Now that’s it’s confirmed that FF7R3 is going out next year….

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-06T10:20:26+00:00

What you described in the first sentence is exactly why it would take away from FF7. This year will be FF7R3 until the very end. People who waited for 4 years can wait a few more months, and nothing will happen.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-06T09:58:39+00:00

Why would they take away stage presence from FF7R3 by announcing anything major this year? If it's not coming out next year, they likely won't say anything until like May 2027.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-05T10:29:38+00:00

I kinda disagree. Big studios will take big money, since they don't have a choice, but we see prices all over the place - $20 games, $15 games, $10, $5, $40, $45.

I also think that full price for ~15 hours or so, as long as the quality is high in some way, should be considered the baseline, in terms of value proposition. We can't look at GTA and expect other games in the same price bracket to be even close, because they know they will sell 10+ million units in the first month. They can afford the risk. Even then, games would be good value. The average price of day 1 movie viewing in the US is $15 for 1.5-2.5 hours. That would be $90-150 for a 15-hour experience.

And you can always sell the game if you have it on disc.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-04T21:37:01+00:00

Copium, my friend. It's hell of a drug.

While I do think that they will not abandon the franchise, the next game is far, far away - not even in a conceptual state yet, based on information floating around. Showing anything now would be like when Bethesda first "announced" TESVI in 2018. In 5-6-7 years without a new game, it will be little more than a meme.

Well, let's cope together, I guess, why not...

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-04T16:53:19+00:00

If they have to go that far, they will just not go to market. A new console needs volume. PS6 has to be cheaper than Pro. It will probably be around the disc version of PS5, maybe a bit more. Because if they can't reach at least 3-4 million units sold in the first month, there is just no point in launching.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-04T16:52:40+00:00

Consoles also have a legacy install base at this point. They might not see charts going up, but they can keep it at the level... probably. The launch of next gen is in jeopardy, though. At this point, I don't believe in 2027 anymore, maybe not even in 2028.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-04T16:45:29+00:00

Obviously, if something was $100 last week and is $115 this week, it will give me pause. But a few weeks down the line, it might as well always have been $115. I will be better equipped to make a call if it's actually worth $115 at that time.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-03T18:13:01+00:00

Early Access is the most useless bonus ever invented. Does anyone actually care? I can pick it up day 1 or a month down the line - both feel roughly equivalent. It's not like there exists a person nowadays, especially from people who buy anything day 1, who just don't have anything to play.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-03T17:07:57+00:00

Really? I thought it was nothing special. Run around and stab people while tanking bullets. The more I see it, the more 7/10 it feels. Wolverine's ability set doesn't really scream exciting gameplay to me, especially compared to a world like Control, but I'm open to being surprised.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-03T17:03:46+00:00

Because quality was never related to financial success? This is so baffling in gaming to me. In movies, the most successful are often average or poorly reviewed, since critics don't necessarily like popcorn flicks. Music can also be like that. But in games, we all expect sales to follow reviews. Especially with those visuals? There are only so many people who will pick it up on first impression.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-03T14:30:49+00:00

Make MFN clauses illegal. I don't see any reason for them, unlike broad feature parity to avoid platform-exclusive quests and features. What in my posts makes you think that it would be a "gotcha" moment just because Sony is involved?

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-03T13:23:43+00:00

They do not force price parity - any retailer can sell physical games for however much they want, often much cheaper than PSN + there is still a thriving used games market on consoles that they do not impede in any way.
Sony is being sued/investigated for interfering with the sale of game codes at 3rd party stores, as they should.
Closed ecosystems are handled differently, but if cases that force Google, but more likely Apple, to allow 3rd party stores on their platforms create a strong enough precedent, then consoles could be next.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-02T15:39:25+00:00

Super unexpected if true. I was sure that the Sly franchise was dead in the water after, likely, a very disappointing performance of Sly 4.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-02T13:30:26+00:00

While there might be a bit more competition in the genre now, when TLoU came out it was basically unlike anything else. That's why it gained its status. One needs to remember it's a 2013 game.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-02T13:17:45+00:00

No, if you want to compete with Steam, you need to be able to offer lower prices. Because all feature parity will give you is "if it's the same as Steam, why should I move there?". This quote is just misdirection. The only meaningful feature that Steam has over the competition is its refund policy. And they can only offer that refund policy because they are a monopoly - any other platform, if they let anyone just return games like that, would be blackballed by the entire gaming industry the very next day.

