a wall of text to say complete and objective proved nonsense. On gamepass there are already titles with higher mc than many of the Sony exclusives. Enough of this nonsense created unilaterally. Halo budget is not less than the one of Spiderman ... Forza it has nothing to envy to Gran Turismo (if anything it continues to be the other way around) Psychonauts is objectively a better game than Knack ..so really I don't understand this nonsense .....What in your head makes you think that Flight Simulator is not an AAA? Or do you think the new Starfield will be a low budget AA RPG released on the service? No matter how many times you repeat this nonsense, it is not real and it is just created on neogaf to push a narrative to excuse the fact that Sony does not want to release its games on a service but prefers to charge them 82 euros each. I wait to read the new spin on the subject.
And anyway Toad meant that the service costs more (he was probably referring to the Ultimate)
I think what he's trying to say is, for his
own gaming tastes, those games may not offer the quality they want to invest their time with them, so even if they are the marquee of a given service, it wouldn't make that service valuable to
them because for
them their
time is worth more than what money they can save.
And that actually isn't a thought isolated to just him; a LOT of people think along similar terms, when it comes to any service or any item in general. At some point the money you save on a product becomes less a factor than what time it will take you to actually get worth out of that product in terms of your personal experience with it! It's something that becomes more and more important the older you get and/or the more busy with work/career your life gets, too: money, relatively speaking, becomes more and more worthless while time becomes more and more valued.
Unfortunately we can't slow down time, we can't get a "refund" on time wasted either, so you have to be more deliberate with how you invest your time as things go on. If a person has a certain set of interests when it comes to gaming, and a given service doesn't provide the content they are drawn to, then it won't matter if that service is very cheap, or offers 500 games, 1,000 games, a million games etc. That person will not be interested in such a service, simple as that.
And with all that, goes to say MetaCritic scores may not always mean much of anything in this. Some of my favorite games of all time, personally speaking, have middling MetaCritic scores, or don't even have MetaCritic entries! Some of them aren't even that popular...doesn't change the fact that I
love those games and would play a lot of them over some of the high MC-rated games like certain Marios, Uncharteds, Halos, even games like BOTW and Elden Ring. Scores don't mean that much to me other than what the journalists community thinks of a game, and that isn't saying as much these days versus the weight that carried back in the '90s and '00s (outside of very select reviewers).
Even with the games you used in those comparisons, things don't line up. Halo Infinite may not have a budget lower (or much lower) than Spiderman/Miles Morales, but a casual looking at both side-to-side would probably assume Infinite's budget is much lower just going by what they see on screen compared to Spiderman/Miles Morales. Psychonauts has a very different theme & sort of subject matter compared to Knack, including different gameplay mechanics...some people may prefer Knack because of those differences. Same can kind of be said about GT compared to Forza (or in other ways, some people could prefer the visual aesthetic of GT over Forza)..etc.
To me something like Flight Sim is definitely AAA in quality, from what I've seen of it...but it's also a very niche type of game. It's a flight/plane simulator; there's no story, there are no characters to become attached to, there's no imaginative world setting, no fantastical lore, no thematic elements based around human drama etc. It's an extremely mechanical game, so it's not going to engage with most people on an emotional level. And that's okay; there's a market for purely mechanical games...it's just a much smaller market than those for games that tap into emotion, or can tap into both mechanical & emotional ("emotional" as in outside of graphics realism).
www.famitsu.com
