It’s boring, and they run the same risk the film studios do: if none of the three tentpoles in the example bring in massive returns, they’re in bad, bad trouble, because they don’t have the more reliable mid-budget fare to keep the lights on.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying, and it’s an impulse I have to kind of take note of in myself from time to time, usually to remind myself that it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get a specific new auto rifle (or whatever). I mean, ultimately, I already have like a dozen auto rifles in the vault that I never use,…

Yeah, they definitely seem to be doing the legwork, like you say (and not getting the cart before the horse this time, unlike with the initial reveal of the Xbox One - which, looking back, was clearly a console designed for GamePass that hit the immediately obvious roadblock of GamePass not existing yet). 

Yeah, I love GamePass; Nintendo doing the same would probably tip me over the edge of finally, finally getting a Switch (which has a lot of games I sort of vaguely want to try, but outside of ‘Breath of the Wild’, there’s not anything that I’m like ‘yes, that’s enough to justify buying an entire console’).

It’ll definitely be interesting, for sure. My money’s still on Microsoft, at least, being done with ‘console generations’ entirely: I think the entire reason they went with the (still terrible) ‘Series’ naming convention is that they’re going to start introducing incremental hardware upgrades rather than re-designing…

Yeah, Warframe’s much better in terms of ‘all of our content is free’; as far as I know, there’s not anything (non-cosmetic) in the game that you can only access by paying for it. The trade-off, of course, is that model is exactly what leads to ‘well, we have to monetize this somehow, so let’s make things frustrating…

For me (on a Series X) ‘Quick Resume’ is another one of those ‘I kinda laughed it off when it was first announced, but totally changed my tune after a few weeks’ things. (Same for Smart Delivery.) Quick Resume has fundamentally changed how I play certain games, just by letting me just dip in and out a couple times a…

I also wonder if the financial math is the same, in terms of expenditure and investment. ‘We’d rather bet heavily on three tentpoles and hope one of them hits huge rather than on ten relatively minor projects that consequently offer relatively minor returns’ has very much been the dominant notion in major film studios…

If only someone had a website dedicated to sifting through the clutter of Steam in an attempt to find overlooked gems...

Hmmmm... I’m honestly not sure. ‘Defining ourselves primarily by the media we consume isn’t healthy’ is certainly a sentiment I’ve expressed before, but I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten into the specifics of how that relates to Sony and their strategy of focusing on AAA franchises nearly exclusively.

Narrative-wise, you’re pretty close to what they’re actually doing: the major expansions move the ‘main’ story forward, usually in a kind-of self contained way, and then the seasonal stuff is more or less its own thing. They’ll often bleed into one another a little bit - the end of one will set-up the next - but not…

I think it’s all part of that trend (not just in gaming) where we define ourselves by the things we like/media we consume, often to a fault. Sony’s made their identity around (usually excellent!) AAA franchises exclusive to the system... so a certain type of Playstation gamer builds their identity around those same AAA…

As someone who owns a Series X and considered the Xbox One my primary gaming platform last gen, Microsoft has this problem a little bit, but it’s nowhere near unmanageable (maybe just because of the relatively fewer number of indie games that arrive on the console, vs the Switch and obviously Steam). As an example, I…

I understand that desire, for sure - I’m very much in the opposite camp, in that I’ve been a lot more invested in Destiny’s story since they started doing more connections between the seasonal stuff, but there are other things where I’ve been like ‘you’re just making this needlessly complicated; what you do best is…

I liked it, as a conclusion to the seasonal arc - but I’m not necessarily looking for everything to be raid/grandmaster levels of difficulty. (Or for anything to be that high level of difficulty, really. I’m glad that content’s there for people who enjoy it, but those people ain’t me, and I’d rather Destiny not bend…

I also always like the ‘take what you’ve learned over the course of the season about the gameplay mechanics and use it all in one mission’ approach, too; I’m sure people will slag it for being repetitive, but honestly, I prefer it to ‘and here’s a brand NEW mechanic to learn!’ Using everything from the earlier Expunge…

Yeah, I tend to agree. Admittedly, I’d rather have my back teeth pulled than play a raid, so my expectations for what a Destiny boss fight should be like are probably different from a lot of people - especially those complaining that it should have been significantly harder through one mechanic or another; if it had…

I think ‘the system would immediately descend into a chaos of corruption and outright bribery’ is a bit of a stretch, honestly; I also think calling the current situation ‘above board’ is not necessarily the most precise descriptor, given that we’re piecing all this together with half-hints from a single developer who…

Part of it is probably my tendency to view leaks as ‘a studio’s PR person wanting an idea circulating that still has plausible deniability in case they can’t deliver’. (‘We never said Avowed would be so awesome it would kick sand in Skyrim’s face and make it cry like a little baby; I’m not sure where you got that…

Yikes. I mean, I get that a certain level of curation is necessary - witness Steam’s various attempts over the years to reign their utter lack of it in, most of which have only had the dubious effect of ‘backfiring spectacularly’ - but ‘pay us and we’ll let our player base know you exist’ isn’t... really curation, is…