Video Games are Real

Author: Caleb J. Ross

  • Will Playstation ever offer Playstation exclusives day one on Playstation Now?

    Will Playstation ever offer Playstation exclusives day one on Playstation Now?

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    I was recently asked by TopSpot123 if I thought Playstation 5 games would appear on Playstation Now, the service from Playstation that allows subscribers to download and steam over 650 games from across three Playstation console generations . Of course they will. Why not? But then I thought more and realized, there’s lots of “whys not” which open up to a larger, and perhaps more interesting question: will Playstation Now ever offer same-day and date exclusives like Xbox’s Game Pass does?

    So, to the first question: Will Playstation Now feature Playstation 5 games. Yes, Playstation Now, and I’ll throw in Playstation Plus, Playstation’s online service, will have Playstation 5 games. Eventually. Definitely not at launch. Let’s use history as an example. The Playstation 4 was launched in November 2013. Playstation Now was launched just over 1 year later, in January 2015. And it wasn’t until almost 3 years after that that Playstation 4 games were added to the Playstation Now service. When the amount of money made from games sales, via system sales of course, begins to diminish, that’s when games from that system will fold into the subscription service.

    Let’s look at some numbers to highlight this point. In the 50 months between the Playstation 4 system launch and the appearance of Playstation 4 games on the Playstation Now service, Sony had sold 73.6 million consoles. That’s about 1.47 million units per month. In the following 29 months between January 2018 and May 2020, Sony had sold about 1.2 million consoles per month. While not a dramatic difference, and averaging in this way can be misleading, this does point to the inevitable slow down in the second half of a console generation’s life.

    Software is where the money is. For Sony, the consoles sell the software. If consoles sales are slowing that means software sales are slowing, which means it’s time to sell the software in a different way. Therefore, Playstation Now and Playstation Plus get current generation games and the marketing team has a sweet, sweet marketing beat they can leverage.

    So, my estimate is that we’ll see Playstation 5 games hit Playstation Now and Playstation Plus in the middle of 2022, assuming this coming Playstation 5 generation will be about 5 years, which is shorter than the previous generations, but that’s a topic for a different video (a video that ReviewTechUSA already did, in fact. Watch it here).

    If we look at the closest direct Sony competitor, Microsoft, they have been much more aggressive with incorporating next generation games into their subscription service, Game Pass, and by all accounts it seems to be doing really, really well for them. So I asked myself, will Sony ever take a similar approach. Will Playstation ever offer Playstation exclusive games on Playstation Now at the game’s launch?

    My immediate response was “of course not.” Consumers have consistently shown that they are willing to spend $60 per exclusive title, so why would Sony risk that revenue for potentially less revenue from a subscription model. But I wasn’t satisfied with a hot-take assumption. So I scoured the internet, crunched some numbers, took some naps, and it turns out, Sony, a company that lives by its exclusive games and their $60 price tags, might actually be better off if they offered exclusive titles on Playstation Now at launch, exactly like Microsoft does with Game Pass.

    First, we’ve got to figure out 1) how many exclusives we’re talking about here, 2) how many copies each exclusive sold, 3) the Playstation Now cost to the consumer, and 4) the count of Playstation Now subscribers. Sprinkle in some assumptions about margins, throw out variables I can’t account for because I’m dumb, and in turn add a bunch of asterixis, and voila. We have a tasty business case.

    First, let’s figure out how much money Sony has made from its exclusive titles. For my purposes, I’m going to restrict to the top selling exclusives, and also just the exclusives released after Playstation 4 games were added to Playstation Now in December 2017. Yes, it’s true people who buy a Playstation 4 today could go back and buy those pre-December 2017 exclusives, but I’ve got to make a cut-off somewhere.

    Between December 2017 and May 2020, Playstation had 6 exclusives that meet the top-selling criteria, with a total of 36,300,000 copies sold according to various sources all documented in Wikipedia..

    Take this number, multiply by $60 per game and then again by 55% to account for the platform royalties and Sony’s first party publishing fee, and we get a staggering $1,197,900,000 of net revenue from 6 games during a 2 year period as our baseline. Not bad.

    Now, we need to compare this to the revenue Sony could have made if they instead pushed a Playstation Now that offers these same exclusives on launch. There’s going to be a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions and straight-up guessary coming up, so all you data scientists that accidentally found my channel when searching for actual data, get ready to cry.

    So first, we need to figure out how many users currently subscribe to Playstation Now. We know that as of May 2020 Sony has sold 111,000,000 Playstation 4 consoles. We also know that as of the same month and year, Playstation Now had 2,200,000 active subscribers. That’s just about a 2% subscriber rate, but for the longest time the subscriber rate was closer to 1%, so I’m going to use 1% as my figure. Now of course, there are plenty of weirdos like me who have purchased multiple Playstation 4s over the years, but we’re going to stick with 1%.

