The Wednesday letters page reminisces about the heyday of GAME and its midnight openings, as one reader bids farewell to it Xbox Series X.
Half the price, twice the number of viewers
Interesting to hear the Saber Interactive guy talk about games needing to reduce their budgets and do away with the £70 price tag. I completely agree on both points, but I really can’t imagine the EAs and Ubisofts of this world going along with that.
It seems to me that the problems we’re currently seeing could easily be solved by just taking a step back and reducing the budgets, but apparently that’s just too much to ask? I guess it’s a general business thing but reeling in previous excesses seems like something most companies are just completely unwilling to do.
Halve the budgets and halve the prices and I’m certain that you’d see a huge rise in the number of people buying them. Worried there’s no growth in console gaming? Maybe if people could actually afford more than a few new games a year that wouldn’t be a problem.
Keef
No one at the wheel
It is a shame the Switch 2 wasn’t released this year after all, as I do feel there’d be a lot less negativity if we had that to look forward to and awesome next gen Nintendo games. At the moment, it’s hard to be positive when so little is on the cards and Sony and Microsoft are both acting so suss.
I did like the Star Wars Outlaws trailer, so that’s good, but what we’re missing at the moment is some industry leadership. I’ve seen Sony pretend that’s their role, but they’ve been so awful the last year or so that they can never claim that again.
I think it also proves that Nintendo can’t step into their shoes either. No matter how good Nintendo’s games and hardware are they’re too obsessed with doing their own thing to be an industry leader. I think the lack of authority is making the current situation worse, with publishers seeming just as directionless as Sony, even though they’re not technically doing anything wrong.
Poindexter
The Last Jedi
I really liked that Star Wars Outlaws trailer. I’m not sure about the main character, who seems a little too obviously good to be a scoundrel, but I love the graphics and the scale and the Star Wars-y nature of it all. As long as it reviews well then I am definitely interested in picking it up, even if August is such a weird release date for a big game it makes me wonder if something is up.
My bigger concern is that this may be one of the last big budget, amazing looking single-player games. Sony has been cutting down on them for a while now, but EA only just announced it was and Xbox still has a whole bunch of games to get out, before it can change direction.
I’m not sure what Ubisoft’s plan is, but if Outlaws does well I’ll be very interested to see if it gets a sequel.
Hobbie
Cross-gen barrier
The phrase ‘biggest technological leap ever in a generation’ is interesting because you wonder would it could end up being. It’s nice knowing it’s in an internal memo, as that suggests it’s the target they’re setting for people working on it.
However, I believe none of us will be very surprised if we do not agree with the final results matching the statement. We also need to think about the practical aspects of this. They have committed to having Call Of Duty run on the Switch/PlayStation and since they h