Apparently they're also removing the disc drive. Terrible decision.
I think Playstation and Xbox are slowly but surely pushing towards an "Only Digital" future (and my guess is Nintendo will eventually go that route as well, but less aggresive about it).
This is one of the many new trends that is not very popular by consumers.
Not only do they want you to forget about physical copies and go all digital, some companies like Ubisoft even go a step further and dont event want you to own the digital version. "You should be comfortable not owning the game. Just pay my monthly subscription for the rest of your life and pray I never de-list the game form the online store".
But we know to them
its all about money. They dislike physical copies of games because you can re-sell them and they dont make any money from that re-sell.
Another trend is the
Games As A Service (GAAS) or "Live Service Games". Fortnite and Call Of Duty Warzone are some successfull examples and as a result every other company is trying to get a piece of that pay. But the good thing is
consumers are voting with their wallets. Warner Bros / Rocksteady created a beatiful
Arkham Trilogy before trying to go
GAAS with "
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League". They spent like 8 years doing that game and most people hated it (I didnt completely hate the main campaign but the post game is terrible). But wait, what was Warner´s most recent success in video games? Ah yes,
Hogwarts Legacy. Consumers will take a good single player game over a mediocre live service game every time.
Most recent example would be
Sony´s Concord. They
spent 8 years and hundreds of millions of dollars on a LGBT Woke Live Service Game that nobody wanted, apparently not even the LGBT Woke community. Its like they said, "Lets combine Overwatch with Guardians of the Galaxy and make it Inclusive for a modern audience....yes, yes...This is the future of Playstation". Nobody played or bought the game and it got delisted after a couple of weeks.
This is possibly the biggest flop in the history of Video Games.
Another trend is
too many unnecessary remakes or remasters of new games. Remaking or remastering PlaySations 2 games, Gamecube Games, Wii games, The Oringal Xbox, or games before that time? Totally on board. But what we are seeing a lot is you have a Playstations 4 game that already looks better and runs better on ps5, and it gets remastered anyways.
The worst offender is Naughty Dog with their
The Last of Us franchise. They released the first game on ps3 and later remastered it for ps4. At the time it was acceptable because ps4 is not backwards compatible with ps3. But later they made a remake for ps5 wtf? The second game released on ps4, already runs and looks better on ps5, ah but its getting a remaster for ps5. Most recent example is
Horizon Zero Dawn. Game released on ps4, runs and looks better on ps5 but again, its getting a remaster for ps5.
There are many more trends we could discuss, but these ones seem to be the most annoying ones atm. Hopefully, consumers keep voting with their wallets and the future of the indsutry gets better.
