Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[Darquenaut]

Thanks for the episode, Jim.

Although, I do have to wonder if it is less about fear and more simply "Follow the Money." I realize it's an old hat to rag on games like Call of Duty, or the brown-and-gray cover shooters, but those were the games that were making stupid amounts of money (and granted, still do). I'm sure most companies saw this and thought "that's where the market is! Let's rework our existing franchises to get these people to buy our games too!" Hence, Japanese companies try to "westernize" their games (yes, I realize I'm painting with broad strokes here), and other similar companies, Japanese or otherwise, trying to make their games more appealing to a certain demographic, damn the "niche" fanbase beforehand.

You know, this all reminds me of back when I was growing up and reading comics when everything had to become dark and serious, because a handful of titles made mainstream attention. Soon, every other comic was trying to be the next "Dark Knight Returns" or "Watchmen" by making their characters all dark and menacing and it went that way until people finally got tired of it (and the stupid marketing ploys - hologram covers, limited edition metal covers, etc.), and the comic creators begun to realize how much of a fucking joke they'd become. The game market seems to be shadowing this, albeit about 15-20 years later.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Well hold on there, Jim. I remember saying a long time ago that even though the core of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts was good, the whole game wasn't actually a Banjo Kazooie game at all and I recommended that the core of it should have been put into a different IP entirely.

But you said no. You were saying that that was a good thing that they were experimenting around and trying new things with the brand even though it didn't match the brand at all. OK, that's fine. But then, you say in this video that the action RPG that Square Enix was making was a mistake even though it was trying new things with the brand.

Explain!

 

[RaikuFA]

So it's the MTV excuse huh?

Back in the early '00's they got rid of a channel called MTVX which played rock and metal 24/7. They canned it in favor of a fifth rap station and their excuse was "well, no one likes rock music at all." Then they just eliminated all programming involving rock or making sure rock didn't play when they did blocks of videos. It has gotton to the point where if that Miley Cyrus thing didn't happen, the biggest controversy would have been them doing the best rock video of the year backstage before the show even started.

Sounds a lot like how the games industry with everything that isn't trying to copy CoD.

 

[impocalyptic]

A rather breezy episode, Jim. Good work.

 

[Hellfireboy]

I think they tend to have a very one dimensional view of gamers. For example the logic would go something like this. FPSs are popular and people who play FPSs ONLY like FPSs. This means that you can't sell JRPG or survival horror to the same person that buys an FPS. Therefore the rising success of Call of Duty implies the death of Resident Evil or Final Fantasy. Most of the people on this board can just look at their own libraries to see that that's utter balderdash. Unfortunately those in charge of the decision making are more likely to listen to the Good Idea Fairy rather than reality.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

no argument there jim you are right, is only shameful the big AAA publishers reached this point

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

I find it surprising Jim didn't mention RTS - a genre that right now only has two companies in total working on them (that'll be Blizzard and Focus Interactive - you all know the former, but the latter make the Wargame Series, and are working on Etherium [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUyCd_GGu6Y]), to the point where the entire genre looks skeletal because one company has become a damned joke who deliberately try to appeal to Nostalgia to overlook how mediocre their output has been (and how they're usually quick to be screwed over by their business partners)*.

And then there's Command & Conquer 4, the game to the entire RTS genre what Resident Evil 6 is to the entire Resident Evil series. C&C 4 screwed up it's home franchise so badly that it's looking pretty damned dead at this point, to the point where it's dubious we'll ever see another C&C game. I get the feeling that a similar line of thinking lead to this.

In truth though, the RTS as a Genre has been on life support since 2007 because of this (it doesn't help that the only financially successful RTS games from that year were Forged Alliance and C&C 3 - everything else was either poorly received, sold exceptionally poorly or some combination of both**).

* For the dense, yes I am talking about Petroglyph - the company whose talent (and dignity) evacuated when Universe at War tanked hard. It says a lot when even after seven years have passed, the damage from that disaster can still be seen clearly. They are in every sense of the word a shadow of their former selves.

** From the top of my head, the list (as best as I can remember it) was Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, C&C 3, Universe at War and SunAge. I'm likely forgetting two or three. All I know is that only Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and C&C 3 sold decent numbers - as opposed to games like COD 4 and Team Fortress 2.

dunno about that, what about the total war series and company of heroes?

 

[Lightknight]

Bravo Jim, wonderful work here. So often it's the specialized game that breaks the mold and wins our cash and awards. It's a shame that everyone jumped after COD money when they (those doing the jumping) weren't even a basic military shooter to begin with.