    Let’s imagine that 1% of users subscribed to Playstation Now since its introduction in December 2017. We apply 1% to each month’s cumulative console sales, then multiply each of those figures by the respective month’s Playstation Now rate, which was $19.99 until October 2019 when the rate changed to $9.99 per month. This calculates to $471,329,414.50 worth of revenue between December 2017 and May 2020. This, obviously, is far below the non-subscription revenue mentioned earlier. So on the surface, it seems Sony’s is smart to push individual game sales over Playstation Now subscriptions.

    Now I know this logic is flawed. I’m assuming people are ignoring multi-month discounts and special promo rates. I’m suggesting that subscriber rates remain constant month-to-month. I’m not considering revenue from non-exclusive titles. And related to that, I’m kinda assuming a false binary here. I’m suggesting Sony can only sell exclusives individually OR they can only offer exclusives through Playstation Now. But I know that makes no sense.

    After all, if exclusives were offered at launch as part of Playstation Now, logically the 1% subscriber rate would increase, right? But by how much? Well, to figure this out I took the sales totals of those six aforementioned exclusives and divided by the 111,000,000 install base to estimate an Exclusives Adoption Rate. Surprisingly, the numbers ranged considerably from 4% for Ghosts of Tsushima, which is understandable given how new it is, to 12% for Marvel’s Spider-Man. When I average all of the EARs together I get 5%. So, maybe we should assume an 5% subscriber rate. I plug this in and instead of a measly $471.3 million in subscriber net revenue, we get $2,356,647,072. Now we’re cooking with money covered in gas.

    But we could go even further. Let’s pretend Sony could do just as good a job marketing their subscription program as Microsoft has with Game Pass. As of May 2020, Game Pass, which promotes same day exclusives as one of its primary value propositions, is subscribed to by 20% of Xbox One owners (Game Pass subscriber count divided by Xbox One install base). If we then increase the imagined 5% subscriber rate to the still imagined 20% rate of Xbox, we’re then looking at $9,426,588,290.00 in net revenue. Now we’re cooking with pure gold covered in gas.

    So, will Playstation Now ever offer Playstation exclusives day one? No, probably not. Sony is weird.

  • Carrion is really good, possibly Game of the Year material

    Carrion is really good, possibly Game of the Year material

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    I recently finished Carrion on the Nintendo Switch. Upon finishing the game, I took to Youtube to join in the chorus of praise. However, I discovered that actually a lot of people feel this game is pretty mediocre. One of my favorite channels, Slope’s Game Room, even came away a bit unimpressed with the game. So, with this video, I try to counterbalance the tepid reactions with my very enthusiastic praise of Carrion. Carrion might be my video game of the year.

    After watching my video, check out Slope’s Game Room’s Carrion review video.

  • The Google Graveyard is NOT evidence of Stadia’s demise!

    The Google Graveyard is NOT evidence of Stadia’s demise!

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    The Google Graveyard is a myth. Well, it’s not a myth, myth. It’s right there. But the way it’s been used as a harbinger of Google Stadia’s inevitable doom is wrong. I’m going to tell you why.

    Ever since Google announced their game streaming initiative, called Stadia, large pockets of the gaming world have doubted its potential to succeed, and some outright hate Stadia for even existing. Now, believe it or not, I don’t necessarily blame them. Antagonism towards the unknown can be a natural reaction. I get it. Here’s this mega corporation, Google,  trying to buy it’s way into the living rooms of gamers who have already aligned themselves to companies and platforms that have had to work hard for years to earn that alignment. Stadia’s existence, to those devoted Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and PC fans probably feels disingenuous and pompous.

    But sometimes the justification of that antagonism is flawed. Such is the case with the Google Graveyard.

    The Google Graveyard is an online repository of over 200 apps, services, and hardware that Google has launched and later killed since Google’s creation in 1998. By contrast, Google currently has 224 active apps, services, tools, and pieces of hardware, many of which are so ubiquitous you probably forgot about them. You’re probably watching this video on YouTube, from a link maybe sent by Gmail, or you discovered this video in a Google search while listening to YouTube Music by way of your Google Fiber internet connection. Maybe you took notes while watching this video using Google Keep or a Google Doc on Google Drive, but then realized you liked writing in notebooks more, so you clicked an ad, served by Google, to buy some notebooks. But the notebooks came back damaged, so you called up customer service on your Pixel phone, using Google Fi phone service.

    I understand that this series of events is absurd. Nobody loves a single company that much. But my point is that when criticizing Google for killing off products, you’ve also got to keep in mind the many important things Google has maintained.

