You can’t fund the future, if the future is making you go bankrupt. Capcom for example, instead of relying on RE to make money, or in your case Company X making mondo grondo world death of souphanosinphone, what they can do is make games like say Ghouls and Ghouls and use the profits from those games to fund bigger games. Banking on big franchises is not sustainable, and taking gambles on huge spectacles neither is. They can however, take advantage of xbox marketplace and PS3 store to make good linear games that don’t require millions of dollars to make all the while making good profit from it and offseting the risk associated with making grandeur games.
If you think open ended games are superior, therefore no money should be spent on making fun simple linear games simply because you believe it has no part in the future. Well all I have to say is LOL.
Umm yes it is. New IPs are a gamble, existing strong IPs are your financial backup plan to make those gambles.
And going backwards in terms on genre is not a good business plan. Video games (as with art in general) are becoming bigger and more expensive because of technological advances.
You can keep a division that specializes in a very specific sub genre of the past and can cater to its now small, dedicated crowd, like with ArcSys’ HCU team, but it can never be the sole direction of the company.
Even Cave has to venture to shitty mobile games, since just making amazing Danmaku’s isn’t enough anymore.
you must have missed the part in my other post where I said that they are inexpensive to make, can generate easy money, offset the cost of bigger games, and is a way to supplement income to generate even more money for your big projects. Not once did I say that these games should become the focus.
Let me simplyfy this for you.
I DON’T ALWAYS WANT TO PLAY SKYRIM or BATMAN ARKHAM WHATEVER. And there is always going to be a large portion of the “gamer” population (whatever that means) that is going to want to play something more simple, linear, or nostalgic along with the big IP’s. So what companies can do is make these simple cheap games with current tech and make a money of it so they can make a lot more SKYRIMS or RE and develop new IP’s with new ideas. They can also use this smaller market that presents less RISK, to develop new ideas and test them with familiar games.
But let me guess, that’s a waste of time and not the future, therefor im the fatass in Havatchu’s funny and relevant comic strip.
Most companies seem to disagree with you on how worthy of an investment they are. But I agree- If you use cunning enough tactics to market it, even a single no talent hobo can make a best-selling video game.
Trenched and Flower were not 2D. Fat Princess was not a shitty 2D game (hint: it also didn’t have “retro” graphics). Trine wasn’t a shitty either. We also got Deathspank and Bastion (but bastion has 2D graphics). You could have asked for more clarification on my statement instead of a dumb ass rebuttal that did not addressed my original point. Here’s a clue: I was referring to gameplay not graphics.
Nintendo makes a lot more money, ooh big fucking deal you idiot. Why the fuck should I care how much money a company makes? I don’t give a shit about sales, because I’m a consumer, not a corporation, and anyone who uses “my favorite company makes more money than yours” as an argument for why their games are good has to qualify for the most enormous shithead on the planet. Activision makes more money than Sega or Konami, that automatically means I should enjoy Activision’s games more! You colossal fucking retard.
“You just don’t like my favorite company’s games because they’re fun” is also a fallacious argument, no they’re not fun, “fun” is entirely subjective you stupid pile of shit. There is no objective qualifier for fun, everyone has a different opinion of what is and what isn’t fun. Zelda’s gameplay has not evolved or done anything even slightly interesting, unpredictable or original since 1998 and I am quite bored with it, same with Mario. Those games both fucking suck to me. If you like them, that’s fine, I don’t give the slightest fuck about what you like. You’re a stupid baby that likes drawing on the walls with your own shit? Again, I don’t care, just don’t try to convince me to do it or that it’s somehow better than what I consider fun because I’m not ever going to enjoy it.
Saying someone doesn’t play games for fun is the stupidest thing you can possibly say. Oh I guess I play games for the money they give me then. Or maybe I play games to feed myself. I must play games because they aid my digestive process. They help me learn practical skills like carpentry or homemaking. Just stop talking you idiot, you’re only embarrassing yourself with the crap you say.
IIRC it was basically that story is relevant, but gameplay mechanics are supposed to outshine the story.
The dumbest thing is that importance of gameplay mechanics often gets muddled into nostalgia which gets muddled into fanboyism/IE hardcore, whereas story often gets muddled into bright eyed optimism which gets muddled into casual.
