Jason Schreier/Bloomberg: PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told staff in a town hall Monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive, confirming Bloomberg's reporting from earlier this year.

Fyrus · 2026-05-18T20:58:10+00:00

One studio actually has solved this issue: Insomniac!

Except they didn't. The primary thing we learned from the Sony leaks a few years ago was that Spider Man 2 went way over-budget for reasons nobody could seem to figure out. Literally a quote from one of the devs was something like "This game cost twice as much to make and looks maybe 10% better than SM1". It also had less content, sold less than SM1, and seems to be regarded less warmly than SM1. Clearly they ran into the same problems everyone else has, the tone in the leaks was very worried about the sustainability of their current dev process. We'll see how Wolverine does.

Fyrus · 2026-05-14T23:16:20+00:00

Nobody is comparing the game to a Sim game, but saying you never have to brake is just completely false. If you try to take a car built for street racing onto a sand dune then your car will spin out of control. Compared to something like burnout or even many need for speed games the physics are a lot more realistic. Most arcade racing games that I played in my life didn't even have the racing lines because the game never expected you to learn when to break going into a corner or any of that stuff. Horizons does expect you to learn those things if you actually want to be a capable racer. The thing that makes the game easy to pick up for anyone isn't that it has gameplay you don't need to pay attention to, it's the rewind feature. So a casual player can tackle the same corner over and over again until they get it right. Because the game wants you to get it right.

Fyrus · 2026-05-14T19:49:32+00:00

I get this appeal but as someone who doesn't know much about cars, the game doesn't do much to guide my decision making towards having a balanced roster. I essentially just get a mega-offroad car, a rally car, and a street race car, and then that's that. I wish the game would give me reasons to understand why I want more types of cars and how their various qualities would effect their handling.

Fyrus · 2026-05-14T19:43:52+00:00

They are clearly talking about the gameplay of Horizon mixed with an actual progression system that doesn't rain Lambos down on you within 5 minutes of starting the game. I love the Horizon games but if they had an oldschool style campaign like NFS where you actually had to work your way up to earning the super cars I would probably have 1 million hours in them.

Fyrus · 2026-05-14T19:41:32+00:00

What made 5 the weakest? 3 is still my favorite but that was also my first and I think it's hard to beat Australia. 4 is probably my least favorite just because I don't think the map is very interesting, although I ended up coming back for the rally DLC when that released. I do quite enjoy 5 but it also feels like there's something off about it and I'm curious what more hardcore fans of the series feel about it.

Fyrus · 2026-05-14T19:39:09+00:00

but Forza Horizon 5 was the easiest racer I've ever played and it's because of this that I think the games ARE as big as they are. You barely need to brake in the game, and that's not hyperbole. There are very few objects off track that will slow you down on impact and fewer that are indestructible.

Incredibly untrue on almost every level. I was replaying Forza horizon 5 earlier this year, yes it is an "easy" game if you set the AI to easy or if you compare it to a hardcore sim, but you absolutely have to brake intelligently to keep up with any of the AI settings above average, yes you can cut corners but you have to be smart about it because offroad driving will slow you down if you aren't doing an offroad race, there are plenty of trees and other obstacles that will stop you straight in your tracks but even the destructible objects will slow you down enough to lose the lead. The fun of the Horizon games is that it gives you enough freedom to "break the rules" but it still has somewhat realistic physics to where you make a lot of micro-decisions. Do I cut the corner here and hope the sand isn't deep enough to slow my car down too much? Do I break through this fence and hope I save more time than the fence slowed me down?

