The full slideshow is a great collection of data, really interesting stuff if you’re interested in gaming biz.

That said, while I’m sure PC enthusiasts (among the larger gaming audiences here at Lemmy and Reddit) will be thrilled to see PC gaming rising while mobile is falling, the actual revenue breakdown is less exciting. PC growth is driven by a larger percentage than ever of microtransactions.

Much of the presentation is centered around “black hole games,” which make up a ton of the market and are extremely difficult to pull users away from. Sad when a lot of the strategy seems to be about cost-cutting and getting better percentages from the storefronts rather than making better games.

This sounds ambitious for a small studio. It doesn’t help that both Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars felt feature-light to me, maybe due to their signature genre blending.

Could be they’ve scaled up (and trust me, I’m yearning for more space games in the AA category), but too many of these projects are shooting for the moon and falling short. I’d love to see a stretch of releases with smaller scope–like Everspace 2–that the industry can build on, because space games are not where they were in 2000. Chris Roberts is off in his ivory tower doing his thing, and the big devs are either planetbound or obsessed with procgen.

Absolutely gorgeous game with an equally bad gameplay loop. Kinda sad.

Post-Meiji is an interesting time period. I don’t know how much media with Western localization there is in this setting. Even The Last Samurai was early Meiji.

I personally don’t think the monsters add much to the game. While I haven’t tried it, the “safe” mode seems like a fine way to play it. There is some atmospheric horror similar to Subnautica’s, too.

That said, SOMA is Existential Horror: The Game, and removing the monsters isn’t going to change that. So I’d tread carefully if you can’t handle horror.