#369: Tragic romance

Be honest with me a sec. How many of you bought a PS5 Pro this week? I see a few sheepish hands towards the back, thought so. I am sure some of you are too embarrassed to admit it, too. It’s fine. I get it! Be assured that you are seen, and deeply understood.

I am sure we all shared in the shock, passing soon into outrage, at Sony’s absolutely mad price hike, which sees the price of both the regular and Pro-flavoured PS5 ratcheted up in every major territory — and the Pro, at $900, inching ever closer to becoming the world's first thousand-dollar console. No doubt we all looked on agog at the stat revealing that a PS5 now costs 30% more than it did at launch in 2020. Perhaps we allowed ourselves a chuckle at the thought that a videogame console has been one of the best investments of the 2020s. Thirty percent in five-and-a-half years? If only my house could appreciate like that.

Then, some of you will have run the numbers and thought, hang on a sec. This is bad news, sure — but is it also, just maybe, an opportunity? The price hike wasn’t immediate; Sony announced it on March 27, but wasn’t applying it until April 2. You had a week, in other words, to save yourself £100. You probably figured, well, with component prices the way they are in our current AI hellscape, there’ll be no sign of PS6 for another few years at least. Correct! At the rate things are going, another price rise at some point appears inevitable. Yep, yep, spot on. Across the internet I saw people laying out their own use cases, using forums or social-media hellscapes to workshop the speech with which they would later justify the purchase to their spouses, and even, I suspect, to themselves. A prettier Crimson Desert! A shinier PSVR2 Gran Turismo 7! The best way to play GTAVI! All fair, all correct. Not sure they’re £700 correct, admittedly, but I get it.

If the above sounds a bit familiar, know that I am not here to judge you. How could I, when I bought a Pro a few months ago, at least in part because I knew that this week’s price rises would soon come to pass? Instead I congratulate you, and urge you not to feel so silly about it as I expect you currently do.

There’s this word commonly used in cricket circles that we for some reason do not use in games: tragic. A cricket tragic will spend a wet weekend snuffling out YouTube highlights of 40-year-old test matches. They will peruse old match scorecards, memorise the batting averages of a 1980s county team, tune into shonky single-camera livestreams of a one-day game in Dhaka or Paarl or Chester-le-Street. Their love of and devotion to the sport is unconditional; they recognise the inherent silliness of their condition, and have chosen to embrace it. When someone is called a ‘cricket tragic’, it is said with nothing but love. (Handily, The Guardian proved this point for me yesterday.)

We speak too often of games as some sort of secret embarrassment. We speak regretfully of our 'piles of shame'. When an exciting new style of game emerges, we rush to slap some demeaning label on it — walking simulators, boomer shooters, friendslop. I think all that needs to change, and if you like you may consider this newsletter something of a rallying call.

If you upgraded to a PS5 Pro this week, or bought your first PS5, well done. You made a financially sound decision that will insulate you against the raging AI maelstrom, will keep you fed and watered in your favourite hobby during the extended wait for the next generation, and in the short term will give you access to games so pretty and performant they will blow off your very socks. Yes, it’s a bit silly, sure. It's a lot of money. But what would life be without the occasional fripperous indulgence? You are a gaming tragic, and you have the receipts to prove it. Let your freak flag fly, brothers and sisters, and know that you are loved.

Before we get on with the rest of the week’s news, might I briefly alert you to the wonders of a paid Hit Points subscription? For £4/$5 a month you get three additional posts per month, access to the full, almost five-year-old Hit Points archive, and entrance to the delightful Hit Points Discord, aka the last good place on the internet. You can get 50% off your first month, too. Do us a favour! Please! I’m so skint!

MORE!

