Speaking of which, on the KH3 DLC. Final fight is some trash (I mean it's a good fight, but I think there's one aspect to it which makes it a lot harder than it needs to be)

So Grubb put out a video, and I think it's one of his better speculation pieces. Speculation doesn't quite feel like the right word, but this isn't inside stuff necessarily. But he's talking about the state of Sony's game development, and why they're pushing on live services.

I want to rant about the things that he talks about in the video, so here we go.

1.) It's really hard to start up a game studio, build a large team, develop a big budget game, and have it be successful in the market. If it was easy for Sony or any other company to start up like 10 studios with a $200 million budget to make big profitable AAA games, they would all be doing that. It's hard and more importantly it's risky to do any one of those steps. Even talented teams run into stumbling blocks. Even if they make it into the market, plenty of games fail or don't make enough to be profitable. It's not easy to just build a studio, hire 300 people to work on it, and successfully develop a great game in 5 or so years, and have it be successful in the market. A lot of these studios have decades in the works, and they still sometimes struggle.

1A.) Paraphrasing here, Grubb basically says that Sony was trying to get Bend Studio to be a Santa Monica/Naughty Dog or even Sucker Punch tier studio (that makes a great game that sells 10 million copies). They're currently trying to do that with Housemarque. But it's hard.

2.) Sony is making lots of smaller bets, in the hopes that one or two of them will be incredibly successful. Budget wise a lot of these games are smaller than The Last of Us. Firewalk has 150 devs, Haven has something similar. Compare that to 300+ developers at Santa Monica or Naughty Dog.  

3.) Sony has the data that shows that game sales are making a smaller chunk of revenue. People are more and more interested in live service titles.

4.) The thing that I would throw out there, is that nearly every big publisher has some kind of live service game. Activision has CoD. EA has tons of sports games and Apex Legends. (71% of EA's revenue comes from live service titles. - I saw someone giving credit to EA for making more single player games like Star Wars and Dead Space, but I think it's important to keep that revenue statistic in mind. They absolutely make gold from live service titles. ) Take Two has GTA Online. Microsoft has a few like Sea of Thieves, Elder Scrolls Online. Epic Games is practically built on Fortnite. Square Enix has Final Fantasy XIV. HoYoverse has Genshin Impact. Sony is far and away the largest publisher that *didn't* have any major live service titles, it's not even funny. So many of these other publishers are practically thriving due to their live service titles. In a lot of cases, it seems to actually make it easier for them to make more risks in the single player space. I think to some extent we are seeing that with EA. Epic Games has gone in a different direction. They're taking more risks with their store and their game engine. 

There are no guarantees of anything, but it's possible there's a best case scenario, that Sony is able to take more risks with single player games in the future. 

5.) It's important to put this out there, Sony is not dropping their traditional games. They're keeping their Naughty Dog single player and Santa Monica single player games, and Sony would like more of those. But it's hard to make, and it's hard to be successful. As Grubb says "if you're happy with Sony's output", basically that's not going to change.

Me hating live service games:

And just like that, it's official.

Day one buy for me! I will not mind double dipping for this game although being on PC, I never buy a game at full price

That being said, I'm curious what the minimum requirements are going to be because there ain't no commercial PC SSD on the market that reaches the speeds of the PS5 SSD. So it kinda turns the argument that the game only being able to be run on a PS5 due to the world jumping, may end up having been a marketing stunt. 

In raw speeds, there are some. The PS5 is like 5.5 GBps. There are plenty of 7.0 GBps on PC.

Although, the PS5's compression system makes a bigger difference.

I'm expecting high RAM requirements to make up for it. 

Oh I know that for sure.

I finished the PSP version first back when it first came out and I already played the HD remaster on the PS3 KH 2.5 collection years ago too.

So this will be my third time playing through the game lol.

Awesome - I'll get it sometime in the future on PC when its cheaper.

Hopefully this means the PS5 version will get cheaper more often.

I wonder if Sony is considering dedicated SoPs for Stellar Blade and Convallaria (with some other trailers accompanying them). 

Convallaria especially feels like it could use a dedicated push, otherwise few people are going to care about it.

Oh? nice! Yeah I only played the stuff I missed out on the KH Collection. Maybe I'll go back one day and go through BBS again . 

Kingdom Hearts is on my top 10 favorite game franchises list and I've played multiple versions of the games multiple times.

Kingdom Hearts (PS2) - 4 times

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix (PS4) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories (GBA) - 3 times

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (PS2) - 2 times

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (PS4) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (DS) - 2 times

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (PS4) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded (DS) - 2 times

Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded (PS4) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts II (PS2) - 2 times

Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix (PS4) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep (PSP) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep Final Mix (PS3) - 1 time

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (3DS) - 1 time

BBS on PSP was pretty hard...I still have nightmares thinking about the ice cream mini game on it - they made the Final Mix on PS3/PS4/Xbox/PC versions easier.

I'll buy the Xbox versions sometime in the future for another playthrough and will get it again on PC (when hopefully it comes to Steam)

I havent played 0.2 Fragmentary Passage, Backcover or 3 yet - so really excited to try it out.

Already bought the DLC for 3 few months ago when it was on sale.

Oh and yeah I already got the Music Rhythm game that came out after KH3 on PS4.

Edit: ReCoded is the worst KH game.