Even though Star War Battlefront II is toxic right now due to intense shameless greed, good deals like this prove that the PS4 Pro remains a great console offering very high quality gaming at a low price. The fact that it sold out so quick is that there are a lot of potential customers out there waiting for the right price. That is a real threat to MS with their new XB1X because Sony can turn this on at any time and steal all the sales if required.
Without going too far off topic regarding Star War Battlefront II, open world games are the future of gaming, not multiplayer 'games as a service.' Those will kill the game industry once players notice the pattern. PVP is far too easy to abuse once you start pitting gamers against each other with each side hungry for superiority at a price, either superior gun or superior skin. Linear stories and adventures will always be popular, same as racing, platform, puzzle games and traditional pvp FPS. The beauty of open world game is that they can include all genre's. Linear stories set within a open world are obviously a prized goal, free from loot boxes and micro-transactions.
Sony could have a good selling point on their hands if they are smart. Just like a TV channel with no adverts or a website with no pop-ups, if they banned all loot box micro-transaction 'games as a service' on their platform, gamers would gravitate to Playstation as a way to escape the abuse coming from all other directions. Gamers have started to notice the abuse pattern and are starting to retract away from it. If devs had to remove such content from their games in order to sell to a large protected community, it would benefit all platforms because implementing it in the first place would not be worth it.
I've seen far worse websites that actually tell lies. I've never had to place a comment on a Gamespot article to correct a biased view or highlight a dishonest claim. That goes a long way in my book because it's very rare.
Basically, if you're smart, you will buy a PS4 Pro because that will have the longevity to hold its ground when the PS5 arrives, so you will get 3-5 years out of it. If you buy a base PS4 it will be totally obsolete and overshadowed by the PS5 in 2-3 years time.
But if cost is an issue, forget all that because you have to get a base PS4 and just make do.
Oh the humiliation, a big budget AAA game being thrown in to spice up a lame clunky PC indie game. All because MS backed the wrong horse in an attempt to get more exclusive content and tap the PC userbase for xbox gamers to play with. But the popularity of this novel gimmicky unpolished game will disappear as quickly as it started.
Delays are a good sign. They show that if the dev is not happy, they have the power to delay the game and get it right. A game that is not delayed is rushed out by the accountants to simply hit a financial target and the consumer suffers.
I think Ubisoft learned a valuable lesson after AC Unity that the accountants approach simply destroys the franchise and kills the golden goose. AC Origins turned out to be a very good game. The best in the series. I was also able to fully enjoy AC Origins without buying any loot chests or micro-transactions, and never felt I was lacking something. It was a game built for the hardware their customers own, instead of some cutting edge concept nobody owns, and runs silky smooth. A real pleasure to play. That again is a good sign.
Hopefully Far Cry 5 will deliver the goods as well and be fun to play, with a deep map editor so we can make our own single player and coop games. I'm looking for FC4 or better.
You made the right choice getting AC origins over Forza 7 because it's a great game.
The prices are all relative at any given point in time. Sony simply make sure that there is always a £100 price difference between the XB1X and the PS4 Pro. The visual difference is just not big enough to justify the extra money unless you have money to burn. The real jump will be the PS5.
£500 or even £455 is a lot of money to shell out for a console with a 2 year lifespan that isn't even a 500% next gen upgrade, because if Sony release the PS5 in late 2019 and MS respond with an XB2, that leaves you screwed.
The latter half of a gen always sees price cuts, so yes we are about 2-3 years away from the end of the PS4 gen when the PS5 will arrive. Nothing new there Einstein.
All gens overlap into the next gen to extend the lifespan. The current model in place is as follows. Each gen is 6 years long with a mid gen upgrade at year 3, and each gen overlaps the next gen giving a total 12 year lifespan for each console. 12 years is enough for anybody and you will be lucky if your console is still working after 12 years.
But 12 years is too long for me. Even 6 years is too long for me. Hardware tech advances far too fast to be locked for 6 years, so a 3 year lifespan via a mid gen upgrade is perfect. That way you don't slide into decline with stuttering frame rates and screen tear as devs push the console harder in the latter years of the gen.
lol so what you're saying is you jumped too early running on hype, instead of waiting to see how things panned out. The xmas period was always going to be the battleground. Surely you knew that.
That's you stupid not Sony. If you're happy with what you have then why make such a comment.
This is an interesting decision. Clearly, Sony agree with me that the XB1X will sell big up front as xbox fans jump from the lame XB1 to a proper game console. Once they have all bought the console, sales will fall back because the high price does not justify the small difference that is hard to notice under normal conditions.
The XB1X is a great game console, but the surge artificially makes the XB1X look like a success, so Sony are simply rebalancing the reality by dropping the price of the PS4 Pro to raise its own sales to a similar level. Then when the XB1X honeymoon period drops off, Sony will be back to normal.
I can understand that decision. Eventually Sony will remove the base PS4, and permanently drop the PS4 Pro price to somewhere in between the current price and the base PS4 price. That would leave MS in a compromised position. Sony obviously want to save that silver bullet for an emergency.
One thing I'm very clear on is that Sony made a big mistake forcing Andrew House to step down because he was unwilling to adopt the greedy concept of running the gaming division as a service, using micro-transactions, overpriced digital games, overpriced DLC, and the dreaded loot boxes. All this creates a lack of transparency and preys on addiction by using gambling techniques.
I think Andrew House knows that such a move will eventually kill off the game industry as a form mainstream entertainment. Replacing him with someone else willing to make more money in the short term via a scam will ultimately fail. The consumers will just reject it as shady and the game industry will shrink back to how it all started. Addictive coin-op machines in shady arcades run by gangsters. Sony need to reverse this decision and put Andrew House back in the driving seat offering consumers the transparency of a fair product for a fair price.
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