GC: That’s not surprising. It only sold a little more than 2 million units worldwide, which is less than the N-Gage.
Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk
The small print
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