Correction: Sony reached out to tell us that the Twitter account allegedly belonging to SIE CEO John Kodera in this story was actually an elaborate hoax. I apologize deeply for the oversight!
Original story: The new boss of Sony's PlayStation division took charge late last year and he made one thing clear at the start of this one: the change in leadership does not mean a change in direction for the company's biggest games. Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John Kodera made the pronouncement in a humbly-worded Twitter response to a PlayStation fan's concerns.
I will do my best to continue the excellent work done by Mr. @AndyHousePS . About the issue of “Games as a Service”, do not worry about it. @PlayStation's vision is totally different.January 10, 2018
A clarification of terms: “games as a service” is a broad concept encapsulating games that keep you playing for months or even years with regular content updates (as opposed to a set campaign or multiplayer experience). It's the difference between the original Halo and Destiny; they're both built on similar shooty-shoot play experiences, but Destiny added stuff for years after launch to keep players coming back. Also to keep players spending money on DLC expansions and microtransactions, which is the part that tends to rankle.
While PS4 is home to many such games as a service, the big titles Sony publishes tend to keep that element secondary or not use it at all: Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4, and Bloodborne are just a few examples. Looking ahead to God of War, Days Gone, Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima, the same seems to be true of Sony's currently announced slate of games. And judging by Kodera's tweet, we can expect similar plans far further into the company's future, even as former CEO Andrew House's press conference voice becomes a distant (but still pleasantly Welsh) memory.
Taking a step past the “good guy Sony” interpretation, this approach makes business sense even as games as a service become more and more profitable for other publishers. When console manufacturers make their own games, they're not just trying to sell those games. They're trying to make their platforms as desirable as possible.
Horizon: Zero Dawn probably would have made more money if it sold you crafting materials in loot boxes, but it also may have eroded some of the good feelings players have about it and the system as a whole. By emphasizing traditionally crowd-pleasing games in its own portfolio, Sony keeps fans happy, sells more PS4s, and cultivates a thriving platform for all kinds of titles. That includes games as a service, from which Sony happily collects a portion of the microtransaction purchases. Such is the unique, hard-earned joy of being a platform holder!
Money, as we all know, can’t buy you happiness. So by the same logic, a lot of fun things must be free. And lo and behold, they are! And we’re not talking about the obvious, weak-ass options here, like sunsets, love, or the sound of children’s laughter. No, we’re hitting the good stuff. Video games.
Free games have come a long way since the old days of mindless XP clicking and endless pay-to-win options. Now you’ll find the full spectrum of gaming experience, from full-bodied action-shooters, to RPGs, to narrative adventures, to competitive fighting games, just begging you to make them part of your life in exchange for exactly zero money. So read on, and we’ll break down the best PS4 games you can get started on right now, with not a single thought for your wallet. Some of them are even PS4 exclusives…
Fortnite Battle Royale
Probably the hottest, free multiplayer game right now, and for good reason. Taking Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds’ basis of a vast, 100 player, last-man-standing shooter as its basis, and then evolving it with natty, on-the-fly, tactical construction, Battle Royale is an instantly accessible hoot with serious long-term depth. Parachuting into a huge, open-world island map – initially completely unarmed and entirely devoid of supplies – the opening minutes of any match are a giddy, tense scramble as you attempt to glide to a spot free of competition (but hopefully bountiful of resources), search for a weapon, and quickly smash up the environment in a bid to accrue a few of the building resources you’ll need as things heat up. As the map boundaries close in, player numbers dwindle, and base structures become ever more elaborate, a different kind of tension ramps, as the game’s demands dynamically evolve. It’s an unpredictable joy every time, and with developer Epic updating Battle Royale at a heady pace, one that’s only going to grow over the coming months.
Forget PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. Actually, forget that instruction. No-one remembers PlayStation All-Stars. Sony’s mascot-touting, Smash Bros. ‘homage’ made a splash akin to a pea in the Pacific back in 2012, and the light, breezy, platform-brawler fighting game genre has (mostly) remained the sole preserve of Nintendo ever since. But no longer! A decidedly slick, accomplished, and even slightly more energetic take on the Smash formula, Brawlhalla presents a nonsensically eclectic cast of mythical and historical warrior archetypes – taking in Valkyries, Vikings, medieval knights, and er, ‘30s gangsters – and lets you go wild. With an increased focus on empowered air-control, and bigger scope for epic, high-flying ‘off-stage’ duels, Brawlhalla also does a good job of standing (somewhat) distinct from it inspiration. And its free-to-play model is rather friendly too, offering a limited selection of the character roster on free rotation, with earned in-game currency or real money buying the rest.
