Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[NuclearKangaroo]

The problem was money. There was a mindset that the only games that made money were 'blockbuster' games and in the HD generation that meant pouring tens and more frequently hundreds of millions of dollars into every single game. In the traditional model of the console industry you pretty much needed a publisher of at least medium size to see a retail release. This in turn led to publishers having a monopoly on content which they exerted with increasing force.

The artistically bankrupt empty suits at the publisher basically do this:

Step one; Mission Creep
"If you add multiplayer we will get Halo/ Call of Duty players, add multiplayer or else we are shelving you"
"We need the game to be as 'cinematic' as the competition or we will look old hat. do that"
"The budget is now spiraling out of control but don't worry, big budget games never fail."
"Since the budget is so high we are uncomfortable with the risks we feel you are taking, stick close to this focus group tested formula and we won't lose any money"
"GAME X is making billions! I know we are already a year in but make our game more like GAME X"
"CORE ORIGINAL IDEA X isn't working in this new framework. Lose it."

Step Two; Developer Destruction
"What do you mean you don't like the game you're making anymore? We've sunk millions into this now, you no longer get a say in it. It's our money."
"We're not happy with the progress your team is making, we're installing some of our publisher guys to oversee the final part of the project"
"We need to have DLC ready for day one to make our money back, lock this content on the disk and take some guys off the main game to work on more DLC. It just makes business sense."
"We're adding freemium elements to the game. They make more money."
"This game needs to be huge. We're doing a $100million marketing campaign"

Step Three: Reality Bites
"The mood in independent previews and on community sites is hostile to the game. We need an 8.0 or more on metacritic. Send the PR guys to gag them!"
"What do you mean backlash? The game isn't even out yet, how can people hate it!"
"The game has launched. Reviews say it is polished but very generic, the scores are not great. They must be wrong. We made the right business decisions. And blacklist that Jim Sterling, he only gave us 6/10!!"
"We sold millions of units but not as many as we projected based on Call of Duty numbers We're not paying you. You must have failed. We told you do make the game this way, you must have messed it up. We're firing half of your team. "
"FOUNDING MEMBER X is leaving the company now the project is complete. The original team and developer has now either left or been merged into another studio. Your IP is now being farmed out as a mobile game"

Step Four: Ignore reality
"We're a multi billion dollar publisher, the game was made according to our strict formula or what makes money elsewhere but it still failed. We're much smarter than those below us therefore the developer must have failed us. Next time We'll make them do it even more our way if we're not going to fail again"


It's partly the same mindset that has driven the Mobile gaming space into the ground. The indiustry is filled with a box factory mindset where if you copy everyone else and stick to the formula you can't lose money. Any other ideas are tossed out in favor of a process that isn't creative and purely driven by ideas that have nothing to do with the actual game design.

fuckin' this, im sick and tired of devs making games with a checklist

-it must be cinematic
-it must cost 60 bucks
-it must have multiplayer
-it must have DLC
-dont support mods! theyll only steal our DLC sales!
-make it more like a shooter!

i mean fuck, when are they going to learn, when the consumer base tells you, "you are doing it fucking wrong!" maybe you should listen to it

 

[Yminale]

you cant destroy 15 years of RTS experience with just one game

Petroglyph. I don't really need to say any more on that.

pff im sorry what? i can barely see any information on their games, they are way way far from being a critically acclaimed RTS developer

Well you may have heard of a little game that the developers (not the company) once helped develop. I think it was called Command & Conquer. Yep these people formerly worked for Westwood studio

 

[Sticky]

And I agree, Square really did drop the ball with FF9, that doesn't change that it was a very clear indication that they had abandoned old Final Fantasy

Well that was Jim's point. It wasn't the audience that abandoned (there still was a dedicated global fanbase of at least 5 million people) FFIX and traditional JRPG's , it was the people running SQUENIX.

My argument was that Jim was missing the REASON they made that decision, which is that the people buying final fantasy games told Square what they wanted with their money. Square following suit can hardly be blamed on Square despite how much Jim and many others rail on him for it.

