Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[Keiichi Morisato]

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'.

Jak 2 was always going to be weak since it's the middle of a great story, and i think they did a good job with the game. my only problem with Jak 2 was the small health bar and the insanely hard final boss, though the final boss in Jak 3 was just too easy.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Pretty good episode. Really needed to be said.

Although I'm very surprised it's not an episode about the whole GAME_JAM debacle. As soon as I heard that story, I flipped my shit and was expecting an emergency style Jimquisition about it, considering just how AWFUL it ended up being, and how offensive the whole thing was to the entire Indie community.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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

Yeah, I get you. I'm not saying one way or the other. I actually agree with you that they should just make both types. I've actually wanted for years, for their to be another classic style SH or RE game. They don't have to stop making the mass market ones, but it would be nice every once in awhile to get something different from the usual samey stuff we see today. And by different I don't mean it has to be brand spanking new. Ask fashion designers that. What goes out of style in the 60's might come back tomorrow. Just because its old doesn't mean it can't be new again.

 

[igor2201]

Also, people have been shouting at Nintendo to bring back their old series such as Star Fox, F-Zero, Eternal Darkness, and a number of others. Heck, people are still screaming at NoA to bring Fatal Frame 2 and 4 to the states, but Reggie is too scared of the games failing to even do it, yet NoE took the chance with FF2 and it was considered a success.

I think the problem is that the executives are sitting in giant echo chambers. They think something is a bad idea and go out of their way to ensure that it fails (executive meddling, less development time, lower budgets and so on) and then point to that failure and scream "SEE!?!?! IT FAILED!!!!".

Perfect example of both of these is Xenoblade.

So here we have Nintendo constantly keeping the damn thing from being released, because they didn't know if it was going to sell well. The same fear that applied to this week's episode, obviously:
<quote=Reggie Fils-aime>I wanted to bring Xenoblade here. The deal was, how much of a localization effort is it? How many units are we going to sell, are we going to make money? We were literally having this debate while Operation Rainfall was happening, and we were aware that there was interest for the game, but we had to make sure that it was a strong financial proposition.
And you know what Nintendo did for its release of this game that they were scared it was going to have them lose money over?

They made it a GameStop Exclusive title. No Amazon, no direct purchase from Nintendo, just GameStop and GameStop alone. That move alone should convey that the executives at NoA are clearly unfit to be in their positions, for making a decision so baffling, so completely contradictory, so mind-bendingly not thought out at all. And only so many were printed. Fuck, how else are copies unavailable offline? How else is its price going through the roof at PREOWNED PRICES? Wanna know what other title that's in clear demand in spite of minimal copies and skyrocketing prices? Metroid Prime Trilogy.

This reason is just another piece of the puzzle of Nintendo as I now know it. It's not quite dead, but its body has starved itself in front of the many plentiful things it can put on its plate. Only recently has itself and its most diehard fans <url=http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2010/09/episode-40-heavens-to-metroid.html>that will literally defend anything and every active decision that they've made <url=http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2014/01/new-year-special-fate-of-nintendo.html>have begun to finally get it. It needs to stop playing it safe to the "holy trinity" and start producing games again.

...<url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.841325-Four-Swords-Nintendo-youve-proven-to-me-once-again-that-you-suck#20685757>or actually learning that you can't make money unless you sell your products. That'd be a good start, too.

The part you are missing is that Nintendo didn't pay for the pressing of xenoblade. Gamestop did. Before Gamestop got involved Nintendo had 0 plans to port the game to the US. That's why the game was gamestop exclusive, and that's why only 10K copies were pressed.

anyways @ Jim

I have to say, for once I noticed quite a bit of errors with this video. Ultimately it ended up feeling like you were pandering to what you felt people wanted to hear, and not the actual reality of the situation.

1. The Survival Horror genre did basically die last gen, and not because devs killed it on purpose, but because at some fundamental level, the people who worked in the genre ran out of steam or something, and the results that we got flopped.

Consider Silent Hill Homecoming. It was almost universally hated, and most people traded it back in for Dead Space instead. Project Zero, AKA Fatal Frame was almost completely dead by the time gen 7 hit. Things like Clock Tower and Haunting Ground were also mostly unprofitable during Gen 6. Resident Evil, which you harp on constantly was most successful when it totally abandoned its survival roots and went action based in Resident Evil 4. But the thing is, this is what happens when IP's are used for too long. If anyone killed survival horror, its the fans demanding a sequel after sequel for these IP's and then hating the sequels they get. Survival Horror didn't start to recover until towards the very end of the gen and only really in the indie sector.