    But me simply stating that observation isn’t enough. Rather than simply reflecting on those numbers, we have to ask why a company, any company, would stop maintaining certain products. The short answer is, because those products don’t generate revenue.

    A for-profit company like Google exists to make a profit. Historically, Google’s main revenue source comes from their Ads service, which relies on users. The more users Google has, the more people they can sell ads to. There’s a trend with these cancelled services: they don’t generate revenue in-and-of-themselves. Rather, they aim to increase users, to then increase ad revenue.

    Of the 204 products currently in the Google Graveyard (as of 7/22/2020), 163 are services with ambitions to increase the number of users. If these services don’t increase user counts enough to increase ad revenue then shareholders are upset and Google has no choice but to kill the services.

    Simply put, if a product isn’t contributing to increased revenue, then it should be killed. This isn’t just a Google decision. This is a good business decision.If Stadia doesn’t contribute to increased revenue, either by way of game sales, hardware sales, service sales, or more engaged users that can be advertised to, then Stadia should be killed. Microsoft would make the same decision. Sony and Nintendo would as well. In fact, these big players in the gaming world have been doing it for years and to a much more aggressive extent than Google. Let’s talk about the Xbox Crypt, the Playstation Cemetery, and the Nintendo…another word for Graveyard. The Nintendo Necropolis.

    Google has canceled about 50% of its products in its 22 years of existence. Keep in mind, this 50% rate isn’t limited to just gaming hardware, which is another problem with citing the Google Graveyard as evidence of Stadia’s impending doom, but I won’t parse that because I’m going to show you that it doesn’t even matter. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are much more egregious with killing products.

    I’m going to focus on first party consoles specifically. If I were to expand to services, apps, console accessories, and software, each of these gaming platforms would have a much higher kill rate. Imagine all of the controller and console stands, charging stations, and of course, games that are no longer available. How many games in all the various form factors are no longer produced? It’s important to realize that each game and each delivery mechanism–physical and digital–is a different SKU, and therefore a different product and should be factored into the respective company’s graveyard, if this graveyard debate is one you want to have. Which, again, the entire point of this video is that the graveyard argument doesn’t make sense.

    Xbox has released 10 consoles since 2001, with 8 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s an 80% kill rate with an average of 0.42 consoles killed per year.

    Playstation has released 21 consoles since 1994, with 15 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s a 71% kill rate with an average of 0.58 consoles killed per year.

    And then there’s Nintendo. Oh boy. It’s impossible for me to track down every official sku for every Nintendo console and handheld, so I stuck to the main ones. Nintendo has released 32 consoles over the years since 1977, with 29 of those either killed or in the process of being killed. That’s a crazy 91% kill rate with an average of 0.67 consoles killed per year.

    Stadia, on the other hand, has had one console/service since 2019, with 0 of those killed. I understand this is an absurd data-point, but that’s partly my point. If the graveyard argument must be honored, then we cannot look at just Xbox, we have to look at all of Microsoft. We cannot look just at Playstation, we have to look at all of Sony. And I’m way too lazy to continue beating this dead horse.

    History shows that major video game platform companies kill a console roughly every two years. As streaming services become more popular, I estimate we’ll start to see things adapt, and we’ll see a major iteration of each streaming platform once every two years.

    You may be thinking, “but Caleb, many of the consoles you mention are iterations and evolutions of previous consoles. Why continue selling an Xbox One when there’s an Xbox series X?” I promise you, if the Xbox One, or the Playstation 4 could continue to drive profit, Xbox and Playstation would continue selling them. But competition with other platforms means consoles become obsolete, so those consoles get sent to their respective graveyards. If these companies could get by with selling the exact same console for 20 or 30 years, they absolutely would. But us consumers don’t let them. Therefore, products get killed. If anyone is to blame–or get credit for–the product graveyards, it’s us. Us consumers are the grim reapers.

    But if we are going to entertain that logic, as flawed as it may be, then you must also allow Google the benefit of iteration and evolution. One example is Google Play Music, which is slated to be sent to the graveyard at the end of 2020. Antagonists toward Stadia will claim this is yet another killed service without accepting that Google Play Music’s functionality is being absorbed into YouTube Music, which isn’t dead. Google Hangouts is becoming Duo. YouTube Leanback became obsolete as Smart TVs got smarter. Of course there are several examples of products that have been killed entirely without being absorbed into other products, but to ignore those that don’t follow such a path to death is irresponsible.

