Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Are Exclusive Games Dead?”.
This is interesting. The extremely popular new game hell divers 2 has been plagued with server issues since launch uh, which Arrowhead CEO, Johan, Johan has acknowledged, is largely due to insufficiently optimized backend code and the time needed to onboard additional Engineers to their back-end team, currently consisting of four developers. He has recommended that Gamers, especially cash strapped Gamers, hold off on buying it until the issues are addressed based. That is unheard of yeah.
I I to be fair if they had a a sales goal, they’re I’m genuinely estimating, probably like 50 to 100 times beyond. What that sales goal was at this point right, um, because they are just smashing it right now um, so they definitely don’t need it and it might actually be like the the good press from saying this is, is likely just worth it exacerbating the problem. Many players have been squatting AFK on servers in order to avoid wait times which Arrowhead Studios will apparently be addressing in an upcoming patch yeah guys when there’s an issue with something doing things that make the issue worse, for everyone is bad. My favorite one is like when a login server goes down and then people just sit there. Yeah login loog.
Lo when goes, and people start spamming, F in the chat, so that when I try to type an update, no one sees it. Yeah yeah people are the problem. Yeah is that is that patch out already sorry, uh yeah, the 15minute AFK patch is out and they also pretty much doubled. The server capacity yesterday they’ve been working non-stop.
It’S amazing. I think it’s like a team of four people. Uh, the backend team is four people yeah, that’s right.
The game is currently PC PS5 only, but a popular petition is currently circulating to Port the game to Xbox, which I’m sure they will do it some point when they are not busy. Well, I think it’s like a PlayStation published game, so maybe not oh discussion question. Does a company have a certain level of responsibility to encourage their customers to make good financial decisions um? Technically, that’s the most optimistic sounding thing: I’ve ever read: yeah, technically, no, not even slightly appreciate you uh, probably Jessica, who wrote that I think Riley’s more jaded, yeah yeah. I think it’s really cool when they do but yeah uh, but I think expecting it at this point is simply not realistic yeah. It saddens me to say that, but it’s the truth, yeah that was like um, the the pal World lead developer or something CEO. I don’t know what it was um, but people pointed out like oh there’s, like a lot less players playing po world now and he’s like that’s cool. There was content and they probably like played it and then hopefully we’ll release more content and they’ll come back. That’S fine, it’s like sweet yeah. That makes sense hey.
You know. Who else did the right thing recently? The Xbox team yeah Xbox is adding the ability to recalibrate their own thumbsticks on series X and S and Xbox One controllers. This will allow players to fix their own calibration issues without having to get a repair or contact support. It will also allow players to independently set up replacement, thumbsticks very cool in other news.
Earlier this week, Xbox announced that four previously Microsoft exclusive games see, if leaves high-fi, Rush, grounded and pentant would all be coming to PS5, and the latter two would be coming to switch. Is platform exclusivity just like dead? I think, to a certain degree. Is it buried? Maybe like okay, we have a video coming, that’s a um console tier list video, so we go through and we rank from from s to f um, all of the major consoles from all the major players and we don’t don’t get into handheld. It’S just like your.
Your living room conso, so we just like crushes um. I believe we ended up being a tier go so because pause wait, because one of our criteria was how how how well the game Library holds up today. We factored in some historical significance so like the Atari 2600 ends up with like a b or something just because of how many groundbreaking things happened on that console. Okay, um, but but one of our major considerations was how do the games for that platform hold up, and this was something that David and I talked about he’s the writer for it, and you know how passionate he is about games yeah and he’s super into the Hardware side as well, but he’s a very, very passionate gamer seems like a video that that he would crush oh yeah.
He he killed it. He did a great job um, but anyway, one of the things that started to happen as we made our way into PS5 Xbox series is, it became really difficult to evaluate a console that way, because what is an Xbox Series game, we discuss how one of the Struggles for the Xbox series is that, unlike the 360, they haven’t really had a box mover title, not really not to the degree that Sony has um whether you’re talking about Spider-Man or um. Okay, Final Fantasy, 7 remastered you whatever the case may be. What do you mean Halo, okay, so a no and B, it’s not exclusive. You can’t shift boxes with software that runs on other boxes. Yeah and – and Microsoft has really struggled.
Not only is the Xbox series under selling the PS5 by like one to two or something like that. According to the most recent numbers, we were able to find surprised. It’S honestly like that low most of them are Series S they’re, the basic one: they’re, not even selling their premium console, not really it’s it’s a it’s a non-factor in the current generation race, and so you know we’re looking at this thing and I’m like okay, so Microsoft, cly clearly saw the path here as to to be a Ser, a gaming services company uh.
So how do we even evaluate their performance in a race they’re, not even really running yeah? That’S interesting and even the PlayStation 5. One of the challenges that we had evaluating its library was that over the first couple of years, because the PS4 had such an enormous install base and reasonably powerful still over the first couple of years, we saw so many games with simultaneous releases on both of those Platforms that it really was more akin to a PC release that runs okay on your older PC or runs great on your newer PC. So how do you evaluate the game library of the PS5? Here we are what three three years in, I think three years since launch yeah when most of the games aren’t PS5 games, they’re PlayStation games, yeah. I I think too, like it’s, it’s I think the main blurring that’s going to happen like even with this announcement uh. Some of them are going to PS5, but not oh, wait.
No, they all are going to PS5, see that that’s a little bit weird to me, uh more games coming to PC is not that weird to me and I suspect, PlayStation games. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to see a ton of them coming to Xbox, just bad blood or what I think well. No. I think the reason why Xbox is doing this is so that they look less like a monopoly uh, because they’re getting a lot of issues lately with companies going after them, and one of the discussions around that has been um that you’re using this to try to Crush PlayStation, so they’re going look we’re giving our games over to PlayStation our our old games that people don’t care about anymore.
The issue is: is that the way that monopolies squeeze out the competition is not by doing it immediately? Um? We I was having an interesting conversation with someone about Uber’s trajectory or like Uber’s path to uh, to profitability, they’re profitable. Now, for apparently the first time and uh. I had to take an Uber somewhere and it was like $ 330 and it was barely anywhere. So it was as expensive or more expensive than what I would have paid for a cab way back in the day and like Uber Eats, makes no sense anymore at the rates that you pay for it. It’S like gee. Should I pay double the price for a cold meal? .