Hilarious, when will they learn you cannot sell a game that gamers do not want to play.
Perfect, now they can focus on the Hogwarts Legacy 2 Live service they promised to pump out , right?
I mean, hey, refunding is at least a cool thing to do. Should be the bare minimum, but tons of publishers seem to just take the money and run.
I’m shocked they didn’t swap to free to play to at least see if that gate was the issue with player count.
that’s still probably the plan. you can’t just do that. this game was supposed to have no battlepass and instead make money through sales of the game and future content in dlcs like in the old days. they can’t just make it free and run the game for no money for the foreseeable future. I’m sure they’re going to try to come up with a monetization plan to switch to free to play.
I never heard of this game, except for how poorly it’s performed. I didn’t see any sneak peaks, or ads on the Playstation store. I didn’t hear about it from friends or guildies.
I know that’s a sample size of one, but no one I know or play games with had it in their radar at all. This game showed up one weekend with some drama over psn accounts or something, then flopped and I still know almost nothing about the actual game.
I saw more information on The Finals than I saw on this.
Sony failing to get another live service game off the ground really highlights a few things.
-
How hard it is to launch something in this space. Not only has the market moved away, it was also saturated long before they dropped Condord.
-
Companies (still) fail to understand that a bad launch isn’t exactly death. There are several ways they could of tried to salvage this instead of just Zaslav’ing it for a tax write off 2 weeks in. We’ve seen plenty of examples in the past 10 years of games that were able to turn themselves around and find success. No reason a company like Sony couldn’t align resources to make it happen here.
-
This should of been on PS+ Day One… I get not putting your shorttail, singleplayer, prestige titles up there at launch. I also get not wanting to go completely F2P, a microtransaction enabled MP game though? Why the hell wouldn’t you want the biggest audience possible out the gate? Halo Infinite was a shit show at launch but it was free and has maintained a pretty damn solid user base for years because of it. Hell, I’ve even picked up a few season passes and cosmetics despite never playing a Halo MP game in the past (outside of lan’ing up for Halo 1 waaaaay back).
Lots more thoughts, but the schadenfreude is just too much right now to avoid jumping on a still warm corpse.
This should of been on PS+ Day One
I’m not a gamer, but isn’t a ps+ subscription mandatory for online gaming? If it was free for ps+ games, that meant it was f2p from the start
As a technicality you would be correct. Games can be removed from PS+ though and it also lauched day and date on Steam. So calling it F2P instead of a PS+ Day One would be a little harder for fans to swallow on PC where it would still have been $40. See also the aforementioned Halo Infinite which launched on Xbox first then PC but only the multiplayer component is F2P on both. You can play SP with Game Pass Ultimate but you need to purchase a license to do so on Steam.
To point 2, I like to mention that Overwatch started off as a scraped game. MMO if I remember right. Oversaturated market, so they took the assets and jumped into hero shooters when the concept was fresh.
Obviously contemporary Blizzard still found a way to ruin it, but to be fair the genre more or less than it’s course by then. Anyway, if Sony had an ounce of talent that old Blizzard had, they’d have done likewise.