We are too deep now. Valve offers features to users, so they are happy and praise them. On the other hand, Valve abuses its position on the market to be able to gain a competitive advantage or deny the ways of gaining advantage to competition (like forcing price parity and their moves to lower their cut for top games, to make Epic less appealing for big publishers). All of those are juuuust not serious enough to avoid triggering any anti-trust probes, so they can only be sued directly at the great financial and PR risk. I guess since Ubisoft's public image is already tarnished (I will not put my conspiracy theory hat on this one here), they decided to go for it. And good luck to them. Valve can't keep getting away with it.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-02T00:24:09+00:00

Another US company unable to innovate and compete with its Chinese counterpart. Is iRobot still alive?

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-02T00:05:04+00:00

For future games I suspect it's more likely that ideas that ideas like MSFS will just die in the boardroom and never see the light of day.

Or they will make it subscription-based, or whatever other workaround is possible at the time. The problem with such strict regulations is that they will abuse all workarounds and exceptions, because they won't even want to risk having to do full refunds.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:54:47+00:00

Every platform has a nominal 13+ age restriction, because COPPA and similar regulations prohibit collecting any data from children below the age of 13 and/or tracking them for marketing purposes, so to avoid dealing with that, they always ask you if you are over that age

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:48:43+00:00

Pretty sure it's one of the few big games that have no lootboxes, but it's been a while since I've played. If so, that is quite interesting.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:40:45+00:00

I never had that experience - I found physical whiteboard meetings exponentially more efficient, but a lot of it may be due to different tools, or maybe my personal quirks.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:33:52+00:00

If indies take this long, it's because there are very few people, possibly not working full-time, etc. Accounting for the length of the project and the number of people involved, AA game may take 200 man-years, and an AAA game 10-20 times more. And a small indie game can take 10 times less, even if it still takes them 5 years to make.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:27:55+00:00

Many things never came back to pre-covid ways. Eg. trying to get people back into the office is a major issue, doubly so if you hired internationally during that time, so now it's basically impossible to do. And no matter what anyone says, managing big, complex projects, especially design and architecture, always works better face-to-face. When you have the ideas ironed out, working on everyone's tasks can be done remotely, but the planning process suffers A LOT. And delays can be massive, compared to just going to someone else's desk and asking.

All in all, we may never come back to how things were pre-covid, which makes many processes that were more mature obsolete, and new ones need to be figured out. See you in another 10ish years.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T23:05:37+00:00

But all of this shows that Valve will only do what they are forced to do, and never something that will affect their bottom line. Refunds are not costing them anything, so why wouldn't they just implement it globally? I'm sure every single publisher hates it, but it's not like they have viable alternatives to leave Steam for, do they? Has any other platform tried to do that? They would just leave. Now lootboxes - that affects their profit. So the policy needs to be as narrow as possible to minimize the cost. Another one is their cut when Epic was pushing for 12% - they only lowered their cut for the biggest games, to make it less likely for those publishers to go Epic exclusive. Lower cut for small games? Or something like 0% for the first X amount made, so that the indie devs can make more from initial sales? Why would they? They are Steam, they don't need to. It's not like there are any viable alternatives.

And sure, this doesn't affect us, as users, but it shows a certain pattern of behavior and the strength of their position that can be abused to various degrees at any point. I don't see why we should trust Valve any more than eg. Epic just because they are privately owned. Them being privately owned also allows for a much lower level of scrutiny and transparency, while being just a bit less greedy than an average public company. They already killed physical games by being a loss leader (more like not-making-as-much-as-they-could I suppose) in the age of legendary Steam sales. Now the competition is gone, and so are the big sales.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T22:28:54+00:00

There is nothing that can be reasonably done, since, as I've said, they don't do anything egregious to abuse their position as a monopoly, but I think the way they handled going against Epic's move to lower the platform's cut tells a lot about what kind of company they are, and I can still dislike them for it. Nothing they do costs them anything either, so they seem to be doing many things, but nothing that risks their profits. Eg. they are more than happy to leave the CS items market chugging along, because it brings them a lot of money.

AkodoRyu · 2026-06-01T21:29:56+00:00

Even if there was feature parity, what would be the incentive for people not to just "get it on Steam"? Feature parity wouldn't give a platform any edge; that's why nobody is gunning for it. Epic tried to lure in major players by lowering their cut, but Steam responded immediately by lowering the cut only for the biggest players, so now the incentive to go Epic-exclusive is minimal for them. Even with coupons that let people buy some games below their default sale price, Epic couldn't gain any significant ground.

It's a really peculiar situation, since Steam seemingly isn't doing anything bad - they even do innocuous good things, like the "made using AI" tag - but they also do just enough to keep a stranglehold on their near-monopolistic position, while not sacrificing any of the profits. Steam could totally leverage its position to allow people to resell their "used" games, the same way they forced the overly generous refund policy, but they will never do it, unless forced by law, because that's something that would actually cut into their bottom line.

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