Some of the Eurogamer highlights you might have missed this week in reviews, features, and original news.
Well that was certainly a week! As we might have mentioned previously — and hopefully it’s not too gauche to say it again — we’re pretty proud of our recently renewed focus on original reporting and features at Eurogamer, and it’s getting to the point where we’re struggling to give everything time to shine.
So rather than watch sadly as it all tumbles prematurely away to some shadowy region of internet neglect, we figured there might be interest in a weekly digest that you, fine readers of vivacious spirit and meticulous taste, can casually peruse in your weekend leisure suits over a delicious morning biscuit (figroll, obviously) and a piping hot cup of tea. So here we are; amid lingering questions around recent console price hikes and whispers of the new tech for PS6, here are some of the highlights you might have missed over this past week on Eurogamer.
Eurogamer editor-in-chief Tom Orry started the week with another Big Question; in the wake of massive price hikes across various Xbox Game Pass tiers, Tom pondered whether the service still offered enough value to warrant the additional spend. He had his own thoughts of course, and — in the communal Big Question spirit — you lot did too.
«Netflix Premium, the most expensive tier offered by any streaming TV/Film streaming service, is £18.99 a month», Tom wrote. «Game Pass Ultimate is more expensive. PlayStation Plus Premium, the high-end option for PlayStation users, is £13.49 a month or £120 a year, which is a lot cheaper than Game Pass Ultimate. So, then you must look at the value, which is almost impossible to say anything definitive on as everyone is different — where I might see a smart addition to the service, others will see a way to charge more for something they don’t want.»
Over in Eurogamer editor-at-large Alex Donaldson’s palatial retro corner (apparently it even has its own bar), thoughts turned to Capcom’s winningly daft horror series Dead Rising 2, which recently celebrated its 15 anniversary. Specifically, Alex cast an eye toward its fascinating — and Xbox 360 Live Arcade exclusive — Case Zero chapter, a strange hybrid of a demo, prologue, and stand-alone game. And so a fond trip into a somewhat forgotten past ensued.
«You can view this game one of two ways», Alex wrote. «Uncharitably, it is a demo that Capcom made the decision to charge a fiver for. Through a more friendly lens, it’s a brilliant-value stand-alone experience. It tells an original story separate to the main game, making use of mechanics, systems, and weapons from the main game but across a new area with a new storyline that tees up the characters, relationships, and world of the main game. For fans of the original Dead Rising, it was the perfect primer, detailing how both the Dead Rising universe and game itself were changing in a post-Frank world.»
For decades, the accepted wisdom has been that console prices fall across their lifetime, but this generation has bucked the trend — it now costs significantly more to buy a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S than it did at launch five years ago. This week, Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese dug deeper into the issue, asking industry experts what’s changed and what it might mean for the future of console gaming.
«Console sales are falling», Bertie wrote. «Sales of this generation of Xboxes and PlayStations are lagging behind previous generations, and in the US, console sales are dangerously close to the lowest years we’ve had in recent memory. And obviously unattractive price increases will only speed that rate of decline. Whether or not Switch 2’s success will offset some of that is sort of beside the point, because the bigger, more worrying point is this: consoles are a mature market — they’re not a growing one.
