I remember when Giant Bomb was talking about Destiny 2 and Brad made a point about the game “not respecting his time” and Jeff just goes...”so then why would you put that time in”. And Brad couldn’t come up with a response.

That’s how a largely feel about Destiny 2: You don’t have to kill yourself chasing after god…

One thing I’ve noticed is how fast these things go on sale. You can bet that within 30 days there will be a sale on Far Cry 6. Maybe $10 off to start, chop off another $10 for Black Friday/Xmas. If you’re really OK to wait you can practically steal it in a year.

exactly what I do.  I don’t need everything. I don’t need to play all there is.  So long as I can play the campaign, get some weapons, kill some aliens--I’m happy.

Fair enough. It is the gacha formula. Bungie knows that a majority of players will just stick to buying the expansion pack and maybe the season pass. But this is for the people who need to try everything, to get everything, to do everything: those are the people this stuff is aimed at.

That’s too bad. D2 is a great game, I love its characters, lore, narrative, universe (not a fan of the pvp content), but it’s such a gigantic investment of money for such a small return. I hope they change their model in the future.

which is that it is still halfway between previous publisher Activision Blizzard’s model of being an annual boxed product and its new ambition of being a seasonally evolving, free-to-try game.

I don’t have a problem with the seasonal model of paid updates. But good grief don’t make us have to use a spreadsheet to figure out what’s what.

I’d say that’s true for a majority of the GamePass releases but they also have their day 1 strategy for 1st and 3rd party games. Like The Medium, we knew like 6 months in advance that it was coming to GamePass. Then on the E3 reveal trailers they usually mark which ones are coming to GamePass day 1. 

I can see where you are coming from but I personally just don’t feel it as an issue myself. I also think gamepass is very pro consumer. While I do like to own some games I also know there are a lot of games I own that I likely won’t ever touch again so gamepass being a temporary thing isn’t a big dealbreaker for me.

I think it will ultimately “harm” (more like shift) game sales - I mean, subscription services did a number on music sales and video/tv sales already, right? But perhaps not for the reasons one might think. It hasn’t had the same effect on me as Steam sales have - I don’t see a game I want and think “man, I’ll just…

so many niche indie games got my screen time thanks to gamepass.

honestly I think it’s fine reasoning. of course I’m also definitely biased as I haven’t bought a full price game in years at this point so maybe there’s a difference in buying preferences impacting the opinion? like I’ve bought a couple of $10-20 games that ended up on gamepass but I also played them for a month or…

i love gamepass as i use like demos. i had never played a Forza game before and thanks to gamepass, I’m a devotee! Will definitely be buying Horizon 5 when it’s released. On the opposite side, I waited to play Avengers until it was on Gamepass and I’m glad I did. One of the worst video games I’ve ever played. 

I definitely think they are only announced as coming to gamepass a few weeks in advance because of two things:

we tend to view paying for our annual expansions more or less as a subscription, rather than a purchase, so ‘paying for Destiny each year’ was essentially paying for admittance into the game, whatever state the game happened to be in at the time.

Very interesting on the Destiny front. I used to be pretty in the loop on it even after I stopped playing because my housemate was really into it...like I’m talking logging 6000+ hours on XB1 and 3000+ on PS4 (he bought the Taken King PS4 just to have more stuff to do and get the exclusive weapons haha). Needless to…

Yup, it’s the reason you often hear of yearly franchises taking skipping a year or deciding to go every other year; yearly releases can stunt the evolution of the series, drop the quality, or both. We’ve seen the EA lengthen the UFC game development to two years, and Ubisoft slowed down on the AC games as well. We…

Far Cry is the perfect game for when you are struggling with really bad jetlag. It keeps you awake when you need to stay awake without requiring you to use your brain, which is currently in sleep mode. 3 and 4 helped me get through a time difference of 14 hours.

Haha I’m an old too (at least by cool gamer kid standards), at 36 and Twitch scares me. FYI, if you’re unfamiliar, Substack is a platform for writers to monetize newsletters. I figure a fellow old head (I think that’s what they call us) could get behind newsletters. I doubt the kids would. 

100%. Reviews like this detail one of the biggest issues with video game reviews, namely that there is so much resentment imbedded within them by nature.