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7/26/2025, 3:09:34 PM
>>716485339
>The amount of potential console users is not enough.
Says who? Switch has sold 150m. PS4 117m. Xbox One around 40-50m. That's about 200-300m~. That's a metric fuckton of people. It only takes a couple million sales for a game to be profitable.
If you absolutely need to grow, you can compete for a larger share of this pre-existing pie (especially when the max a single console has sold is the PS2's 160m). You can court people who don't traditionally play games to buy your system (e.g. the Wii/DS blue ocean strategy did). You can court PC gamers to buy your system. You can increase profits in other areas, like increasing software attach rates (e.g. what the Switch did).
>This is why they have to increase the prices of everything in order to milk individual customers as much as possible. Console market has hit a cap. Game budgets have not.
Here's a thought: Cap game budgets. Drive sales through innovation in game design rather than chasing hyper-realistic graphics and scope creep. The Nintendo approach.
Shit like Spiderman 2, a same-engine sequel with heavy asset reuse, should not have 3x the budget of Spiderman 1. That's pure fucking inefficiency.
>And I will just say that artificially locking a game to a box is just kinda gross. If the systems are totally different and porting is costly and time consuming I can understand, but locking games away just for the sake of it is actually anti-consumer. If I like game X on platform A why would I have a mental breakdown over it being on platform B as well? It literally doesn't affect me whatsoever
This is a midwit take. It's not about fanboys having mental breakdowns when exclusives get ported. It's ultimately just healthier for the industry when there's more competition. It drives innovation and prevents one company from dominating, stagnating, and enshittifying.
If every game was on every platform, people would just flock to the best one. That's what we're seeing happen with Xbox/PS and PC now.
>The amount of potential console users is not enough.
Says who? Switch has sold 150m. PS4 117m. Xbox One around 40-50m. That's about 200-300m~. That's a metric fuckton of people. It only takes a couple million sales for a game to be profitable.
If you absolutely need to grow, you can compete for a larger share of this pre-existing pie (especially when the max a single console has sold is the PS2's 160m). You can court people who don't traditionally play games to buy your system (e.g. the Wii/DS blue ocean strategy did). You can court PC gamers to buy your system. You can increase profits in other areas, like increasing software attach rates (e.g. what the Switch did).
>This is why they have to increase the prices of everything in order to milk individual customers as much as possible. Console market has hit a cap. Game budgets have not.
Here's a thought: Cap game budgets. Drive sales through innovation in game design rather than chasing hyper-realistic graphics and scope creep. The Nintendo approach.
Shit like Spiderman 2, a same-engine sequel with heavy asset reuse, should not have 3x the budget of Spiderman 1. That's pure fucking inefficiency.
>And I will just say that artificially locking a game to a box is just kinda gross. If the systems are totally different and porting is costly and time consuming I can understand, but locking games away just for the sake of it is actually anti-consumer. If I like game X on platform A why would I have a mental breakdown over it being on platform B as well? It literally doesn't affect me whatsoever
This is a midwit take. It's not about fanboys having mental breakdowns when exclusives get ported. It's ultimately just healthier for the industry when there's more competition. It drives innovation and prevents one company from dominating, stagnating, and enshittifying.
If every game was on every platform, people would just flock to the best one. That's what we're seeing happen with Xbox/PS and PC now.
7/25/2025, 9:54:26 PM
>>716429806
It's not a necessity for PlayStation to port their PS5 exclusives to PC. Sony's exclusives are profitable before they're ported to PC. Even Sony's non-superstar games, like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, turned a profit on PS5 alone (https://icon-era.com/threads/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-was-profitable.8211/).
Sony is just chasing extra profits. It's greed. Not a necessity due to modern bloated development costs.
> Nintendo is maintaining it for now but how sustainable it is remains to be seen.
They at least acknowledge the issue of raising costs and want to keep their dev times reasonable (pic related from their moSt recent investor Q&A).
These are the types of questions Xbox and Sony should've been asking themselves during the 7th and 8th generations, when budgets/dev times skyrocketed. Instead, they doubled down on that red ocean, with 7 year dev cycles for AAAA games that chased hyper realistic graphics. Now Playstations' 1st Party output is the weakest its ever been, with the platform only supported by turbo normies. Xbox's entire hardware business is in the shits. And most of the Western AAA games industry is in the shits. Great job guys.
It's not a necessity for PlayStation to port their PS5 exclusives to PC. Sony's exclusives are profitable before they're ported to PC. Even Sony's non-superstar games, like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, turned a profit on PS5 alone (https://icon-era.com/threads/ratchet-and-clank-rift-apart-was-profitable.8211/).
Sony is just chasing extra profits. It's greed. Not a necessity due to modern bloated development costs.
> Nintendo is maintaining it for now but how sustainable it is remains to be seen.
They at least acknowledge the issue of raising costs and want to keep their dev times reasonable (pic related from their moSt recent investor Q&A).
These are the types of questions Xbox and Sony should've been asking themselves during the 7th and 8th generations, when budgets/dev times skyrocketed. Instead, they doubled down on that red ocean, with 7 year dev cycles for AAAA games that chased hyper realistic graphics. Now Playstations' 1st Party output is the weakest its ever been, with the platform only supported by turbo normies. Xbox's entire hardware business is in the shits. And most of the Western AAA games industry is in the shits. Great job guys.
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