Seems like that wouldn’t be it, unless their statements in this article are a lie. If the main source of bloat is weapon skins, then they wouldn’t have to “basically redownload the entire game” to get a new map - the skins port from one map to the next (unless they’re doing something insane like pre-baking a…

You’re right - it’s a weak analogy, just one that is easy to reach for. Maybe blockbuster would be better, but again, physical footprint and all that complicates things. Sony is absolutely in a better position than any remotely comparable example because of their flexibility: and the way that traditional media…

Yes, that’s fair - they have a lot more agility in this space than vendors of physical goods did. But the up-front investment is still large (investment is maybe the wrong word - they have to be comfortable forfeiting a lot of short term revenue in order to make that pivot, even if they can technically do so easily in…

Hopefully they can see it coming before it’s too late.

Microsoft also doesn’t put them in singleplayer games. They just make a lot less of those than Sony does. Perhaps that is the influence of Game Pass, but I don’t know that I buy it yet. If Starfield comes out with MTX then I’ll start to get concerned.

Same thing Kodak thought when they invented the digital camera. The film business was booming and they didn’t want to mess with film sales by offering customers a new technology that didn’t require film.

Translation: it probably makes sense over the long term but we have to spend a lot of money that we don’t have to get there. Microsoft has it, so they can do it that way, but we can’t.

I have heard that Microsoft is burning money trying to keep Gamepass alive, that they’re chasing retention and higher numbers with it, which just doesn’t sound sustainable. So what happens when it becomes too great a cost to bear for them? Or what will they do to reduce their cost?

Hard, yes. Impossible, no. PCs weaker than the PS5 can emulate the PS3 for many games, and that’s through unofficial reverse-engineering. Sony could do it if they cared to invest in it. They just choose not to.

The US doesn’t really have the internet infrastructure in most of the country to support cloud streaming well.

They had a chance to undercut GamePass for all of the users who don’t care about cloud streaming, and match it for those that do. I don’t know why they didn’t do that in the month-by-month version. They actually did do it (by $20) if you pay yearly, but monthly payers actually pay more for a cloud streaming version…

The title of the article suggests that this has either some sort of live service mechanic, or some sort of randomized never-ending content. The body of the article suggests that it’s still a fairly standard single-player action game that progresses linearly towards some natural end, and the “it’s going to destroy my…

They’re doing it mostly by growing their in-house developers, though - we’ll see how it plays out of course, but everything concrete that we know about so far doesn’t take away from their existing developers at all - it’s purely supplemental so far, which means if you don’t care for these kinds of games you aren’t…

Sony promised it wouldn’t make games like this back in 2013 and for that stint it earned the success of the PS4 era

You sign up for always online, but you don’t sign up for server maintenance taking the entire game down. It’s been decades since we figured out how to build reliable web services that don’t require periods of offline maintenance. It’s fair to expect more technical competency out of the devs, and call them out when…

You have to be able to drum up interest from potential employees. This generally happens when you’re in the “ready to start scaling up the hiring to go into full-blown production” stage, and I suspect that is what’s happening here. It’s impractical for all but the largest (or smallest) teams to keep their projects…

I have not seen anything to suggest they’re that incompetent from a technical perspective, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt there. Most large companies are taking that kind of thing seriously now because if it does happen to them it’s so, so costly.

More detailed: Yes please!

Offloading everything to “the cloud” is certainly one way to make DDoS attacks way more effective

Map size is not the reason that Ubisoft’s too-big games are too-big - it’s amount of “content” (side quests, mostly). If a game has a gameplay loop that benefits from a really dense world (which could be part of what this is about), that doesn’t demand that you explore every nook, but rather just benefits from the…