The first paragraph or this article made it sound like PS+ for the Vita and PS+ for the PS3 were separate things with separate costs. Reading it made me very angry.
I calmed down by the time I finished paragraph two though. LOL.
@ggregd Right. During the sales, there will be games offered for free for a limited time (usually a week or two). You can "purchase" the free game without downloading it. After that, you can download it at your leisure. Those games are downloadable and playable for as long as you're a PS+ subscriber. If your subscription lapses, you'll be cut off from your discounted games until you (a) re-new your PS+ subscription or (b) re-purchase those games at full price.
Every time I hear about the skyrocketing costs of next-gen game development, I always feel like I'm being primed to watch average game prices rise by another $10 or more.
I'm often very impressed with the scale and scope or modern game worlds, so I don't know how much more we really "need" in that category. As such I often think that increased computing power can be used to give us more vibrant worlds -- more people on the street, cars on the road, birds in the sky, better particle effects, etc. Hopefully some of that will flow naturally from the work that has already been done in current game engines.
I also believe that mature tools will help to mitigate a lot of that cost. As Unreal Engine 4 gets better, for instance, it will allow a lot of studios to produce better products in the same amount of time as their current efforts. Besides, we're already at a point in our cycle where the capabilities of our software has outpaced the capabilities of our hardware, especially on consoles. (The difference between some games on the console vs. a modern PC is extreme; new hardware will help to reduce that gap.)
A permanent ban might be of some consequence to those who have heavy investments in PSN (e.g. lots of purchased games / music / videos or lots of trophies). For others who decided that hacking their PS3s was okay, they'll probably be okay with the ban too.
I expected Windows Phone 8 phones and Surface tablets to be the mobile component of Microsoft's gaming strategy. I can't see the value of a gaming-oriented tablet in addition to the Surface. And creating a handheld gaming system doesn't seem worth the risk.
@alrepairs Yep, it's not the first time that the woman has shut me down, and I'm sure it won't be the last. To be honest, it's probably for my own good. Left to my own devices, I'd be the only guy in the country with every new gadget known to man who was living in his car.
I hope you enjoy that Wii U. I hope to have the console One Day, it just won't be on Day One.
I wanted to get one on Day One, but the woman shut that down quickly. Oddly enough, one of her arguments against my getting a Wii U was that "You don't even play with the Wii anymore!"
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