• A heavy cold kept me from my keyboard last week, which deprived us all of an opportunity to see me spend 800 words trying not to drop the c-bomb on Tim Sweeney over the Epic layoffs. (A thousand staff, about 20% of the company, were let go because, Sweeney claims, Fortnite has peaked.) Sweeney has at least stepped in to safeguard the life insurance of a laid-off worker with terminal brain cancer, so that’s something I suppose. Still though. Not great.
• Indie Pass is a new subscription service that offers up a 70-strong selection of indie games for $6.99 a month. Now I consider myself to be pretty up to speed with the indie scene, but I have never heard of a single one of these games, which seems rather suboptimal. And the revenue model, which divvies up your subscription fee based on your playtime in each of the catalogue’s games, overwhelmingly favours long-tail replayable stuff and tacitly encourages engagement-baiting dark arts. Not for me, thanks. Dreadful actually.
• Freshly minted Xbox boss Asha Sharma personally took the ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing campaign out to the woodshed, a Microsoft spokesrobot has confirmed, because “it didn’t feel like Xbox”. Speaking to Windows Central, the nameless rep says Sharma is “personally leading a reset of how we show up as a brand.” It was all going so well until that sentence, wasn’t it. LinkedIn drivel.
• Bethesda’s also spent this week clearing dead wood, closing down its 2019 mobile RPG The Elder Scrolls: Blades. It’s seemingly sought to memoryhole the entire game, going so far as deleting the 2018 blog post that first announced it to the world. Little wonder, perhaps, given Appmagic’s estimate that in its seven years on the app stores, Blades brought in just $13.5m in revenue. Yikes.
• Hit Points genuinely wishes Jason Blundell all the best. The former Call Of Duty superstar has unveiled his third studio, barely a week after his second one was sent to the wall by parent company Sony. (The first one shut down after Sony pulled out of a funding deal.) Unfortunately he’s now used up all his good ideas for names, which is why this one is called Magic Fractal. “Third time’s the charm,” Blundell says. Mmm. Maybe don’t get into bed with Sony this time? Just an idea.
• Eidos Montreal has conducted its third major layoff in as many years, and this is the worst of the bunch. A total of 124 workers, including long-serving studio head David Anfossi, have been sent packing after the reported cancellation of Wildlands, an open-world shooter the studio had been working on since 2019. Fucking Embracer, man. An absolute disaster.
• Shift Up, the Korean maker of titsy PS5 actioner Stellar Blade, has acquired Unbound, the studio formed in 2023 by Capcom legend Shinji Mikami. “I see strong synergy with [Shift Up CEO Hyung-Tae Kim],” Mikami purred. “I believe this is an ideal partnership that allows us to focus on creativity.” Unbound currently has a shade over 50 staff, plans to grow to 150, and says it is working on a “triple-A title for high-end consumers”. Doesn’t sound like a God Hand sequel, alas, but Hit Points holds out hope regardless.
• Books! They’re still good! My old chums at Edge have just released Playmakers, an artfully designed compendium of old Making Of articles, including one of mine (Persona 5, which I have absolutely no memory of writing). I’ve barely cracked the spine on The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of essays from writers and narrative designers pulled together by Inkle’s Jon Ingold, but what I’ve read is excellent and Eurogamer really likes it. Oh, and Keza MacDonald’s excellent Super Nintendo, thoroughly if grudgingly praised in Hit Points a couple of months ago, is the deal of the week on Kindle.
• I continue to not be interested in Bungie's Marathon — it just doesn't sound like my sort of thing at all — but I can barely stop reading about it. I love it when a game gets the critic community's juices flowing, reminds me of a bygone era. This, from HP chum Jeremy Peel, is exquisite: "To those who take the time to learn the soundscape of Marathon, such noises are like signatures, signed in florid handwriting by the overconfident." Cor.
• This oral history of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is equally terrific. How on earth has it been 15 years already? Impossible.

That will do! Paid subs, I’ll see you at the weekend to talk about the games I’ve been playing. If the rest of you want to read my early thoughts on Crimson Desert (a sample line from the drafts folder: “a constantly changing game of Twister, designed on the hoof by someone who has never played Twister, or in fact even seen it, or had it described to them”) kindly click the subscribe button below, and join us. There’s the tip jar too, if you’re not into the whole subscription thing. See you next time!