Sony’s DRM Ecosystem Nightmare Strikes Again
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/16/25 at 02:41 AM CT
Well, PlayStation Network, a.k.a., PSN, went and had another major outage that lasted a couple days. Even worse, this most recent failure of their online infrastructure revealed that, far from the cheerleaders of “simple” and “reasonable” game-sharing and DRM features they pretended to be when the Xbox One was threatening potential customers with an always-online hellscape of DRM and disc-checks, Sony is actually just as bad as Microsoft intended to be.
It seems that plenty of folks went out and grabbed the sold-separately PS5 optical disc drive during the outage in order to play physical copies of their games, only to discover that the PS5 optical drive won’t work without phoning home to PSN first. This has, apparently, been a known issue for a year already, but with the flagging popularity and relevance of both physical media and PlayStation in general, it’s the type of thing that didn’t make a splash among any of the activist-driven James Gournalism outlets of the …
“Veilguard” Flops Hard, “It Wasn’t a Live Service,” Says EA CEO
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/09/25 at 03:35 PM CT
Yahtzee Crowshaw over at the Second Wind gaming YouTube channel coined a phrase – and is now selling t-shirts bearing it – that becomes increasingly relevant, year after year. “Let’s all laugh at an Industry that never learns anything. Tee, hee, hee!”
Our most recent bout of uneducatable Industrial Gaming pontificating comes from none other than Electronic Arts – the last stable member of the former Triumvirate of Evil Gaming Companies, with Activision now part of Microsoft and Ubisoft teetering on the brink – who once won Worst Company in America two years in a row. EA CEO Andy Wilson told investors that the reason the publisher’s latest sequel in the ‘Dragon Age’ franchise flopped so unbelievably hard was entirely due to the fact that the game didn’t have any ‘shared world’ features – which is code for ‘It wasn’t a Live Service.’
Talk about sheer ignorance! Andy needs to lose his job immediately, since he is willing to ignore the obvious …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/02/25 at 02:26 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Big things are happening at MeltedJoystick, as we have recently inked an official partnership with the International Games Database, a.k.a., IGDB. As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more cover-and-box art appearing on games in our database. Even better, Nick has expressed interest in finally revising the way the site handles multi-platform titles to make the database less cluttered and make new releases more discoverable.
In order to prepare for these upcoming changes, I’m going to revise the way I look at upcoming releases in a way I’ve been dreaming of for at least 8 years: I’m no longer going to mention ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, or other rehashes of old releases (unless circumstances warrant a rare exception). As a result, it will be much clearer just how little the Games Industry does each month.
Without further ado, let’s get to the shortened release docket for the shortest month of the …
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