Part third-person action game, part competitive shooter, part RPG, part co-operative PvP team game, Smite takes the loose spirit of the MOBA and turns the genre in an entirely more immediate direction. You’ll earn gold and experience with which to level and enhance your character’s power and abilities, but – much like in something like Destiny – the RPG numbers mean nothing if your action skills and combat strategy aren’t up to standard. Not that this s just about instinctive twitch play. With a current line-up of 93 playable hero deities covering ranged and melee archetypes (with separate magical and physical combat types), spread over five distinct classes, there’s a huge amount of tactical team play to get stuck into. The free-to-play model is pretty damn pleasant, too. You get five permanent gods for free when you start, and five more will cycle into the roster on a weekly basis. From then on you can buy or rent your chosen champions as you go, or pay for the full package and get access to every one that’s been released, and every one that ever will be.
A hectic, borderline-sadistic hack-and-slash, you should only play Let it Die if you have a penchant for getting your ass handed to you. Or thrown over the other side of the room as one of its many insane bosses rips you in half in ways you didn’t know existed. No, I’m not going to compare it to that game about darkness and souls. Grinding your way through its many levels, you’ll have to beat boss after boss to make it all the way to the top of a tower that’s mysteriously risen up through the earth. On your way you’ll meet characters that look like someone pitched them based on random word combinations. The most memorable by far is the skateboarding Uncle Death. Who wears spiral sunglasses and biker boots. He’s… interesting. There is a slim monetisation aspect to Let it Die, but you get a ton of ‘death metals’, its currency of choice (*metal horns gesture*), thrown at you after completing special events so you don’t have to drain your wallet to play. Plus each time you die your player will appear in someone else’s game as an additional enemy. So we promise all those deaths mean something. Promise.
Bewitching players for two years now, finally you can see what all the fuss is about for free. Everything changes when lead character Max discovers she can rewind time, saving the life of her rebellious best friend Chloe in the process. Life in their home of Arcadia Bay gets dark when the pair start using Max’s power to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Amber, one of their school friends. Rachel’s absence causes ripples in the town, and they find themselves drawn deeper into the uncomfortable goings-on that have remained in the shadows until now. Altering the past creates its own problems, though. The game as a whole has multiple endings, so there’s a huge replayability factor. Episode 1 is a good sampler of the entire saga though, so there’s really no reason not to give Life is Strange a try.
Ready for some outlandish mental images? Here we go: a tiny imp riding a warbeast with a mouth big enough to swallow a walrus whole. An angelic white-and-gold angel android. An engineer with one extra robotic arm clinging to her back. I assure you each one of these characters exists. And you can find them in Paragon, a multiplayer battle arena game bursting with havoc. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, everything looks beautiful, which you’ll want to focus on when you’re trying not to get shot to bits. Building your deck (no cards here: it’s a fancy name for perk cards) will help to delay the inevitable, as you can select different perks or items to suit your playstyle. But wait, there’s more! Different items will pop up during the game depending on the cards you chose, so you can easily vary each session by dropping some different perks into your loadout. These cards are earned through gameplay too, so you won’t have to face people who have bought their way to the top of the game. It’s all very fair, and is a good stop-gap while you eye that Overwatch purchase hungrily.
PlayStation’s attempt at Minecraft feels a little more like Dragon Quest Builders, with hours of building fun in store. In between bouts of piecing together your house/castle/lair of choice in Trove there are vastly different landscapes to be explored. Yes, there’s the usual forest, desert, and arctic sections. Scattered into the mix is also a bright pink, saccharine-sweet candy realm, and a futuristic tron-like world with high-tech enemies. Slashing your way through levels of each dungeon is surprisingly tough at points, yet it gradually gets easier. Each boss drops a variety of weapons and masks, which you can equip to give yourself some skill boosts. Perhaps you think you can guess what kind of characters you’ll be playing. No offence, but you’re probably incorrect. Choose between Chloromancers who control the plants that spring from the ground to deadly effect, or a Candy Barbarian who gives the phrase ‘sugar rush’ a whole new meaning.
Cyberninjas. Does that word alone not sell you on Warframe instantly? With your main aims being assassination, looting, and trying out as many frames as possible, at first the amount to do is intimidating. You see, ‘frames’ are loadouts (in the form of different sets of armour) that determine your abilities, and therefore your playstyle. To amass different frames to try you’ll first need blueprints, which will be splurged out of bosses you defeat. Use these to buy the frame you’ve got your eye on. One will be able to teleport, another will be able to summon a frost nova or a sonic boom. Encouraging you to play the game however you want and try out new approaches, it helps that each frame has an eye-catching design for you to yearn after. It’s outperformed usual free-to-play expectations by making it entirely possible to get to a high level of expertise without paying a single penny, though expect to grind quite a bit in the process. With over 26 million users, there’s a very active community to play too.
