We've brought this on ourselves. Musings about the state of the industry.

[ResonanceSD]

What's in a flop?


Does it take something like a "Daikatana" moment, where everything goes wrong at once? (And it's entirely the developer's fault)


Is it an Assassins Creed 3 situation, where sequelitis has set in to a once awesome series, turning it into a collection of minigames without the appeal of Mario Party? (This one is on the publisher)

Is it more "SimCity"-esque, where something goes wrong at the launch, then later on, people realise that the game mechanics are broken (and EA keep releasing advertising-based DLC for it)? - Oddly enough, this happened to Diablo 3, another always online sequel to a popular series. (This time the developer was wholly owned by the publisher)

Is it something on the scale of the PS Vita? A horrendously overpriced paperweight (don't get annoyed, Vita owners, I have the exact same feelings about the 3DS sitting on my desk) seriously, if anyone?s got a recommendation for it, that'd be much appreciated.


My thoughts are that we're not discerning enough in what we give publishers money for, which has had far-reaching implications. I'll use the shooter genre as an example of what I mean, because we're all familiar with the tropes involved. The way we've been spending money recently has led to the rise and rise of the "Modern Military Shooter" genre (or "Spunkgargleweewee" if you watch Zero Punctuation.)

Here's how it's a problem. Developers see the profitability of previous 'realistic' military shooters, and go for the same market that buys Call of Duty. (Unfortunately as a lot of developers have learnt, people don't want to play a CoD clone, they want to play CoD).
This leads to a massive subset of the industry designing games that are like Call of Duty. Games that employ the same design techniques and mechanics. And whilst I hesitate to use these words in relation to CoD, the pacing and storytelling aspects have been lifted as well.

So what does that mean for gamers? Well we 1) 'get' to play a lot of shooters, and 2) get to see games that have no business being run and gun action games suddenly develop Gears of War pretentions. Seriously, all of Mass Effect 3's combat sections was basically Gears with different shaped aliens. More stupid set pieces (looking at you, Assassins Creed 2.2), more rectangular men shooting rectangular weapons at distant foes behind rectangular pieces of cover.

And the game that rips the MMS genre a new arsehole, Spec Ops: The Line, doesn't do well financially (or at any rate, not nearly as good as the games it's calling terrible). Why? Because gamers of a particular demographic like a certain sort of game, and expect their games to follow a certain formula. 'What the hell do you mean that I was the bad guy', etc.

When a game doesn't follow it, regardless of the storytelling/themes/pacing, it's derided. Again, sticking to First and Third person shooters here as examples. I can imagine the developers of Homefront right after their game didn't do well going "we made CoD: America, what the hell do you people WANT?". It's got an invasion from a hostile force, it's got set pieces, White Phosphorus, remote controlled tanks, stealth sections and just general lunacy, and yet it was criticised for linear game play and shit storytelling, despite the fact that any MMS has the same design idea.



As such, the games industry has learnt that for most of the time, it can shovel any old thing out and expect it to do well, and when perplexingly it doesn't, they can call it a flop and say the market wasn't ready for it yet. - This was seen with Medal of Honor the latest iteration in a long running series which did so badly that the IP has now been ?rested? by EA.

What really gets to me however, is that we keep giving ridiculous ideas tons of money, and wonder why they continue. I point to Peter Molyneux' latest "social experiment/slot-machine" 'Curiosity', as my star witness. As such, this gives other developers 'ideas'. Mark my words, if Curiosity is a financial success by any degree, other "games" of it's ilk will follow. This cascade of shittiness has already been seen in the F2P MMO market. Some succeed, and then a glut of them shows up. Will a few survive? Sure. Will all of them? No, however, the market will get saturated and the amount of money each will make will shrink.

A recent Jimquisition highlighted precisely how a publisher thinks. Even with sales in the millions, three SquEnix games were regarded as failures by Square. Entirely because they didn't sell nearly as many as they think they should have. Once again, poor habits from consumers (buying anything that comes out), have led publishers astray. "How could Square be this stupid?", we asked. Surely selling millions of units for games should be seen as a success? No, as it turns out, publishers have become used to seeing larger and larger numbers next to their sales counter, and as such, game budgets are larger and larger. These days, a publisher defined flop is very different to a consumer defined flop.

