I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.

I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.

You claimed it got attention for reasons other than being a game many people just plain enjoyed despite critical evidence to the contrary, you strangely expected them to go back and change non-trivial things in a non-live-service game that had no beta tests or public demos, backed up your opinion with numbers that completely ignored real world context and did not support your points, and then somehow took that to mean that criticism isn’t allowed?

Surely you’ve upgraded your PC in the last ten years since the game came out, right? I’d recommend checking it out on a sale or something sometime.

Player counts are a strange metric to use to try to support any sort of argument like this. Bayonetta is currently on a 70% off sale, and Hi-Fi Rush isn’t on sale at all.

i said i believed it could have been even better if they paid attention to criticisms that put off the people who didn’t enjoy it.

What would you have them do? Change large swaths of a game after it’s already been released and people really enjoyed it? Again, the game was shadow dropped. Most of these decisions were set in stone by the time anyone ever played it, and if you’re going to iterate on feedback, you do it in the sequel.

also just looking at the percentages on the global steam achievements and most people do not even see the ending for a 9 hour game. The achievement for beating it on normal difficulty is …16%.

Most games have an astonishingly low completion rate. Hi-Fi Rush separates its achievements by difficulty. I have the achievement for beating the game on hard mode (which 9.1% of people have) but not on normal. So the actual completion rate for Hi-Fi Rush is somewhere between 16.6% and 31.5%, which is very normal. Your own example of Bayonetta has an achievement for beating the game on any difficulty, and it’s only 19.7%; according to How Long to Beat, the games are a very similar length.

I think you need to better understand the sample set and context of the data you’re reading and also understand that not every game is a live service. Thankfully, not every game is a live service. With any luck, we’ll see far fewer of them, and then expectations like yours can begin to disappear.

The premise is that Palworld got too big, not Pocketpair.

Making hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t big?

Unity was the best in my opinion. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all the new design of Assassin’s Creed games that earned their own set of fans, but they’re so different from what came before with their faux RPG design. The fantasy is broken for me when I sneak up behind someone, stab them in the neck, and their health bar only goes down a little bit.

The first Assassin’s Creed game was very repetitive, but they gave you small assassination missions for you to figure out how to get, kill your target, and get out. The next several games in the series were better in every way except for perhaps these missions that mattered most, which they made extremely linear and scripted action missions.

Unity (set in Paris in the late 1700s) was an answer to those frustrations. There was a point in the dialogue where they specifically called it out. “So what’s the plan?” “The plan? Come up with your own plan. I’m not here to hold your hand.” They gave you expansive areas to carry out your mission, and you could find your own way in, kill your target, and get out. The game has some of its own baggage, like the loot system taking any challenge out of the combat later in the game, when the whole idea was that you were squishy that you should avoid combat, but it delivered on the experience the best since the first game.

Then Syndicate came out next, and they highlighted different ways to do your assassination like you were a big dummy, and they made a significant part of the game about street brawling, so I gave it a hard pass. The next game in the series was Origins, which brings us to the modern faux RPG era.

Given that it’s pushing 90 on OpenCritic, I think they got more people in the masterpiece camp. And I think it’s fair to say that it attracted attention because plenty of people found it to be a masterpiece.

When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.

What player feedback? The game shadow dropped. I loved it start to finish, and it was so good that it got me to go back and play old DMC games. So far, I still prefer HFR to all of those.

I mean, if we assume that guy makes 6 billion won per year, that’s less than $5M USD. You could absolutely turn around a sequel to Hi-Fi Rush and profit by significantly more than that. It’s not like it would be a drop in the bucket.

I don’t see why it couldn’t. It had twice the value of other high-profile Microsoft releases but cost half as much. Put out another one, flesh out the friend attack systems, and charge what it’s actually worth. Without Game Pass eating into copies sold, you should be able to make money off of a $60 release, surely.

None of those made hundreds of millions of dollars.

So like…no mention of which patents?

Yeah, I think the strategy is so terrible that they can’t believe it, but they’ve publicly stated that’s the goal. I’m not sure what data they’d get out of it that they don’t get out of Steam achievements, but more likely it’s to brag about how many “active PSN users” they have, using a misleading number. Still, all I see when I see that requirement is online DRM.

It was faster to load the higher resolution data back in the early 2010s on HDDs, so I don’t imagine it got any better for using compression now that we’re on SSDs.

Starting with this one, it’s a requirement on PC, yes. Hopefully they do away with it due to lost sales, but they’re still at least pretending that they’re somehow going to convert PC players into console players.

Nah, that’s not some inherent quality you have. I played fighting games regularly for basically my entire life, but it was only about 5 years ago that I started to really learn how they work under the hood and focused on how to improve. You can too! Also, “learning how to get good” is a skill that transcends any one genre, so I recommend you try it on one game or another.

You play some more and get better. Nobody starts good at a game unless they spent that time getting good at a similar one. Probably right at launch will be tons of people at your skill level to learn with.