Similar to Warframe, Hawken gives players the option to hold onto their hard-earned cash and instead grind their way to the top. Stomping around in a giant mech is exciting enough, but the main attraction of the game is the fact that ammunition is unlimited. Of course, there is a catch. Your guns will overheat, turning you into the equivalent of a squishy damage sponge, so you’ll have to retreat to recover your energy and get those guns firing again. Don’t expect to be lumped with a specific mech loadout either, as you can customise the weapons, equipment, and select different mech upgrades to suit how you want to play. Lumpy movement is to be expected from giant robots. To be as nimble as a ballerina the giant buckets of metal can side dash and boost their way across the arena, and turn around speedily at the cost of a draining fuel tank. If you want to see how a massive mech could be that elegant, give Hawken a go.
Lone wolves, step away. Those who yearn to be part of something bigger, to have brothers-in-arms shooting by your side, step up to the plate. The raucously hectic FPS Planetside 2 has you join one of three factions and battle for domination of the planet Auraxis by using foot soldiers, monstrously huge vehicles and air support. The premise will be familiar to anyone who’s played an online FPS match. Each outpost you conquer and retain gives your team extra resources and limits the spawning options open to your enemies. You can only capture outposts that are near ones you’ve already claimed, so there’s no voyaging deep into enemy territory where you’ll become over-familiar with bullets in various body parts. There’s just the right amount of direction to keep Planetside 2 from becoming overwhelming, so it’s ready and waiting any time you want a bit of free sci-fi FPS action.
Paragon, Epic Games' action-oriented foray into the MOBA genre, is shutting down. First teased during PlayStation Experience 2015, it was released as a free-to-play, in-development title for PS4 and PC in March 2016. The game never managed to exit beta despite the addition of several new heroes and other major updates. On the game's official site, a statement from the Paragon team reads:
“It’s with heavy hearts we’ve decided to close down Paragon.
We truly appreciate everything you’ve put into Paragon. We received many passionate ideas for where to take the game; the outpouring of thoughtful suggestions is another testament to this incredible community.
After careful consideration, and many difficult internal debates, we feel there isn’t a clear path for us to grow Paragon into a MOBA that retains enough players to be sustainable.
We didn’t execute well enough to deliver on the promise of Paragon. We have failed you — despite the team’s incredibly hard work — and we’re sorry.
To try to make this right, Epic is offering a full refund to every Paragon player for every purchase on any platform. This refund will come directly from Epic rather than your platform provider.”
The statement then provides instructions for how to request a refund.
I don't know about you, but I find that statement quite sobering to read, and it illustrates just how risky an investment games have become. The risk on the development side is obvious: you never know if your product is going to be successful, and (as is the case here) it's possible you may never see it grow into the vision you planned for. But there are risks on the consumer side as well, the most obvious being monetary.
Epic is doing right by its consumers to give refunds, but there was always a chance it, or any other studio, wouldn't. And going forward, there will always bea chance that money spent could end up being money thrown down the drain. That's the nature of ‘games as a service,' and it highlights why some are so skittish about getting involved with modern games.
Don't get me wrong – any game can be a risk, and to varying degrees, that's always been the case. Did you pick up that SNES game back in the day because your friend at school wouldn't stop talking about how cool it was, only to be letdown? Did you buy that PS2 game based on a review you read in a magazine, but found you vehemently disagreed with its assessment? Or maybe you didn't read any reviews or hear any word of mouth, but grabbed a game based purely on trailers and/or box art, only to find it was nothing like you imagined?
It's the extra layer of uncertainty that comes when games exist as a service – meaning that even if you love it one month, you may hate it the next, or in this case, it could be gone the next – that gives me pause. We already struggle with preserving games, but how do you preserve a game like Paragon? You don't really, and so players who loved it must now be content with the memories they made during the game's brief lifetime. There will be no ‘I think I'll dust off my old copy' in the future for Paragon's community, and so it may feel like a gamble that simply didn't pay off. That, quite frankly, sucks.
And it doesn't just suck for those who loved the game – it sucks for every developer on the Paragon team who worked hard to make it a reality, every person who assumed they'd get around to it someday, and every believer who told their friends, ‘Hey you should check this out'. Regardless of what you think about the game itself, Paragon's brief life should serve as a lesson on being careful about where you put your money and your time.
Epic's position that anyone who spent real-world cash on the game will be getting a refund is welcome and the right thing to do. But personally, I find that a bit of a hollow victory – I'd much rather there be one more game in the world for people to enjoy.
The heartwarming success of Stardew Valley has taken on an even brighter note, thanks to its debut on Nintendo's latest console. According to Nintendo's official worldwide rankings, the farm-life RPG was the most-downloaded Switch eShop exclusive title in 2017. It beat out the juggernaut that is Minecraft, which took second place, as well as Sonic Mania and Rocket League at No. 3 and 4 respectively. All that despite Stardew Valley releasing later in the year (and thus having less time to rack up sales) than the others.