Though honestly I think people are too critical of SQUENIX. No one innovates as relentlessly as SQUENIX. Look at what they added (strong story, identifiable characters, the job system, FMV, first use of polygon 3d based engine, real time based combat system). This is the company that gave us Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and the World Ends with You. Personally I never understood the hate that FFXIII generated. Exploration and stupid minigames are the things I hated most of FF games. No one seems to notice that the combat system is COMPLETELY BROKEN. They definitely tried to fix things with FFXIII-2 and FFXIII-3. Any SQENIX fan will tell you that every iteration has to be judged separately, some of it will work and some of it won't.

And I can only agree with this.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

What JRPG fans still want is to explore an interesting world with endearing characters. Most long-time-JRPG-fans-but-detractors-of-recent-Final-Fantasy-games will tell that that is what FF has been lacking.

Yet when Squeenix delivered what they were asking for with FF12, the very same people complained because the game had no story

He said with endearing characters, not Vaan and Penelololololol. Problem with FF12 is all it really had was exploring, and more exploring, and a weak weak story that was basically irrelevant because you spent 100 hours running around the world doing everything EXCEPT the story.

I liked FF12, but I thought it was a huge step in the wrong direction for the series. Unfortunately they overcompensated in the other direction with FF13 and we got little to no exploration at all, AND still had some of the worst characters to ever grace a video game.

XII was basically a dumbed down FFXI system without the online interactions and depth and co-operation that made it interesting and fun. XI was challenging, XII you could get lvl 3 quickenings super early in the game and solo bosses in 1 move 20 hours into the game. 20 hours!


And don't remind me about Gambits. The game literally played itself. They say this about XIII but no, in XIII you still need to switch paradigms and do stuff in the right order to get the 5 star rating. XII had no ratings and gambits made it play itself.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

you cant destroy 15 years of RTS experience with just one game

Petroglyph. I don't really need to say any more on that.

pff im sorry what? i can barely see any information on their games, they are way way far from being a critically acclaimed RTS developer

Well you may have heard of a little game that the developers (not the company) once helped develop. I think it was called Command & Conquer. Yep these people formerly worked for Westwood studio

not all of westwood

 

[TheDefenestrator]

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?

That's Daylight. It's not out yet but Jim has a couple Let's Play vids of it on his YouTube.

I was around when the first wave of Survival Horror petered out and, honestly, I blame Resident Evil 4. There were a lot of same-y tank-controls-and-fixed-cameras style Survival Horror games during that time and, as good a game as it was, RE4 showed that you could update a stale franchise into a more mainstream action game and succeed. It became the model and the excuse every big publisher used to justify a blatant cash grab... right up to EA turning Dead Space 3 in a brain dead, big budget action game with micro-transactions and co-op. Why think differently about how to scare your audience when you can just add more guns?

All it really takes is one modest success to make these companies abandon their senses and crawl over themselves to make their version of someone else's popular game.

 

[JayRPG]

I never understood it either.

Final Fantasy 10 was the 3rd best selling Final Fantasy of all time, and a mere 0.15 million copies behind Final Fantasy 8 which was riding 7's coattails.

The very next thing they do, even though the series is selling as good as ever, is totally change the battle system, they even put it on promotional posters and early QnA's on the subject "Veteran Final Fantasy players might not like the new battle system, we are trying to make it more active".

The inevitable happens and Final Fantasy 12 just a little over half of the sales FF10 did.

So they changed the battle system from turn-based into this sort of action hybrid, they lose sales (almost 50%) but their decision is to make the battle system even more action-y hybrid? What? why? how? who makes these decisions?

Did they think FF12 didn't reach the sales of pretty much every other traditional turn-based Final Fantasy before it because of the story rather than the huge, glaring change they had touted as something veteran players might not like even before release?

