Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[EndlessSporadic]

I happen to like the solid white background. It makes you look more professional, though I'm not sure that is exactly what you want to hear.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Single player being irrelevant to gaming? Ive been gaming since Atari, 29 years of gaming and 99% of that was single player games with online gaming (not PC) being last gen mainly. I think its because there is more effort and money in making a decent single player game than a multi player online game. Really, who bought the new Tomb Raider for its online multiplayer?

 

[Quiotu]

That interview REALLY bugs me. I still LIKE Mass Effect 2 and, for the most part, ME3, but I would have greatly preferred DEEPER RPG mechanics. Instead, they gutted the games.

Going after Call of Duty players? The two audiences are not mutually compatible. That's like saying you want tween girls that love Twilight to go see The Avengers, so you add a sparkly mopey vampire with bad hair to the crew... just because. Or you want grandmothers that love Hallmark movies to see that new horror movie, so you ensure it has a sappy, predictable, sentimental ending where everyone learns to love each other.

Go after the audience you have and build FROM it. So many companies spit in the faces of their fans this generation, and we've seen them and their franchises suffer (probably none more so than Mega Man and Resident Evil).

From Devil May Cry, to Final Fantasy, to Resident Evil, to SimCity, to Diablo III, to Metroid: Other M, to so many more... the more they altered a winning formula to try and mutate a series into something it never was intended to be, all in favor of "expanding" the audience, the more the series actually SHRUNK and alienated their more loyal fans.

Let's hope the coming years give other developers more "captain obvious" epiphanies. I'm glad Square Enix figured it out, even if they never should have had to do so in the first place.

Woah now... hold on. What did they do to DMC other than make the main character less of an embarrassment? It still has DMC mechanics, and was one of the few games with actual decent platforming. The others I understand, but they didn't change DMC's genre... they just removed 90's loose-cannon cringe-worthy Dante from the equation.

 

[Thanatos2k]

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/919569/bioware_we_want_call_of_dutys_audience.html

How absolutely pathetic is that?

Wow, that's just sad. I've never seen that article. Yeah lets make RPGs into shooters... I mean who the hell will care right?

To be fair, it worked in the short term. ME2 is the best rated Mass Effect title, both by fans and critics, and it got that massive boost in sales. While ME3 wasn't the strongest (I still liked it), BioWare successfully got CoD players to care about RPG elements, showed what actual characters in games were, and the character powersets highlighted how drull modern military shooters can be.

The hope here is that BioWare has learned their lesson about what made their games so good back in the day. When ME4 or whatever it is comes out, so long as the story doesn't suck balls they will have a HUGE audience.

And yet, as an RPG fan, Mass Effect 1 is still my favorite game in the series. They left some of their old audience behind to chase others. In this case it wasn't hard to trick CODers into playing a game about Space Commander Marines and shooting people, but it did NOT work when they tried similar things in Dragon Age 2 - and Dragon Age 2 is near universally reviled. It's not a coincidence.

 

[Hazy992]

Snippity doo dah

Snippster Act 2: Back In The Habit

But the industry has always had those sorts of popularity booms for certain genres, hasn't it? Just look at JRPGs in the 90's. How come this is so different?

 

[Catrixa]

However, I think the problem was less about fear and more about greed. Yeah, JRPGs and survival horror and other such "niche" markets never really stopped being successful, but the problem was that executives at Square-Enix and Capcom and Konami, etc. all saw "Halo" and "Call of Duty" making way more money than they were and deciding that they could be just as successful if they did the same thing. Rather than remaining content with the modest success they were enjoying, they decided to try and out-Call-of-Duty "Call of Duty", and as a result, they alienated the market they had and reported losses.

I think this is most of it, but I don't necessarily think it's totally greed-based. If games like Call of Duty did anything, it was set the bar on what constituted a successful game, and Call of Duty put that bar waaay up there. So, if a company wanted to think of their game as successful, they had to do as good/better than Call of Duty. I feel like this is an issue with a lot tech companies--they have to beat the last quarter's most successful new thing, or they've failed.

The way this works out in the games industry is kind of sad and hilarious--if some genre over performs (fps), everyone jumps on that bandwagon and ditches other genres. In the tech sector, this makes sense: if smartphones are popular because they're extremely easy to use, building a super-customizable command-line-based smartphone is probably not the right direction to go. However, the darned games industry is a creative industry too, so it'd be like every movie being a bland teen romance because Twilight was popular. The movie industry knows it has an audience (maybe not as huge) for excessively violent horror films, so it keeps making them. The games industry needs to actually recognize it's not a strict tech industry and capitalize on all of its niche audiences already.