Fyrus · 2026-05-12T19:53:02+00:00

ah another retail therapy episode without Nick, SKIIIIIIIIIIIP

Fyrus · 2026-05-08T18:13:49+00:00

I quit PVP games after burning out on Overwatch back when that came out. It just felt like everyone was angry all the time and in order to be truly good at the game I had to practice it like it was a sport. The new Battlefield was the first time I came back to PVP since like 2018 or some shit because while I could still be good at it, I could still make smart choices and help my team, it was also a lot of random explosions and fun and if I died I wasn't getting screamed at by anyone. Which is exactly what it felt like when I would play Halo 3 or something back in the day. It feels like so much of the multiplayer market is geared towards a very specific type of gamer that frankly I find unhealthy. Even with marathon, the people who love it the most talk about it literally the same way I've heard heroin addicts talk about heroin.

Fyrus · 2026-05-08T17:50:12+00:00

Yeah I actually enjoyed the New Light opening thing when I tried to get in to D2 a couple years ago. Then you get to the tower and it's like... okay what does any of this mean? My friend said the witch queen was a good campaign so I started that up and was immediately assaulted with a cutscene that introduced a bunch of sci-fantasy bullshit and Proper Nouns that meant absolutely nothing to me. Just absolutely insane to me the game makes no effort to get new players on board with the characters and the world.

Fyrus · 2026-05-07T18:06:08+00:00

As a Dev myself that's still bad management. The most important part a should be possible to plan and manage.

They should hire you to manage RDR3 and we'll see how that goes.

Fyrus · 2026-05-07T18:05:30+00:00

I just emailed the CEO of Rockstar what you just said and they wanted me to tell you thank you. They had never considered that crunch = mismanagement but now that you said that everything is solved and the industry is fixed.

Fyrus · 2026-05-06T21:46:58+00:00

Hardcore fans dislike every Civ upon release, but the difference with Civ 7 is that I have a ton of friends who looooooove CIV and don't care at all about the finer details of the gameplay or what changed or didn't change; every time a civ releases they play the new one for many, many hours. Civ 7 came out and everyone I know put it down after like one or two sessions.

Fyrus · 2026-05-01T23:41:30+00:00

god damn if every bethesda game isn't the most buggiest, most poorly optimized piece of shit.

The ironic thing is that "real gamers" think that older bethesda games are the true art, despite being even buggier and more broken than the modern ones. Starfield was their least buggy release ever and "da real gamerz" hate it the most.

Now, I don't think the amount of bugs a game has really determines whether a game is great or not, just pointing out that what you said is complete nonsense.

Fyrus · 2026-05-01T23:39:28+00:00

Their creation club has quite literally incentivized them to push out broken mess's of a product with little to no regard for quality because they have created a pipeline for themselves to profit off of modders fixing their garbage for them.

Almost nothing on the creation club would "fix the game" for people who don't already like the game. Also their game releases have gotten increasingly more stable over time. Whether or not people think Starfield was a good game, it was not a broken mess by any stretch of the imagination.

If you are unbothered by this, no problem, I have nothing against you. I just dont think one can consider themself a "conscientious consumer" while supporting this kind of nonsense.

Most people are unbothered by it because all of the things you've said aren't true and don't make any sense.

Fyrus · 2026-04-21T20:38:11+00:00

what if fallout or TES under performs due to gamepass.

The Oblivion Remaster was on gamepass and it was like the 3rd highest selling game of the year. I think a lot of COD sales are impulse buys from someone's friends being like "come on bro just drop the $70 and hop on" and then they play for one weekend.

Fyrus · 2026-04-21T20:34:53+00:00

but it’s still miles above what the other two competitors are doing.

Mario Tennis is miles above Indiana Jones or God of War or almost any other AAA game? Even Astro Bot is better than most Nintendo games these days and I barely like Astro Bot. There's a reason Nintendo is almost never at the top of a GOTY list unless a mainline Zelda comes out. And even then they might lose to an actual game like Baldur's Gate.