2. Final Fantasy 13 was a perfectly fine entry in the series. Who's only real fault was that the paradigm deck can render a battle unbeatable, which is why they included a restart the battle option when you die. Regardless of what you thought about it, it carried on the lifetime trend of Final Fantasy's battle system getting a complete revamp from game to game. (this is coming from someone who physically owns a copy of every major entry in the Final Fantasy series, and has beaten all but a couple) Most of the complaints I have read have to do with the game being too linear. But even that is a flawed complaint as every Final Fantasy besides 10-2 has been extremely linear. Please understand that side quests (most of which are unrelated to the story and ultimately time wasters resulting in some prize totally unnecessary to the game) and a dead and unpopulated world screen, don't suddenly make a game non-linear, and furthermore the extremely focused and linear plot and game play of the game was justified by the story as presented. If people had actually paid attention, there was no time for characters to go goof off, because of elements clearly laid out in the story. However at the end of the game, the world that would have actually been able to be fully explored was reopened to the player allowing them to engage in time wasting endeavors.

3. Many games that were released in the traditional JRPG genres by Square Enix were in fact flops. The Last Remanent and Infinite Undiscovery were flops.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Because of the information listed in points 1-3 I am sorry I have to dismiss most of what you said today as whiny drivel that isn't supported by the reality of what actually happened last gen. There is clear evidence that companies were in fact burned hard by these things and its hard to fault them for deciding not to pursue these traditional genres based on that.

Next time you wanna call a bunch of people cowards, can you please do some more research and actually come up with supporting evidence for your claims of this nature, because for this video it you are simply wrong for most of it. The single part of your trolly rant (and yes that's what it was 7 minutes of you trolling and ranting about unsubstantiated things that clearly don't mesh with reality) that happened to be true was was the claims about single player games, and the only publisher to make that claim was EA. Last I knew EA did not encompass the entire game industry.

This is the first time I have actually been let down, and saddened by a video of yours. When you claim to have integrity and be a real journalist. You owe it to your watchers to make sure you are reporting accurate information. Not simply harping on OPINIONS. This was not a review episode and you owe it to US your viewers and yourself to actually engage in real journalism.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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.

Well I'll give you that. Its definitely possible and the last sentence may be just enough.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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.

Yeah it really is too bad there everything turns into this high school, popularity bull****. It would be nice if our society would stop wasting so much time comparing themselves to something else... If industries spent as much time creating an identity as they did comparing themselves they'd probably have made much better stuff by this point. Hell, we might even have a more fair, just system as well.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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'.

Hell, the WoW one is still going too. Its not successful but every major RPG just HAS to become the next big MMO. And then they fall, unsurprisingly.

 

[veloper]

Jim is preaching to the choir again and this time too late to have an impact.

Previously neglected genres have been on the rise again for some time now.

 

[SilverStuddedSquirre]

I have to disagree in large part about your Final Fantasy suppositions, Jim. Traditional Final Fantasy was not doing "Fine". Traditional Final Fantasy has been on its deathbed since FF9 flopped at the end of the PSX era, when these kind of games basically stopped selling at the numbers they were. Compare FF8 sales numbers to FF9 and you get a pretty clear picture of the mindset Square Enix had when it decided that this kind of game was basically dead and they had to adapt or die out.

Square Enix, instead of taking the path of trying to resurrect something that many viewed as a dying genre, took the path of trying to change what Final Fantasy itself has meant. Gradually taking the series more and more off the rails of what we viewed the series to mean. This isn't something I can't fault them on and I really don't understand why people still rail on them for "abandoning" traditional final fantasy when it was clear that it just wasn't working anymore. Ever since then they've only been going in more crazy directions to try and find a traditional final fantasy that would give them those FF8 sales numbers.

And people really can't sit on their high horse and throw shit at Square Enix for doing that when the most egregious Final Fantasy games so far, one that many view to be the most outlandish, insane entries into the series that makes no sense and is completely unfun to play, Final Fantasy 13, has been the best selling game in the franchise since Final Fantasy 8 [http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/lightning-returns-final-fantasy-xiiis-creators-justify-a-third-game-in-a-se].

So no Jim, this IS our fault, we DID tell Square Enix that the traditional RPG is dead and we want this slurry of action oriented combat and traditional combat, we did it with our wallets. We can scream and cry that Squarenix is killing traditional RPGs and releasing half-baked mannequin simulator trash like Lightning Returns, but our cries land on deaf ears if there are still six million customers out there throwing money at that business model while we gnash our teeth at Squarenix making what is unarguably a good business decision even if it's a terrible gaming decision.