 

[shrekfan246]

Snippity doo dah

Snippster Act 2: Back In The Habit

But the industry has always had those sorts of popularity booms for certain genres, hasn't it? Just look at JRPGs in the 90's. How come this is so different?

Well, the world is much more inter-connected than it was in the 90's, for one. Information is, in general, easier to obtain than ever before.

The companies were arguably much more "relevant" back then, as well. I wouldn't exactly say Square Enix or Capcom have no relevance in the modern gaming industry, but in the late 80's and early 90's their names were pretty much synonymous with "The best of the best and you probably won't find anything else like this, buddy", which is why they're still around today while whatever competition they had has largely been forgotten in time. Today? They're much smaller fish, or they're in a much larger pond. Or both. Who knows?

 

[Grace_Omega]

I think there are two factors playing into this:

1) Rising development costs. It's been known ever since the last gen started that the cost of developing "AAA" games has had developers worried.

2) The success of Call of Duty. In the middle of the fear over rising costs that I mentioned above developers saw the earth-shattering financial success of the Modern Warfare franchise and came to the conclusion that there was an easy way to solve the problem: follow the leader. They took on a strange, almost magical-thinking attitude that simply aping the trappings of Call of Duty would somehow replicate its success.

At the same time, in the minds of executives CoD's astonishing piles of launch-day cash somehow went from being a once-in-history outlier to the new normal. It's like they thought "oh, video games make billions of dollars now! Well we can massively over-inflate our budgets then since we'll just make it all back on day one. A hair-rendering engine for Lara Croft's ponytail? Sure why not! Spend spend spend!"

I think this is the real origin of the weird "x genre doesn't sell" stuff. What they actually mean is that x genre doesn't sell *as well as Call of Duty*, which is now treated as the baseline for success instead of the game development equivalent of winning the lottery eight times in a row. They thought they were blasting off to the stars on a multiplayer-powered rocket and all of those older genres that never made back their development costs five seconds after launch were now obsolete

Of course the reality is that this is all insane nonsense and a far more responsible reaction to the problem of rising dev costs is to keep budgets under control and try to hit new markets (the option Nintendo and mobile devs went with) instead of sticking multiplayer and bald guys talking about how the LZ is hot in all of your games.

 

[orangeapples]

Companies say a lot of things. While it is a good thing that Square Enix wants to go back to its roots we'll see what Final Fantasy XVI looks like (I say 16 since 15 has been in production for a very long time). We'll see if what Square Enix says is true when the games start coming out.

 

[xGrimReaperzZ]

Purely, this is a beautiful and a well-constructed episode, there was no sinle moment in this 7min episode where i found myself not listening due to change of pace or abrupt change of topic.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I very rarely disagree with Jim. His points are cogent, as always, and are never poorly thought out. However, in this case, I think what really drove game companies to forsake 'the good old games of yester-decade' was their increasing success and eventually the profit motive for those public companies. Check out MatPat's video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q] on this very topic. I think this provides a very interesting counterpoint to Jim's video.

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.

 

[Baresark]

I simply could not agree more. They went out of their way to fix things that were no broken, broke them, then freaked out making even more bad mistakes. It's kind of fiscal responsibility 101 to me. If things have gone down the shitter, then you have to look at what you were doing last time the company did well. Depending on the situation, I'm not saying to go back exclusively to your old ways, but maybe look at then and look at now, and see what extreme decisions have resulted in.

 

[Lightknight]

It would be an interesting footnote in the industry if this means their next JRPG ends up being an FPS. Hilariously sad to think about.

 

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

I only scanned over the posts so far and I think no-one's added this modest detail:

This sort of bullshit isn't happening in just games, but all media.

The good Mr. Chipman pondered the question "did Battleship become a freakin' movie? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/moviesandtv/moviebob/9624-Brand-X]

Test screenings and end-user panels have been a tool in AAA media for a long time. But in today's desperate times, we take their word as sacred. This is symptomatic of the cover-your-ass attitude prevalent in corporate US. When a big title fails (that is, fails to be as spectacularly awesome a blockbuster as bean-counters predicted), they always scapegoat people in the production, and so it's safer to be able to point to the consumer panels and prior "similar" successes and the branding identity association and say "We ran the numbers. It should have been a shoe in."

In Agatha Christie's era, there was a notion that money makes us all murderers. These days, money makes us all cowards, especially corporate capital that isn't ours, knowing that but for the providence of a target audience, we would have their lives systematically ruined by the auditors. Corporations who can afford to make AAA titles are generally risk-adverse, and thus can't allow for the creative liberty necessary to make a brilliant and meaningful AAA title. And that's the case whether they publish games, movies, music or books.

