it has everything to do with it. The simple fact of making games that help that particular group resulted in a bad game. The bad game results in bad sales. Its a domino effect that gets starts it process @ the developers table when they talk about how they want the game to be.
if you don’t cater to casuals, you don’t have to worry about such a drastic domino effect because a good game that is good from square 1 of the developer process will more than likely have staying power as its the case with kof 13. Its not really being catered to anyone and it caters to what makes a good game.
Appeasing the casual market is stagnating the design process out the gate. Instead of making the best game possible, they have to worry whether or not some of their consumers would have a problem playing.
Capcom has to go back to catering to what makes a good game rather trying to build games that help casual players. It simply doesn’t work and results in fuck mechanics or fuck games in the process. We’ve had the last 4 games try to help casual players and every time there is a fuck mechanic in it. TvC had get out off jail free cards, sf4 has ultras that fuck game the game up, umvc3 XF is the worst of them all and sfxt has gems that allow players to be better than they really are. All of these are mechanics designed to help casual players but they end up fucking up the games from a tournament perspective.
The best way to cater to casuals is just to make a good game, then give them tournament information to access through the game. This way no one is left in the rain. OG’s still have a good game to play and new players aren’t left in the rain trying to figure out where the fuck to go. There is nothing wrong with genuinely earning skill rather than endlessly bitching about things people don’t want to practice so Capcom gives them tools to use. Eventually, those same tools get used by pro’s against other pro’s and now you have a fucked ass game.
tataki: there’s no reason for me to do any work for you. i’m not here to sell you on the site.
i just think you are overly misguided as to what gamasutra is. look at their blog page:
they have a section dedicated from blogs from select industry professionals, each post is labeled with a specifc aspect of game development. then even in the user blog where you still need to be talking about an aspect of game development, and even most of those come from professionals as well.
gamasutra isn’t for you. it isn’t. 90-99% of it has no relevancy to you.
but what is interesting about the article above is that it doesn’t look at the games failures from a gamer perspective. it looks at it from a developers perspective. yes, it is one of their less professional pieces with alot of editorialism, but that is why it is an opinion piece, not a objective piece with numbers and metrics and play test stats. its not directed at players, it directed at the types of people who make the decisions that essentially hurt products like this. it might also be interesting to people to understand at a fundamental level where this games shortcomings are and how certain things are taken into account when developing a title.
in the end, you might think its an agenda driven site, but often i’ve seen completely dissenting opinions on the very same page by articles written by two completely legit professionals. that is just how the industry is. capcom thinks they will get more profit by charging for dlc and enriching the experience, and namco thinks that they will get more profit by giving you the whole experience without dlc and only charging you for cosmetic differences. 2 very similiar companies with similar clout making completely opposite decisions… that is the video game industry.
I’m not a regular Gamasutra reader to be honest, but the article was pointed out to me, and I thought it was both notable and very well thought out.
Still, I spent about 5 minutes looking for a good article on there, and I found one for ya. It’s not terribly relatable to fighting games (especially since Capcom backed away some from the CCG element of gems), but if you play any other social game type (especially ones with a large amount of item sales), its a good read… the parallels are obvious.
I do want to ask though, there must have been some specific triggering moment for this site-hate. Was there some article equivalent to the Kotaku sexism one (as a random example) to spur the hate?
edit:
no seriously, you don’t get it at all. Your point has *absolutely nothing to do with this article. *None of the points addressed tie in to ‘catering to casuals’ at all.
Furthermore, the numbers don’t add up to what you’re saying. The games that are usually listed as being the most centered on casual players (and I don’t necessarily agree that they are so much, its more complex) are also the best-selling games, and the ones with the biggest tournament scenes to boot (Right now being SF4 and Marvel3 in the US).
But really, we just had a 5 million page thread that ended up being mostly focused on that subject, I don’t think we need to do that again
What you described isn’t opposite views. All the issue of pricing works under one simple rule- “we charge the maximum price that we know people will still fall for”.
That is why Capcom can sell whatever for 60$ + 200$ DLC because they know people will still buy at that price, and Sega sells VF for 15$ because people won’t buy it for more.
And the answer “go search for yourself” just proves that I do have a point when I say I have yet to see good insight from them. If you have seen some yourself it should have popped in your head in a mere second and linking wouldn’t be a problem.
