GTA5 is more than a decade ago,.

The older gemers may remember but there is a whole generation that has spung up since.

Edit: a quick look shows there were 1.7 billion people born between 1995 and 2007 i.e. born in the period that would have trurned 18 between 2013 and 2015… This corresponds to 20 of the global population.

the console install base isn’t what it was when GTA V came out at the end of a generation.

I had a look to check the figures.

From the PlayStation perspective February 2025 estimates put the PS5 at 74.9m, while January 2013 estimates put the PS3 at 77m.

However Xbox is really letting their numbers lag with 28.3m Series consoles sold by September 2024 vs 77.2m 360 consoles by April 2013.

If we were just talking PlayStation I would say 97% is near enough to make no difference but if we compare both platforms together its only 67% and that is enough to influence strategy. A console only release in 2025 is unlikely to eclipse GTA5’s position as “fastest-selling entertainment product in history”.

Switch is conspicuously absent from the release platforms.

If I had to guess I would say they are skipping Switch 1 and it will be on Switch 2 when that drops.

That’s a bit like saying you can buy flour and bake bread.

Some people are interested in a product that is immediately ready to use as a simple convenience. Others might be on console that doesn’t offer the origial title or allow mods.

If it’s got platformer elements, then it’s a platformer, right?

Yes!

But I also argue that the second half of '89 counts as 90’s and that Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap was the best platformer I played in first half of the decade.

The 1.7 million customers who originated from a top 2023 release

This wording is a bit strange, are they tracking the new steam accounts that signed up to buy a specific 2023 title (like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, or Starfield)?

If so it says more about the specific demographic attracted to that unknown title than it does about Steam in general.

Edit:

The methodology is explained here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/751641001553035271

To gather data illustrating the effectiveness of that approach, we went all the way back to 2023 and identified the biggest 20 releases of that year. We looked at every new first-time purchaser generated by those products (that is, an account making a purchase, or redeeming a Steam key, for the first time) for a total of 1.7 million new users.

Thanks

They have taken the survivors.wiki domain.

I wonder if they are planning spinoffs with other themes?

Edit: typo

Xbox one era d-pad shows a real attention to detail

Hazelight Studios has been doing OK under their publishing umbrella.

So what I really want is a game that gives me a sense of achievement, and with the vaguest possibility that I actually might finish it. And so it’d be really interesting to know how many games are actually finished, and how many games are just abandoned by what proportion of people.

It can be fun to go to an achievement/trophy tracker and compare the numbers for the awards for first and last story missions.

For GTA5 some numbers are:

• Welcome to Los Santos: 1,736,456
• To Live or Die in Los Santos: 565,297

For Assassins Creed Odyssey:

• This is Sparta: 417,003
• Odyssey’s end: 207,371

The future is indeed dumb. The 2022 GoldenEye has it’s own baggage.

I don’t think Nintendo was willing to let Microsoft sell it as a physical product (collectors would view it as superior to Nintendo’s NSO requirement).

It looks like they were using the name.

At that point it becomes a trademark protection issue.

This is going to vary from case to case.

In a situation where sales are legal and the publisher or platform later choose to remove it from sale then it usually remains available in your library for download.

But in a situation where the publisher never had a legal right to sell the product then they were never legally able to grant distribution rights to the platform? In that case the license offered to the purchaser is invalid and it may be pulled from libraries.

The PlayStation version released in 2021 was PS4 software (that also ran on PS5 in backwards compatibility mode).

This update provides a native PS5 version. So I guess it is “next gen” in comparison.

I bought it because my son has been asking for Skatebird, but we also enjoyed an hour playing Ripped Pants at Work together and I’ll give Delver a go later tonight.

Thats the thing with bundles, different titles will appeal to different people.

The only thing they have ever done well is host a Q&A board and incubate niche communities.

Then they stopped doing that well.

I understand proprietary licenses and the business models they support, I also understand open source licenses and the business models they support.

If they they published paid binaries and free source code I would support them (morally), or if they published free binaries and free source code and ran a patreon I would support them (morally).

But to fork GPL code and hold the derived source ransom? Not cool.