I’m sure it would if I thought more highly of it.

I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.

They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.

I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?

Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.

The magic is similar to Dark Souls 3. I don’t know that it’s any more overtuned or anything, but there’s a lot of fun in finding broken builds, and there are tons of them.

Of the ones I’ve played, Elden Ring. The biggest aid for new players being that if something’s too tough, you just go somewhere easier and come back later. The opening area has a boss roaming a field designed to teach you exactly that lesson.

Is their removal of these licenses a measure to somehow prevent people from taking action?

The problem is this game can’t even be pirated due to how it’s architected.

No. As others have said, there’s just a lack of information about what’s coming out. Basically starting last year, companies got fed up with announcing release dates that they can’t meet, which has a tangible marketing expense on their side, among other problems. So now we basically only hear about games’ release dates when they’re imminent. This year, we’ve gotten:

• Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
• Balatro
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Penny’s Big Breakaway
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Tekken 8
• The Thaumaturge
• Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes

…and while it’s divisive, I quite liked Alone in the Dark.

We’ve got the likes of Palworld and Enshrouded in early access, with No Rest for the Wicked to join them shortly.

There are a couple of games from smaller developers and publishers I’ve got my eye on with likely or confirmed 2024 release dates. They may have a wide spread in quality when reviews hit, but some of them could be winners, especially since they’re in genres currently underrepresented by the wider market:

• Aero GPX
• Agent 64: Spies Never Die
• Big Boy Boxing
• Broken Roads
• Conscript
• Commandos: Origins
• Core Decay
• Fallen Aces
• Kingmakers
• Phantom Fury
• The Plucky Squire
• Streets of Rogue 2
• Tempest Rising
• Titan Quest II
• V Rising (1.0 release)
• Warside

Then some other noteworthy games that are likely going to be very good and have a real shot at releasing this year:

• Avowed
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Dragon Age: Dreadwolf
• Gears 6
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Judas
• Mina the Hollower
• The Rise of the Golden Idol

What this year doesn’t have, at least so far, is a clear front runner like Baldur’s Gate 3 or God of War, but there’s more than half of the year left.

In fact lots are claiming the opposite since this leak came out and they started looking at the numbers and taking directly to devs involved.

Then please link that instead of their estimates, because if they were lying, publishers calling out bad math is exactly what I’d expect to happen. What I see on this list though are a bunch of costs that can be spread out over several years, not paid out all at the same time. Jedi Survivor, Suicide Squad, and Mortal Kombat account for $800M of this list, and none of them came to Game Pass, meaning Microsoft did not opt to spend that money.

Games leave gamepass since when it comes to renewal they don’t want to since streaming cannablizes sales and leads to lower revenue (already said this) so it’s not Microsoft deciding it’s not profitable, it’s the game wanting control back.

You are misplacing cause and effect. It’s more expensive for Microsoft to get someone else’s game on Game Pass right at launch than it is after launch, because if it’s a game people are already excited for, it will eat sales, as opposed to something like Descenders where most people never even heard of it, so it would serve as a form of marketing. In that case, Microsoft and the other company are essentially making a bet with regards to how much the game would make if it’s not on Game Pass, and Microsoft pays them a guaranteed sum up front, which reduces risk but also reduces reward. When a game leaves Game Pass, it’s not because they saw their sales tanking and wanted to “take back control”. It’s that Microsoft isn’t offering them enough to make up for the sales they’d expect to otherwise make for the next leasing period. Microsoft doesn’t offer them as much for the next period, because they don’t expect that keeping that game on the service keeps more people subscribed.

If you can produce that link that demonstrates what you’re claiming, I’ll read it, but otherwise, this sure looks like you’d rather believe in some boogeyman conspiracy theory than a simple truth.

In the link that you provided, which I have seen before, you can see that they turned down games for hundreds of millions of dollars but estimated that that’s what they would cost to get on Game Pass when they launch. Have you noticed that games often leave Game Pass as well? That’s because they have to keep paying those people for those games, and they don’t see any value in continuing to do so. If they were spending 10x on licensing what they reported to investors, that would have come out in these leaks, especially since the licensees would be able to do some back of the napkin math when they can see what was spent to license their competitors. But that didn’t happen. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no conspiracy here. Microsoft just has a profitable service.

Critical thinking: $200M game budgets are not “per year”. They’re 5+ year development timelines. Microsoft’s output was only a few games. Starfield had a $200M budget over the course of 5 years. Forza wouldn’t surprise me if it had about that for its own budget, even though it reuses a lot of legacy code and assets to get there for cheaper than building it from scratch. But that’s not $200M per year for those games. How much do you think Hi-Fi Rush cost? We’re talking 8 figures for that one, not 9, and that’s over the course of 4 years.

they could also spend more than 10 billion, but they omit that specific information. Why? Because it would show the lie….

They could omit all kinds of things that they didn’t do from their financial reports, sure. Why didn’t they say that they spent $10B? Perhaps because they didn’t spend $10B…

Your link, which I have seen before, refers to how much games are estimated to cost to come to Game Pass, some of which happened and some of which they turned down because they were too expensive. They famously low-balled the impact BG3 would have on the industry and how much it would take to secure that game for Game Pass…if they were interested in doing so.

So if they only make 2.7 billion and spend more than a billion a year with some games costing $200 million….

How is it profitable?

$2,700,000,000 -$1,000,000,000 = $1,700,000,000

If the rest of their expenditures are less than $1.7B, then it’s profitable for the year. Since we’ve already accounted for the line item where they’re licensing products for their service that they don’t own, I’d be surprised if they had $1.7B worth of other operating expenses left to pay for, unless you can share a source stating otherwise. But what I see is this stating that it is profitable.

They are being intentionally vague and not releasing intimation as it would show they are doing very illegal things.

The burden of proof is on you if you think they’re doing something illegal. It’s not difficult at all to believe that they’re doing everything by the book, have a profitable service, and also found a plateau in how many customers are interested in using such a subscription.

What do you mean? It’s already profitable for them. I’m far more concerned with Nintendo’s online subscription than Microsoft’s. Nintendo’s already crossed the line, and Microsoft still stands to make more money by offering games for sale on Steam than to make them only available via a subscription that isn’t doing well with regards to acquiring more customers.

I was being facetious. If your development timeline is 7 years, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out at the end, but they all set out to make a good product, especially when it takes that much time and money to make. Guardians of the Galaxy was supposedly a very good game that bombed horribly, for instance. There’s a lot of risk when your game is that expensive to make, because there are only so many customers out there, and they’re already playing other big expensive games. Even Sony is finding that their marquis titles aren’t bringing in as many customers as they expected anymore, so they can’t keep spending more on games and expect them to be profitable.

True. There would also be even more layoffs in this industry if they threw out years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars at the finish line because they decided not to release a game that didn’t turn out to be as good as they’d hoped.

Even if every $200M game was good, you’re still competing against the other $200M games out there, and that’s very risky.

You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.

You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.