Episode 524: Goodbye, 2018!

This is the last podcast of 2018, and the next episode will be our Games of the Year announcement. Until then, we snark at Pewdiepie, and check some of the news ending the year.

This week’s news includes:

  • Steam Xbox One cross-play tools hinted
  • Americans can get Assassin’s Creed Odyssey free from Google
  • Discord Store to offer developers 90 percent of game revenues
  • Inca announced for Civilization VI: Gathering Storm

Let us know what your Game of the Year is.

0 thoughts on “Episode 524: Goodbye, 2018!”

  1. Hi guys.

    Thanks again for this nice episode. Sorry that I was a little bit lazy writing comments under the last episodes, but I had to much thing going on :/
    Regarding the topic of this thousand crappy small games on steam: I totally agree. There is so many useless shit there, it’s hard to find the good ones (and I bet there are many we will never find). On the other side, I don’t like that every company tries to run their own shop, because so you have to search / look through so many platforms that it feels like work :/
    Best games of the year: i did not really played many actual games, because most of the time I played Magic The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone. Some Overwatch and Battlefield 5 the last weeks. BF makes fun because I play it with my friends, I would not have bought it to play it on my own 🙂
    I bought some games, but did not find the way play it. These were Mega Man 11, Detroit become Human, Toki (the new Switch Version) and some shmups for the PS4. I think the only actual title I played so far is Life is Strange 2 (episode 1). Hollow Knight was released 2017, but I bought it some months ago. I love those metroidvania games and I am playing hollow knight a lot during the last weeks 🙂 I Stimm want to play God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2, but there are so many games I wanna play, I will wait with these two until they get a little bit cheaper 🙂

    I hope all of you had a great New Year’s Eve and celebrated it with your friends and family. I am looking forward to a good 2019 with a lot of good games and many episodes of your podcast. Stay healthy and the way you are.

    Greetings from your loyal listener,
    Ralf

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 436: Wednesday From Now OnEpisode 436: Wednesday From Now On

This week has a new recording date, Wednesday, so the crew can have more timely discussions about newly released games and more of the week’s news. Thanks to the Star Trek Convention, the podcast is still delayed a little.

This week’s news includes:

  • People buy PS4 Slim consoles before it’s announced
  • Rumor: Nintendo NX could be region-free
  • Devs can now publish Windows apps straight to Xbox One
  • Fallout 4 PS4 Mods not broken, but Sony hasn’t pushed it live yet

All this and Listener Feedback. We also have a new Question of the Week: “What is your favorite fan convention?”

PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About ProfitabilityPlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability

The Xbox 360 price drop rumors flow like water and it’s all but officially been announced at this point. What about PlayStation 3 and their price? No.

Nobuyuki Oneda, the Sony’s chief financial officer said, “our plan is not to reduce the price. Our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability.” (gamespot) This makes complete sense coming from their chief financial officer, as their motivation is to make money, not lose it.

The question remains, how will they actually make money if they’re no longer in the race for competitive market prices? Considering game licensing must Net them some amount of profit Sony’s idea seems to be the exact opposite of their original PlayStation method: saturate the market and sell them all games.

So far we’ve seen very few “need to have” games for the PlayStation 3 console while Xbox 360 continues to build a substantial library and Wii continues to break sales records for apparently no reason. When a game publisher has to decide on a platform to launch a new game, why would they choose the one that doesn’t care to be competitively priced in the market? The one that doesn’t care about quantity of sales?

Sony intends to reverse the entire razor blade philosophy where one sells a cheap razor and charges users for the blades over and over again. Their take on this concept is to sell really expensive razors and put out small half-quality blades. Is that a good market strategy at this point?

Episode 331: Videogame Music TimeEpisode 331: Videogame Music Time

This week’s episode has a long discussion on videogame music of the past, while Jonah discusses Batman: Arkham Origins and iPad adaptations of board games.

This week’s news includes:

  • Surprises found in the PS4 FAQ
  • Xbox One will support DLNA, MP3 and audio CD
  • Valve working to make offline mode indefinite
  • Nintendo: We have failed to establish Wii U as a “worthy” Wii successor
  • Wii U bundle announced

This week’s Question of the Week is: “What was your favorite videogame music?”