    Lastly, consider that the video game industry is a known entity. Google has a history of innovating with new products that aren’t aligned to such established frameworks. Often, Google is iterating upon the very search service that it helped pioneer in 1998. With such innovation comes great risk. I’m surprised only 50% of Google’s products have been killed, honestly. Because video games have an audience and a stable history, I don’t see Stadia getting tossed into the Graveyard anytime soon.

    Now, I’m not going to suggest that Google will never kill Stadia. I don’t know that any more than the haters themselves. But I can say that citing the Google graveyard as evidence of such an argument either way is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. I don’t blame any of these companies for canceling products. That’s part of running a smart business.

  • Help me ditch physical video games in favor of cloud gaming!

    Help me ditch physical video games in favor of cloud gaming!

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    I’ve really taken to cloud gaming lately, specifically with Google Stadia. I love the convenience. I love the speed from a cold TV to a heated gaming session. But there’s one wall I can’t quite break down when it comes to dumping physical games in favor of an all streaming lifestyle. And that wall is literally physical. In this video I’m going to talk about why I find it hard to abandon physical video games and how I’m hoping to change that, so I can embrace the cloud gaming future. Come with me. Help me.

    I believe in physical media. Divorcing yourself from a belief can be hard. Wars are fought and lives are lost because of beliefs. Remember the Media Format Wars of 2024? You will.

    For me, when I want to break a habit or change a belief, I try to learn as much as I can about that thing. I learn about its history and its psychological power over me. I find that the more I understand about a belief, the easier it becomes for me to deconstruct it. And therefore when the mystery is removed I can disassociate myself from the belief.

    Sometimes this level of education and awareness can be a bad thing, like when I was a kid and I learned how cartoon animation cells worked with transparent cells painted over static backgrounds. After learning this I hyper focused on trying to see where the animated portions were over the static backgrounds. I couldn’t concentrate on the cartoon anymore. It was like my own little game where the increasing score measured how much I’ve ruined my own childhood innocence.

    But most of the time, breaking things down in this way is a great thing. So I dove in to learn about why I treat physical items in higher regard than digital items. And I want to share this information with you. Because maybe when the apocalypse comes and we all must adjust to a nomadic lifestyle to avoid being hunted by mutant cannibals, I can help you feel not quite as bad about leaving behind your stack of Nintendo Power magazines. But then again, toilet paper is going to be hard to find in the irradiated wasteland of future Earth following the Media Format Wars. On second thought, hang on to those Nintendo Powers.

    I found a scientific paper titled “Digital Goods Are Valued Less Than Physical Goods,” published in 2017 in the Journal of Consumer Research. But I’m dumb, so I found an article to explain the paper to me.

    The authors of the paper conducted a series of surveys and tests based on the assumption that in general people place a higher value on physical items than digital items. In one test they had a bunch of people dress up as historical characters. The researches gave physical photos of the event to some tourists and digital photos to others. The tourists were then asked how much they would be willing to pay, if anything, for the photos. The recipients of a physical photo were willing to pay more, on average.

    In another scenario, the researchers asked participants about how much they’d spend on digital or physical versions of popular movies and books. They paired this with personality type questions. Those who would pay more for physical versions agreed more strongly with statements like “I will feel like I own it”  and “I feel like it is mine” and “holding an clamshell xbox case fills my veins with a reverating energy that I must hold back for fear of demolishing mountains with a barely a punch and draining oceans in a single gulp.” That last statement probably wasn’t on the survey.

    In the end, the researchers concluded that physical items tend to afford a greater sense of ownership and are more enticing when there’s a possible sense of connection to it. So, if you have great memories playing a specific game with your dad when you were young, you might be more likely to want that game as a physical item than a digital item.

    The researchers also correlated that people who are disposed with a need for control will value physical items more than digital. But I don’t believe that. I’m not controlling. In fact, I’ve forced everyone in my family to agree with me that I’m not controlling.

    And though the paper doesn’t get into the ability to re-sell video games, reselling is absolutely worth mentioning. Practically speaking my physical games do have a transferable value. I can resell them if I want to. I cannot resell a digital game, at least not legally and not in the United States where I live. But even if I could, because we’ve already learned that in general people value physical goods more than digital ones, it’s a good assumption that the resale value for digital games would be less than physical. And with streaming platforms like Stadia or Playstation Now, well, you cannot resell a service.

    “But Caleb,” I hear you yelling, “digital game sales have been growing tremendously over the years.” That’s very true. In fact, in Q1 of 2019 digital games sales eclipsed physical games sales on the Playstation 4 for the first time. And by some measures, if you include computer game sales, digital game sales overall reflect about 80% of all game sales. What this means is that most people are better than me.

    My own personal hangup with embracing digital video games over physical video games, I think, is due to the idea that a person’s belongings act as affirmations of their identity, and as we learned earlier in this video, people have a stronger sense of ownership with physical media.