I don't want to say Final Fantasy and changed and we just need to move on, mostly because Bravely Default is proof that they are perfectly capable of making good JRPGs still, but it's time to admit that people do actually like this stuff and buy it instead of proclaiming every time they release a new game that Final Fantasy is dead and they'll be bankrupt within the quarter. Really those cries are just background noise at this point.

FFIX flopped because they announced that FFX was going to be released a year later on the PS2. when people saw the difference between FFIX and FFX graphically, which do yo think they would choose?

Everybody I know LOVED FF1X, even my most Dude-Bro gamer bud, who said he liked it, but it would have been better without the [redacted for ignorance] art style. I have personally bought2 copies, as my first one got badly Mauled. It was a nice departure from the Whiny Teen story arc. (Look, i like Cloud and Squall, but once you yourself are through Puberty, it's a LOT harder to identify with Angsty characters. Them being suitably Bad-Ass will compensate though.) And while the art style was a little more Never Never Land, it was beautiful, and seamless. Also battles could be played with 2 people Double Sweet.

You basically argue that based off the poor performance of ONE game, that as has been pointed out was basically swept under the carpet to advertise the new one for the new system, WE decided with OUR wallets that Final Fantasy was dead? I find your argument very, very weak.

I see a game that was deliberately undersold and marketed so as not to make Ten look bad. Then I see LAZY people and Greedy marketers pointing to the low sales figures for 9 as a reason not to have to go through what was likely MUCH more effort for a game with a lower profit margin. Essentially "proving" to CEOs that cheaper games can sell better and make more money.
Both parties of course, willingly blinding themselves to the obvious point that OF COURSE more people want to play the Next - Gen final Fantasy.

Like the proverbial Dog on the Bridge, they wanted BOTH pieces of steak at a time, rather than FF1X steak this year, and FF X steak next year. The result was NO steak at ALL after FFX. (FF X1 through X111-3 are NOT steak, they are SPAM)

And about Bravely Default not having ANY connection to Final Fantasy? What do you say to the Obvious artistic similarity to Final Fantasy Tactics: The Zodiac BRAVE story? Somebody knew enough to know we would all see this cover and think " Oh sweet Mother of Monkey Milk can it be possible? Do they once again know how to make a JRPG?"

 

[Haru17]

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.

Yes, the thinking man's game, like Pokemon. /sarcasm The Witcher 2 has strategic combat without everything taking forever, wasting players time.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

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.

whats up with the attitude? shouldnt the burden of defending the argument fall on YOU?

anyways i guess you are talking about petroglyph having a few westwood devs in it, of course, the magic word is "few", if you are asking how i know this, someone else bothered to defend your argument


id like you to explain to me, exactly, how can one failure affect your future games?

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

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.

same with valve, except for very few instances, they have really earned their customer's respect

 

[Paragon Fury]

So I just watched this Jimquisition and it got me to thinking about FFXIII.

I've played all three (XIII, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns) and I didn't find any of the three really "bad". Rather each of them was really weak in one or two areas that dragged the rest of the game down - even though each of the games actually has at least a couple of really strong points. And what Jim said about "experimenting" got me to wondering; what is the thought process that could lead a company like SQEnix to get something right in each one, but not realize that COMBINING those things was the way to go? I mean;

Final Fantasy XIII - Has an actually good plot and probably the strongest individual characters of the three games. Dragged down by bad exploration and poor TELLING of the story.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 - Has actually pretty enjoyable combat and gameplay. Has perhaps one of the best Final Fantasy villains, and probably one of the best recent villains in the form of Caius Ballard. Crappy story, and convoluted exploration though.

Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns - Terrible story, ruins one of the better characters from the first two games, not really FF combat at all. However, has GOOD exploration and GREAT party/character customization.

In the series, they had ALL the elements of a great, even excellent FF game; so how could they not figure out how to combine them? The same people worked on all three games; what gives people? Maybe they've learned enough from Bravely Default - but it seems like they didn't need to "learn" so much as "stop ignoring what they already knew".

 

[Darmani]

I've always felt that the AAA industry's brains fell out around the beginning of the last console generation. Actually to be more precise, sometime around 2009. Good to see that Square-Enix has managed to salvage at least part of their brain.

Comparison to the movie industry and trying to get into that groove. They needed stars, star vehicles, action stars or similar.

Also, arguably, Kingdom Hearts and this is when they COULD be more like everyone else. Besides when do you point to the decline Ff8? 9? 12? When they tried to be an MMORPG?

Some of it is just pure cycle and targeting, another IS the rapid expense

 

[Sir Shockwave]

whats up with the attitude? shouldnt the burden of defending the argument fall on YOU?

anyways i guess you are talking about petroglyph having a few westwood devs in it, of course, the magic word is "few", if you are asking how i know this, someone else bothered to defend your argument

id like you to explain to me, exactly, how can one failure affect your future games?