Of course there is a market in the West for JRPGs, hell, if anything the west wants more JRPGs, it's a niche but a pretty large one - They would only have to do a bit of google searching to see that in some cases we are so desperate for a localisation we end up doing it ourselves in (or donating to) fan-translated versions, does that not show you there is an audience over here for JRPGs when we are literally taking it into our own hands to translate an entire game funded solely on donations and free-time?

 

[Mangue Surfer]

You guys know that every FF is very different from its predecessor, right?! Maybe you're under the false impression that the early FFs are all the same because the graphics but was just the hardware limitations of the time. FF 2 already was polemic in its mechanical changes, so much that Square gave up to launch the game in the west.

FF is about re imagination an experimentation, obviously with so many changes someone will always hate this or that game but is part of the process.

But know you're happy because they will infinitely clone FF 3?! AH FUCK YOU!

And for all of you whoare expecting FF 7 remake, .!.

 

[Yminale]

My argument was that Jim was missing the REASON they made that decision, which is that the people buying final fantasy games told Square what they wanted with their money. Square following suit can hardly be blamed on Square despite how much Jim and many others rail on him for it.

No you can blame SQUENIX because you can't determine a trend with ONE data point. Also why isn't FFX a traditional JRPG, it has all the elements of a JRPG except that it doesn't have pilot-able airship. If you look at FFXII which is radically different gameplay than other FF games than I think Jim has a point.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

Spoiler

The problem was money. There was a mindset that the only games that made money were 'blockbuster' games and in the HD generation that meant pouring tens and more frequently hundreds of millions of dollars into every single game. In the traditional model of the console industry you pretty much needed a publisher of at least medium size to see a retail release. This in turn led to publishers having a monopoly on content which they exerted with increasing force.

The artistically bankrupt empty suits at the publisher basically do this:

Step one; Mission Creep
"If you add multiplayer we will get Halo/ Call of Duty players, add multiplayer or else we are shelving you"
"We need the game to be as 'cinematic' as the competition or we will look old hat. do that"
"The budget is now spiraling out of control but don't worry, big budget games never fail."
"Since the budget is so high we are uncomfortable with the risks we feel you are taking, stick close to this focus group tested formula and we won't lose any money"
"GAME X is making billions! I know we are already a year in but make our game more like GAME X"
"CORE ORIGINAL IDEA X isn't working in this new framework. Lose it."

Step Two; Developer Destruction
"What do you mean you don't like the game you're making anymore? We've sunk millions into this now, you no longer get a say in it. It's our money."
"We're not happy with the progress your team is making, we're installing some of our publisher guys to oversee the final part of the project"
"We need to have DLC ready for day one to make our money back, lock this content on the disk and take some guys off the main game to work on more DLC. It just makes business sense."
"We're adding freemium elements to the game. They make more money."
"This game needs to be huge. We're doing a $100million marketing campaign"

Step Three: Reality Bites
"The mood in independent previews and on community sites is hostile to the game. We need an 8.0 or more on metacritic. Send the PR guys to gag them!"
"What do you mean backlash? The game isn't even out yet, how can people hate it!"
"The game has launched. Reviews say it is polished but very generic, the scores are not great. They must be wrong. We made the right business decisions. And blacklist that Jim Sterling, he only gave us 6/10!!"
"We sold millions of units but not as many as we projected based on Call of Duty numbers We're not paying you. You must have failed. We told you do make the game this way, you must have messed it up. We're firing half of your team. "
"FOUNDING MEMBER X is leaving the company now the project is complete. The original team and developer has now either left or been merged into another studio. Your IP is now being farmed out as a mobile game"

Step Four: Ignore reality
"We're a multi billion dollar publisher, the game was made according to our strict formula or what makes money elsewhere but it still failed. We're much smarter than those below us therefore the developer must have failed us. Next time We'll make them do it even more our way if we're not going to fail again"


It's partly the same mindset that has driven the Mobile gaming space into the ground. The indiustry is filled with a box factory mindset where if you copy everyone else and stick to the formula you can't lose money. Any other ideas are tossed out in favor of a process that isn't creative and purely driven by ideas that have nothing to do with the actual game design.

