It seems like Square wants to have AA successes like with Team Asano games (the pixel games you mentioned), outside of Asano too, but can’t seem to do it.
It also doesn’t help that Sony doesn’t even market the AA Square games they moneyhat/grab marketing rights for. At least the Square games that are tied to Switch get heavily marketed on Directs. Sony just shows the one reveal trailer and then backs off. They should have marketed Diofield too since it was revealed on State of Play, people who are actually playing it say it’s pretty decent.
I’m happy Team Asano games keep being successful though. Live A Live is my favorite game of 2022.
Sure it’s neat to see a publisher published many titles, but man, some are average or weak sale. Good ones are those you mentioned but so far, it’s like they’re EA with flip-a-coin outcome.
I think Square’s Switch output is mostly pretty good. 1 or 2 stinkers like Chocobo Racing in there though.
I also think Sony may have saw AA Square successes in Switch and bought up a couple AA Square games “of their own” for PS… and got served games like Valkyrie and… Babylon’s Fall…
That all said I’ll probably play Valkyrie someday on sale because people who played it so far say it’s okay and I have a thing for 6/10 jank ARPGs lol.
I did also notice there is only 5 reviews so it could go to an “acceptable” number soon
I bought Valkyrie Elysium digitally for PS5 since not a single GameStop in my state had the game available. Played just over 5 hours. On chapter 3. I liked the demo and enjoying the base game a lot more because I upgraded my sword, acquired new skills and have more combos including finishers. I know the Open Critic score is a 68 or so but it’s closer to an 8.0/10 for me right now. My biggest complaint is the carrying capacity for potions and whatnot. It doesn’t go past 6 and it’s very annoying. Otherwise, no major issues. Playing on hard. Died once thus far.
Once ABK goes through they’ll have a reasonably beloved karting franchise in Crash Team Racing. So I think a good idea could be to release Crash Team Racing: Edition X or some such, and include other Xbox IP in addition to Crash himself.
The opening cinematic could be Crash and the traditional CRT gang racing along, and then something happens (bolt of lightning? a new type of bomb appears? doesn’t really matter) which causes Crash to be sucked into a green portal/vortex thing, and get dropped off in another world, filled with a bunch of Xbox characters.
Goofy and fun, and would “explain” why the rest of the CRT characters aren’t there.
My 7th (maybe 8th, I’ve lost count at this point) Elite Series 2 replacement just shipped and is coming from the US instead of the repair center in Canada. Fingers crossed that means they have different stock they’re using for replacement and they’ve actually fixed the face button issue.
Probably on a long timeline they expected devs to port the games themselves? I think at least 50% of the reason why Google went with Linux is because they hate Microsoft.
In this universe where they paid tens of million of dollars to multiple devs but had only a limited installbase in their data centers? No. But Google wanted Stadia to succeed big and then they would have millions of Windows Servers and a pretty big check to write for Microsoft. So in that way their thinking makes some financial sense.
If Xbox ever want to create iconic family/party games to compete with Nintendo I think Sonic could do it.
Sonic Racing sounds alot more kid friendly then Xbox Kart (sorry) .
They could basically create a Sonic & Friends universe where they incorporate all their mascots (Banjo, Raz, Crash, Spyro etc) to create party games, kart racers, platformers etc.
They could have technically already done this with Minecraft already but I guess Minecraft is its own thing.
As Mario vs Sonic is already established with the Olympics games, they could continue doing crossovers between the Sonic & Mario universes.
Microsoft could partner with Ubisoft’s huge workforce as a 2nd party to start pumping these type of games out for them.
I remember a little while back when there was some drama about Cyberpunk’s third party QA team potentially having fudged their work I looked up the credits list to see how much of the QA work they were responsible for - something I noticed is that there was a pretty surprising amount of people working on the Stadia port, it’s been a while but there was 50+ people including a dedicated QA team as big as any other QA team working on the game. It was pretty substancial, I’m not surprised Google had to pay heavily for these things to happen.
Yep, this has been my thought as well. The Sonic IP is underutilized imo. So I think Sega is a better acquisition than most ppl think. They really need more family content and with Sonic they have an IP that is very well known. Just follow the Mario route and start making all things Sonic with help from outside devs and like you said tie in their other kid-friendly properties.
Would really help Xbox family pass if they had kid’s profiles and enough content for kids.
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They could basically create a Sonic & Friends universe where they incorporate all their mascots (Banjo, Raz, Crash, Spyro etc) to create party games, kart racers, platformers etc.
They could have technically already done this with Minecraft already but I guess Minecraft is its own thing.