    In the same way that my t-shirts, wall art, and bookshelf all reflect that I love games and that games are a part of my personality, the physical games on my shelf do the same. It’s hard to surround your physical space with digital artifacts. Therefore, it’s hard to be confident with your sense of self identity. And that’s probably the most helpful thing I learned in this research binge. Maybe I’m not terribly confident in who I am. And perhaps this room helps to restore my fragile ego…or the games just look really cool. Yeah, let’s go with that.

    When I look around my gameroom, my love of video games is showcased everywhere. But the focal point of my game room is definitely the shelf of games. I don’t collect games. I just have games I really like or games I really want to play. I have a few games that are neither, but they are worth a bit of money, so I hang on to them for now. If I got rid of the framed art, the t-shirts, and even the books, I’d be sad, but I’d get over it. If I got rid of the games, I’d cry.

    So how will I cope with the inevitable digital future? First, I’ll continue with, what I’ll call, a transition period. I’ll continue to buy physical games while also subscribing to streaming and download services like Google Stadia, Playstation Now, and xCloud, if that service ever offers a way to stream to a TV without buying the console. This way, I can get more comfortable with digital gaming. I can let it live with me, like a stray cat. And over time I’ll get so comfortable with that cat that I’ll forget about its feral history. I start sleeping soundly, certain that this animal I’ve taken in and cared for won’t some day kill me in my sleep. And when that cat does kill me in my sleep, my final words will be “I told you physical games were better!!!!”

    The other thing I’ll do to cope with the inevitable digital future is actually more something that will be done to me. I believe that the forthcoming 9th generation of consoles, the Playstation 5 and the Xbox series X, will be the last consoles with physical media. So, the decision to abandon physical games will likely be made for me in about 5 – 10 years. If I want to play a 10th generation game, it will have to be digitally. I may as well get used to digital games now.

    Lastly, indications are that games will cost about 14% more in the next generation. If this increase doesn’t apply to digital games, then buying the cheaper, digital version through a cloud service like Google Stadia will be much more appealing. However, I’m very confident that both physical and digital prices will go up. But, maybe digital sales will happen more frequently to help offset the new price burden on the consumer.

    So how do you approach digital gaming? Do you prefer one format over another? Do you wrestle with the same anxiety I have about ditching physical games in favor of digital games.

  • Google Stadia Connect from 7/14: the good, the bad, and the less bad

    Google Stadia Connect from 7/14: the good, the bad, and the less bad

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    So let’s get the bad news out of the way…well, some of the bad news, anyway. Stadia’s refusal to state November 19th as the Cyberpunk 2077 release date all but confirms for me that the game is not going to launch on the same day-and-date as other major platforms. You are safe for now, PS4 pre-order.

    Before we go any further, please consider subscribing to this channel for more video game content. I’ve done a lot of Stadia focused content lately, and it’s been really fun. The Stadia community has been incredibly welcoming. So, I’ll probably keep doing Stadia content in addition to my normal non-Stadia content.

    Yes, the July 14th Stadia Connect has come and gone, and overall, I’m a bit deflated. The number of games was underwhelming. The type of games was underwhelming. And I don’t believe Stadia did much to expand the user-base like I think they needed to. Well, except for one important feature, which I’ll get into shortly.

    You’ll want to stick around through the end of this video because at the end I’m going to mention some viewer comments left on my predictions video from July 7th to see what people got right and what people got wrong.

    The presentation started as I thought it might, by reintroducing Stadia to the public. A succinct commercial full of game titles that us Stadia fans already know about, but the rest of the gaming public might not. This section of the Connect ended with a detailed look at the Click to Play feature. Content creators can leverage the video description to place a link that will take viewers directly to the game on Stadia to begin playing the game instantly.

    Functionally speaking, this seems like little more than a standard outbound link. Practically speaking, this could help expand the user base. If content creators place these links at the top of descriptions while streaming, viewers will see these Stadia links constantly. Multiple touchpoints increases the chance for a user to take action. The obvious limiting factor here is that the number of non-Stadia gamers watching Stadia streams is probably quite low, at least right now. Though, perhaps exclusive games will help this. Gamers who want to see what Orcs Must Die 3 is all about, for example, will have to watch a Stadia stream.

    Speaking of exclusives, we saw a few here. Super Bomberman R Online from Konami is a timed exclusive, and it looks like it could be fun. I haven’t played a Bomberman game in decades. I’m not a multiplayer gamer, but this is one that could get me to test the waters a bit. And, it’s nice to see Konami making a video game again. But don’t expect many more. They’re pretty invested in the Pachinko machine industry now. Super Bomberman R Online will be released Fall 2020.

