Yes and I just wanted to point out that this isn’t a choice of the devs (most of the time) but rather consoles being a walled garden.
Because I think it’s unfair to say that you shouldn’t have empathy for PC gamers just because they have so many games already. Do the 100 indie games I can buy for <5€ really make up for the inability to play GTA6 or Death Stranding 2 (early)?
Console exclusivity always hurts the consumer and is, in my opinion, a legacy practice.
You always develop games on PC. From there you create builds for PC and Consoles, but the console build step is not easily achievable. You need to go through a lot of hoops to get a game on console. Oh and you'll spend a lot of money to get there.
And does it really make sense as a solo indie dev to release your game exclusively on one console?
Bottom line consoles intentionally don’t make it easy to publish to. PC is as easy as making an itchio account and uploading your games there.
This is the core issue of console gaming tho. You can’t actually upgrade. You just straight up buy a new console. This wasn’t that big of a deal during the PS4 gen because the PS4 pro wasn’t that expensive. But at the current price points a different strategy is needed.
Honestly I think if Sony made a program like “mail us your old PS5 and like $200 to get a PS5 Pro” the console would’ve done better. It wouldn’t address the “why do we need this?” part (especially considering we’re hearing reports of GTA6 running at 30 FPS on the Pro) but it would’ve done some good for customer goodwill.
I own all of these games already so I can tell you this is a good bundle. Any single one of these games is worth the full price of the bundle alone.
The 3 Zachtronics games included are a great sampler of of the studio and I like that this isn’t just a "All Zachtronics games bundle".
There are better programming games out there but I think this bundle strikes a good balance between fun games that require light programming knowledge and wow this is just programming lightly disguised as a game.
It can definitely work. Some of my fondest memories in multiplayer are me playing Arma 3 on a hardcore milsim server. The immersion was unmatched for me but it’s hard to replicate. It requires everyone to play along and that just doesn’t always happen.
So I’m not inherently super skeptical about the multiplayer aspect.
I liked the next fest demo and I’m glad the game seems to be doing well for the devs.