Osiris397

damn, wish I could edit, anyway: ...moving past the limited audience meat-head aim and pull the trigger only medium it is the aim of lots of game developers and publishers not simply to do something creatively different, hopefully attract and captivate new kinds of customers to grow the base in the process. While not directly related, VR offers a unique window often ignored by the irrational. A game like Before Your Eyes proves unflinchingly that the most powerful application of gaming is not necessarily gun slinging.

Just started with Darklight on PC.

I think it's starting to be forced now probably because of partial platform failure with the BHaptics vest adopting support for PS5/PSVR2 and the Omnidirectional treadmill adopting support for PS5/PSVR2, gun stocks, golf club accessories etc. These were all accessories that developed years ago but passed by PSVR1 and were exclusive to PCVR but now they're flowing to PSVR2. The low volume games purchasing VR userbase of yesteryear is not large enough, the peripherals have been too experimental with too limited practical applicability and too expensive. The variability of hardware and performance in many scenarios created user nausea from not having software optimized for specific hardware is real. The biggest ally of VR progression is a predictable moderately powerful hardware foundation to build on, there are simply too many ways to poison the well with a constantly shifting and/or too severely underpowered foundation.

UploadVR article: A memo was recently leaked from Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth noting “Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.” 2025, it is said then, will determine whether Meta's hardware and metaverse division is “the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure”. Meta's shifting priorities adversely affecting developers.

I don't know that it has completely stagnated, but mobile graphics based VR has a hard ceiling and Sony has been mostly willing to concede to Meta's billions used to corner the market on VR developers. Typically in the Fall since the original PSVR release Sony has organized bigger holiday VR launches, which have apparently been successful as this is the 8th year with Metro, Aliens, Behemoth (VR Shadow of the Colossus) with Wanderer and Hitman: The World of Assassination promoted in the Fall for Spring releases. Obviously, it's not enough and remaking Playstation's first party titles of the past (PS3 and further back) could have and maybe should have the safer and more successful path they would have been innovate much further along by now, but that wasn't the path they chose, both because of questionable leadership decisions during the first generation of PSVR and then allocating massive resources to failed high risk projects during this generation of PSVR2. Previous leadership in both cases let VR down. While not impossible, it's difficult for me to see new leadership being any more conservative with VR development PSVR2 than the prior groups. The problem with PCVR from a development standpoint has always been the low volume of users with all the necessary hardware to run a high end VR game that wouldn't get them sick, but never really bought a ton of games. Without being heavily subsidized it very quickly became a "no bueno" for most studios that weren't named Valve. Most studios just weren't going to gamble with their mortgage money and then hope for the best, which is why it became the domain of Valve and they only built one game. Meta had a lot of developers over a barrel and railroaded them into Quest development. To me the road out of this mess is through more aggressive PSVR2 1st party development that grows VR as platform until there's a locked in LCD (lowest common denominator) standard that's significantly higher than the mobile standard. After that PCVR will have an opportunity to flourish particularly with Steam VR if Steam releases a console and. a new VR HMD for that console.

Given the myopic view of the vocal minority (maybe?) on full display in the form of constant thinly veiled racist, misogynist and homophobic public criticisms turned predatory influence on games sales I definitely think that some portrayals of intimacy in games offer an important nuanced exploration of human relationships, complex emotions, personal connections and vulnerability. Even in cases where there is controversy and the value is questionable a lot of it should be chalked up as trial and error at this stage IMO. It's rare to find romance in games and thus rare to to see iterative progress in that area. Gaming certainly wasn't developed as a potential tool of human exploration and there's been a not insubstantial offensive launched against this kind of direction, but there is a lot of potential. Also, the gaming industry hasn't grown substantially in something like 20 years, moving past the limited audience meathead aim and pull the trigger only medium is the aim of lots of game developers and publishers not simply to do something different, but to captivate new kinds of customers and grow the base. While not directly related VR offers a unique window often ignored by the irrational to something like Before Your Eyes a game that proves unflinchingly that the most powerful application of gaming is not necessarily gun slinging.

On one hand I suspect they won't add much only because the modding community has really overtaken the mantle of community development/redevelopment with closed source games thus incentivizing more and more publishers to green light modding instead of open sourcing the game. Also, there are more game assets and game templates available today for the modern game engines then there have ever been to developers and with all the major game engines being free to Indie developers it's made so many games available at so many different pricing levels it seems inconceivable that most of the opensource games could compete with all of that. Even Source 2 will be made free and publicly available. Where/when open source games do get traction I almost feel like the open source games themselves won't benefit, but later games that cut time to develop by standing on the shoulders of the open source games benefit. Right now i can't think of any super popular games that are also open source and that's what will be needed, I suspect, to make the open source games "main stream" or to get enough eyeballs on them to make a difference. There again I don't know if like Dead Cells may have used Abuse as a foundation or what other games that kind of thing might be true for. To me, there's a small kind of specific developer group for which Open Source games will be ideal: It's really the veteran solo dev that has a bit of a following from previous releases but the licensing fees absorb too much of the revenue for them to really get ahead financially, so they look at building on top of something open source. Alternately, I know that in a lot of cases Unity is not very efficient if veteran dev feel limited by that they may look to some OS game that's light and efficient with resources.