fuckin' this, im sick and tired of devs making games with a checklist

-it must be cinematic
-it must cost 60 bucks
-it must have multiplayer
-it must have DLC
-dont support mods! theyll only steal our DLC sales!
-make it more like a shooter!

i mean fuck, when are they going to learn, when the consumer base tells you, "you are doing it fucking wrong!" maybe you should listen to it

For a very specific criticism along these lines as a PC gamer i often hear many big publishers whine that "Our games don't make money on the PC because of piracy and the fact that the PC is shrinking as a platform, therefore we don't want to spend money porting them properly"

The fact that publishers like to blame gamers and ignore the MASSIVE indie boom with people even going so far as to take part in a bad customer system and buy alpha build games to get some scraps of innovation really irks me. It's the best example of their circular logic and twisting of reality to suit their world view.

The reason many AAA games don't sell well on the PC is BECAUSE of their console price matching and poor port quality. It's a chicken and egg situation, how can your game sell well on the PC when it is a terrible game being sold for £55? Publishers don't know how the game market works. Its that simple, they don't have a fucking clue. If you make bad games people are less inclined to buy them. Shocking i know.

I think the saddest indictment of the modern AAA gaming industry is this; they no longer know what a good game is. They can no longer tell if they are making crap. The developer is so shut out of the creative process that there are no creative decisions being made.

not to mention now that steam is comparable to either the PS3 or Xbox in userbase, 75 million users back in january, this dumb excuse no longer holds water, some games even sell more on PC, games like L4D2, FEZ, Super Meat boy, etc

this "its everyone else's fault" excuse ive seem being used by ubisoft more than anybody, when asscreed sells 1 less unit than expected, its always the pirates fault, or the used game market's fault, we must put intrusive DRM in our games now and online passes for fucking single player games

sometimes your game is only going to sell X amount and thats the end of the story, any effort you might make to earn any more customers might only drive customers away

 

[RandV80]

I don't quite agree with Jim's comments regarding JRPGs. On other forums I visit, Japanese games (and their RPGs in particular) get a lot of flak for "refusing to evolve" or "not going with the times". I can't help but suspect that FFXIIII and its sequels were attempts from Square-Enix to respond to that criticism.

Yes you see that opinion a lot but I always get the impression that the people saying this were never really JRPG fans to begin with, but rather more the mass market opinion when trying out JRPG's rather than the opinions of the actual niche fanbase. I mean really when you get down and analyze it you'll be hard pressed to find a genre that innovates more than the JRPG.

 

[Yminale]

You guys know that every FF is very different from its predecessor, right?!

And SQUENIX still makes excellent JRPG's. Everybody talks about Bravely Default. Well what about Chaos Ring and Final Fantasy Dimensions, both of which use traditional turn based combat and FFD uses a 2D engines. All the Bravest besides, SQUENIX is the most aggressive in developing for the mobile market (but come on $15 for Chrono Trigger).

 

[JayRPG]

You guys know that every FF is very different from its predecessor, right?! Maybe you're under the false impression that the early FFs are all the same because the graphics but was just the hardware limitations of the time. FF 2 already was polemic in its mechanical changes, so much that Square gave up to launch the game in the west.

FF is about re imagination an experimentation, obviously with so many changes someone will always hate this or that game but is part of the process.

But know you're happy because they will infinitely clone FF 3?! AH FUCK YOU!

And for all of you whoare expecting FF 7 remake, .!.

Of course they changed the game, new story, new universe, new characters and even new game mechanics BUT the one constant was the battle system, it was always turn based - yes they did make changes but they were all minor, FF10 was essentially FF9 but with the ability to switch out characters during battle and every other one was very similar.

Turn-based battle systems are (or I should say were) indicative of a JRPG, that and large sprawling worlds, one of those was dumped in FF12 which lead to mediocre sales which then lead them not to rectify but to drop both core elements of the JRPG genre in FF13 which lead to.. well it lead to FF13.

The story in 12 was great and so were the characters, the world was good too, they lost sales on changing the one thing that had remained constant in the entire series.

