ampersandrew

I don't know the exact contract between these two companies, but often times a publisher like Sony will own the title/world/story and the developer will own the code. Sony is within their legal rights to make a remake of Demon's Souls (also a Sony exclusive from back in the day), but it seems to have upset FromSoft, and when FromSoft is putting out bangers like Elden Ring, you don't want them to find a reason to not put their games on your console. Other than Demon's Souls and Bloodborne, every other modern FromSoft game has a different publisher, whether it's Bandai-Namco or Activision.

I'd say unless games get smaller, like they used to be. I don't see AI solving problems like that.

There was a time where it did. A few other games did too. They changed the stick into a carrot, and now a PSN account just unlocks a few extras. But like I said, that hurt my trust as a consumer.

Which they can't do without pissing off FromSoft, and they don't want to upset FromSoft any more than they already have.

Companies make bad bets all the time, which is why Sony bought Firewalk and Haven. Even Japanese companies like Capcom can see that they make more money on PC than consoles.

We'll see this again when Marvel Tokon comes out.

The 7th gen was exactly where this started to break down, in large part because these machines are all so, so similar these days, rather than having a completely different set of capabilities. I think consoles as we knew them years ago are just reaching the point where they've outlived their usefulness. Sony can try to fight it by holding onto exclusives, but I think it's actually only going to hurt them.

During the PS2 era, there were lots of reasons that a game might end up exclusive to one platform even if there was no deal involved. Now the only exclusives are the ones Sony makes themselves, so there's maybe one or two of those per year, and that doesn't guarantee that those one or two are going to be your cup of tea, let alone justify buying a dedicated machine for $500 just to play those few games. As opposed to a PC that plays every video game that isn't made by Sony or Nintendo. It gets harder and harder for that $500 to make sense, and the PC ports Sony had been doing was any attempt at all to recoup the money that they spent on blockbuster games that weren't growing their console install base.

Yeah, if they already made me wait past GOTY podcast spoiler season, I'm far less willing to pay full price for it anymore.

Virtually nobody is still not nobody. Being able to continue to play it is important not just as a failed piece of art that we can all learn from but also as something that gives it value in the first place. We had the ability to spend money in Highguard, but the value I might get out of that spend depends on the game's continued existence. If that existence is guaranteed in some way, then I no longer have that barrier. Every live service game has this conundrum, which might explain why they either immediately die or become the next big thing, with very little in between.

They'd still have to patch out their anti-cheat. And I'm guessing neither of those things are going to happen.

Every live service shuts down because not enough people were playing, eventually. Even ones I loved. I've got multiplayer games from 25 years ago that I can still play, but I can't still play the ones from 10 years ago.