The current strategies are still to be revealed since the change of leadership, but global territory expansion seems like something that's always been in Playstation's plans considering the China Hero Project, India Hero Project initiatives, it's just a question of how fast or slow. The MENA Hero Project (Middle East and North Africa) is part of that. It seems' like these Hero Projects are a way to fund smaller development, but also a way to get Playstation reps on the ground in these places to get larger groups of developers/games when they exist from the same region like for the games Black Myth Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero.

I'm not so sure I would lump NMS in here only because I suspect people that are hesitant about the title are people that generally wouldn't like a game that's primary game loop is exploration and resource mining/farming. The odd thing about NMS is I feel like every major update has been a mini relaunch of the games for new players and it's VR edition is pretty groundbreaking in VR gaming.

I found these news stories a couple of weeks ago and they confirmed some things I thought. NWN blogs: Quest 2 VR Usage/sales rates: This article basically states that most people that bought Quest 2s didn't buy many games and didn't engage with VR content online much: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/01/quest-2-vr-usage-sales-rates.html RoadtoVR: Quest Sales, 20 million, Retention Struggles This article essentially has Facebook officials confirm the struggles and promise efforts to do better: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-struggles/ UploadVR: Quest 3 appears to have sold at least 1 million units After a year and maybe a half the Quest 3 sales: https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-3-sold-at-least-1-million-units/ Ok, so the Quest 2 sold roughly 5 Million units per year, but now that part of the user base is effectively dead. In the last 8+ years there has been a linear decline Meta investment into the VR space (advertising particularly) even while they are spending billions per quarter still to support it, so it seems more like a billionaire's vanity project than a real business, as such support could be completely yanked from it at any time. On top of that a lot of the years of holiday advertisement blitzing was somewhat, to be kind, misleading. It's possible the company burned up whatever goodwill with customers that they had. Games media generally refuses to highlight any of these facts even though they are critically important for a lot of people considering purchasing a Quest. From a PCVR/Quest Youtube Influencer walking away from making Quest content for these reasons: Ultimately, I don't think VR is cooked and PSVR2 strikes the right balance in a lot of areas for a lot of different reasons.

It definitely seems like they're taking a much, much more conservative approach to GAAS. Honestly they have had non-GAAS success with multiplayer games like Uncharted, TLOU Factions and Ghost of Tsushima Legends. Many players would pay once for DLC level expansions, but the constant MT along side a completely useless in-game XP system (the standard) just instantly drives most gamers nuts and then drives them away.

If rumors are to be believed Playstation has squandered over a BILLION DOLLARS on games the Playstation gaming community would have essentially viewed radioactive if released at any point in the last 7-8 years, but there's a lot more to this and the long history of failure with GAAS. There is no successful live services sector of gaming there’s a handful of successful games (and that’s being generous.) It’s been the case that the few successful service games are outnumbered by the unsuccessful ones by exponential factors since well before Sony sent itself careening into failure with it’s ill-advised live service agenda, hence the need for all their public defending of live-service…the cloak and dagger organizational “streamlining” and railroading of certain executives that most certainly would not have gone along with it. Consider a single minuscule VR case of a failed live service PSVR game almost fully funded by PlayStation, Megalith. The game looked good, it was polished butch had few levels, playable characters and enemies. Initially it attracted players, however before the end of it as I recall the rancor the few fans had for the openly greedy publishers/devs in their discord left every one bitter and eroded the user base to zero in like under a week from what I could tell. That was 5-6 years ago and a drop in the bucket. Disruptive games went on to build Godfall and relatively recently announce significant layoffs. One larger industry long term problem with these GAAS games as a a games initiative, not only is that once the franchise is built exclusively as a GAAS product that runs it’s course the publisher typically kills it and the game vanishes like it never existed, but also it will NEVER be able to come back, like Overwatch. Blizzard learned the hard way with Overwatch 2. Beyond that industry wide irreparable and ultimately fatal reputational harm to ANY FRANCHISE THAT REMOTELY LOOKS OR PLAYS LIKE IT is also doomed because of the player perception of GAAS as predatory. Sony’s wasted $300M-$400M on Concord plus other recently canceled GAAS attest to that. Consider that the Overwatch Beta, a product that wasn’t yet made available to the public won GOTY in 2016…9 years ago. Uncharted 4 was also a nominee. Overwatch is a worthless franchise and Activision will never be able rejuvenate, they will never be able to build spin-offs from it, Overwatch will never be a trans media product. All of these things that will never happen with Overwatch will and are happening with Uncharted and it will continue to generate hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in revenue for Sony going far into the future. This franchise erosion aspect of GAAS is a problem for which there will likely be many business case studies made in the future around the question of whether the short term success of the one in a million GAAS game success is worth any investment to any party involved.