Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[Demonchaser27]

It's the issue with publicly traded companies in this current financial industry. With a lot of them, it doesn't really matter because the companies don't produce art. It's kind of easy to make more steel and sell it and get a higher profit. Steel is steel, it can be judged objectively. Videogames, provided they function, always have to be judged subjectively. This is where shareholders and publishers come in and fuck with things to try to increase potential profits. Where they fuck up is the execution of this often makes something neither crowd wanted.

If they want Gears of War, they can play Gears of War. Give them Resident Evil. If they want an action RPG, they can go find one. Give them Final Fantasy. It's one trap Nintendo didn't fall into. Sure, they did it via what I would call stagnation, but Nintendo games have always felt like Nintendo games. Their first party stuff generally doesn't try to be something it isn't.

Yeah I would actually like to see public traded companies eventually vanish in all businesses over time. This is because of what you said. The types of business that these shareholders/execs relish in can all be automated in the near future. And creative businesses have no real valuable use from them, as you said. It could (IMO would) be a good thing to get back to business based around values other than just money.

 

[Demonchaser27]

What JRPG fans still want is to explore an interesting world with endearing characters. Most long-time-JRPG-fans-but-detractors-of-recent-Final-Fantasy-games will tell that that is what FF has been lacking.

Yet when Squeenix delivered what they were asking for with FF12, the very same people complained because the game had no story (except it was there, if you bothered to speak to the NPCs instead of waiting to be spoon-fed everything in the next expository cutscene), that the protagonists deeds felt meaningless (ignoring the fact that "Big Epic Clashes of Armies that storytellers love to talk about so much are Not the most important historical events" is one of the main recurring themes of Matsuno's games), that its battle system was boring (because of course having a great customizable IA which spared players the busywork of micromanaging every meaningless encounter with mooks meant that you spent a lot less time fiddling with the battle menues: oh the heresy), that the protagonist was a non-entity (despite the fact that he acts as the commoner foil to Ashe's aristocratic self-righteous vengefulness, who, by rejecting his own desire of revenge and embracing his childlike curiosity about the world and its inhabitants ends up teaching compassion to his queen and stops her from becoming the genocidal puppet-tyrant she was about to become, gaining the unbridled freedom he craved for in the process).

Yeah, I'll be honest. I love that you can "discover" the story in FF12. I just couldn't play it because I disliked the combat system. It's fine that they made it. It was an honest try, but I couldn't keep playing using it. I'm big on gameplay, and if I don't like it and I'm going to have to use it constantly throughout the game, I'm out.

I don't know what others really felt about the game. But sometimes you just try an idea and it doesn't work. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try new things. You win some and you lose some.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I think part of it is that "doing fine" isn't good enough for large shareholder driven companies. You always want to be doing better, growing etc... So in some ways this is Square giving up and saying we aren't going to get "big market" money.

I think that's a big part of the problem right there. Publishers don't give a crap about satisfying gamers, their priority is satisfying the shareholders, who themselves don't care about games, they just care about the stock price and what kind of dividends they're looking forward to.

I've often promoted the idea that gamers should be the primary investors in the game industry. I myself hold some game related stock and I think if the majority shareholders were actual gamers, the publishers would think more about the integrity of their product than what sort of attractive buzzwords they can attach to their "brand."

Seriously people, pick out your three favorite recent games, go to one of those low transaction fee trading sites, and invest in those publishers. Yes, even if it's EA, you know why, because EA will take a shareholder more seriously than a customer when he writes in about the quality of a product they've released.

