Reality does not match that headline. Was this generated by AI to be something people wanted to read?

Yet, the PlayStation 5 Pro gives certain backwards-compatible PS4 games an added boost in resolution and framerate. Gamers on Reddit are hoping that Bloodborne will benefit from a 60fps boost on Sony’s upcoming machine.

“Gamers are hoping” is definitely not what that headline says. It links to a trailer from the original release 9 years ago. There’s no press release about the game being confirmed to run better than 30 FPS on PS5 Pro. This is garbage.

Sharing your games doesn’t lock your entire library when someone is playing a different game than you in the same account.

I don’t know how you got from A to B on the Porsche. Embracer was funded largely by debt that they were expecting to get bailed out of by an investment that didn’t happen; the classic leveraged investment gone wrong. Microsoft absolutely could stomach whatever losses they face, especially since that was the whole idea a few years back when they started Game Pass, so them deciding to not follow through on that and tighten their belts now is a situation unique to them. At large, across the industry, are tons of companies making big bets like Suicide Squad or Concord or Warhaven that follow a live service template that’s been tapped out of customers and don’t work out, and even smaller companies following the traditional publisher model like Mimimi are so exhausted hunting for funding for their next game, just barely making it by on copies sold, that they decide instead to close up shop. That’ll happen when customer dollars are spread out around more games.

What law does this break?

If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.

How many releases is a very different number than how much profit. Only a few of Microsoft’s releases likely account for a sizable percentage of the entire industry’s profits in a given year. The fact is that investors saw dollar signs, and the industry expanded to a level that the market doesn’t actually sustain. How many metroidvanias do you want to play in a given year? And given that Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out this year, how likely are you to play Tales of Kenzera: Zau after you’ve bought and played those? Mass layoffs are not a good thing, but it’s a mathematical consequence of how much companies are permitted to expand relative to what people actually buy.

And quite frankly, there are (or were, before layoffs), too many developers making games for how many releases the market can bear.

I try to focus on the part where the thing they were building was inherently bad for video games, so this makes it less likely for it to happen again.

There’s an external drive accessory you can buy from them for about $80.

I didn’t once call it one, and since this is where you’re headed with this conversation, I think we’re done here.

Go check out how the rest of the market is working out right now. Helldivers is only as successful as it is because it had a PC version that outsold its console counterpart several times over. Square Enix took a beating on timed exclusivity and won’t be going forward with it. Take a look around: who else is postponing their PC version and saying they want to continue to do so? Who else is postponing their PC version without Sony greasing the wheels in the first place? It kind of doesn’t matter if it’s harder to make a good PC version; the economical thing to do is to prioritize it, unless you’re the exception to the rule like Grand Theft Auto that can get people to buy it twice.

You have your reasons for choosing to play on console, but that’s not really relevant to this discussion. For any publisher other than Rockstar, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not releasing on PC at the same time, and even Rockstar might not be immune to some foot-shooting this time around. It’s just too much money left on the table. It would be like if a third party decided to launch on Xbox but not PlayStation; PlayStation is just too big of a market of potential players to ignore. PC is larger still.

You wouldn’t put out console first and PC later, if you were any other company, because then your marketing spend has to be split between two dates, and PC players won’t put as much value on playing the game so far after launch, so you can’t command as high of a price out of them. For instance, I’ll buy Final Fantasy and Horizon games but definitely not at full price; if I have to dodge spoilers during GOTY season until it comes out for my platform, I’m no longer willing to spend as much when it’s finally made available for me.

You might look into the mini PC form factor and throw Bazzite on it for a Steam console-esque experience.

Arguably, consoles are killing themselves.

Being fair, there’s no other possible reason you wouldn’t launch on PC these days than trying to get two sales out of the same customer.

Remarkable is, presumably, a good bang-for-your-buck PC build?

I thought the same thing about Concord, and then no one did buy it, and that too was funny.

I know it’s not an option for consoles. Since the 7th gen, it was always moving in this direction. It’s probably one of dozens of reasons that PC overtook consoles in market share.

The writing has been on the wall for physical games for some time. If you want to hold on to your games, DRM-free is better than physical.

What’s the downside to it? It enables cross play.