 

[zvate]

Indeed let us all thank god for...this is freaky

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

I was glad that Bravely Default succeeded as it did, and I'm glad that Square-Enix has opened their eyes (the new Hitman will supposedly return to the original style of gameplay) to the fact that not everything needs to be an action game. I do hope that Capcom learns this lesson as well, but Capcom has many problems beyond just Resident Evil.

The sad truth is that multiplayer FPS games are what's selling right now, but that doesn't mean that games of other genres can't find success.

And then people wonder why I'm primarily gaming on my 3DS these days, where old ideas tend to find new life.

 

[InsanityRequiem]

In my eyes, it's because of the current generation of consoles selling well overall. As an industry, the big names in publishing consoles and games saw huge sales in the consoles, and attributed that to potential huge sales in games, which lead to development studios being created and a higher number of people hired to develop games. But the issue immediately differentiated when the big publishers saw their games not selling as well as their internal marketing people speculated. You got the Wii selling a total of 101 million, the 360 selling a total of 81 million, and the PS3 selling a total of 83 million. A marketer would say that that's nearly 300 million customers, when the reality is possibly 1/10th that if lucky. The numbers say so many bought all those consoles, but those numbers do not account for replacements, people owning multiple consoles at a time (Be it multiple of one brand or one of each brand), or people that are non-consumers (This would be people that bought the system as purely a DVD/Blu-ray player, use the non-gaming apps mostly, etc). So you now have bloated budgets, bloated studios, and an extremely bloated marketing campaign.

That's why I would say the "Future-proofing" is so sickening horrible. The execs are chasing horribly exaggerated numbers, and we can see that with how the PS3 handled after the PS2, as well as the Wii U after the Wii. Looking at VGChartz, the PS4 has sold 6.5 million, the Wii U has sold 5.9 million, and the Xbone has sold 4 million (Numbers may be outdated). Compared to the current gen, three years on the market saw the PS3 sell roughly 24 million, the Wii sold roughly 52.6 million, and the 360 sold 13.5 million. If anything, big publishers and big console makers are going to need to shrink in size or they'll over bloat and rupture. If the "trends" continue, we'll probably see the new generation of consoles meeting underwhelming sales due to the "non-gaming" console buyers sticking to what they have and not getting the new consoles.

I'm surprised Jim didn't mention Nintendo at all in the video. I know that they haven't really been as extreme as some of these companies are, but at the same time, they're not reaching far enough to really warrant any applause. Look at the line-up of first party games the Wii got within it's first 16 months to what the Wii U got in it's first 16 months. You'll notice that there's a huge difference between the two.

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. They can't just live on the trinity (Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon) for the rest of their days and hope that their consoles and games sell. That's part of the reason the Wii U is failing. There's not enough there to really warrant a purchase of it, besides the back catalogue of 2012 ports and Wii games.

Having more games like Pikmin 3, Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, and Hyrule Warriors are what gets more people to buy consoles.

I'd say the issue with Nintendo is they have a "Don't fix what isn't an issue" mentality and it has become a problem. Mario, Zelda, Pokemon are not broken so they incrementally improve the games, while adding some innovation. Then when problem games do happen (FZero, Metroid, Star Fox), they put these IPs in stasis to look at in the future to see if they can fix them. Which then leads to these IPs being out of the loop for most of a generation or two potentially. With the Wii U, I feel Nintendo realized that new, and I mean absolutely new, IPs are a must, but they let the 3rd party take the lead for the first year the console was out. And the 3rd party publishers snubbed Nintendo hard with just ports of games already released, with Ubisoft taking the brunt of actual new games (Which negatively hit Ubisoft as well). At this point, I don't think Nintendo will really care anymore about 3rd party publishers because of how badly they reacted to the first year the Wii U was out in the market without competition from both Sony and Microsoft as well as Nintendo itself.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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!!!!". This is not unique to the video game industry, anyone who is a fan of Sci-Fi and good cartoons on television will attest to the same shit happening (Firefly the most famous example among many others). And if they think something is a good idea then they will put all of their resources into it and even if it fails they will blame everyone and everything (pirates, new console generation, microwaves, conspiracy of journalists, mind control).

Also, to expand on some of the genres that were mentioned in the video, here are some more:
Space Sim genre is dead outside of X series, Eve online and possible hope of Star Citizen

Point and Click adventure genre was dead until it was revived by Phoenix Wright and then Telltale

WW2 FPS are gone

DDR, Guitar Hero, Rockband also gone

RTS hanging on thanks to Blizzard and Relic

TBS hanging on thanks to CA and 2K



Video Game industry is bigger than it ever was and at the same time it is blander than ever before. And I have no idea what can be done to wake those executives up. Bravely Default acted like a wake up call but most publishers are not willing to risk even a small niche title whose success might shock them.