It's some decent advice. The problem is that stocks are kind of a skewed game. Rich get richer, poor get poorer kind of thing most of the time. Its good to try but the chances that gamers will ever be the biggest shareholders (remember that the biggest shareholders get the biggest say and the most attention) is slim to none. The biggest shareholders are also generally just a few select people. Like 70% of stock is usually held by like 10-15 big fat cats. And if a whole other business holds stock, remember that business' decisions are made by a select few at the top anyway.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

The one criticism I have for Jim is that the situation is not as simple as he makes it to be. People's taste are cyclic in nature. Look at Titanfall, it looks shiny and new but the gameplay came straight from Starsiege: Tribes. What happened was "realistic" cover based shooters became popular and other FPS were dropped. People said adventure games are dead but thanks to GOG and mobile devices, people are rediscovering lost treasures and new games are being made. Even Space sims are coming back thanks to Eve Online and Star Citizen. People are going to get sick of even CoD and then after a few years it's going to comeback and be as popular as ever.

i don't think he is making it to be simplistic... he has talked about the other facets before and in great detail, and with this video he wanted to focus on the fear that publishers had, the imaginary boogie men that publishers have created to justify their decisions. the kind of fear mongering that created DRM, multiplayer passes, etc. and how it has affected what publishers produce.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I just find it odd that people ***** about Halo/Battlefield/Call of Duty being the same every year when Final Fantasy and Resident Evil were basically the same every year. They didn't even improve the game play, just the graphics

Resident Evil, yeah. Final Fantasy, not so much. Yes there were always take turn RPGs. But the systems inside those take-turn RPGs and the stories/secrets/battles were largely different. And to be honest, whats the big difference between COD/Halo vs. Final Fantasy of old? COD and Halo actually do feel like your doing the same thing over and over and their generally very short games, meaning that the singleplayer is okay at best. Ideas and new gameplay aren't able to be fully fleshed out in 5-6 hours. Final Fantasy games had extremely varied types of take-turn systems with varying levels of depth and incredibly long, deep, and detailed stories and characters to boot. Its like comparing a short story to a massive epic. There is so much more to see and its very very rare that you get the same regurgitated stuff. Sure some ideas stayed. Usually the good ones. But they grew and changed plenty in those games, both in gameplay and story.

 

[Demonchaser27]

And I agree, Square really did drop the ball with FF9, that doesn't change that it was a very clear indication that they had abandoned old Final Fantasy

Well that was Jim's point. It wasn't the audience that abandoned (there still was a dedicated global fanbase of at least 5 million people) FFIX and traditional JRPG's , it was the people running SQUENIX.

Though honestly I think people are too critical of SQUENIX. No one innovates as relentlessly as SQUENIX. Look at what they added (strong story, identifiable characters, the job system, FMV, first use of polygon 3d based engine, real time based combat system). This is the company that gave us Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and the World Ends with You. Personally I never understood the hate that FFXIII generated. Exploration and stupid minigames are the things I hated most of FF games. No one seems to notice that the combat system is COMPLETELY BROKEN. They definitely tried to fix things with FFXIII-2 and FFXIII-3. Any SQENIX fan will tell you that every iteration has to be judged separately, some of it will work and some of it won't.

It's like you said though. The reason they got flak was because they

1.Removed actual gameplay out of the equation with FFXIII and co.
2.Tried to morph their genre.

That's the thing. You're right. They did used to innovate quite a bit. And they still try to. The difference then and now is back then they innovated WITHIN their current genre, whereas now they try to change/morph or dumb down that genre almost completely.

 

[Demonchaser27]

this "its everyone else's fault" excuse ive seem being used by ubisoft more than anybody, when asscreed sells 1 less unit than expected, its always the pirates fault, or the used game market's fault, we must put intrusive DRM in our games now and online passes for fucking single player games

sometimes your game is only going to sell X amount and thats the end of the story, any effort you might make to earn any more customers might only drive customers away

This is where I think that old saying of "The customer's always right" comes in. It's not that they're never wrong. But if you treat customers with respect and treat failures with a "What did I do against the customer that I can change to solve this problem" mentality then you will see much more success and find yourself with much happier customers. I don't ever hear anyone talking shit to or about CDProjekt Red/GOG and that's the mentality they have.

