fbm

@fanboymaster

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with.
Occasionally write bad chinstroking posts about game history and design philosophy.

fbm @fanboymaster11/20/2022, 8:44 PM

It's a little weird when I see people really chasing after PlayStation 5s because like... I get it kinda but also, as someone who got lucky and managed to snag one at launch, the PS5 specific library could be charitably described as dire. 2022 especially has been just miserable. I looked at Sony's beginning of the year "here's 22 games to be excited about in 2022" and

6 of them are still not out. 1 was a combo pack of 2 PS4 games 1 was the new Batman game that no one liked 1 was Babylon's Fall

All but one of the rest came out on other consoles, often the PS4. The one that didn't was Ghostwire which was... fine.

They're starting to be in stores more now it seems like, but... I'd say you can wait for a deal but they're probably gonna raise the price on them sooner so I dunno, it's just weird to be in the position of having what I would describe as an extremely uninteresting piece of hardware two years into its life but the sheer difficulty of actually getting one has granted it a curious mystique.

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fbm @fanboymaster11/21/2022, 12:38 AM

I guess this has me thinking about how much corporations benefit from creating and maintaining the aura of invincibility and inevitability, and how much they stand to lose when it gets cracked. The PlayStation 3 saw that aura cracked but not shattered, in part because Sony's aura of invincibility created a sort of permission for it to be a trashfire for a full 4 years before there was a consistent output of exclusive software and the non-exclusive software was no longer garbage to play on it. It's a leeway the market leader gets afforded and it' allows them to in some small way rewrite history. 15 years on and people will wax about how the system was really "equipped for a 10 year lifespan" when it was really Sony just kicking the corpse and its relevant lifespan was about 6 years and change tops.

Game companies are the easy ones for me to track, but you see it with things like the MCU, unsuccessful side projects are basically memory holed because it's useful to Disney and Marvel as a brand to portray itself as being constantly going from strength to strength. Social media brands, as is happening right now, need to convince users that they represent irreplaceable ecosystems rather than just ones that will take time to recreate, like all "lock-in" it's as much about making it feel inevitable that the trash decisions involved cannot possibly sink the ship and it takes a special kind of failure to be able to pierce that aura the way the birdsite's owner is currently managing to.

Not really much of a point here, just some thoughts I can't escape.