So how do we stop the rot? It's very simple. We stop buying games that are bad.

First of all, we stop preordering titles without knowing anything about them other than the title. If you preordered Colonial Marines, I have 0 sympathy for you. You had no idea what the game would be like, and you forked out cash to the developers before the game was off embargo.
The same goes for people who preordered SimCity and Diablo 3. What?s even worse about the SC and D3 example is that people who are aware of online DRM, buy the game anyway, and then complain when it's the one thing impeding their game enjoyment act like people didn?t warn them sufficiently.

A knock on effect from this will be that the number of games that are bad will go down. Sharply. No longer will shooter clones be seen (only) as a tremendous waste of money from the consumer?s end. They?ll be seen the same way by publishers too.

The second thing we have to do? Stop buying crap. Read reviews, if it's likely to be another plod-athon through corridors filled with bullets, are you seriously enriching anything about yourself by experiencing it?


And the day we have fewer, excellent games coming out rather than many, many mediocre games, is a day I'll be happy to see.


So thanks for reading this far. Now I ask you, what's in a flop, and who's fault is it when a game or game console flops?

 

[ShinyCharizard]

And the day we have fewer, excellent games coming out rather than many, many mediocre games, is a day I'll be happy to see.

I'd say we are at that day already, but instead of a few excellent games we have many. Every year many, many excellent games come out while the mediocre shooters are still a minority.

 

[ResonanceSD]

And the day we have fewer, excellent games coming out rather than many, many mediocre games, is a day I'll be happy to see.

I'd say we are at that day already, but instead of a few excellent games we have many. Every year many, many excellent games come out while the mediocre shooters are still a minority.

Yeah I used the shooter genre as an example as I said midway through the piece.

However, the same can be said about action platformers, look at Assassins Creed. annual sequels until the market stops buying them. Assassins Creed IV being entirely naval based suggests that instead of respecting their customers and waiting, Ubisoft are just rolling out the only good bit of AC3 into an entire game by itself.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Currently, I must say that I don't think there's much we really can do, short from going cold turkey on buying any games and letting the industry implode.

The problem is that the producers today are, as Jimquisition pointed out, not people from within the gaming industry that has been promoted to top-tier management positions. They are often people with degrees in economics, finance and business who are hired from other industries, that are totally dissimilar to gaming. They see the sales of CoD or GoW and think "That's the peak for any game" instead of realizing what every semi-interested gamer knows: That CoD and GoW have managed to stake out a very niche market of buyers that rarely buy other games but are ready to invest in the brands of CoD and GoW every year (similar effects are seen with Fifa, NHL and Madden). The same goes for MMO-publishers and WoW, instead of realizing that WoW has cornered a niche-market of casual MMO-players they keep thinking they can get the same kind of numbers in their games.

As gamers we can't really change that. We can only hope that more knowledgeable people will get into the publishing business and make better decisions. One can deride the likes of Deep Silver for being money grubbing meanies that impact on the quality of the games they produce, but they also manage to turn profit on most of their games, because they are run by people who have realistic expectations on how much their games can be expected to sell.

 

[ResonanceSD]

Currently, I must say that I don't think there's much we really can do, short from going cold turkey on buying any games and letting the industry implode.

The problem is that the producers today are, as Jimquisition pointed out, not people from within the gaming industry that has been promoted to top-tier management positions. They are often people with degrees in economics, finance and business who are hired from other industries, that are totally dissimilar to gaming.

Well this is the problem when you commercialise an art form. It's sad to say, but I'm completely ok with the AAA industry imploding. If it leads to a better industry in the long run, sure! Why not?

 

[Zeh Don]

You have to be careful with the "Stop Pre-Ordering" and "Read Review" instructions, because they'll be easily manipulated against you the moment the trends catch on - exactly as the "Modern Military Shooter" trend caught on.

Much like gamers, who play the same games for hours and figure out bugs, glitches or exploits that the developers of those games never thought of, Publishers have many people on the pay-roll who's job is quite simple: figure out the current best method for getting your money.