 

[Demonchaser27]

A similar problem in media is that companies keep assuming that nearly anything with a female protagonist or major female character will fail & if they do let anything like that be made they wanna keep the female character out of the commercials & off of the cover. People tried to convince Naughty Dog to keep Ellie off of the cover of the Last Of Us, people tried to convince the creators of the Kick-Ass movie to leave Hit Girl out of the movie entirely. Popular female characters keep getting left out of Street Fighter & Capcom VS games in favor of unpopular male characters. Games are often written like you're playing as a male even when you choose to play as a female. Jill & Claire keep getting left out of Resident Evil & replaced by new, more generic, women as if to create a collective harem across the series. Elizabeth was left off of the cover of Bioshock Infinite even though she's basically the main character.

You'd think that, by now, these people would've learned from stuff like Tomb Raider, The Last Of Us, Resident Evil 3, Bioshock Infinite, Half-Life 2, Portal, Beyond Good & Evil, Mirror's Edge, & Heavenly Sword.

Yeah I hate that so much. I miss Claire and Jill both. They had their games but it would be nice to see them again.
I was so mad that they kept me with Sheva in RE5. Once I found Jill I said "Awww yeah, let me get Jill on my team!" But nope. Just still using Sheva.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I always wondered whee exactly it was coming from when Somone said BS like "single player games are no longer" just look at titanfall I mean Christ, goat simulator has more lasting appeal and even though I'm looking forward to evolve I know it will never accrue as many hours as XCOM....you know, that game that No one played because it don't conform to what's popular?

I think the biggest problem with that mentality is that Singleplayer has so many more possibilities than Multiplayer. There is a reason that multiplayer games almost universally feel similar. The goal is almost always the same in every multiplayer game. Not true with Singleplayer. Its not to say there is anything wrong with multiplayer, but I would sooner throw that criticism at multiplayer than singleplayer.

 

[Gaius Livius]

Whilst it does appear to be true that companies fear things that don't exist or that aren't as drastic as they think I believe the same thing can be said for gamers themselves a lot of the time. There is a lot of irrational concern and suspicion among other things.

 

[Demonchaser27]

XII you could get lvl 3 quickenings super early in the game and solo bosses in 1 move 20 hours into the game. 20 hours!

FF6 battle and leveling system are so broken and easy to exploit that the game presents no challenge that isn't self imposed or provided by a mod.
Yet it's often hailed as the best episode in the series.
FF7 also allowed a ton of exploit and presented little challenge: yet it's FF6's main contender at the top of the series.

The people complaining about FF12 difficulty come in two groups: those who got stuck against the Elder Wyrm, did not realize that there was an easy grinding spot right next to it and concluded that the game was unfinishable, and those who discovered -or gamefaqed- exploits for leveling up fast in the early parts of the game and called the game a joke.
I've been gaming for nearly 30 years and those-who-get-pissed-at-the-slightest-challenge and those-who-get-bored-after-abusing-cheatcodes have always been part of the audience.

I like challenge quite a bit, but to be honest I think the reason FF6-7 were so good for most is because they were incredibly thoughtful games. Just using FF7 as an example, the sheer amount of customization allowed hundreds of builds. The challenge was there, but if you understood the mechanics you could win easily. I actually wish more games would do that. Mastery and understanding should be rewarded with success IMO. People who thought those games were hard never bothered to understand there systems. If mastery/understanding of the game's fundamental mechanics doesn't allow you a better/complete success rate then why bother learning them in the first place?

 

[Demonchaser27]

You may notice that after FFIX, the series started to slowly decline. This is no coincidence, FF9 really was the beginning of the end for traditional Final Fantasy. It was where FF began to stagnate and Square started trying to find more and more places to take the series as a whole. We can see where that has taken the series so far.

Um, what? FF10 is a far better game than FF9. FF9 is probably my least favorite FF game excluding the two awful ones (FF2 and FF3). FF9 was a low point for sure, that rebounded with FF10. (Not so much FF10-2, and DEFINITELY not with Dirge of Cerberus) And it's not like FF10 wasn't that different of a game compared to FF8, so what did they abandon, exactly?

I said nothing about the quality of FFX. FFX actually did a lot better than FF9.

