bigsocrates

They're pushing the game pretty hard within the Xbox ecosystem itself. On the home page and the Game Pass page etc..

This always felt like the right place for it. It seemed to me like a game they got to "bulk up" Game Pass and make sure there were regular big releases for people to get excited about and dig into. This was part of their "buy smaller but respected studios" period for that strategy, a long time ago. Now it seems like that isn't their strategy anymore (otherwise Hi-Fi Rush would have been perfect) but this game has been in development forever.

I don't think it's a game that makes sense to give a big advertising blitz like you would Starfield or Halo because it DOESN'T have mass appeal. If you get the COD bros to check it out they're going to mostly hate it. So it makes sense to push it in the enthusiast press and within Xbox itself but not buy big TV ads.

I did see some Reddit ads for it, for what it's worth.

@chamurai: I'm sorry that you don't like DEMOCRACY.

I guess the outcome of the vote has you feeling blue(y).

At least we can rest assured that it was a totally fair and unbiased vote administered in an unimpeachable manner.

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club Year 3! Our 11th game of 2024 is Little Kitty, Big City. The target completion date is June 3, 2024.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after June 3, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Little Kitty, Big City?

An exploration game where you explore a city as a little kitty, making friends and wearing hats, as cats, famously both super friendly and beloved of being forced to wear clothes, are wont to do.

How long is Little Kitty, Big City?

How long to beat lists it as 2.5 hours long.

@zombiepie: Is there room for these games though? Arc makes a lot of fighting games, primarily its two big franchises and licenses, and SNK keeps doing its Saudi-backed thing, but I have no idea if these games actually do well. Arc does well enough to stay in business I guess. The fact that we haven't seen a new Soul Calibur in so long and talk about how 6 did makes it seem like that franchise is at least moribund. And Sega may be trying to revive Virtua Fighter but it's also trying to revive Crazy Taxi and Golden Axe. Sega is on a nostalgia kick. The fact that it's been stuck on 5 for well over a decade despite the fact that 5 is a very good game suggests that they haven't seen a burning need to put out more in that franchise.

I just have no idea whether being outside the top tier in fighting is actually profitable at this point.

@av_gamer: People may be playing DOA but are people BUYING DOA? The competitive scene is a tiny sliver of the purchasing public and it's not where the profit is. Companies support the competitive scene to draw in the casuals. The very top games seem to sell well enough but the stats I've seen on the smaller games haven't tended to be good. The sexy thing matters because I think the DOA team believes that "whaling" is the more viable path forward (or was when DOA 6 came out) than trying to sell broadly.

Even the big games are riddled with DLC in an attempt to extract more money from a potentially smaller audience. Street Fighter 6 was very well received critically and sold decently, but as far as I know didn't shift huge numbers.

From what I've gleaned it seems like the fighting game buying community is large enough to support the big games (and casuals will buy Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and Tekken) but I'm not actually sure it's big enough to support the second tier, outside of the aforementioned Arc, which has its own fanbase.

@chamurai: Is the game even beatable? Does it have an ending? I sort of assumed it was more of, as I said, a "toy" game where you could walk around and trigger stuff but nothing actually changed. Part of that is because of how inconsistent it all is. Like when you go for the picnic with the family, first it turns from day to night then you have the picnic (and it's day again) and then the school shows up for random camping, where nobody seems to notify your parents or anything.

It just seems so disconnected I'm not sure that it advances enough to be beatable.

And yes, the unskippable stuff makes it a literal chore to play, but again I'm sure they were worried about kids hammering the buttons and being confused. It just seems like they were so paranoid about asking anything from the player that they didn't actually make a game.

This one is in my sense memory.

And you still get "nailed it" if you guess first try.

#GuessTheGame #738

🎮 🟩 ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜

#MasterGamer

https://GuessThe.Game/p/738

Everyone has reasons that seem plausible but what if we approach it from the other direction; why SHOULD Dead or Alive have survived?

Tekken is basically the only classic 3D fighter series that's still popular. Everything else, including Virtua Figther, Soul Calibur, and Bloody Roar seems to be niche at best. I was a huge DOA fan but it just seems like 3D fighters aren't popular outside of Tekken. The fighting scene is basically Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, a bunch of anime fighters of various flavors, and indies. SNK keeps trying to revive its properties like KOF and Samurai Shodown without a ton of attention.

The fighting game market has consolidated and DOA is marginal, like most franchises, because it's not one of the big ones.

@emnii: I mean I would buy that package for $20 too. But not Kileak on its own. And I probably wouldn't play Kileak for more than 25 minutes. It's got big Ninja Golf energy.

@shindig: A new game that LOOKED like PO'ed but was good would have no problem selling at $20. If ACTUAL PO'ed had never been released and a game that was exactly like it was released today for $20 it would be universally panned and nobody would buy it and everyone who did would refund it.

Shovel Knight looks like an NES game but is good by modern standards so people are willing to pay for it. But there are a lot of NES style games released today that are bad and nobody buys them. PO'ed is awful and if not for its notoriety and place in video game history it absolutely wouldn't sell if released today.

@finaldasa: Wow do I disagree with this.

I do not find ANY PlayStation controllers comfortable with the possible exception of the DS4, which was...okay. But I have a friend who literally could not use it and had to buy a dongle to use a Switch Pro controller on his PS4 because the DS4 was unusable for him.

I made a thread about how bad the Dualsense was for me when I first got it, and a lot of people agreed. I did adjust to it and with better hand positioning it's fine, but I've never seen people have the same complaints about the Xbox controller, and a lot of people use that as the PC default.

I think Xbox has the best controller shape. The Switch Pro controller copied it even more blatantly than the DualSense did. The problem with Xbox controllers is they haven't bothered putting in the new bells and whistles that others have. No motion controllers for gyro aiming and the like is just inexcusable at this point, and Switch and Dualsense have better rumble. Adaptive triggers are a cool idea though they don't actually do that much in my experience.

@emnii: I knew the PowerSlave defense force was out there but I didn't know there was a Kileak defense force waiting in the wings. Truly every game has its defense force. I know your pain. I, too, have halfheartedly defensed bad games, like Balan Wonderworld. The Kileak of its time.

@cikame: Nightdive can do whatever it wants, I'm not responsible for its finances, but as a consumer this stuff just seems bizarre to me. Yes it's a funny joke to remaster PO'ed, and it has some game preservation value, but it's not just PO'ed as others have pointed out. Old games have gotten really expensive.

@apewins: Are there people paying for these obscure old games? I don't actually know. I'm sure Turok sold but I'd guess a lot of these games do very poorly. I'm someone who loves playing retro games in new wrappers but I'm not sure anyone has figured out the economics. Xbox couldn't make backwards compatibility of old games economically viable (PS4/5 and Xbox One/Series backwards compatibility is different because it's not done on a game by game basis), and Nintendo abandoned the Virtual Console. PlayStation's attempts to put old PS1 games on PS4/5 are a fraction of what they did for PS3 and they haven't even bothered with PS2 games, even though those are much more playable today, and PS2 is now much older and should be easier to emulate by PS5 than PS1 was when PS3 was released.

Maybe there are retro gaming whales who will pay a lot and THAT's the profitable business? Maybe you sell 60,000 copies no matter how much they cost so if you can do that for $20 each you can make a profit but if you do it for $10 you won't get many more sales and will make less money?

Or maybe it's price drop bait. Sell for $5 off the bat and people will think it's worthless but release for $20 and then people WILL buy when it drops to $5 because they think they're getting a deal. A common tactic.