Demos, for example, were proved to actually lower the rates of sales for virtually any game or genre. However, what we don't often hear is that demos almost always increased the overall customer satisfaction level of paying customers for those same titles. Instead of having a million customers of varying degrees of happiness, you instead have 500,000 happy customers in their place.
However, ask any Publisher: there is no difference between an unhappy customer's money and a happy customer's money. So what happened? The industry stopped making demos.

Reviews are already questionable as it is - Diablo III scored a few 9s and 10s before word of mouth revealed the game to be the worst ARPG ever made, and Sim City was much the same. A lot of reviewers completely ignored the Always Online DRM, and others encouraged people to buy the game despite it.

The only rock solid, sure fire way to rule out the rubbish is not buy any game until a month or so after launch, and visit a forum like The Escapist, Penny-Arcade or other Meccas of nerd-ism, and ask there for an independent review. This forum has it's own "User Review" section for just such reviews.

At the end of the day, there will always be a gamble when you buy a game.

 

[ResonanceSD]

You have to be careful with the "Stop Pre-Ordering" and "Read Review" instructions, because they'll be easily manipulated against you the moment the trends catch on - exactly as the "Modern Military Shooter" trend caught on.

How?

Much like gamers, who play the same games for hours and figure out bugs, glitches or exploits that the developers of those games never thought of, Publishers have many people on the pay-roll who's job is quite simple: figure out the current best method for getting your money.


However, ask any Publisher: there is no difference between an unhappy customer's money and a happy customer's money. So what happened? The industry stopped making demos.

Reviews are already questionable as it is - Diablo III scored a few 9s and 10s before word of mouth revealed the game to be the worst ARPG ever made, and Sim City was much the same. A lot of reviewers completely ignored the Always Online DRM, and others encouraged people to buy the game despite it.

The only rock solid, sure fire way to rule out the rubbish is not buy any game until a month or so after launch, and visit a forum like The Escapist, Penny-Arcade or other Meccas of nerd-ism, and ask there for an independent review. This forum has it's own "User Review" section for just such reviews.

I only read reviews on Destructoid & RPS these days. Greg Tito giving 5 out of 5 to Dragon Age 2 removed all credibility this site had in terms of reviews. Ranking the Escapist with Penny Arcade is a complete farce.

At the end of the day, there will always be a gamble when you buy a game.

Yes but there shouldn't have to be, and I'm saying if we all didn't decide to force feed shitty publishers our money, it wouldn't be an issue. Trim the fat and keep the meat.

 

[ResonanceSD]

Currently, I must say that I don't think there's much we really can do, short from going cold turkey on buying any games and letting the industry implode.

The problem is that the producers today are, as Jimquisition pointed out, not people from within the gaming industry that has been promoted to top-tier management positions. They are often people with degrees in economics, finance and business who are hired from other industries, that are totally dissimilar to gaming. They see the sales of CoD or GoW and think "That's the peak for any game" instead of realizing what every semi-interested gamer knows: That CoD and GoW have managed to stake out a very niche market of buyers that rarely buy other games but are ready to invest in the brands of CoD and GoW every year (similar effects are seen with Fifa, NHL and Madden). The same goes for MMO-publishers and WoW, instead of realizing that WoW has cornered a niche-market of casual MMO-players they keep thinking they can get the same kind of numbers in their games.

As gamers we can't really change that. We can only hope that more knowledgeable people will get into the publishing business and make better decisions. One can deride the likes of Deep Silver for being money grubbing meanies that impact on the quality of the games they produce, but they also manage to turn profit on most of their games, because they are run by people who have realistic expectations on how much their games can be expected to sell.

This rings very true.

Through kickstarter, we've already had more knowledgable people taking the reins funding, at the very least.
They say don't underestimate the stupidity of people in big numbers, but I say, also don't underestimate the intelligence of people in big numbers.

When it comes to the success of WoW, it also had the blizzard brand behind it, something that was responsible for starcraft and diablo 2 at that point, two of the most succesful games in history. What's more, they didn't have a game that had serious issues yet. Warcraft 2 and diablo were also amazing for their time.

This I think, helped create the critical mass necessary to make the MMO a success. Because it's like facebook and google+. If you don't achieve critical mass, you can't really grow. It's so dependent on human relationships.