Also this thread brings up another good point: What did Bravely Default do right to where it didn't have to have a lavish budget in order to be considered successful? It didn't sell as much as even the typical FF game that's considered a huge failure, but it didn't have to. So what made Square suddenly consider that it was a 'good direction'?

Profit. Number of sales means jack if you don't make profit. Which was the problem with their latest games.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I agree with most everything said here, but turn based combat is rather lame. It feels like a lazy copout to actually programing and fine tuning gameplay. Look at the Tales of [Name] series, those are all good JRPG stories that don't make me fall asleep while playing them. I wish more turn based games would try new and different styles of combat.

Ahh. I think of turn-based as the thinking man's game. Like chess, some people are bored to death because there isn't enough "activity" but for people that like to have to think ahead, its great.

 

[GonzoGamer]

I think part of it is that "doing fine" isn't good enough for large shareholder driven companies. You always want to be doing better, growing etc... So in some ways this is Square giving up and saying we aren't going to get "big market" money.

I think that's a big part of the problem right there. Publishers don't give a crap about satisfying gamers, their priority is satisfying the shareholders, who themselves don't care about games, they just care about the stock price and what kind of dividends they're looking forward to.

I've often promoted the idea that gamers should be the primary investors in the game industry. I myself hold some game related stock and I think if the majority shareholders were actual gamers, the publishers would think more about the integrity of their product than what sort of attractive buzzwords they can attach to their "brand."

Seriously people, pick out your three favorite recent games, go to one of those low transaction fee trading sites, and invest in those publishers. Yes, even if it's EA, you know why, because EA will take a shareholder more seriously than a customer when he writes in about the quality of a product they've released.

It's some decent advice. The problem is that stocks are kind of a skewed game. Rich get richer, poor get poorer kind of thing most of the time. Its good to try but the chances that gamers will ever be the biggest shareholders (remember that the biggest shareholders get the biggest say and the most attention) is slim to none. The biggest shareholders are also generally just a few select people. Like 70% of stock is usually held by like 10-15 big fat cats. And if a whole other business holds stock, remember that business' decisions are made by a select few at the top anyway.

That's a bit of a fallacy that I think some investors like to perpetuate.
The rich get richer because they invest and the poor get poorer because they don't make enough money to invest: The rich buy stocks, the poor buy lottery tickets. That's the big problem with the economy right now. Stocks have been a good investment for me(well, most of the ones I've chosen so far) and are one of the reasons I'm not poor anymore.
Yes the majority stockholder thing is a little bit of a pipe dream but at this point I think there are more gamers out there than investment bankers (though walking down the streets of Manhattan these days might convince you otherwise) so if it became a movement that most gamers took part of, I think we could really take over a couple of these publishers.
There are some gamers who are quite wealthy too. Gaming isn't exactly a hobby you pick up if you have very little disposable income. For every game you decide not to buy, put aside some of the money and invest it. Take Two is around $20 a share right now (not that I'd yell buy on that one right now, though I do hold some, I got it a few years ago) so that's 3 shares for the price of one game. Also, gamers will be far less fickle investors than day traders (believe it or not) so I think a more stable investor base would be a welcome change to the big corporations too.
I would hope that people who make money off the gaming industry in one way or another (especially people with strong opinions like Jim or Yahtzee) are already heavily invested in the business end just for their own good; not that they should plan their whole retirement on those stocks but they're probably in the best position to spot innovations worth betting on.

I could go on right now but I don't have time. I'm just saying, it's something that is possible and would lead to real improvements in the products we buy. And like I said before, even if you only own a few shares, you can write to the company claiming to be a shareholder. You will be taken more seriously.

