This generation is plagued by AAA studios wasting years of work making live-service games that very few people want. Big money is chasing risky trends.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Yeah, but what about "remasters" that don't actually improve anything and you have to buy again due to the lack of backward compatibility?
True, I think I've played more Mass effect on my PS5 than PS5 games. I assume it is leading faster at least.. not a good investment. I should have stuck with my PS4 Pro.
Not really.
You have realize COVID basically screwed ps5 for 2-3 years. The system is 5 years old, but effectively was only available since '23.
And a PS6 is around the corner, isn’t it?
I would be surprised honestly. Technology has stalled pretty hard, tariffs and hardware is not in a great spot, PS5 still looks great and honestly there's not going to be much to sell a customer base. I could see them doing it, but it might be wiser to kick it down the road for a few years until things get a bit better, like they did with the PS3 and 360.
Focused more on big theatrical AAA titles rather than releasing games and selling you PS5 versions of PS4 games . That's what I think the issue is
Yeah, exclusivity is dead, and games take half a decade to make these days.
What's crazy is lots of good games don't take that long. You don't need an epic sound track, textures, physics, etc to make a good game. There are so many amazing low budget games that are not that technically challenging or that demanding of musicians/graphic artists.
epic sound track
That's the one thing where I would raise an objection. An epic soundtrack is that one thing that adds to the experience more than fancy graphics or overly complicated game mechanics. Epic doesn't necessarily mean expensive. Monkey Island had phantastic soundtracks, as well as other older games like The Settlers 2, early Anno games etc. They just set a mood. They supported their narratives. That was good stuff - and I guess you might now be able to extrapolate how old I am.
Bioware used to be able to make good AAA games quickly :
- Mass Effect : 2007
- Dragon Age : 2009
- ME2 : 2010
- DA2 : 2011
- ME3 : 2012
With epic soundtrack, voice acting, cinematography, ...
Even an independant (back then) studio like CD Projekt "only" needed 4 years between each Witcher game (2007, 2011, 2015), while making their own engine for the 2nd and 3rd
I don't know where the years get lost in game development nowadays, except pre-production (lack of direction/managment) and... "open world"
"Quickly" - the "Bioware magic" used to be years of lack of direction followed by one year of "HOLY SHIT WE NEED TO DELIVER!" crunch
But the former executive producer of Dragon Age, Mark Darrah (...) posted a YouTube video about how the so-called “BioWare magic” really worked. According to Darrah, it referred to a hockey stick graph where most of the progress is nearly unnoticeable. It’s nearly flat, and “if you draw that line out, then your game is shipping in like 30 years.” At a certain point, the developers hit a “pivotal point” when the game would finally shape up and a lot of progress would be made in a short amount of time. According to the developer, that tipping point is what is known as“BioWare magic.”
Half a decade for a subpar product that's barely out of beta.
Back in the day we've got subpar products barely out of beta that we had to patch from magazine cds more often. Oh - and they were more fun because developers had to make something out of nothing. I feel today, where everything is possible as the engine used delivers a toolset for anything, games easily are so overly stuffed with "mechanics" that they just feel like work. I don't like that.
Personally, I'm quite happy with less exclusives and more multiplatform games that I can play with all my friends regardless of what device they bought.
My biggest issue with gameing now is that PC has too many exclusives and I can't play my favorite games with a lot of friends because they wanted a console instead of a device that can be used for any digital workload.
Lol I love how you criticize the gaming industry and then your friends directly.
Thank you, criticism is my passion.
Me next, me next!
I do not like your shoes and you should have stuck with the trombone in the fifth grade.
Aww who am I kidding those look fantastic
No
PS4 severely disappointed me after PS3. The regression in GUI / OS multimedia features from XMB was one part of it. Charging to play online was another part of it.
When it came to games? Any exclusives it did have, besides souls games which I don't like, ended up ported. Regretful purchase. What games were coming out came out slowly and the quirky/experimental games I loved were all but dead and gone from Sony Studios. Matters less to people who only play on console, but I PC game too. It became a useless brick.
I figured PS5 would be more of the same and stopped buying Sony hardware.
Nintendo with the Switch 2 I bet will be on a similar trajectory and already was getting there except for games with Switch 1. Donkey Kong Bananza is brainless, MK World is inferior to 8 Deluxe. They're being weird about giving dev kits to developers.
I have both PS3 and PS4 and they are equally great devices: great and responsive UI, great titles. PS4 still have 90% of games playable offline without patches or accounts. PS5 looks very bad like latest gen console + XB1 (but at least XB1 have games, and backward compatibility.
Yeah, I think I've only bought one or two PS5 exclusives since I got mine around October 2020. Demon Souls remake and Horizon Forbidden West (though the latter is now available on Steam).