Yeah that's how marketing works for those games unfortunately for the rest of us.

You're either playing WOW, or you're playing something else, and given wow's colossal size, if your friends play it, you'll have to or become "the odd kid".

and boy do advertisers know it.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

When it comes to the success of WoW, it also had the blizzard brand behind it, something that was responsible for starcraft and diablo 2 at that point, two of the most succesful games in history. What's more, they didn't have a game that had serious issues yet. Warcraft 2 and diablo were also amazing for their time.

This I think, helped create the critical mass necessary to make the MMO a success. Because it's like facebook and google+. If you don't achieve critical mass, you can't really grow. It's so dependent on human relationships.

I think you are spot on here. This along with Blizzards ability to drag even casual players into WoW (about half of my friends who are "occasional gamers" play WoW exclusively) made it a true success story. The combination of highly capable developers with a solid reputation and the perfect timing of WoWs launch is unlikely to be seen again however. But as TOR proves, this is not how publishers see it. They see 14 million players and think that they too might get those numbers if they only mimic WoW mechanically.

 

[Squilookle]

It's really quite simple.

1) Never pre-order. Doesn't matter how inviting it looks, how much you like the company or series, you don't ever do it. No, shutup. Just don't.

2) Don't buy games until they're a week old, or until a handful of post release reviews are out- whichever comes last. It's these goddamn first week blind sales that drive the direction of the industry, and they are defined entirely on how well something is marketed.

One could also say you should boycott DRM and always online games, but that sentiment is as lost as a fart in a hurricane.

 

[Zeckt]

Actually the 3ds seems to be having an avalanche of great releases right now. It's turning out to be a fantastic portable, despite me never using the 3d ever.

 

[4RM3D]

Lets take a detour; lets talk about an analogy... Buying gold (online) from 3rd party websites is possible for most popular MMORPGs.

Buying gold (online) has mostly a negative impact on the game industry and the community. And then there are all those gold sellers. They never seem to end. Why? Because people keep buying gold. And as long as people keep buying gold, there will be gold sellers. I don't blame the gold sellers as much. They just see a way to make a profit. I mostly blame the gamers; the people who buy gold.

Spoiler: run script:replace { set gold = CoD; set sellers = clones; }

Buying CoD (online) has mostly a negative impact on the game industry and the community. And then there are all those CoD clones. They never seem to end. Why? Because people keep buying CoD. And as long as people keep buying CoD, there will be CoD clones. I don't blame the CoD clones as much. They just see a way to make a profit. I mostly blame the gamers; the people who buy CoD.

Hold your horses... I just made a little word swapping game. In reality the Activision and EA situation is a bit more complex that this. But the original analogy with the gold sellers still holds up.

@ResonanceSD Yeah, I agree with what you said

 

[Frybird]

2) Maybe people who ***** about Online DRM aren't the same guys who are buying the games

My thoughts are that we're not discerning enough in what we give publishers money for, which has had far-reaching implications. I'll use the shooter genre as an example of what I mean, because we're all familiar with the tropes involved. The way we've been spending money recently has led to the rise and rise of the "Modern Military Shooter" genre (or "Spunkgargleweewee" if you watch Zero Punctuation.)

Here's how it's a problem. Developers see the profitability of previous 'realistic' military shooters, and go for the same market that buys Call of Duty. (Unfortunately as a lot of developers have learnt, people don't want to play a CoD clone, they want to play CoD).
This leads to a massive subset of the industry designing games that are like Call of Duty. Games that employ the same design techniques and mechanics. And whilst I hesitate to use these words in relation to CoD, the pacing and storytelling aspects have been lifted as well.

The modern military shooter of today is what were Jump-N-Run Games on the NES/SNES. Publishers always tend to jump onto what is most profitable and given how in recent years we do get fewer "MMS" Games, the trend will eventually switch to another overexposed subgenre.

So what does that mean for gamers? Well we 1) 'get' to play a lot of shooters, and 2) get to see games that have no business being run and gun action games suddenly develop Gears of War pretentions. Seriously, all of Mass Effect 3's combat sections was basically Gears with different shaped aliens. More stupid set pieces (looking at you, Assassins Creed 2.2), more rectangular men shooting rectangular weapons at distant foes behind rectangular pieces of cover.