238U[footnote]As of this posting I have not received a US National Security Letter or any classified gag order from an agent of the United States.
Encrypted with Morbius-Cochrane Perfect Steganographic Codec 1.2.001
Monday, April 07, 2014 12:01:48 PM
window senator migraine jealousy safe voting sunburn chip[/footnote]

 

[Thanatos2k]

It would be an interesting footnote in the industry if this means their next JRPG ends up being an FPS. Hilariously sad to think about.

Starring Lightning.

Oh god....

 

[karma9308]

Your...nakedness is disgusting. And a change too! I don't like change and will throw a hissy fit about this!

Incidentally, when you were talking about survival horror, what game did you have on the screen where you were running around in the sewer with a camera and it looked like banshees were chasing after you?

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

THQ went under. While Relic did resurface, COH 2 was heavily panned (for all the wrong reasons**) and as a result wasn't as successful as everyone hoped (DLC'ing the game into oblivion hasn't helped matters), and so everyone went back to playing the original COH. It's doubtful we're going to see a COH 3 or even an expansion pack anytime soon.

Total War is also a niche genre within a genre - called grand strategy*. It is also currently the ONLY grand strategy title out there, with nobody else daring to jump in (and has schizophrenic enough quality to drive off everyone else).

*Not to be confused with 4X Games like Civilization, Galactic Civilizations and Age of Wonders. Turn Based Strategy in itself is turning into a healthier market.

** Mostly comments about it's historical accuracy because they dared to depict Order 227, over things like the game having crappy optimisation and (as mentioned) the DLC'ing.

I'd argue that Paradox is the main competitor for the total war series. While they don't play the same, a lot of paradox games do scratch that same itch and like to call themselves Grand Strategy games as well.

Completely agreed on COH2 by the way, the fact that most of the DLC commanders are head and shoulders above the freebies is utterly disgusting and should have people more furious with Sega.

 

[Trishbot]

Woah now... hold on. What did they do to DMC other than make the main character less of an embarrassment? It still has DMC mechanics, and was one of the few games with actual decent platforming. The others I understand, but they didn't change DMC's genre... they just removed 90's loose-cannon cringe-worthy Dante from the equation.

I actually think DMC is a good game. However, it's also a game that openly MOCKED old-school Devil May Cry fans (both in the game itself, and the developers did so frequently during conferences). The game itself was fine (apart from cutting the framerate in half...), but the ATTITUDE they had drove the old school fans away.

If you ever want to expand your audience, do not blatantly insult the fans you're trying to win over to their faces. I'm still baffled they did so, and it killed the interest of many fans on the fence about it.

 

[spacemutant IV]

Fear alone isn't a motivator to do anything, except run away. A lot of points have been brought up that probably played a part in this, and another one I think would be the greed of those who saw a chance to sow the fear and then reap the benefits, by seemingly being the ones who had the solution to a future problem at hand, ready to be sold. Want to rise up in the company, but don't have anything good to contribute? Tell the others that the times they are a changin', pretend to know what will happen and how everyone can be saved, and they will follow you, I guess.

 

[Thanatos2k]

I only scanned over the posts so far and I think no-one's added this modest detail:

This sort of bullshit isn't happening in just games, but all media.

The good Mr. Chipman pondered the question "did Battleship become a freakin' movie? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/moviesandtv/moviebob/9624-Brand-X]

Test screenings and end-user panels have been a tool in AAA media for a long time. But in today's desperate times, we take their word as sacred. This is symptomatic of the cover-your-ass attitude prevalent in corporate US. When a big title fails (that is, fails to be as spectacularly awesome a blockbuster as bean-counters predicted), they always scapegoat people in the production, and so it's safer to be able to point to the consumer panels and prior "similar" successes and the branding identity association and say "We ran the numbers. It should have been a shoe in."

In Agatha Christie's era, there was a notion that money makes us all murderers. These days, money makes us all cowards, especially corporate capital that isn't ours, knowing that but for the providence of a target audience, we would have their lives systematically ruined by the auditors. Corporations who can afford to make AAA titles are generally risk-adverse, and thus can't allow for the creative liberty necessary to make a brilliant and meaningful AAA title. And that's the case whether they publish games, movies, music or books.

Actually I think movies are in a different yet still sad boat. Because Hollywood is unable to come up with competent new ideas, movies are made SOLELY on brand recognition now, not genre.

That's why this has happened: