This again? Yes, it's expensive. Taking old tech and adjusting decades old prices to current dollar value/rate of inflation doesn't change that. It's completely irrelevant to other factors like current wealth distribution, current economic health, average amount of disposable income per class in that economy etc. Not to mention the fact that Nintendo game sales happen about as often as a golden conjunction.

You know a country has lost its way when its President tariffs almost every country on the planet over trade deficits under the guise of reciprocal tariffs, including islands inhabited by nothing but penguins, polar bears or volcanoes and half the country is fine with it. Not to mention threatening to annex its neighbors, destroying everyone's 401k, crashing markets, risking a global recession, breaking all norms and laws, destroying democracy and marching towards authoritarianism and arresting citizens of allied countries and throwing them in maximum security prisons because their immigration security agents now have quotas to meet. Its complete anarchy.

As far as games go, they are already too expensive and often have a lot of risk for the developer. These tariffs are going to make them more expensive and make developers hesitant in trying anything new.

Might have something to do with the draconian and completely unnecessary and arbitrary hardware requirements. Basically, if you want to run Windows 11, you have to throw out a perfectly good, fast, reliable PC because your CPU is not on some arbitrary list even though it's still blazing fast or because your system doesn't support TPM 2.0. Microsoft can't plug the holes in their OS so they punted security to hardware manufacturers. I have an i7 based custom build system that can run circles around most prebuilt Windows 11 systems but I'm supposed to throw it in the closet because of an arbitrary cutoff date and lack of TPM. Ridiculous. My gaming PC is not in a Domain or has access to intelligence agencies' classified systems. I'm just playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle...

Yeah, like everyone saw this coming; buy a bunch of studios and focus on being a game publisher rather focusing on one platform that's always behind. They still have Windows PC and will hopefully still make powerful consoles regardless of how well they do as a third-party publisher. But it's like after two decades, they're still trying to find their place in the video game ecosystem.

Good on them. Wonder if this was just them deciding to get with the times or if it was a decision based on too many PC gamers not wanting yet another account to play their games and thus their PC ports not selling as well as they could.

Well that was obviously going to start happening on and off after buying up all of those studios. They say they're still going to make hardware but, I'm betting their goal is to stop producing consoles eventually and just publish games and run Game Pass. Whether or not they reach that goal is the question. Their internal numbers for Game Pass are not being met.

@neoXmahi: I can't remember the last time I purchased a physical copy of a game and didn't have to download a huge amount of content day one. I mean, is this kind of thing new to you?

Dumbest thing I've ever heard from a developer. Let's have our game make 1/10th what it could make in sales so that like 50 people don't use nude mods for it. It's not very often a developer wants to have their game fail. Modders are what keeps interest in games far longer than there normally would be, thus making more money for the developers. Very bizarre choice. Wonder, if the game tanks, will they change their minds?

Looks like they've finally figured out that live service games suck and are rarely successful. Not good for workers if it does result in layoffs but that's on Sony's Suits trying for the 10 year, monetized to death cash cow rather than just doing what they do best. Stick to making money off of great, pay once RPGs, Action Adventure games, platformers and such and stop trying to make the next Overwatch.

@chriss_m: You literally just said exactly what I said about him, just using more flattering words. There has to be a balance between a good story and great gameplay. Too much of one and not enough of the other does not make a game better. These are AAA games that sell for $90 or more, not TellTale games that sell for $15. At least Telltale doesn't make Delivery Sims and charge you $90 for it because: 10,000 cutscenes.