I find your Mass Effect 3 observation wholly subjective. If you play ME3 like Gears of War, that is because you specifically ignore all the abilites and whatnot you can use, as well as classes that require a different kind of gameplay. I always played ME as a Vanguard, wich meant since ME 2 that my main approach to combat is to jump right into the enemy lines, dish out damage in close combat with area-of-effect skills and try to get out without being shot to pieces. It's a risk/reward dynamic that is unlike most shooters, and makes ME a lot different than Gears of War.

And the game that rips the MMS genre a new arsehole, Spec Ops: The Line, doesn't do well financially (or at any rate, not nearly as good as the games it's calling terrible). Why? Because gamers of a particular demographic like a certain sort of game, and expect their games to follow a certain formula. 'What the hell do you mean that I was the bad guy', etc.

When a game doesn't follow it, regardless of the storytelling/themes/pacing, it's derided. Again, sticking to First and Third person shooters here as examples. I can imagine the developers of Homefront right after their game didn't do well going "we made CoD: America, what the hell do you people WANT?". It's got an invasion from a hostile force, it's got set pieces, White Phosphorus, remote controlled tanks, stealth sections and just general lunacy, and yet it was criticised for linear game play and shit storytelling, despite the fact that any MMS has the same design idea.

I don't think many people were even aware of the deeper subjects of the game. In most Trailers and all TV-Spots i know of, this game really just seemed to be another Call of Duty-esque Game with a somewhat weird setting.

BUT, i can't deny that gamers in general like thier familiar stuff to the point of hypocrisy, always fantasizing about "Innovation" but bitching whenever a new installment of a game strays from the established formula.

As such, the games industry has learnt that for most of the time, it can shovel any old thing out and expect it to do well, and when perplexingly it doesn't, they can call it a flop and say the market wasn't ready for it yet. - This was seen with Medal of Honor the latest iteration in a long running series which did so badly that the IP has now been ?rested? by EA.

Uhm...what else should they do? Sure, "The Market wasn't ready for it yet" is PR Bullshit Excusing, but when a sequel to a successful franchise flops, the sensible decision is to stop making Sequels for it.

It's what happened in the Movie Industry with Batman, and that turned out mostly alright.

The same goes for people who preordered SimCity and Diablo 3. What?s even worse about the SC and D3 example is that people who are aware of online DRM, buy the game anyway, and then complain when it's the one thing impeding their game enjoyment act like people didn?t warn them sufficiently.

While it makes sense that you shouldn't support a game with business practices you disagree on, It's entirely possible that the people who complain and the people who buy a game are two entirely different groups of people.

It's important to realize that vocal gamer people on the internet only represent a small part of the gaming market.

A knock on effect from this will be that the number of games that are bad will go down. Sharply. No longer will shooter clones be seen (only) as a tremendous waste of money from the consumer?s end. They?ll be seen the same way by publishers too.

The second thing we have to do? Stop buying crap. Read reviews, if it's likely to be another plod-athon through corridors filled with bullets, are you seriously enriching anything about yourself by experiencing it?


And the day we have fewer, excellent games coming out rather than many, many mediocre games, is a day I'll be happy to see.

We'll always had, and always will have a flood of mediocre games among the excellent games. The Trick is not minding that they exist.

That's what irks me about all the complaints about the industry as it is today. Am i the only one who enjoys games nowadays. I recently finished Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider and DmC and greatly enjoy them. I rarely mind DLC, and the only time i felt like a game i played is worse thanks to DLC was Assassins Creed 2 with it's blatant "Files missing" Plotdevice, and even with that game i can't say that i didn't get enough "bang for the buck".

I am fairly disappointed in SimCity, not even because of the Online Focus but because of how the game is smaller and less feature-rich than it's predecessors, but that doesn't stop me from playing SimCity 4 or any of the current releases.

The game industry as a whole is big enough that it can have parts i do not like (in my case, Free To Play Games) while still having enough great games each year to play.

I'm not really worried about the gaming industry, and if the day should actually come (it won't) in wich every game has crippling DLC disruptions and Orwellian Online DRM, i'll weep a single tear for gaming and just go. Until then, i'll always find something to enjoy.