Quite simple - since Universe at War crumbled, they haven't been able to release anything good, or release anything at all. They were unable to create Mytheon because they ran out of money. They got kicked off End of Nations by Trion. The Victory Kickstarter failed essentially before it even began. Going back to Universe at War, most of the Dev's (most notably Adam Isgreen, the lead designer on UaW and one of the Ex-Westwood guys) left the company after it tanked. The extra kicker? Universe at War was planned to be a Trilogy. This plan got scrapped because of just how hard it tanked.

Even if most of what went wrong there was not Petroglyph's fault (a fair amount of blame can also be leveled at GFWL and Sega withholding patches to name a few things they weren't responsible for), the after effects of how badly Universe at War tanked can still be felt.

That's how badly one failure can affect your future games - and that problem isn't just limited to the Real Time Strategy scene either. I know of a few studios who literally release only one game, and then had to close their doors because it tanked so hard.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I've always felt that the AAA industry's brains fell out around the beginning of the last console generation. Actually to be more precise, sometime around 2009. Good to see that Square-Enix has managed to salvage at least part of their brain.

Comparison to the movie industry and trying to get into that groove. They needed stars, star vehicles, action stars or similar.

Also, arguably, Kingdom Hearts and this is when they COULD be more like everyone else. Besides when do you point to the decline Ff8? 9? 12? When they tried to be an MMORPG?

Some of it is just pure cycle and targeting, another IS the rapid expense

In Square-Enix's case I'd say their decline began around the time Final Fantasy X-2 was green lit.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

whats up with the attitude? shouldnt the burden of defending the argument fall on YOU?

anyways i guess you are talking about petroglyph having a few westwood devs in it, of course, the magic word is "few", if you are asking how i know this, someone else bothered to defend your argument

id like you to explain to me, exactly, how can one failure affect your future games?

Quite simple - since Universe at War crumbled, they haven't been able to release anything good, or release anything at all. They were unable to create Mytheon because they ran out of money. They got kicked off End of Nations by Trion. The Victory Kickstarter failed essentially before it even began. Going back to Universe at War, most of the Dev's (most notably Adam Isgreen, the lead designer on UaW and one of the Ex-Westwood guys) left the company after it tanked. The extra kicker? Universe at War was planned to be a Trilogy. This plan got scrapped because of just how hard it tanked.

Even if most of what went wrong there was not Petroglyph's fault (a fair amount of blame can also be leveled at GFWL and Sega withholding patches to name a few things they weren't responsible for), the after effects of how badly Universe at War tanked can still be felt.

That's how badly one failure can affect your future games - and that problem isn't just limited to the Real Time Strategy scene either. I know of a few studios who literally release only one game, and then had to close their doors because it tanked so hard.

sure but again, relic has 15 years making RTS, great ones, one single failure cant possibly crumble them, specially since the funding for CoH 2 came from THQ from what i understand

theyd need many more failures before they go under


Petroglyph despite having some westwood devs, was never that good, like i said i can barely find any info on their games

 

[God of Path]

My only problem with this video is that he highly over generalizes. The same mistake the suits are making. For example, the Mario thing. He's assuming that just because the top selling Mario games are still 2d platformers that they didn't innovate. I can't say anything about Super Mario Bros. Wii but Super Mario World did a ton of new things at the time. Just because it exists in a genre that previously existed doesn't mean that it didn't enhance or change the experience. He's also comparing the success of old titles to the success of new ones. Which doesn't make sense because the industry was much smaller back then. Plus some of the old titles have had years longer to sell than some of these new games. And what about marketing, some of those games didn't even appear until they came out. No one but the most dedicated gamers even knew about them.

And besides asking for innovation doesn't mean going completely left field and into completely foreign territory. It means build on your current successes. The reason the 3d marios weren't nearly as big as the 2D ones was predominately because it was faaar too different. You have to add new features over time. Maybe release a spin-off at best. Not make huge dramatic changes out of no where. Because then nobody knows what the hell your doing. But there is another factor he doesn't account for. Risk. The customer has a huge risk when it comes to buying a game. With few to no consumer protections or return policies in this industry and demos pretty much a thing of the past, there is a huge risk to buying a bunch of completely new games you've never heard of. This is also in an economy where, at least in america, wages haven't increased much at all since before gaming was a thing, all while the cost of everything else has increased.

The guy has a point, somewhat. But he isn't looking at all the factors. As far as I can tell from this video, he's overlooking countless other factors that play into this.

Ineresting. Thanks for the cogent feedback.