@jenovaschilld: Keeping up the store really isn't that expensive considering it's the same store as the one used for PS4 and PS5 titles. The CDNs they use (at least for PS3 and PS4 games) are the same. There shouldn't be any added operating costs there.
If Sony wants to push an all-digital future, which I think is eventually inevitable--speaking as someone who prefers physical copies--then they need to do the trust-building that customers will have access to their purchases in perpetuity. And from a preservationist standpoint, it's really shitty to lose (legal) access to a ton of exclusives and retro games. A physical copy of Megaman Legends 2 can run me over $100 used, but it's like $10 on the PS Store.
As for buying games on the console store, I don't know if you've used the PS3 or Vita stores, but...they're INCREDIBLY shitty. Just an awful experience from a UI and performance perspective.
@wesker010484: More like so many videogame females were designed with large boobs, to the point that it became the norm, that it's nice to actually have some variety. Like I get it, earlier games put big boobs on a character so that it was more easily read as female at a glance, but I'd rather have more variation in silhouette shape. If people want to make female characters with big boobs then more power to them, it's just--frankly--boring that it's the default.
@HarlemVIP: I guess having game dev experience and knowing what goes into the business and technical parts of games means that I can't be with you on this one. You're effectively saying that game devs aren't trying hard enough or that they don't care enough about a thing they spend literal years of their life slaving to complete. You're not wrong that games ship with issues corrected in day one (and later) patches, but I can't join you on this crusade against patches.
To use FFXV as an example again, if patches weren't a commonly accepted thing, then you'd never get something like this character swap update--which is an update that makes a large selling point of their paid DLC a free addition for everyone, and is a feature that the dev team has said was never intended to be in base FFXV. Not every game released is released in the best state, intentionally or no, but the gaming scene as a whole is better than it's ever been IMO.
For your Friday the 13th example, if I understand the situation around that game correctly, it was a Kickstarter game that released to backers early, and it worked fine up until the real launch where the servers buckled under the load. I don't know much about any actual gameplay changes though. Every developer knows a ton of things that are poor about their game when they ship, that's just a thing that happens. However, you can't fix every bug that comes across a programmer's desk because it's just not a feasible use of time when fixing bugs often means introducing problems elsewhere or coming at the cost of working on something else instead. That's not counting the many issues the developer never found, and were only discovered because you had hundreds of thousands of people all playing the game--orders of magnitude more than the amount of QA people you had.
@HarlemVIP: Just putting it out there that there were *tons* of broken/technically poor games released back on the NES/SNES days, let alone PS1 era. Like many things, the rise of the internet has made technical issues that much more apparent in people's eyes because they can find plenty of people talking about it. That and as games become more complicated, the existence and number of technical issues becomes more difficult to manage. Like it was back in the day, QA testers can only find so many issues, and only a portion of the issues they find can be reasonably expected to be fixed before release. Look at how many jacked things you can do in Ocarina of Time, Half-Life 2, or how messed up Sonic Adventure is.
The biggest issue I have with your reasoning is that you're insinuating people pay for bug fixes or updates:, they don't. To use FFXV as an example, they've put out an update every month for the past year, all of which were free. They must have been digging into their profits for that work or something, because season pass sales certainly weren't covering for that *and* DLC development. Contrary to popular belief, that game was fine on release; not perfect, but it wasn't ruining anyone's day. None paid for the work done to Fallout 4 either, for example.
@adayinverse: As a backer of PP, it's sounded like there were a lot of problems along the way that stalled development and ate money. I'm not too terribly upset if I'm honest, because I subscribe to what I believe to be the best Kickstarter methodology of "I'm giving them this money and now I've written that money and project off for good until something hopefully exists".
@kaminobenimizu: The free trial covers up until level 20 or 30, I think. That's a handful of dungeons and half the base game's story. Word of warning though: the story to FF14 is pretty good, but the story that shipped with the main game is really not. The quest design never changes all that much later, which is standard MMO fare, but the actual story and characters improve dramatically.
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