I am but a humble Shrimp.

[Dragon Lord]

What mobile games (if any) have you played by both of those companies?

Star Ocean: Anamnesis was the first mobile game I ever played and I absolutely loved it. I was actually very anti-mobile up until that point, and they finally got me by making a mobile game of one of my favorite game series of all-time. I spent a hefty amount of money in the game as well and was having a very good time with it and got myself heavily involved in the community and everything. Then they shut down the game after only a year of service, and the way they went about it was extremely scummy to boot (released a last banner with some very wanted characters on it, went radio silent for a few months after that, and then announced the shutdown after the refund periods were passed for people who spent money on that final banner). This experience with Square Enix and their mobile games was enough to make me never spend money on another SE mobile game again.

Bandai Namco has never burned me in the same way, but they are extremely notorious for closing down their games after just a year or so (especially Global versions of their Tales mobile games). I played Tales of Crestoria and knew that it wasn't gonna be worth sticking with (which I was right, they announced the shutdown a couple of months ago). Then I tried Tales of Luminaria that just released recently and it was absolutely ass, so it just re-confirms my stance of not spending on a Bandi Namco mobile game.

$700,000 seems like a good number to me since that's surely a notable profit for the game still right?

$700K is extremely low for a gacha game, especially one that has service in Japan, Korea, China and the West. If this trend continues with the game, I can see it closing down sooner rather than later, which has made me hesitate on spending any more money on it. The quality of the Global translation is pretty sus too (one of those Google translate quality types). So while you'd think that $700K was fine and dandy, it's actually pretty bad for a mobile game.

What makes those other two poisonous areas worse? I assume you can't just use the same strategy of consuming something to counteract the poison?

Dark Souls only offers an item to heal the poison, but if you don't know where to get it, obviously you're screwed. Other than that, you just have to heal through it, which wastes your Estus and puts you in a bad spot when you really need the healing. The swamp in Blighttown also slows down your movement speed, and the only way to counter that is to find a ring that allows you to move normal speed through it, but the ring is in a place that a lot of players aren't going to find on their first play through most likely. The area also has a very... undesirable first half, if you're coming into from the intended path. Then you get through that and you're met with this poison swamp that makes you slow and, if you're playing on PS3/360 or PTDE on PC, will give you a nice, crisp 2-5 FPS through most of it (though at this point in time, anyone should be playing Dark Souls Remastered, where the FPS problems are mostly fixed).

Valley of Defilement in Demon's Souls is just a very notorious place. The swamp drastically slows you down, the area is huge and 90% of it is spent in the swamp itself, and there's a Black Phantom NPC in the swamp who does insane damage (can 1-2 shot even higher level characters) and is not slowed down by the swamp at all. So while you're slow and unable to dodge roll, the NPC is free to chase you at full speed. It can be an absolute nightmare for anyone who isn't good at parrying. It's also pretty easy to get lost in the swamp on your first play through, and it just ends up making the area more of a headache than anything. Paired up with the fact that there are no checkpoints mid-level in Demon's Souls, if you end up dying towards the end of the area before you open the shortcut, you gotta go through all of it again. It might not necessarily be a hard area to deal with, but it can certainly be draining on one's desire to continue playing the game. Oh, and there's absolutely no way to counter the movement speed decrease in this one.

I'm surprised but I guess that's because Genshin on PC is tailored to run on even the lowest hardware at a decent level whereas PS5 can target a single universal hardware?

It's not because it is tailored to run on lowest hardware, but rather because the PS4 and PC versions of the games are just ports of the mobile version. The PS5 on the other hand had nearly the entire graphic library rebuilt from the ground up with high res textures, and it was optimized specifically to take full advantage of the PS5s hardware. Genshin on my PS5 loads faster than on my computer. Granted not by a whole lot, but loading 1-3 seconds faster on a $500 console vs a $3000 PC says something about how good they made the PS5 port of Genshin (and also how good the PS5s hardware can be).

Also do you care about Steam achievements at all, or is it really just trophies on PlayStation you make a point of going after?

You better believe I do. I just greatly enjoy the fun of getting trophies/achievements and seeing that nice "100%" at the end of it all.