Both Minecraft and Rocket League were phenomena of their own, though their respective fervors had died down a bit by the time they arrived on Switch. Still, when you remember that Stardew Valley was almost entirely the product of a single person's labor and deep, deep love for Harvest Moon, it's all the more impressive (Minecraft started out as a one-person project too, but it's had a whole studio behind it for many years now).
Here's an extended list of the top 10 global eShop bestsellers on Switch. Remember that this list only includes download-exclusive titles (or chiefly download, I believe, if they have limited physical versions), so you're not going to see games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey on it.
Stardew Valley
Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition
Sonic Mania
Rocket League
Snipperclips
Overcooked
Shovel Knight
Fast RMX
Kamiko
Steamworld Dig 2
The staying power of Minecraft has already been made manifest. Will Stardew Valley hold on to its ranking even as the upcoming Nintendo Switch games of 2018 start pouring in? Whoever wins… we also win, because these games are rad and this system is rad. Nice.
Minecraft has now surpassed 144 million copies sold worldwide and currently has 74 million MAUs.
The figure was revealed by Microsoft head of Minecraft Helen Chiang in an interview with PopSugar. The MAU record was set in December 2017. It is unclear how many of these players are on mobile.
Chiang pointed to consistent updates bringing players back, as well as the promise of more to come in the future. This includes the addition of the Marketplace on Switch, which allows user-generated content to be sold to other players.
Setting records
“We just recently set a new record in December for monthly active users, so now we're at 74 million monthly active users — and that's really a testament to people coming back to the game, whether it's through the game updates or bringing in new players from across the world,” said Chiang.
Minecraft is pretty important to Microsoft. Not only did the company spend $2.5 billion in 2014 to own the world's most popular building-block game, but just last week it promoted Matt Booty, the head of Minecraft, to corporate VP of Microsoft Studios. As far as Microsoft sees it, there's a direct line from Minecraft to Gears of War, Halo and all of the company's major first-party games. And now, with Booty's ascent, there's a new Minecraft boss.
Helen Chiang has been with Microsoft for 13 years, and the past 11 of those were spent in the Xbox division, managing the Live team and working with developers in the Xbox Live Arcade program. She helped Minecraft get settled on Xbox long before Microsoft's acquisition, and now she's in charge of the entire game.
“It's really important for the overall gaming strategy,” she told Engadget. “What I like to think is that we're out in front thinking about a lot of different things.”
Chiang says Microsoft can use Minecraft as a proving ground for new ideas and features that might make their way to other Xbox projects. For example, Microsoft recently partnered with NetEase to release a version of Minecraft in China, and Chiang says the game is doing well in the region. This opens the door for other Xbox games to make the international leap. In the coming years, players might also see more Microsoft games coming to a range of devices, just like Minecraft.
“We're one of the games that's on all of the platforms outside of just Microsoft platforms,” Chiang says. “When I started at the company, and it's really evolved over time — that is something that's changed in our strategy. I'm really excited to work on a game that, really, it doesn't matter where the players are playing. Part of what's important to Minecraft is that we make it available to anybody, anywhere they want to play, on any device that they want to play. And that's something I think we'll see Microsoft do more of.”
With more games on more platforms, an obvious question looms: What about cross-console play? Currently, Microsoft allows PC and Xbox players to join select games together, including Gears of War 4, but the list is limited. The company is even willing to enable cross-play between Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch — here's looking at you, Rocket League — and it wants to work out similar deals with Sony's PlayStation 4. Cross-platform play is possible from a technical standpoint, and both Microsoft and Nintendo have expressed interest in connecting their consoles. However, Sony has historically rebuked these efforts.
Minecraft is an ideal test case here. The Better Together update unifies all versions of Minecraft, from consoles and PC to mobile, allowing players to interact with people on different devices and receive updates at the same time. Better Together is live for Xbox One, Windows 10, mobile and virtual reality versions of Minecraft, and Chiang's team is working on the Switch version right now. It should be available “shortly,” though there's no concrete launch date.
Sony, meanwhile, is still playing coy.
“In my role as the new studio head for Minecraft, I'm looking forward to continuing the discussions with Sony about bringing the Bedrock engine over to players on PlayStation,” Chiang says. “I think that is something that is very important to us and I'm looking forward to continuing to have those conversations with Sony.”
If everyone decides to play along, Minecraft‘s future will be more connected, communicative and open than ever, and Microsoft's broader game strategy could follow suit.
“I think games are such a dynamic industry, one that really builds on everything that's happening in technology,” Chiang says. “So I'm really excited about what we've done in games and how much farther we still have to go.”
