Shiki nailed it. Capcom fighters up until CvS2 were clearly made for a more hardcore audience. That was a trend that continued to varying degrees by other fighting game creators as well - look at how crazy competitive Guilty Gear is, or KOF - and it stifled the audience. If you make your games appeal only to the competitive crowd, you are stifling your profit margins. You can see this in the shmup community now as well: practically the only major manufacturer in Japan is Cave, which produces shooters that only hardcore fans of the genre can manage.
Recently you have a trend towards making games more accessible, which causes the hardcore to bitch about how easy-mode the game is, but they sure are selling a lot more copies to make more games. Look at SF4, or BlazBlue, compared to their predecessors. Look at the hit that were the more casual-friendly Geometry Wars games, or to a lesser extent Cave’s own Deathsmiles. Who’d want to go back to tiny profits from there?
Nintendo set out to make a good fun party game, and accidentally made something competitive. If they tried to catch lightning in a bottle twice they’d probably just fuck it up and get people bitching one way or the other, and it was never their intention anyway. The competitive crowd is a few thousand people vs. millions of copies sold, I don’t think their complaints are denting the profit margins. Capcom’s not going to put out another ridiculously complex SF game like A3 specifically for their hardcore audience, nor should they be expected to.
The veracity of this “More hardcore = Less sales” statement is up to debate, no? Shmups were never an extremely profittable (for today’s standards, before someone points out Galaga or Asteroids or whatever) genre, their biggest advantage has always been that they cost little to produce compared to other games, so developers can turn a profit usually. Even the artsier modern shmup is still a lot cheaper to churn out and make assets for than your run of the mill 3D action game
This is also pretty much looking for confimation for the “More hardcore = Less sales” thing - It could be that gaming is just way bigger now than it was in the 80s or 90s. Isn’t it a bit of a leap of logic to assume it’s the “dumbing down” of previously hardcore genres that’s making them sell more, in general, nowadays?
Third rung, improbable/ Bird hung, unstoppable/ Lungs burn in the song notes, but fire climbs the ostriches’ long throat, regardless/ Contentment in hell’s flames after a long quest of slayin’ the heartless/ I’m just sayin’ the shit ain’t obvious…/ I’m just playin’, this shit is Godlessness/
Not that I agree with Synikal but it looks like you guys are confusing accessibility with underlying depth. Don’t worry, it seems like Sakurai was too.
Didn’t one of the later iterations SF2 widen the input window for dragon punches if not special moves? If not, I’m pretty sure most every game aftward did. How is that catering to the hardcore? What about super canceling become easier, special to super canceling, and super to super canceling? How about the several games mentioned that severely weakened the projectile game and/or footsie game? Is that catering to the hardcore?
^ Not sure where you’re going with that, but in many cases sometimes making a mechanic easier to use, more practical to implement in standard play IS catering to the more serious players.
this thing, making the game for the “hardcores” == less sales, is something that boders me, imo, the real reason why these games dont sell, its because they arent well advertised, examples of games that at high level require a good amount of understanding of the game and still sell well, like mvc2 prove otherwise
as i said, the developers should focus on making a game that its enjoyable at different levels of play, i have seen friends, that are casual players having a blast with gg, and they cant frc, sb, or do anything of the high level stuff, and they dont care either, since the game despite of being one of the most dificult to get into it, is still accesible to many of the stuff for the casuals
the same its for other fighting games, i have friends that love to play mvc2, but they arent capable of the mid level play, imo games like gg and mvc2 are on the right spectrum, have elements that let the casuals enjoy the game yet they have still enough room for the hardcores to explore
if the companies want to sell their games well, they need to make good marketing, and stop doing stupid stuff like cattering to casuals or hardcores, and just make games that are enjoyable
There is no debate. Simple games sell better. Shmups, at least until recently, were always accessible. You simply moved and shot. Many of these games did very well and are well remembered. They were a big part of the early arcades.
Well, it’s interesting in the shmup side of things. Most of the major producers of games in the genre either dropped out or closed down. In the late 80s/early 90s though, they were pretty big in the arcade and console realms. Look at the sheer glut of them on the market for the Turbo or Genesis. Then you started seeing games with more bullets and tinier hitboxes and confounding scoring systems, and suddenly you’re chasing away a good chunk of the audience that just wants to fly around and shoot shit, like me. I can count the number of Cave games I really liked on one hand.
You could use pinball in place of shmups as a genre of games that were absolutely huge but turned almost exclusively hardcore circa 1992, and now have trouble attracting new players. Only one company even still makes pinball machines, and they focus largely on that hardcore following… I can play an older pinball machine for several minutes, but I try to play Avatar or Iron Man and I’m out in no time. Yet both machines are considered to be fantastic if you’re a hardcore pinball player.
While it’s true the market is bigger now, it’s also true that throwing in multitudes of subsystems and custom combos and suchforth make a game look pretty overwhelming to someone who isn’t really big into fighters. Capcom pretty much simplified SF4 down to SF2 gameplay plus some extra shit that isn’t terribly hard to figure out but useful if you’re hardcore into it and left it at that. Compare to CvS2, where you have six grooves to choose from that are different in so many ways, plus baker’s dozens of characters to figure out, PLUS that roll canceling, and you get a game that’s not very friendly to new players. Marvel 2 was popular because it’s easy as hell to do impressive looking combos and supers, and because it had Marvel characters in it.
My view is that when you start catering to the specific audience that really gets into something, you run the risk and probability of alienating anyone else who may have wanted to get into it in the first place. You’ll always get some new blood, but if it isn’t enough to keep it profitable then you get another long-ass fighting game hiatus like Capcom took.
I do like the avatar! Robotron made it for me a while back; you can’t fuck with Sinistar.
It’s not only a belief, it’s basically a “truth” that permeated so many of their games. :lol:
I mean, you go with the likes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and it basically was a fanservicey, “Doujin-style” game that was meant to be a love letter to a manga that the dev team loved so very much. “Balance” was clearly not at the forefront of that project though, as the likes of Petshop should showcase.
Sakurai originally wanted smash to be competitive( at least when he created melee). Then when He saw all these smash whores creating dumb tourney rules w/o items he said to himself “Man this scene sucks, Im never gonna make Smash competitive again” and " No items really? These guys dont even know how to play smash uggh!!"
True Story. I connected telepathically with Sakurai’s mind and he relayed this crucial info to me.
Except that sf4 didn’t deliberately put in elements to try to prevent high level play. There is also tech involved in sf4 that most casual players will never do or maybe see.
Brawl took the opposite approach. The only tech they left in was di (which is unavoidable, unrrmovable mechanic) and powershielding. The only other tech in brawl that is worthwhile is roll projectile tossing. Then they removed l-cancelling wavedash and 90% of the other tech mechanics that made melee a highly technocal fighter. They even added in random tripping.
So on one hand you have Capcom dumbing down a game while attempting to maintain a deep game system that hardcore players can still enjoy, and on the other you have Nintendo dumbing down a game to prevent that depth.
Yep. I always thought of smash as kind of a “sandbox” fighting game in the sense that you can do what you want with it. If you want to have madness with free for alls or intense 1v1’s, so be it. If Sakurai wants to force a “fun” atmosphere on his gamers, he should make Smash a Mario Party minigame and stop giving us options.
Oh yes. Because, you know, he certainly didn’t put anything in the game to turn off items or anything like that. The 7,000,000 copies that can turn off items are hacked.
