I'm worried about being forced again to ugly, androginous, uncharismatic woke characters and to have again a bland, generic artstyle and (despite polished) gameplay. I think they have to learn 3 main lessons from Condord:
- Stop forcing woke political/religious agenda in Sony games. Let players choose characters they like and stop removing the white, male, heterosexual characters (plus sexy females) as main characters. Stop putting white heterosexual males only as bad guys. Stop the dumb 'aha' scenes where a "diverse" character 'gives a lesson' to a white heterosexual male showing they are more powerful / smarter / more skilled, etc.
- Art style, music and some main gameplay mechanic(s) should feel unique and stylish when compared to similar games, as happened in most iconic Sony IPs since the PS1. Parappa, Patapon, Gran Turismo, God of War, Loco Roco, Uncharted, Journey, Destiny, Astro Bot and many other ones share this.
- When marketing the game, focus on showing what makes it unique, different and more appealing for the target user than the competition.
But I don't see them leaving the woke / DEI wagon.
So let's hope that at least it has a poweful character editor that allow us to play with whatever body type we want (allowing specially sexy women with femenine, attractive bodies and super jacked males) plus to select the skin and hair color that each player wants.
That would allow the 0.0000000001% of the userbase who identify as cupiosexual two-spirit gender native inuit unicorns to be fine with the game, but also to the over 90% of the Concord genre player base that was ignored by not including white males or sexy women.
That & also don’t make it $40. Fairgames needs to be free to play to have any chance.
No, you guys always talk as if Marathon or Fairgames should be F2P but doesn't make sense because they are AAA games, and many of their direct competition are paid games.
Heist games or extraction shooters like Payday 2, GTAV, Escape from Tarkov, Hunt Showdown, The Division, Deep Rock Galactic plus many other top shooters like Helldivers 2, CoD, Battlefield, Rainbow Six Siege, Doom, Far Cry etc. are paid games.
Paid games are a totally viable option.
Making them F2P implies to force aggresive monetization and retention techniques to make it profitable worsening the game experience and requiring a way bigger userbase to make the games profitable/successful.
Paid games allow them to get the average player ARPU/LTV they need since the player acquires the game (or almost in case of the 40€ games), so they require way less players to get a profit and also don't require to keep them engaged during a very long period of time.