See, but then NO ONE is happy (except the suit-wearing fucktards up in the top offices.) The devs make a shitty game, the players end up playing a shitty game… Seriously, anyone bitching about how bad SFxT was/is (and I don’t know because I haven’t played it) who also bought it…we can only blame you for Capcom making these kinds of games. The community needs to grow a spine and say, “You know what, we’re not going to support this game because it sucks.” That means people like Wong, Daigo, whoever. The best way to get better games is to grow a pair of balls and tell them, “Nope, try again.”
The problem is that a lot of the mechanics that cater to, well, people who don’t care about fighting games, is that they fuck up the game for the folks who DO care about fighting games. Being in the music industry, I can tell you that that industry fucked itself by making bands/artists play to people who don’t care about them. Do you want to hear AC/DC to disco? No. Do you want a Street Fighter game that anyone can win at after playing only an hour? No.
I think it’s still too soon to say that KoFXIII has “staying power.” It’s a good game, but it becomes King Of Corner Combos XIII at a certain point. I like the game, but there are things about it that I don’t really like, and the seeming emphasis on corner combos is one of them.
i’m not that easy to troll. I never said anything about “go search for yourself”. i more or less told you to not even bother because the site isn’t for you. what are your interests? you enjoy learning about how to improve art submission pipelines or market trends in mideast asia? maybe you like to hear about how to properly sync a work force or how x designer overcame the hardware limitation issues to render a model in half the time? yeah, let me just link one of those to you, and you’ll be sold instantly…
i’m not selling you on the site. and i’m not dumb enough to think i will and i’m not stupid enough to spend time to convince you. i would never tell you to go “search for yourself” when you have 0 reason to be on that site in the first place.
if you are going to try and troll me, you might as well troll me about things i’m actually saying.
and your capcom/sega whatever is just arguing semantics. i’m arguing business practices, you’re arguing end result. trying to simplify the scenario to its end result (purchase prices) has nothing to do with the path someone takes to get there. namco is trying to get just as much money as capcom, but have decided to go in 2 different directions with obtaining the same goal “get as much money as possible form users”. this conversation isn’t going to progress if you are just making up your own points to argue with.
Gamasutra is a site for the sole purpose of answering “why?” and “how?”. Not telling you what something is.
Stop treating it as the latter tataki, it makes you look really, really silly.
It’s a very, very useful site to understand the justifications and thought processes behind actions. These are valuable lessons to be learned and can teach you a lot about game development on many levels. What it doesn’t tell you is anything from a consumer standpoint, something you are.
Even if you disagree with something, you at least understand how someone came to a conclusion and the reasons and situations that led up to it. At the very least, if you think that’s a bad thing, you now have a mistake to avoid. This is how the site is useful. It’s not some cut and dry cookie cutter fact sheet. It’s not a review site. It’s a site that allows you to interpret the end result from the processes that resulted in that conclusion. It’s there to help broaden problem solving skills and avoid making the same mistake someone else made.
As a game developer, the site is incredibly useful. As a customer, it’s utterly useless.
The analysis was spot on from a marketing and developer standpoint. The design of the game was not called into question. Development and production choices were.
I think developers would be smart to educate themselves on the tournament player POV. They might actually make a good game that way. Things like XF are needless tools in a game. They don’t need to be there and if the developers understood the tournament player POV, they would of realized that and there would be no more shit comeback mechanics in fighters. We might even receive steady god like net code for fighters too. There is a shit ton they can learn from us
I don’t understand why this is so hard for people to understand. Kudos for breaking it down further but no one is going to read this shit since its the truth.
By focusing on this, you’re letting them get away with a bigger crime, which is not wanting to bother to spend the money for good games at all. The problem isn’t that they’re spending too much time trying to help casuals, the problem is that they figure half-assed is good enough, because hell the hardcore fans will buy it anyways!
And half-assed is the problem. None of the recent Capcom games are terrible, they’re just increasingly sloppy (SF4 was pretty solid, mvc3 was a wreck, sfxt was a disaster).
