Free to play is also a great way to stop piracy. If everybody can access it free there is no point in making an illegal copy. But if you want the full experience you have to pay up, no matter where you got the game. Of course free to play also means online play. It's the only way to monetize the experience, with an internet connection.
@FandomTheory Of course they have projects on the way. A new game takes several years to make. No launch titles started in the same year of the console launch.
Please, try and be not so US centric. I understand you are an US site, but with an worldwide audience. To say XBox 360 is the best selling platform is looking only to the USA because that's the only place where it happens. If you look at Europe for instance you see the opposite, and the worldwide sales of the XBox 360 are behind the PS3 for at least three years now...
It's funny to see people now going the other way and saying that graphics don't count at all. They do. It's so obvious they do! For instance when people looked at New Vegas everybody said it looked like Fallout 3 with an aging engine, when Skyrim appeared everybody was gasping at the great open world graphics. Go try and play PSOne titles and see how it's really hard to enjoy them today, for the most part. (I know you're favorite 20 year old game is still the best experience in the world today, just take it as an exception).
Graphics are the the materialization of the visual part of the game, so it's a huge part of how we experience each new world. Go play Uncharted and put it with Atari 2600 graphics on it, then come and speak about the lack of importance of visual fidelity. Try and make Arkham City on the Game Boy and see if it's the same thing.
But graphics are the concretion of an visual and gameplay plan, they are not the only thing in a game. It's just as stupid to say that you only need great sound design as it is to say you only need great graphics. A game is a mixture of a ton of different parts, each of them are needed to create a great experience.
What bugs me is the comparison to movies. It's such a different medium, that relies on such different things, that it really makes me mad that people think of games as movies with controllers. They are not. Mario, Sonic, Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, Little Big Planet, Journey, Space Invaders, Pong, Donkey Kong, Burguer Time are obvious examples of games that are loved by many and have nothing to do with movies. Heck, even story or lore driven games work because of the interactivity, it has nothing to do with a passive story telling medium like cinema. Try and make someone watch 100 hours of Oblivion with no input and see how it is impossible to enjoy. It's something that needs to be played and only works when it's played. The sense of wonder of roaming the countryside does not exist on a passive experience, after 30 seconds people are bored. So the way games achieve their goal, the way they entertain or create emotion is so different from film, that it doesn't make sense to compare the two.
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