Games Inbox: When will Sony released new PS5 games?

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Familiar questions
I have a nasty feeling that the new Astro Bot game is just going to be Astro’s Playroom 2 and used as a way to demo the PS5 Pro. It makes sense with the timing and while I enjoyed the original it was something like two hours long and not really a full game.

So the question is, when are they going to announce anything real? And can they really launch a new console without any major games? I don’t even know what third party games they could attach it to, since there seems so little out this winter.

We know they have a bunch of live service games and things like Ghost Of Tsushima 2 being made but why won’t they announce them? I feel like we’ve been asking this question for years now and I have no faith there’ll be anything substantial revealed next month.
Crosshairs

Time is money
I found the Newzoo report on gaming relatively interesting and a nice insight into what is quite a secretive industry.

The reporting on average monthly users seemed a bit pointless. I played Mario Kart more months last year than Alan Wake, but is that important? It’s not really a surprise that games that have an end rank lower, because in general you stop playing when you get to the end.

However, Nintendo seems to be a surprise exception. Super Mario Bros. Wonder has a higher average number of monthly users than Minecraft, despite only being out for three months of the year. My guess is that it’s because the game has a much higher total number of users.

The total number of players continues to baffle me. The Switch has sold 140 million and everything else less. Presumably a lot of PlayStation 5 owners had a PlayStation 4 and the same for Xbox Series/One. Some will own more than one and some will have stopped using it. Despite this, the total number of active console players is put at 625 million! As a guess that means each device has an average of three users, making me wonder why local multiplayer isn’t more popular on Xbox/PlayStation.

Lastly the bit I guess publishers are most interested in is the money. 59% of new game revenue (i.e. not Fortnite/Minecraft/Roblox, etc.) was from live service games. This shows that even though it’s a crowded market new games are still combining to more revenue than traditional games. This also includes Sony’s MLB: The Show, that they release on all consoles, taking 2.2% of new game revenue.

The one bit of good news is gamers are still buying just as many games. They might not be playing for as long, but the total number of games purchased has stayed the same.
Tim

GC: If you were playing Mario Kart (a seven-year-old game) that was time you couldn’t spend on other, newer games. It’s your time, just as much as your money, that publishers want nowadays.

Polling errors
The results of that Bafta poll are a bit puzzling. I’d argue the most recognisable video game characters, for some random person off the streets, would be Mario, Sonic, Pikachu, and at a push maybe Pac-Man. But of course this isn’t the public, this is 4,000 random… I don’t know… fans of the Baftas?

To be fair I can just about understand Lara Croft being number one, as she was massive in the 90s, but as GC said, a lot of this screams of recency bias given the recent Tomb Raider remaster and the Baldur’s Gate 3 characters… but that argument falls apart given Sackboy and Agent 47 are in the top five and if I’m not mistaken neither of them have had a mainline game this decade.

I can only conclude that either a bunch of people got together to purposefully give us this weird cocktail of characters for the minor laughs it brings, or the question the poll was asking wasn’t clear at all.
Sunny

GC: We agree, it was very odd. The small sample size was the main problem, but even then Sackboy and Agent 47 are such peculiar choices to float to the top. Hitman 3 was in 2021 though and Sackboy: A Big Adventure in 2020.

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Independent recommendation
Thought you guys might be interested in Minishoot’ Adventures. I had heard nothing about it until yesterday, but I downloaded it last night after seeing some rave reviews and could not put it down.

It’s a cross between old school Zelda and twin-stick shooter and it plays, looks, and sounds fantastic. One of those perfectly formed little games that just feels right the moment you start it up. Anyway, flew under the radar for me but feel it could maybe do with a little more attention.
AudioSpanks

GC: We’ll take a look; we always appreciate indie recommendations from readers.

EDF! EDF! EDF!
Playing Helldivers 2 has got me thinking, this is nearly the ideal version of Earth Defence Force. Swap the galaxy for cities/areas around the world, they already have their bugs and robots… one thing it has better than Helldivers is more interesting weaponry and different character types.

Combine these games and it’d be great. Or I’d like a remake of Global Defence Force, no ‘story’ like the sequels have had, no voice acting, just a modern clean-up of one of my favourite guilty pleasures.
Liam

GC: We miss the old days of the series too. For the record though, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is out later this year.