That's a good point, and a very likely possibility

 

[Elyxard]

Great episode, definitely capstones my frustrations with the industry over the last decade.

The notion that entire genres can "die" was the most ridiculous thing to come from these big publishers, and every single time.. every single time they tried to re-invent a franchise for mass appeal, it always failed (or at least the parts that were homogenized were typically cited as the weak link of their respective games, ie: QTE's in 99% of them).

 

[BunnyKillBot]

With the topic of this jimquisition in mind, it's going to be very interesting seeing how Dragon Age 3, aka Inquisition turns out, given the broad appeal dumbing down bull**** of DA2. Are they going to find that middle ground, or will it just be another cashtastic copout.

 

[castlewise]

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.

 

[Jennacide]

I'm glad Bravely Default did well enough to smack some sense into SE, but some questions come to mind. Why did it take Nintendo outright BRIBING SE to get it localized? Is it's success too little, too late? Will you EVER stop trying to force goddam Lightning down our throats? (Only tangentially related, but I really despise Lightning)

Oh, and will they finally admit their loses in recent years were their fault, and not "underperformance" by their western dev teams behind Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs? You know, two games that are pretty highly regarded while FF14's launch is viewed as the biggest disaster in MMO history.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I actually kinda' liked RE6. I get that it wasn't survival horror, but it was fun. And what, 6 million sales in the first week? A couple of other people had to as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but its personal greed on the part of the CEOs that caused such a decline in games, right? They try to create COD or something, its wildly successful, and they get a big bonus, stock options and when they leave to start their own small time game company, they get a six or seven figure severance package. Its all short-sided 'I want to be a millionaire by next year' blind hope that lightning will in fact strike the same place 6 or 7 million more times.
Same logic that drives social media sites these days - the need for the next Facebook or twitter. The billion dollar idea that requires very little actual work. That self-same spirit drives these game companies; what is the least amount of work we can do for the greatest profit? And then we retire with a few million and pretend we wanted an in-depth character driven horror game with a small-breasted lesbian in sneakers the entire time.

Oh wait...Greenlight...

 

[Demonchaser27]

Good video Jim.

I actually think its not fear at all. I think its the obvious answer, greed. Plain and simple greed.
Think about it. In marketing and advertising we are taught about the power and influence of brand recognition. I think what happened is that as brand recognition got big, so did egos.

Then the big gaming boom happened. Games were finally selling millions and millions of copies. Executives were being promoted and eyes started turning towards gaming in the business world. With such a big increase and the happening of the Wii there were more new gamers than ever. They knew from experience that most new gamers wouldn't easily buy into niche/deep games.

They wanted that new money so bad they could taste it. However, they needed to keep the old money too or else they wouldn't make more, just the same. This is where brand recognition reared its ugly head. They believed so deeply that people would stay attached to a brand no matter what that they thought they could do anything to appeal to the new audience with no repercussions from the old audience. It worked for a short time, but people got fed up quick. Then all this mess in recent years happened.

The fact is that they had a choice. Nintendo/EA/Activision/Microsoft/Sony etc. made there choice. They should have kept going with the slow, sustainable growth. They should have used smart advertising and marketing to slowly ween in new gamers over time as to not lose the quality of games. Convince new customers that what you have is great and show them why. Similar to how FromSoft and Bamco tried to advertise a hard game (Dark Souls 1 & 2) instead of turning into something else.

Instead they made the quick and easy choice. The rapid unsustainable growth. And it costs many studios and publishers BIG time.

Jim I agree. I think their scared... now. They weren't scared when they made the decisions that got them here, but they are now that they finally realized they failed.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

I don't quite agree with Jim's comments regarding JRPGs. On other forums I visit, Japanese games (and their RPGs in particular) get a lot of flak for "refusing to evolve" or "not going with the times". I can't help but suspect that FFXIIII and its sequels were attempts from Square-Enix to respond to that criticism.

I think that those comments are directed more at the battle system.

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.

 

[Charli]

A bunch of executives got together, asked how they could increase profitability in their companies, teabagged sustainability, and then started making studies and decisions based upon bullshit about what they could cut and 'focus' on. Cus y'know, experts told them that the kids like multiplayer.


Never realizing that the world is made of all kinds of different flavors and all marching toward the same golden goose egg is going to leave you with nothing but yolk and alot of ruined company reputations.

*closes book* And that's my fairy tail for the ages.