What it boils down to me is, when videogames were just making it big in the mainstream it was always just about being a video game. Now there are emerging sub-genres that are more akin to open-ended stories, those games have always been around, but games like Heavy Rain and others are gaining more ground.
Now there are people who’s concept of a what a videogame is from when they were younger is more along the lines of videogame rather than videogame as it used to be.
It appears to me that their rhetoric is that a videogame is supposed to be totally immersive experience, akin to a book or movie. This is not how videogames were made back then, mostly because of obviously little funds to focus on anything other than the gameplay mechanics, and at best some pretty graphics to put asses in seats.
Dumbest of all neither is going to kill the other, they are just going to veer back and forth in popularity just as the main gateway to videogames used to be platformers/sidescrollers, it is now largely FPS games.
As I see it.
Your mileage may vary.
Stop bitching about videogames not being videogames and videogames not being videogames.
All it does is make people who play videogames seem like obsessive shutins.
I was referring to a quote where you were talking about so called “independent” developers. (Go see the quote for yourself)
Games by Sony like Fat Princess and Flower=independent? If you want to call every game that suits your needs “independent” then go ahead but at least be clear about which ones you are talking about.
And you’ve already established the type of games you like, and there’s no point in discussing it. If you don’t get enjoyment from complex mechanics and real suspense caused by real challenge and punishment then there’s nothing to talk about. Immersion is not for everyone.
I like this post because it mentions me and I have an ego.
As for Nintendo at E3, I’ll say what I said in the totally awesome podcast in my sig: good that they’re reaching out for the third parties, but it’s disappointing the big showings were all current gen games.
Of course, in the thousands of games Nintendo’s released throughout their years there’s bound to be some I like. I particularly like the Wario Land series and F-Zero. But that’s meaningless. I’m not letting my nostalgia for them delude me into thinking they’re good these days.
Like, of course I played Mario a lot when I was a kid. But that doesn’t mean that it was the best game ever, it was just good. Same goes for basically every Nintendo game. They’re competent, and sometimes they release one that’s exceptional. But the games I consider my childhood favorites weren’t made by Nintendo at all. The games I enjoyed the most on the SNES were made by Konami, Capcom and other companies. What made the SNES so good was its massive third party support, which is exactly the thing that Nintendo lacks these days that makes their COMPETITORS good. When people look back on Nintendo fondly it’s just because what they had a lot of was good quality. Encountering a game on the Nintendo systems with bad controls or poor design was actually fairly uncommon. Link to the Past was by no means the best game on the SNES, indeed there was none that could be called the best. Almost all of the stuff on the SNES was good. LTTP was just another one. The games of that age were defined by TMNT, Final Fantasy, Megaman, you know, a whole bunch of non-Nintendo properties. So when I see people going “OMG Zelda and Mario were the best games of my childhood” I’m like no they weren’t, you dumb fanboy, you’re completely full of shit. Because there were a ton of great games on the SNES and NES, of which Zelda and Mario just made up an incredibly tiny fraction. They give Nintendo all the credit for the gaming they experienced as kids which includes all the stuff they didn’t make which I find disingenuous. Developers and their variety of different IP are what define console generations, not just the labors of any one console manufacturer. So fuck Nintendo with a cherry on top.
i do see a lot of these so called “nerd gamers” clamming how much they LOVE zelda when in truth they don’t know shit about it and just want to be part of something or to be trendy. Sure you should hate them but should you hate nintendo because of them? i mean if people did play these games as a child and were given fond memories for playing them they should be giving nintendo credit for loving something they made, and sure these nintendo games make up a small fraction but they have had quite a big impact. as for everyone giving credit to nintendo for what others have created sure maybe the people who aren’t as knowledge able about the gaming industry but that statement is a bit of a hasty generalization.
and the same could be said about sony and microsoft there are a lot of fanboys out there who love these systems because of those 3rd party developers.
i like nintendo i like how they take on the gaming industry. you could call me a nintendo fanboy ,but nintendo is not all i see nor the only developer i like.
EDIT: I also like how nintendo has the balls to try something new