Saturday, November 23, 2024

PS Plus day-one game’s latest PS5 update can’t prevent certain death

Must read

PS Plus Extra’s Foamstars has a new update for PS5 in June 2024. Yet, with so few players collecting Foamstars trophies in our sample of 3.1 million active PSN accounts (courtesy of GameInsights), it looks like no update could ever make Square Enix’s shooter relevant.

PS Plus couldn’t boost Foamstars to success

If Square Enix was looking to make Foamstars a live-service hit when it launched as part of PS Plus February 2024, it didn’t succeed. To its credit, Foamstars is trying — a new update is available to download right now on PS5 called ‘Whip Hop.’ This fifth season is bringing a new character called Ramzey, the Extreme Party and Overlap OK Party! modes, as well as two new skins.
However, last week Foamstars was in position #478 of our most popular PS5 games (data from week ending Sunday, June 16, 2024). Now, as of Friday, June 21, 2024 — the day after the fifth season was released — Foamstars ha yet to grace the top 500 at all. That’s even though the game is in most players’ digital libraries, making it painfully clear that no one is interested.

We reported that Foamstars’ PS Plus player count has been remarkably poor since March 2024. So, if this new content can’t lift the game’s performance on PS5 and PS4, then frankly — Foamstars is facing certain death.

Just to be clear, sitting above the Foamstars in the chart right now are long-dead community-centric games like Warner Bros live-service flop Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the similarly-fated co-op zombie game Back 4 Blood, and the original Destiny. I can keep going with the list of ‘dead games’ too: Saints Row, Marvel’s Avengers, Outriders, and Dreams have all got more active players than Foamstars.

Square Enix experimented with Foamstars by giving it a small budget and then throwing it out on PS Plus. All in all, the Japanese publisher probably hasn’t felt its horrible performance much. Even so, if you are going to experiment with a budget multiplayer experiment on PS5 — why rip off Splatoon and do it so unconvincingly?

Foamstars feels like it may be the least original PS5 game so far which explains why it will never reach the best PS Plus games list. So, it looks like Foamstars will soon cease to exist in the gaming conscious (if it ever did). Have you played it? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments below, foamy TrueTrophies community!

Latest article