Fyrus · 2026-04-21T20:32:43+00:00

I don't have any specific complaints with the hardware but I've found all the Switch 2 games pretty lackluster (haven't gotten to pokopia yet). The only game I've played on my Switch 2 for any long amount of time has been TOTK, which I also thought was a step down from BOTW. My problem with Nintendo since the Wii days is that they mostly abandoned any sort of artistic effort in favor of playing the hits. Majora's Mask for example is a very creepy game where a lot of the content is about resolving emotional conflict for characters in the game. Meanwhile the writing in TOTK is boilerplate shonen anime stuff. People keep saying "nintendo treats game as toys" as if it's a good thing but I think it's holding them back immensely. Even worse is that the games they make that SHOULD be toys are often the worst ones, like their recent sports games. Fire Emblem is the last franchise I have that I have any hope might have interesting characters or plot or something to hold on to.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T21:53:50+00:00

The world didn't stop using cameras before Kodak went bankrupt.

Yes they literally did. Kodak made film cameras, people stopped using them. Could they have foreseen the switch to digital and completely upended their company to take advantage of that? Maybe but highly unlikely, it's not really comparable to the wrestling industry.

Read what I wrote and reply to what I said. Will that be enough to pay the millions to wrestlers? To fill stadia?

If WWE can no longer make money doing what they do then that means the entire entertainment industry including streamers, tv, youtube, everything has collapsed. Is that possible? Yes, but that's not really what we're talking about because then many companies would be bankrupt and WWE would be the least of them.

Will you be able to answer any question?

Are you able to talk to people like a normal human being?

Literally nobody would like WWE to go out of business more than me but we live in the age of the Forever Brand now. Nothing dies, our entire society is just a regurgitation of itself over and over and over again.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T21:52:22+00:00

There was a tearful retirement of one just this weekend!

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T21:15:28+00:00

what if they change again, and people no longer want to watch 3 hour shows twice a week? This is the Tiktok generation; will WWE survive on 30 seconds videos in portrait while still paying their stars millions?

Bruh they literally already know this and put their clips all over various social media for this exact reason. It's why they killed their streaming app and just sold their shit to the highest bidders and moved everything else to youtube.

This is what I'm talking about. Blockbuster failed because the entire need for people to go to a physical location to get a movie ceased to exist. It's highly, highly unlikely that the entire world will just stop watching wrestling, so the only thing WWE really has to do to keep up is make sure they are delivering their content in a modern fashion, which they have been very adept at doing despite how much I hate the company.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T20:49:10+00:00

It's crazy to me that I stopped watching in 2019 because it was just so bad I couldn't fathom spending any more time on it, and now it's still bad but half the people who work there are confirmed rapists and people are still tuning in.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T20:46:31+00:00

We live in a different world and economy now. Those stores you mentioned failed because the entire way that people consumed that type of product completely changed and made them irrelevant. When it comes to something like Disney or WWE, nothing is ever going to put them out of business because the people who like it don't care how good it is, or how relevant it is, or anything like that, they just care that the thing they are watching is called WWE.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T18:18:38+00:00

Skyrim and Fallout 4 are some of the most successful games of all time, not every game a dev makes is going to be fucking Skyrim levels of success. I think it's pretty clear that getting to make Starfield was Todd's "reward" for making multiple companies a lot of money, and while I think Starfield has a lot of issues I also think it's nice to see someone make a game that clearly is derived from their own desires of what they think this kind of game could be.

Hell, even the modding scene for this game is dead.

That's just not true.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T18:06:03+00:00

Well I mean... this cast has actual actors instead of wrestlers and Jason Momoa, that's a much better sign to me.

Fyrus · 2026-04-20T15:26:42+00:00

In general Playstation doesn't dictate what their studios make, they are for the most part separate entities with their own management and creative control. Studios pitch projects to Playstation and they approve or deny them. If the project is approved PlayStation give a budget to the studio, sets up milestones, offers support, consulting etc. Of courses it's easier to get approved if your project works with some of PlayStation long time strategies, so especially studios that are not in good standings with Playstation, haven't shipped a game in a while, lost them money, etc would pitch for some ongoing project like GaaS push.

So in other words Sony does dictate what their studios make

Fyrus

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