That said, I still think I've gotten a good amount of value out of the console by reaping the Patient Gamer™ rewards by picking up many of the major PS3/PS4 titles during good sales. I didn't play many video games during the PS3/PS4 era, so I missed out on quite a few major releases. I've accumulated a pretty great digital library with some fantastic games for a relatively small amount of money (which, like my Steam library, I've only actually played a fraction of).
As an aside, probably my favorite PS5 exclusive has just been the free Astro Bot game. The haptics in the DualSense controller are frankly cool as hell, and I hope more games utilize them going forward.
Wasn't forbidden West PS4, too?
Also, if you liked Astro's playroom, you really ought to try Astrobot, it's great.
The dlc was ps5 only, so I'm in the middle of another run so I can seamlessly flow into it
No doubt. There are many factors that lead to this, from studios wasting years chasing live-service and failing, to AAA games generally taking way more time to make because they "need" 50+ hours of content to justify being $70, to most importantly publishers realizing that exclusivity is a bad idea.
Sony has been winning the console race vs Xbox but have been really slow at pushing out games. I like God of War but they're putting out one game every generation.
but they’re putting out one game every generation
That wasn't as big of a deal when it was a two year console cycle...
But I think for hardware and software, consoles keep wanting to hit metrics, because that's what the parent company looks at.
The result is usually all flash and every game hitting the same points that were popular 5 years ago when development started
There's no risks, so there's no payoff. They have built in audiences so they still make money and keep getting paid.
Shit only changes when an I die game blows up and AAA try to integrate what made that game popular.
The kinds of games Sony makes have gotten bigger and taken longer to make. Taking longer to make means you get fewer of them. There were three Uncharted games and The Last of Us between 2007 and 2013. Naughty Dog today hasn't put out a new game since the PS4. When Sony spends $300M on Spider-Man 2 but they've actually sold fewer PS5s than they sold PS4s at the same point in the console lifecycle, you need to start getting your money back in other ways, like porting the game to PC. Helldivers II is a Sony joint, but the vast, vast majority of its sales came from PC, not PlayStation, and now it's even on Xbox.
Exclusives are just going to be less and less of a going concern as time goes on. As for what Sony's studios are cooking, Sucker Punch has a game this year, Intergalactic from Naughty Dog is at least a year away (but probably more), Sony Santa Monica still has their sci-fi project that Alanah Pearce wrote for that still hasn't been announced (so likely at least a year away), Guerilla "just" put out Horizon: Forbidden West in 2022 (meaning at least another year on their next game), etc. At this point, all of the pent up projects from these studios are looking like they're going to attempt to sell a PS6, with the same cross-gen situation we got for the PS5, where it comes out on both. Combine that with the talk about there being two SKUs of PS6, one of which being a handheld, acting as a Series S to the regular PS6's Series X, and that's what Sony's output looks like to me. That, plus the collapse of Bungie following Marathon's release and the collapse of Haven Studios regardless of whether or not Fairgames even comes out.
Game development time keeps increasing while console development cycles are decreasing. We got a gaming bubble before GTA6.
Yes. Moreso for the dumbasses who thought the PS5 Pro was a good investment
Factoring in PS4 backwards compatibility, no not really.. I got an external HDD this year and with all the PS4 games I bought but never got around to, my backlog is huge. I'm set for years without buying another game (though I still keep buying them).
whether you factor backwards compatibility or not is irrelevant. Those are still ps4 games. There are comparatively quite few ps5 games
At this point in the PS4 life cycle, I didn't have access to as many games as I do at this point for the PS5 so I don't think it is irrelevant. Platform exclusives at this point seem a bit silly anyway.
I'm more disappointed that the PS5 can't stream anything over 720p using Plex. I don't want to buy another gadget just to watch my local media >:(.
No new releases from Naughty Dog partnered with big IPs like God of War and Horizon releasing early in the PS5's lifecycle with no news from those studios is really making it feel stagnant from a first party perspective. When you list out the releases, the slate doesn't look too bad; we have a new Spider-Man, Astro Bot and Helldivers were excellent surprises, and Ghost of Yotei is right around the corner. The issue for me is after Yotei releases, there isn't anything we are aware of that I can think of off the top of my head that's coming soon, except maybe Wolverine.
Intergalactic is obviously exciting, but there's no way that game is coming before 2027 (if not 2028 or beyond). Guerrilla is surely making a new Horizon game which COULD make next year, but we'll see. The PS5 release schedule has just felt pretty slow since 2022, and beyond 3rd party support, it doesn't feel like there is anything huge coming to give it momentum.
It is. Mine has been collecting dust for about a year now. Waiting for gta6.
It's the same with my XBox Series S. It's just sitting there, collecting dust. Just as my steam library. My switch though has seen some rise in usage during the past few months as my kids are getting old enough to play video games and I prefer them to do this instead of binging Cocomelon...