@raveneye: That's probably fair. I do prefer more RPG elements to fewer. The main reason I found it less satisfying in Dying Light was that there was no real choice, you basically filled out every skill as it became available. Maybe you went with the 1hd skills before 2hd but that was about it.

I do have a maxed character, sans legend points which I'm not finding very compelling, and honestly, the higher level I got the less I wanted to fight stuff. They didn't drop anything compelling and there were so many ways to just bypass them between the climbing, camo, etc.. Zombies were basically completely trivialized by the parkour. Dead Island forced you to face stuff straight up and in very varied ways depending on what character you were playing, to take advantage of their unique bonuses and abilities.

Ah yes, Dead Island, the Marmite of video games.

Personally I wouldn't mind another jar of it. Dead Island's RPG aspects and combat were a lot more satisfying than Dying Light's. Dying Light spent most of its time having you avoid combat and every character was just the same dude with no real variation of build after a point.

Either way, the question does still remain: Who do you voodoo?

@dexda: and Phantasy Star Portable 1 and 2. And god knows how many others, there's like a hundred odd games that were physical release only.

@Hammershock6:

This follows the its removal in other regions, including Europe, in September 2014.

@Stiler: I'm personally expecting a slew of light-bar equipped prop controllers. Think the Wii's silly baseball bat and gun shells, but ones that aren't the controller themselves, that can be represented in game accurately in tandem with the headset, gloves and camera.

Or maybe just another silly gimmick that won't go anywhere. We'll see.

But you can't play Brutal Doom with those versions...

@Dark_sageX: It's an economic lifecycle that's been repeating without end for as long as commerce has existed. An entity gets so big it no longer works for the customer but instead works for the investors/profit margin/greedy owner/whatever else at which point competition tends to step in and snap up all of their business and the behemoth falls and new companies spring up to feed on the rotting carcass's market share.

This process has recently been stopped from happening at its natural rate thanks to government bailouts, grants and funds doled out for reasons I'll leave to your imagination. Many game companies are simply indirect beneficiaries of this process as their investors should've bowed out but haven't, but some are more directly impacted and the final effects of this aren't readily apparent yet.

Additionally people are being instilled with amazingly powerful brand loyalty, very apparent in the form of fanboyism and nostalgia, that's resulting in them buying stuff even when they know they're going to hate it entirely because it has a name or character in it they once associated with quality or joy.

Essentially as soon as companies stop trying to please the consumers they should nosedive as competition beats them but that process is currently being stopped by outside forces and it's simply going to get worse before it gets better.

@Dark_sageX: It's not, it's corporate-speak for "We can squeeze more blood out of this stone, can't we?"

@spaced92: A lack of demos also contributes, a lot of people pirate to try a game they're unsure of out. If they like it they may buy it, particularly if it has online functionality they're interested in, if they don't they won't. If there's no cracked copy available to them, they simply won't play that game and fully skip on it until they see it at a few bucks on sale, at which point they may well have lost interest and still won't get it.

Steam and Origin both have made slight attempts at remedying this with their refund systems but they're still not particularly ideal as developers implement ways to dodge that like more than 2 hours of puttering around before getting into the meat of the gameplay, or third party external accounts being required that disallow refunds once you activate them.

@Dark_sageX: This becomes incredibly apparent when you check out Steam's hardware survey data, with almost 50% of the userbase still rocking a dual core CPU, less than 20% running a video card less than 4 or 5 years old, not even 17% having more than 8gb memory, barely more than 20% have more than 2gb VRAM, etc etc.. The actual average PC player is not quite on par with the modern consoles once you account for OS overhead, multi-configuration optimization being less than ideal, and so very many of them being on laptops.

Generally speaking console sales fund the majority of development, without them there basically wouldn't be PC versions of many games. PC versions tend to have better performance and visuals on far more expensive and modern hardware but that serves largely as a showpiece. The hobbyist who spends the two or three grand every few years keeping their hardware up to date to run new releases on max settings is hardly the majority.

It's very difficult to know for sure though since you never really hear any direct anecdotal stories from companies if they do less well on a new platform. Usually it's only the indie devs that talk about it, and you can generally expect to hear a pretty even mix of devs going console to PC saying they were surprised at how much more money they made on PC than console, and then devs going from PC to console saying they were surprised by how much more money they made on console than on PC. I think that's an artifact of high quality games with a big following and a lot of praise being introduced to a new platform with numerous interested parties mixed with the existing playerbase also buying it a second or third time both to support the developers and to enjoy the game on the go, on their TV, in the office, etc..