We can’t seriously talk about solutions if you can’t even understand the problem.
i don’t think it should matter. for a consumer, gamasutra is like the behind the scenes on a dvd. its cool and all for those that care, but more people don’t, and the only thing that’s important is whether the end product is good or not.
it shouldn’t be the consumers duty to educate themselves on the innerworkings of videogames; they should be worried about which product is worth spending money on. i always hate when people go “i’m going to buy this game to support insert reason here even though i know it won’t be that good.” in the end, whatever empathy you built up for this company or game because you read about an article about how they used this specific tech to do X with the game isn’t fair to the overall system. at best, its like giving the worlds most sloppiest, insignificant hand job… you aren’t making a meaningful purchase based on the end result, which cheapens the developer/consumer relationship.
like, people buying sfxt in some misguided attempt to help sustain the fighting game scene. the numbers in improvement are still going to be insignificant, and you are just rewarding capcom for doing a poor job with their game. even with a couple thousand people purchasing the game out of empathy, capcom still isn’t going to make a new fighting game until its shown to be profitable… you are just lessening their losses and validating their mistakes simply because you had some ulterior motive to your purchase instead of worrying if the game was going to be good or not.
i think it something where if its interesting to you, then you might want to delve into it a bit more. but if you are someone with a life and other things you are interested in, stay away. let companies make the game and market them to you. take that information and be smart with your purchases, because speaking with your wallet should be your only obligation as a consumer. and worrying about what goes on along the way behind the scenes doesn’t make you a smarter consumer, it just makes you a skewed data point along the path towards really making this industry better.
I wouldn’t say sf4 was solid. In my opinion it was mediocre. Hell, that’s me being nice about it there is alot i would change to it especially the movement. Marvel series was always a wreck but the reason the games we’re a wreck in the past (CPS2 Era) cause it was their experimentation series for the hardware and/or gameplay. SFxT quick cash-in like the ports of the old games, mega man 10, and Mega Man battle network games.
It’s true that you shouldn’t base your buying decisions on that kind of thing, but I’m not sure how many people actually do that. To me its part of being an informed consumer and more importantly having realistic expectations.
Especially when you get into the ‘design’ bits instead of the technical bits. There’s a huge amount of knowledge and well-developed theory about game design, and if we’re gonna discuss it (it comes up on here a lot, for instance), we should be informed on the concepts… and reading a real life account (like the one about the guy who made his game too complex and then went back and redesigned it by doing a tabletop test) is a lot more useful than reading a white paper or a wikipedia article. Not that the technical parts aren’t important too, that has come up a few times also, but that’s just so system-specific.
We’re probably getting in the realms of taste there. SF4 was solid (in the not fucked up sense) but definitely a game not all players liked… people complain about various things, sure, but its not a game where the word ‘broken’ comes up much, if at all. MvC3 seemed rushed to me even from the start… you can see it both in how much more work went into the early characters as compared to the late ones, and with the nigh-nonexistant balance testing. SFxT I’m with you on though, it came up in some corporate meeting probably about ‘synergy’, and was doomed to a poor bastard life from its inception.
I wanna hit again on MvC3 especially, I of course don’t know capcom internals at all, but didn’t it seem that they cut the budget massively about 2/3 of the way through the project? I always felt like there was a pretty specific line where they decided to cut back.
are you saying capcom doesn’t spend enough money making their games? last time I checked anime fighters are leagues better than sfxt and they cost far less to design. Capcom has enough money to make a good game and anime fighters seems to spend about 1\10th of what Capcom does on a fighter. They just want everyone to play their games and you can’t appease both sides and still have a good game. It doesn’t work
All I’m trying to say is that every time Gamasutra wrote something about issues that I did care about and as such, could judge their value (rather than technical talk and rendering models and shit) it was just horrible. So let’s just end with that.
Just looking at the fact that you buy or didn’t buy a game isn’t enough for a company to conclude WHY you didn’t do it.
A good game could have some awful things in it (for example KOF13’s net code) and you must be able to share feedback with the developer that you bought the game cuz it’s good, but the flaws are a big deal for you and must be addressed.
Voting with your feet isn’t always enough since your feet can’t talk…
I just said this up above, but Capcom’s thing seems to be Dilbert-esque management.
They set insanely tight schedules (which the article covers in depth), they seem to like wedging crap into the game for blandly mercenary reasons (eg Gems), and they seem to really really really skimp on playtesting (and in SFxT, even more basic QA).
So in essence,** they spend money on games the way a crappy movie adaptation does.** They don’t respect their players and think they can skimp on quality control. That’s the basic problem.
PS: Although its almost certainly true that capcom has bigger budgets, that info is *exceptionally *difficult to come by (I have tried a few times in the past, and tried again briefly just now). Money unfortunately doesn’t convert into a better game on a 1:1 ratio. Capcom is a bigger company with bigger overhead making bigger games (often with 2-5 times the number of characters, for instance). They of course also have much much different sales expectations ><
