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A couple of things we're learning here:
Your personal data in PSN is more profitable than actually selling the game in 180 other countries.
The continued enforcement and even expansion of the delisting in these countries, which we now know was done by Sony is proof-positive that they're just going to try again to enforce this at a later date.
Sony's death-grip on their platform is more profitable than selling the game. They only fund games to promote the Playstation brand. There is nothing else propping up the Playstation brand. Without lock-in they only make a decent gaming PC with a weird OS.
I sincerely think they're rattled by Microsoft turning Xbox into a gradient... or whatever the fuck Microsoft is doing. Xbox exists specifically to PC-ify the console market, and they've succeeded so completely that the console market is now two AMD laptops versus an Android tablet.
Sony saw how much money they were making just being a PC publisher and it scared the shit out of them. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. This debacle has been a direct overreaction to that possibility.
So on the plus side, Sony's not extracting value from your name and phone number. They want it to be 2004 again. They want every game to be for one platform, so no matter how good or bad their machine's games are, they can sell the machine as having their games. But that model nearly sunk the PS3, as multiplatform development triumphed, and now Microsoft has tricked them into releasing PC ports. MS isn't talking about Halo on PS5 because they need the sales, you know? Sony wants to keep winning the console war... but Sony needs there to be a console war.
more profitable in the short term
there's no way you can build a 10- or 20-year business plan around that.
I don't know where people get these ideas from. Sony has been around for 40 years, and they haven't done so by shooting themselves in the foot.
They sold the original Playstation at a loss, the PSP was a bit of a flop and was advertised with a white woman physically intimidating a black woman by holding her by the face, they tried to copyright the words "Let's Play", and their laptop batteries used to explode causing the biggest recall of pcs in history.
There's plenty of examples of them fucking up.
Selling consoles for a loss at release is a common practice. They make most of their money from software sales and around the time of the mid gen refresh the consoles start selling for a profit. Also the PSP sold really well and was hardly a flop (the vita on the other hand)
Clearly you don't understand the phrase "shooting yourself in the foot". What you described are mistakes. What they're being accused of is intentional.
Lance Armstrong won 7 tour the France, he must have been doing something right.
...wat?
Oh really? They killed betamax because they want all the profit to themselves.
...and?
They shot their own foot on that one. Betamax was the superior format than VHS but they kept the tech to themselves paving the VHS to win the format war.
You're going to have to be a lot more descriptive...
What part didn't you understand?
All of it. But mostly the "kept the tech to themselves". What "tech"? Why?
Sony kept Betamax format proprietary they won't allow anybody to use it freely. While VHS was made open source.
You ever heard of a little thing called Blu-Ray? Was that open source?
Ever heard of a little company called Apple? Because they're basically the antithesis of open source but still insanely successful.
Have you ever heard of insanely good marketing?
LOL yes, thank you for proving my point.
Yet
so far
It won't happen, though part of me just wishes ol' Gaben would up and find a loophole in the Sony contract and tell the Helldiver 2 devs to directly partner with Steam. Not because I think it's a legitimately good idea; because the pure chaos this would cause would be extraordinary.
170 countries are being undemocratically denied the sweet liberty of managed democracy.
My review stays negative until super earth is liberated.
Do you have the strength and courage to be free?
I would like to know more
It really is amazing how Sony is still learning to kill off their own games.
The major order has less players because of Sony's stupid push to bulk up PSN numbers.
I think it's fair to say Sony actually doesn't care about a successful game or not. They want a permanent recurring slice of the PC gaming market pie. Games be damned. They want their own platform like epic
They want their own platform like epic
Epic is really not a platform anyone should aspire to...
I'm sure the thinking is, Sony is already making games for this PlayStation platform. With publisher money and in-house studios. Creating their own online store platform like epic, would just be extra money for them. And help grow a market they haven't tapped yet. They're not thinking about it as giving up money that they could have made just by being on steam.
This is a big hypothetical, I'm doing lots of projection, and reading into their PSN moves. But it lines up
I don't wanna be a party pooper but the Steam conccurent players doesn't reflect that at all. The downward trend (that all games have after release) has not changed velocity at all.
This. The game had an insanely strong peak but is leveling off. It will peak again with new Factions introduced and if there are big expansions, but there are other games too. My friends went and played some other stuff, and even I have no desire to grind up to level 150 for no reason, and have already finished all the warbonds.
If they're lucky it holds a strong 50k player base over time and they can keep healthy matchmaking and an active community. But drop off is kinda inevitable.
The sales lockout in certain territories is a legal issue. It sucks, but they gotta figure that out now.
They aren't killing off their own games tho. Players were more than happy to shame other players into changing their review back to positive and just keep playing.
(Edit to note: I wrote this before seeing what at least appears to be confirmation that it was Sony who instituted the block, though it was just a support agent who said it and we know that always get everything right and have all the info available to their company...)
The block was implemented by Valve because they were blindsided like the rest of us and wanted to protect themselves when there was no plan available how Sony was going to handle all the copies that would be left unusable. I imagine Valve isn't going to revert the change without some direct assurances by Sony that the PSN change is not happening and will not be attempted again because they don't want to be in the position of having tens of thousands of copies that rightfully should be refunded because they never should have been sold in the first place.
I still believe Arrowhead is doing what they can about this, and that Sony only cares because they got a financial black eye over it. At the end of the day I think Sony is doing to prefer getting money from non-PSN countries as well as continuing to get money from the rest which they likely won't if reviews go that far back into the dog house again.
I don't regret putting my review back to positive but I don't begrudge anyone who wants to wait and see more first (or feels they should leave it at negative as a reminder). If this doesn't get resolved, though, it will be changed back to negative and it won't be updated again after that, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that