Small vs. silver
The recent video game TV shows have been mostly hits and are better than what a film could possibly have been like. Gaming films I tend to find are never what the gamer wants and is not what the average movie goer would want to see on the big screen either!

The recent Super Mario animated movie worked, as it kept to the familiar world from the game franchise. The 90s Mario movie with Bob Hoskins was the exact opposite, pretty much.

Mortal Kombat has had better attempts, whilst Street Fighter not so much. I remember an Alone In The Dark film a couple of decades back, which might as well not have been based on any game! It was just a pointless horror movie. The CGI Final Fantasy: Spirits Within was a much better attempt at a gaming movie and matched the Final Fantasy vibe a lot more than most gaming movies.

The recent TV production of Resident Evil on Netflix, starring Lance Reddick, was enjoyable and good within its own portrayal of the games, just like the film series starring Milla Jovovich. But, ultimately, they’re not what us gamers take from the games. The CGI films of Resident Evil do a better job at getting closer to the gaming franchise we love.

The recent TV series of The Witcher, The Last Of Us, Halo and the soon-to-be-released Fallout series does what the movies fail at, which is capture the spirit of the game and be much closer to the original games. The budget allowance for television has definitely increased over recent years, thus enabling the production of more lavish productions.

I am hopeful for more television adaptations of classic game series, which seem to be much better than the controversial movies of bygone years.
Alucard

Jet Set pricing
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is on sale as a physical copy for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch currently for £19.99, normal price on Amazon is £34.99 and when not on sale on PlayStation Store it is
£34.99.

I would have picked it up but am saving my money for a few mid-price releases in May.
Andrew J.

Glaring inconsistences
Your article about gamers playing less new games than ever brought up some valid points but missed the most obvious glaring point staring you right in the face. It’s not that people aren’t playing new games, it’s more that there aren’t any new games worth playing. Let’s take a look at Palworld; when the beta for that title became available, people flooded to it, even gamers such as myself that don’t particularly enjoy the survival game genre. At its peak, it hit 19 active million players across Steam and Xbox.

Gamers have stuck to games along the lines of Fortnite and Call Of Duty, etc. for the simple reason that they know what to expect from them and have been burned one too many times by failed titles. Titles such as Anthem, Skull And Bones, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Fallout 76, Halo Infinite multiplayer, and Mass Effect: Andromeda to name a few.

These are titles that promised much and failed to live up to expectations laid out by their publishers. These weren’t small franchises either, but huge IPs from established companies. Gamers love new things; we are virtual drug addicts, after all, always looking for our next digital fix and new worlds to dive into and explore. But the birth of the battle royal genre has got us hooked. Warzone and Fortnite, with their battle pass systems, and now every new game seemingly has to be a game as a service and deliver new content in the form of a battle pass.

The days when video gaming was the home of some of the best storytelling found in entertainment seemingly peaked a few years ago with the Mass Effect trilogy, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. There are a few notable titles that have tried to restore this with the launch of Bethesda’s Starfield but these titles are too few. Games take longer to develop than ever before, as technology has improved and has become increasingly complex.

It’s safe to say that producing a video game takes more man hours, and likely costs the same as producing a Hollywood blockbuster. Gamers are playing fewer new games currently because there are fewer quality new games to play. It’s that simple. Gamers these days want to play with their friends. It’s also important to understand the influence of streamers, which can’t be understated.

The most popular streamers are playing the titles mentioned in your article. These people are larger than life and gamers enjoy watching their content and also enjoy trying to kill them, hence the term stream sniping. It becomes a challenge to take on some of the best to play that game.

Game developers are now under more pressure than ever to create the next Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Pokémon, GTA, etc. – the next billion dollar franchise. They lack the freedom and trust to produce titles that they want to.
Christian

GC: 2023 is widely considered one of the best years for video games ever. And while there seems to be a drought coming, 2024 has also been good so far. The idea that gamers like new things is not borne out by any reliable data and is even contradicted by your own comments.

Inbox also-rans
Since it has been a year since it was released on PC, I wondered if Pizza Tower was any closer to being ported to consoles?
Chaosphere

GC: Strangely, there’s still no sign of any console versions. Which is a crying shame.

I really can’t see how Xbox is going to get anyone excited about Gears Of War 6. It’s not even that the last two were bad, they were just so mid.
Cabint

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