 

[Brockyman]

I just find it odd that people ***** about Halo/Battlefield/Call of Duty being the same every year when Final Fantasy and Resident Evil were basically the same every year. They didn't even improve the game play, just the graphics

Resident Evil, yeah. Final Fantasy, not so much. Yes there were always take turn RPGs. But the systems inside those take-turn RPGs and the stories/secrets/battles were largely different. And to be honest, whats the big difference between COD/Halo vs. Final Fantasy of old? COD and Halo actually do feel like your doing the same thing over and over and their generally very short games, meaning that the singleplayer is okay at best. Ideas and new gameplay aren't able to be fully fleshed out in 5-6 hours. Final Fantasy games had extremely varied types of take-turn systems with varying levels of depth and incredibly long, deep, and detailed stories and characters to boot. Its like comparing a short story to a massive epic. There is so much more to see and its very very rare that you get the same regurgitated stuff. Sure some ideas stayed. Usually the good ones. But they grew and changed plenty in those games, both in gameplay and story.

I was mainly saying that to be controversial. I enjoy my Halo and COD games and I hear the "they never change" argument so many times....

I'm not a JRPG fan. I don't like turn based combat in anything that isn't Pokemon (the metagame just makes more sense then anything I've seen in traditional JPRGS) and I haven't been able to find any character that I really liked. I tried FF XIII and wanted to kill all of the people I had met in the first hour. (and no, its not that I don't get Japanese culture, I love anime and other Japanese exports)

I also hate Survival Horror (SH), but I don't like horror/fear based entertainment in general.

However, there is a market for traditional JRPGS and SH games. I don't completely agree with Jim's common of "we hate the game industry, they are all a bunch of wankers" stance on, well everything.

Hindsight is 20/20... I think Capcom/Square/ect should have done both... make traditional style SH/JRPGs and made games (either with new or existing IP) that tried the new things. If Halo went turn based all of a sudden, I'd be pissed off too, especially if it came to a shock like running down liner hallways pissed of JRPG fans in FF XIII

Also, I think another thing Bravely Default and the PC Survival games shows us is that a genre game doesn't have to be AAA, either in graphics, length, ect. Portal wasn't long, and it was one of the best games of Gen 7. Bravely Default looks like it's playing on an N64 or Gamecube. Pokemon only now has 3D sprites.

If the industry can develop these genre games at a lower cost, they maybe able to make more money and make the business model more viable

 

[K@rt.MaN]

I think I agree with what quite a few people have suggested here, in that the situation is less indicative of companies running away from one formula or idea, but rather running towards another.

Like in so many other avenues of modern life gaming now suffers from the "mega-star" syndrome, where a certain property becomes (for whatever reason) THE thing to have. When this happens in today's world of mass marketing and globalized trends the property in question will generate and astronomical amount of revenue, and everyone (publishers) secretly dream of being the next.

Like with so many things now... sports, music, movies, technology etc. the higher echelons of the gaming industry operate on such a massive financial scale that it overwhelms everything else, which then filters down through the ranks to pollute everything below it. The same effect can be observed in many walks of modern commercial life - and gaming is just another victim of a socio-economic consumer sickness... something which sadly the proliferation of the internet, mass communication and media has helped to create.

 

[shadowmagus]

Because Call of Battlefield, Halo, Gears of War and sports games.

Screw 'em. They turned this hobby into a mess of mediocrity and I hope to one day live long enough to see every one of their parent companies and the people who run them burned in the streets for it.

Yes, I'm mad.

 

[Jiachi]

The terrified 'that's making money, quick, make our own before the gravy train disappears!' reaction has had companies dancing around like an elephant near a mouse for a while now. Remember the GTA craze, where every game HAD to be like it, giving us weak entries like Jak 2? The headfirst into a meat-grinder battle to dethrone WoW? These 'they're making money that we aren't!' panic attacks hit all the time, the CoD ride has just been one of the longer lasting ones at the forefront of 'money we cry over not making'.

 

[Sir Shockwave]

you cant destroy 15 years of RTS experience with just one game

Petroglyph. I don't really need to say any more on that.

pff im sorry what? i can barely see any information on their games, they are way way far from being a critically acclaimed RTS developer

If you actually bothered to do the research and we're actually informed on matters, you would know Petroglyph's history and what happened exactly.

Go look it up, right now. I have time.