Industry News / Upcoming Games

[Antimatter]

Honestly, I don't think the woke vs. anti-woke debate affected Concord player numbers on a large scale. I watched a few reviews of the game, including ones from the beta phase, and I can conclude the game's failure was due to many factors, such as price, slow combat, no variety in gameplay scenarios, the lack of memorable characters, and bad sound design. Overall, combat was very unfun and sluggish, it even lacked any ultimates. The market for these games is just overcrowded, and Concord had nothing done better than its competitors. The politics/culture part was just an addition that is easy to discuss/complain about, but it didn't make or break this game.

 

[JustKneller]

The politics/culture part was just an addition that is easy to discuss/complain about, but it didn't make or break this game.

Well, that's interesting. I'm not familiar with the game, so I took that article at face value. I figured Wired was a reliable enough source. It sounds like it just wasn't a good game, and definitely not good enough to displace established entries. Maybe this means something else then. It's not good enough to be newer and flashier than what's established. One really has to come up with the game that is just flat out better than the current king of the hill. And some of these top games have been around for quite a while at this point.

I never really play those types of games though, that is MMO shooters with micro-trans and what not. IMHO, the design there is meant to be a money printing machine for the devs and quality gameplay comes a distant second. You'll never get a deep story or complex gameplay. It's just twitch nerve gaming. I think it's a different model than single player games for sure. Like, nobody really needs to compete with Baldur's Gate anymore. It had its time and that market share is totally up for grabs. And, even at the time, there were a lot of other RPGs (FFIX, VtM:Bloodlines, Vagrant Story, BoF:IV etc.) that had great stories solid gameplay, and did well enough in the market.

I'm secretly hoping what emerges from all this is a revival of retro-gaming. The kind of thing that you don't need a massive AV studio to produce. You can just focus on quality challenging gameplay, decent enough visuals, and knock it out with a much smaller studio. Lower production cost means needing fewer sales for the project to be viable. But, I'm sure that's excessive optimism on my part.

 

[Antimatter]

This is such bad news...



Annapurna Interactive President Nathan Gary and his team had been negotiating with Ellison, the daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, to spin off the video-game division as an independent entity. When Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, Gary and other executives resigned and were followed by around two dozen other staffers.

The exodus has led to chaos as game developers partnered with Annapurna to try to figure out what this means for their upcoming projects.

Annapurna Interactive was famous for publishing indie hits like Stray, Outer Wilds, Gorogoa, Neon White, What Remains of Edith Finch, and many more, may not be the same company anymore...

At least Remedy is not hugely affected by that.

Remedy Reassures Us Their Deal With Annapurna For Control And Alan Wake Is Still Safe - Gameranx

They're still in control.

gameranx.com

 

[Antimatter]

Ubisoft is not doing great these days. At least, on paper it seems they'll learn from SW: Outlaws and adjust something for their next game, Assassin's Creed: Shadows.

Assassin's Creed Shadows Delayed To February Because Star Wars Outlaws Isn't Doing Well

The open-world RPG was set to be one of this fall's big blockbusters

kotaku.com

The company as a whole is experiencing issues:

What's ailing Ubisoft? | Opinion

Since its IPO almost thirty years ago, the corporate history of Ubisoft has been defined, to some degree, by battles wi…

www.gamesindustry.biz

 

[Antimatter]

The situation is escalating.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s founding Guillemot family are considering options including a potential buyout of the French video game developer [Ubisoft] after it lost more than half its market value this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Chinese tech company and Guillemot Brothers Ltd. have been speaking with advisers to help explore ways to stabilize Ubisoft and bolster its value, the people said, asked not to be identified discussing a private matter. One of the possibilities being discussed would involve teaming up to take the company private, according to the people.

Shares of Ubisoft have fallen 54% in Paris trading this year, giving the company a market capitalization of about €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion). Tencent owned 9.2% of Ubisoft’s net voting rights at the end of April, while the Guillemot family held about 20.5%.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

www.bloomberg.com

 

[JustKneller]

Coincidentally, ten cents is the current stock price for Ubisoft!

But seriously, the stock is only $3. A point of comparison, I looked up a number of competitors and saw stock prices generally in the $20-100 range (and even higher for companies like Microsoft, for obvious reasons).

 

[BelgarathMTH]

I wonder how all this Ubisoft bad news will affect the new HoMM game?