Now I ask you, what's in a flop, and who's fault is it when a game or game console flops?

Depends, sometimes it's the publisher putting money in all the wrong places while forcing Devs to rush out an unfinished Product (Remember Atari and Alone In The Dark and Driv3r?), sometimes people ***** and moan about how they do not like the concept of the game and disregard it for safer titles (DmC and Mirrors Edge come to mind), sometimes companies fail to accurately advertise and present their games so no one cares once it comes out and sometimes a game just plain sucks and was perhaps just doomed from the start.

You can't generalize it to one reason, many failed games did something wrong individually or are just stricken with "bad luck"

 

[ResonanceSD]

2)

You can't generalize it to one reason, many failed games did something wrong individually or are just stricken with "bad luck"

Dude I read your entire post and couldn't find the coherent argument within. Would you mind summing up?

Actually the 3ds seems to be having an avalanche of great releases right now. It's turning out to be a fantastic portable, despite me never using the 3d ever.

like what? I'm going to pick up fire emblem next month. anything else?

The answer's SO simple, yet the dumb bastards getting paid to make those decisions are failing so miserably at their jobs that the fact they earn more than a janitor is an insult to janitors everywhere.

BECAUSE ALL THINGS MUST APPEAL TO ALL PEOPLE said the parasitic brain worm inside the Activision HQ.

 

[Krantos]

who's fault is it when a game or game console flops?

The people who made/published it.

What? You want sympathy? You get none, the consumer is never at fault for a product not doing well. Simple as that. We should never feel beholden to the industry for any thing. If the industry is in a decline or crash, it is the responsiblity of the industry to pull it out.

That said, I do agree that people should stop preordering. I agree people should stop buy games from a company while constantly complaining about said company.

But those are simply being a smart consumer. It's in the interest of saving your own money, not because you have any obligation to change the industry. It's not our fault SquareEnix and EA don't know how to budget and plan their games. Implying such is so bassackwards I have a hard time believing you're serious.

The state of the industry is the industry's fault.

 

[Yopaz]

It's really quite simple.

1) Never pre-order. Doesn't matter how inviting it looks, how much you like the company or series, you don't ever do it. No, shutup. Just don't.

2) Don't buy games until they're a week old, or until a handful of post release reviews are out- whichever comes last. It's these goddamn first week blind sales that drive the direction of the industry, and they are defined entirely on how well something is marketed.

One could also say you should boycott DRM and always online games, but that sentiment is as lost as a fart in a hurricane.

You simplify things too much here.

I was really looking forward to playing Tales of the Abyss when that was rleased in Europe for the first time. I knew that I was going to love the game, but I held off buying it. What was the rsult of this decision not to pre-order? It was sold out when I wanted to buy it. I checked everywhere, I even looked in foreign online stores and I couldn't get it. After6 months of searching every online retailer I know weekly, after cancelling it from several who didn't get it in stoxk weeks after I had ordered it I finally got the game and I loved it despite the fact that I had not read a single review, had not seen anyone talking about their opinion of the game. I even enjoyed it more for diving in blind rather than have it hyped up or knowing important details about it beforehand.

Then there's Bioshock. I bought that game a few months after it was released, I had read the reviews, I had read what other people thought of it Nd I had played and loved the demo. I played for an hour and then quit when I realized I didn't like it one bit. Despite the reviews, despite one of my friends recommending it, despite liking the demo I was still disappointed by my experience with the game. There are games that I have been sure I am going to love and I usually end up loving these games. Then there are games like Bioshock or Mass Effect that I buy because they receive a ton of praise and I end up not liking.

All in all, no amount of research can determine if you'll like a game or not (though generally crappy reviews can tell you to stay away) and reviews can build up the experience too much or even give away things you would have enjoyed learning on your own. Waiting because "the industry needs to learn" is a decent enough strategy, but this can backfire. Now I happily pre-ordered Tales of Xillia which is to be released in August and I know nothing about the game except that it's the highest ranking game in the series. Call that stupid or call me a sheep, but I'd rather make up my own mind about the game than look for what the critics say a week after release.