    We got a trailer for Serious Sam 4 from Croteam, which will be a timed exclusive on Stadia and PC. This is a beloved series that I’m glad to see back. Steam shows the release date as August 2020, but for some reason the Stadia Connect did not mention a release date at all. This seems very strange, but I’ll try not to look into it. I’ve already bummed myself out by looking too much into the lack of a Cyberpunk 2077 release date.

    Outcasters from Splash Damage is a Stadia exclusive which was introduced as an effort from Stadia Games and Entertainment. This introduction addresses the confusion I had expressed in my predictions video. I wasn’t sure if Stadia Games and Entertainment was a studio or if it was a division responsible for getting games from third parties onto Stadia. It turns out, it’s the latter.

    The general consensus in the Stadia community, based on comments I’ve read online, is that while we wanted to see an exclusive from one of Stadia’s own divisions or studios, this game doesn’t seem to be the one we wanted. I did expect a new first-party game to be a multiplayer battle type game, which it is, but I, and it seems others too, wanted something grander, something more AAA feeling. This game seems like a mid-tier team-battle game with a few new mechanics. But I don’t think it’s the kind of game that will bring new people into Stadia and it’s certainly not the showpiece that will get people talking and keep them talking up until its launch in the Fall.

    Finally, with respect to exclusives, Orcs Must Die 3 from Robot Entertainment is a timed Stadia exclusive and is the only game to get officially announced and stealth-dropped today, July 14th. This is a game I’ll probably watch more than play myself—again, I’m a single player gamer—but I know a lot of people are excited for it. This game also showcases Stadia’s unique ability to have hundreds of enemies in a wave at once, which is great.

    Stadia needs games like this that showcase what’s unique to the platform. Unfortunately, this stealth-drop wasn’t so stealthy as it was leaked weeks ago. Also, unfortunately, it’s the only game that was released free to Stadia Pro members today. I was not only hoping but actually expecting at least two games to be announced and available today for Stadia Pro members.

    11 additional games and game expansions were mentioned, which I’ll run through quickly right now in chronological order according to the stated release date.

    Available in early access right now is One Hand Clapping from Bad Dream Games. Platformers are one of my favorite genres, but this game doesn’t do much for me. It uses a unique singing mechanic and I’m not a fan of scaring my family by singing to myself here in my already creepy dungeon-like downstairs game room.

    PUBG Season 8 is coming on July 30th. Neat.

    Elder Scrolls Online: Stonethorn is coming August 24th. Also neat.

    Dead by Daylight from Behaviour Interactive is a good get for the Stadia platform. Currently, the Stadia store doesn’t have any asymmetrical multiplayer horror games. And on Stadia, the game will support Crowd Play and Crowd Choice. Crowd Play is a Stadia feature that allows stream viewers to queue up to play the game with the streamer. Crowd Choice provides stream viewers with collective agency over various facets of the game. Think of it like a voting mechanism that impacts the game in real time. I believe Twitch has a similar feature currently. Dead by Daylight comes to Stadia in September 2020.

    Also coming to Stadia in September is Hello Neighbor from TinyBuild Games. Hello Neighbor is a stealth horror game with very non-horror visuals which I think makes for a very interesting subversion of expectations. The design itself plays into the very unease that a stealth horror game relies on mechanically. I’m excited to try this one, and considering it will be free to Stadia Pro subscribers upon launch I won’t have any reason not to. The follow-up prequel Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek hits Stadia in late 2020.

    Hitman and Hitman 2 will come to Stadia in September with Hitman 3 coming in January 2021. All three games are from IO Interactive. This is perhaps the only announcement in this entire Stadia Connect that got me excited. I’ve somehow not played any of the modern Hitman games despite being really intrigued by them. Also, Hitman will be free to Stadia Pro subscribers which is really smart. Build the audience for Hitman in preparation for the release of Hitman 3 in January.

    Perhaps the biggest surprise in this Stadia Direct was the announcement that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice from FromSoftware will be coming to the platform. FromSoftware are the people behind the Dark Souls games and Bloodorne. The arrival of Sekiro is a good thing for a couple of reasons.

    Firstly, because the game won tons of awards last year including Game of the Year at The Game Awards, this game brings further legitimacy to the Stadia platform. Second, because FromSoftware games are so heavily dependent upon perfect timing combat scenarios, this could be another game to showcase the surprisingly low lag with Stadia. Doom Eternal showcased the speed and fidelity. PUBG showcased Stadia’s capacity for twitch shooters in a multiplayer arena. Sekiro will showcase how the platform has come close to eliminating lag.

    Lastly, with no release date mentioned in the Stadia Connect but with other sources mentioning December 2020, we have Outriders from People Can Fly. This game looks to be more my style than almost every other game included in the Stadia Connect. A post-apocalyptic, action shooter with a single player campaign and RPG elements? Yes please.

    And that’s all we got from the July 14th Stadia Connect.

  • Why I might get Cyberpunk 2077 on Google Stadia

    Why I might get Cyberpunk 2077 on Google Stadia

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    I pre-ordered Cyberpunk 2077 immediately after the very first teaser for $48 using Best Buy’s Gamer Club Unlocked (RIP). The pre-order comes with a steel book, which I don’t care about, so I could sell that for a few dollars, bringing my total cost to maybe $40, which is presumably about $20 less than Cyberpunk 2077 will be on Stadia.

    But I’m actually considering cancelling my PS4 pre-order and buying on Stadia. Why? (more…)

  • What will be shown at the next Google Stadia Connect (7-14-2020)?

    What will be shown at the next Google Stadia Connect (7-14-2020)?

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    The next Stadia Connect is coming up on July 14th and, not to put too much stress on Google, it has got to be a big presentation. If Stadia wants to compete in the market against two brand new consoles (4 consoles if you count digital editions from the legacy players in the space, Microsoft and Sony) then a misstep here could reverberate for a long time.

    So, what should we expect from the July 14th Stadia Connect?

    As far as what we should realistically expect, I’ll start with what the official marketing materials say. The Summer Game Fest twitter account notes that we should expect “a look at some of the games coming this year,” and “a few surprises.” The official Stadia Twitter handle says simply “Join us for a look at some of the games coming to Stadia later this year.”

    Of course we should expect games. I anticipate we’ll actually see quite a few games announced. We likely won’t get the barrage of 60 games we saw with Xbox’s E3 2019 presentation, but we should get at least 15 announcements with dates and possibly another 15 mentions of upcoming games. And, as Stadia’s tweet implies, I’m hoping for a lot of 2020 release dates.

    Currently, Stadia has about 59 games available for purchase with 26 announced but not yet released. This means that if Stadia wants to fulfill the statement they made in January that they were bringing 120 games to the platform this year, they’d need to no only release all 26 that they’ve announced, but also announce and release 15 more. This feels doable, and I would love for all 15 of those to be announced at this next Stadia Connect.

    Ryan McCaffrey from IGN spoke with Jerome Jones at Robot Entertainment and Marc-Alexis Cote from Ubisoft in a June 18 discussion as part of IGN’s Summer of Gaming, so it’s reasonable to suspect we’ll get more from Orcs Must Die 3 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Though, when it comes to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I doubt we’ll be getting any exclusive news. Though Ubisoft and Stadia seem to be close partners, Ubisoft will probably save exclusive details of one of their biggest franchises for an announcement with a platform that has a much larger user-base.

    What about exclusive games, other than Orcs Must Die 3. Well, Stadia currently owns three studios, I think. I say “I think” because one of the studios is Stadia Games and Entertainment, which may not be a true studio. It might be more of an internal division focused on getting games to the platform, which may mean development or it may mean working with 3rd parties. The details around Stadia Games and Entertainment aren’t clear.

    Stadia also launched a studio in March of 2020 led by former Sony Santa Monica head Shannon Studstill. And, I sometimes forget, Google purchased Typhoon Studios, who made last year’s surprisingly awesome Journey to the Savage Planet. Surprising because it is their first game and it is really, really fun. It’s the Metroid Prime game to hold us over until Metroid Prime 4. I have a video review of Journey to the Savage Planet, linked here, if you’d like to check that out.

    So that’s 3, possibly 2, first party studios. What are they working on? I expect we’ll find out even if we don’t get very many details.

    Also, I do think we can expect some Cyberpunk 2077 mention, even if as only a way to remind the public that Stadia is getting this highly-anticipated game.

    I don’t believe the game will be hitting at the same time as other platforms, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll get a specific release date. Otherwise, if we did get a specific release date, headlines will leverage those two dates, with Stadia’s being later, as just another occasion to dump on Stadia. Google doesn’t want that. However, if the Stadia release is just a couple weeks later than other platforms, maybe we’ll get a release date. But my guess is that we’ll be waiting months longer than other platforms for Cyberpunk 2077 to be released on Stadia.

    Besides, if the release date of Cyberpunk 2077 was going to be on the same day as the other major platforms, we would have known that by now. Google would love to promote a same-date release.

    Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed twice already, keep in mind. Some people suspect that the second delay is more about marketing than development, as in CD Projekt Red are wanting to pair Cyberpunk 2077 with the launch of the new console generation, but assuming that’s not true, if a studio is pushing back development on Playstation and Xbox versions of a game, they are doing so at the expense of any other platform. That’s just business. Prioritize the biggest user base. But I would love to be wrong. If Cyberpunk 2077 released on the same day as other platforms, I would be overjoyed.

