Month: April 2019

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  Google's Phil Harrison (you may remember him from his days at Sony).

Last month, when Google revealed its upcoming Stadia streaming gaming platform, it left open the major question of precisely how Google and game developers would make money from these games running on remote servers. In an on-stage discussion at LA's GamesBeat Summit this week, though, Google's Phil Harrison mentioned that "our platform at a fundamental level has been architected to support a very wide variety of what people call 'monetization options.' Everything from purchase to transaction to subscription."

That's not quite a direct confirmation that all those different options will be available to developers on Stadia. All Harrison would reveal is that "there is no technical limitation on how we have architected the platform to support a variety of business models." (Emphasis ours.). But that architecture would be a very odd thing for Harrison to bring up if, say, Google was planning to impose a one-size-fits-all subscription on Stadia users.

In discussing Stadia, Harrison has put a lot of focus on how the platform makes it easy for players to share a game through a link in a text message, for instance, or by letting people instantly jump in to an instance of a game they're watching on YouTube at a specific point on the video. This form of game discovery could "change the way game value is perceived by players," Harrison said, by removing the "retail store pressure" and limited "outward facing" selection of brick-and-mortar and digital storefronts. "When a game is a link, the Internet is your store," he said. "That means we can change the perceived value of games."

Enlarge / Your hopes for a lengthy, charisma-filled biker romp in Days Gone should be tempered for many reasons. One of them is the fact that main character Deacon (left) doesn't interact nearly as much with his buddy Boozer as we'd originally hoped. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Sony's streak of must-play, open-world video games does not necessarily come to a grinding halt with this week's new PS4 exclusive Days Gone. But it's absolutely a tougher elevator pitch than the likes of Spider-Man, God of War, and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Each of those Sony exclusives has some game-changing gem I can use to insist that they're worth investing in for dozens of hours—that sort of unmistakable highlight to finish the sentence "polished open-world adventure and," including massive-city web-slinging, polished story, and robo-dino safaris, respectively. The special sauce in Days Gone, which arrives with the baggage of "yet another zombie game" as a loud descriptor, is a lot tougher to extract. It's there, but it's mild.

What follows is not a comprehensive Days Gone review, but rather my take after 10 hours of the game convinced me I had seen enough to declare this a fine-enough game rental—nothing more, nothing less.