 

[Antimatter]

I wonder how all this Ubisoft bad news will affect the new HoMM game?

Hopefully, it won't affect it. The devs are working independently, and Ubisoft will be only a publisher—a bit like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, which was released earlier this year.

Btw, I really enjoy blog posts by Unfrozen, they are written by someone who is a big HoMM fan and player.


In other gaming news, ZA/UM successors keep appearing. The hope of getting a Disco Elysium successor is very low, to be honest.

A Disco Elysium successor studio has been announced for the second time today, meaning there are now 4 companies battling for the title of ZA/UM's true inheritor

There are now as many ZA/UM successors as there are Workers' Internationals, appropriately enough.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Antimatter]

Hmm, I wonder if this is true.



When we consider the Elden Ring DLC was nominated for GotY, it might be a coincidence, or not?

 

[Nimran]

Path of Exile 2 comes to early access on Dec. 6.

 

[Antimatter]

I'm putting it here because more people need to know about this. "Access journalism" is certainly a term.

 

[JustKneller]

I use metacritic, but I balance out the critic score against the user score (and often, I watch a lot of YT videos about a game before I buy). In fact, I lean towards the user score since most media outlets are not very trustworthy anymore. Fallout is a good example. New Vegas has 84/86 critic/user reviews. This seems legit and consistent to me. For Fallout 4, the critics barely squeaked it into the green (84 for PC) but then if you look at the user reviews, it's 27 points lower! The same thing happens in Fallout 76, except this time Bethesda can't even buy a good review. They get 52 from critics and then 29 for users, a 23 point gap.

You can look at some of the true gems in the hobby (Deus Ex, Bioshock, Disco Elysium, Don't Starve Together, Subnautica, and so on) and see the same consistency that you get with New Vegas. It's all really telling.

 

[Antimatter]

Path of Exile II Sets New Peak with Over 500,000 Concurrent Steam Players During Early Access - GamerReporter

In a groundbreaking achievement for the action role-playing game genre, Path of Exile II has surged to an unprecedented peak of over 500,000 concurrent

gamerreporter.com

Seems like it's a treat for Diablo-likes fans.

 

[JustKneller]

Path of Exile II Sets New Peak with Over 500,000 Concurrent Steam Players During Early Access - GamerReporter

In a groundbreaking achievement for the action role-playing game genre, Path of Exile II has surged to an unprecedented peak of over 500,000 concurrent

gamerreporter.com

Seems like it's a treat for Diablo-likes fans.

Hint hint, I presume?

I have had a lot of fun with PoE1. I may check out PoE2 down the line once they work out any kinks (and I get through a few other games first). They did a solid job with the first game, I'm confident the second will do just fine.

 

[Nimran]

Diablo wishes it was this good.

 

[JustKneller]

Diablo wishes it was this good.

For some reason, that statement made me think of this:

 

[Antimatter]

Post your predictions

I'll go wild: Half-Life 3 by Valve and the next NieR game by Platinum Games.

 

[JustKneller]

I'll go wild: Half-Life 3 by Valve and the next NieR game by Platinum Games.

I would probably buy a new gaming laptop so I could run HL3. I'm rather bummed it all dropped off after Episode 2 and left me hanging. So much so, that at one point, I was working on a homebrew tabletop game that would effectively pick up where EP2 left off.

 

[Antimatter]

Sure, and I think we can safely say that if it's a game from Valve, it'll move gaming forward. I was so impressed by their Portal games. HL3 would definitely be one game that deserves a hardware upgrade of anyone's PC.

 

[Antimatter]

Only 15% of all Steam users' time was spent playing games released in 2024

Steam's end-of-year review of what we play and how we play makes for some interesting reading.

www.pcgamer.com

Steam users spent just 15% of their total playing time in games that launched in 2024. 47% of the total playing time on Steam was spent on games released in the last one to seven years, while a sizeable 37% of time was spent in games that have been out for eight years or more.

So what do we make of all this? Are people just not buying new games any more? No, that's probably not the case. In fact, that 15% is a significant increase over the 9% of playtime spent in 2023 on new games released that year (though it's down on the 17% of time folks spent in new games in 2022). So 2024 has actually seen a bit of a bounceback from last year.

And this is how it looks for me:

So yeah, it's getting increasingly difficult to play only new games as there are so many games to play. Not that it's a bad thing.