    Let’s dissect this same-date release concept for a bit. Why is that so important? If Stadia can release a big budget AAA game on the same day as other platforms, most importantly for this conversation, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, that does a few things:

    1. it shows legitimacy. It shows that Stadia can no longer be tossed aside as an irrelevant product like a lot of influencers and some games media like to do.
    2. It may siphon some sales from other consoles. This allows sales charts to possibly show Stadia sales as more than just part of the chart label of “other.” Realistically, sales would still be far less than the established consoles, but even just to see the name Stadia alongside Playstation and Xbox in various marketing and sales charts could help with perception of value. Though I understand it could have the opposite effect and show just how dramatically different the sales of each of those platforms is, with Stadia being a minuscule piece of that chart.
    3. the gamer/marketers, those who play and promote games, would be able to evangelize for Stadia and its benefits, specifically its no-downloads feature. Currently, industry publications and well known influencers get early copies of most games so that reviews and footage can be released day-one. Stadia needs to be a part of that. But also important, I’d argue, is the ability for consumers level gamer/marketers, that’s the people like me who play games and create media about games for a small audience, if those people could access Cyberpunk 2077 at 12:00am, and begin streaming within 30 seconds, no downloads, no patches, then Stadia player footage would be some of the earliest player footage. Cyberpunk 2077 will have pre-load functionality on Playstation and also assumedly on Xbox, so having Stadia footage alongside those consoles again shows legitimacy. Youtube algorithms like early coverage, so this could be a way to showcase not only the performance and fidelity of Stadia, but also its near-instant start times.

    So though I don’t believe at all that Cyberpunk 2077 will be this same-date release game that Stadia needs, Stadia will need such a game soon. It’s happened before, with the most high-profile instance being Doom Eternal which was released on all major platforms, including Stadia, on the same day. But that was back in April 2020. Google needs to continue working to clean the residue from its poor launch and find the next same-date release game. Maybe that will get announced at this Stadia Connect.

    Outside of games, I expect the overall delivery of the Stadia Connect to feel a lot like a commercial rather than a celebration of games as we might expect with established platforms like Playstation and Xbox. Sunny Cloud Gaming made a great point with his predictions video. Because the Stadia Connect is part of Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest—which for all intents and purposes is this year’s closest E3 replacement—this Stadia Connect will not have just the Stadia-loving audience, but will be exposed to the wider game-buying public. Because of this, I think Stadia will be trying very hard to re-introduce itself as a service worthy of the casual gamer’s living room. We’ll probably hear a lot about the free tier of the service, now just called Stadia, and the paid level of service, the Stadia Pro subscription. I anticipate we’ll hear a few times some variation of the phrase “you don’t need to buy a next gen console to play next get games.” For Stadia fans like us, this will probably sound like old news, but remember Stadia is needing to re-introduce itself to a lot of gamers out there.

    The truth is Google still has some Public Relations injuries to massage out. At the initial Stadia announcement and the November 2019 presentation, I sensed gamers became a bit defensive. There was a sense that this mega corporation was trying to buy its way into our living rooms without having to slowly build the audience that Sony and Microsoft had to do. Yes, Sony and Microsoft were mega corporations at the time that they entered the console space, but the space was smaller then. There was room for optimism and excitement.

    As for the “few surprises” that the Summer of Games tweet references. I imagine there may be some game release surprises. Maybe some games released the day of the Stadia Connect. But I think more realistically, the surprises may have to do with long-promised features. State Share, the feature that lets users share URLs that bring other players into an instance of their game, is currently being beta tested with Crayta. I’d like to see a surprise rollout of that functionality. Crowd Connect, Youtube Streaming, and full In-Game Google Assistant functionality (emphasis on “full”; I know some Google Assistant functionality is available now), these are all features we haven’t yet seen. Because these have already been announced, they may not count as surprises, but for me, these would be welcomed announcements.

    Speculated features include Android TV support and Demo functionality for all games. Those would be surprises as well, but I wouldn’t expect any announcement at this time.

    As for what I personally want to see. Simply put: I want to see a killer-looking, single-player, first party exclusive to be released this year. I don’t think it will happen. My bet is that Stadia is going to lean heavily into multiplayer games as it tries to grow its user base. Multiplayer games allow for a better showcase of the unique Stadia features, including State Share, Crowd Connect, and of course the promised ability to play battle royale scenario type games with hundreds of players. I much prefer a single-player game, but Stadia isn’t just for me, and I understand that.