For me, personally, I like turn-based battle systems, I can laze about in bed or on my couch, playing the game with the controller in one-hand, I can sit and focus on the story and just have fun but with active/action based combat I have to be at attention at all times, I can't laze about I have to be sitting in a perfect position with both hands on the controller, my eyes fixed to the screen so I don't make a mistake.

I'm not saying Action based combat is bad, I also like the Tales series which is largely action based, what I'm saying is that there is a market for Turn-based and there is certainly room for both turn-based and action.

 

[Yminale]

Yes you see that opinion a lot but I always get the impression that the people saying this were never really JRPG fans to begin with, but rather more the mass market opinion when trying out JRPG's rather than the opinions of the actual niche fanbase. I mean really when you get down and analyze it you'll be hard pressed to find a genre that innovates more than the JRPG.

Thank you. I was about to post the same thing (and it's not only JRPG's). So called game critics (professional or otherwise) are one of the MAIN reasons companies try to innovate. For years, SQUENIX has been trying to move away from turn based combat and it lead to awful mess that is FFXIII just because of the constant criticism.

 

[D YellowMadness]

A similar problem in media is that companies keep assuming that nearly anything with a female protagonist or major female character will fail & if they do let anything like that be made they wanna keep the female character out of the commercials & off of the cover. People tried to convince Naughty Dog to keep Ellie off of the cover of the Last Of Us, people tried to convince the creators of the Kick-Ass movie to leave Hit Girl out of the movie entirely. Popular female characters keep getting left out of Street Fighter & Capcom VS games in favor of unpopular male characters. Games are often written like you're playing as a male even when you choose to play as a female. Jill & Claire keep getting left out of Resident Evil & replaced by new, more generic, women as if to create a collective harem across the series. Elizabeth was left off of the cover of Bioshock Infinite even though she's basically the main character.

You'd think that, by now, these people would've learned from stuff like Tomb Raider, The Last Of Us, Resident Evil 3, Bioshock Infinite, Half-Life 2, Portal, Beyond Good & Evil, Mirror's Edge, & Heavenly Sword.

 

[Saltyk]

You know what? The last Final Fantasy I really enjoyed and even beat was FFX. I actually thought FFXII had an interesting story, though Vaan was entirely worthless. But I didn't enjoy the combat (it's a bad sign when I have to watch TV to entertain myself while playing a video game) and the Gambit system was both cheap and lacked the customization since you had to buy the Gambits. And FFXIII played itself for you, so.....

But FFX had turn based combat and random battles. You don't want to use Random Battles? Do like you did in Chrono Trigger and FFXIII, Square! But I actually liked being able to strategize and control all of my characters. That's what I want in my JRPGs combat. If I want action, I'll play an action game! If I want an FPS, I'll play an FPS. But if I want to play a JRPG, I'll dust off my PS1.

Admittedly, FFXV might do well if it's doing a Kingdom Hearts style system. Still, wouldn't be mad about a classic turn based system with up to date graphics.

 

[Vault101]

I always wondered whee exactly it was coming from when Somone said BS like "single player games are no longer" just look at titanfall I mean Christ, goat simulator has more lasting appeal and even though I'm looking forward to evolve I know it will never accrue as many hours as XCOM....you know, that game that No one played because it don't conform to what's popular?

 

[Yminale]

The one criticism I have for Jim is that the situation is not as simple as he makes it to be. People's taste are cyclic in nature. Look at Titanfall, it looks shiny and new but the gameplay came straight from Starsiege: Tribes. What happened was "realistic" cover based shooters became popular and other FPS were dropped. People said adventure games are dead but thanks to GOG and mobile devices, people are rediscovering lost treasures and new games are being made. Even Space sims are coming back thanks to Eve Online and Star Citizen. People are going to get sick of even CoD and then after a few years it's going to comeback and be as popular as ever.

 

[Lilani]

Huh, guess I'll be picking up Bravely Default then. I saw it yesterday when I went to GameStop to pick up Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, and the only reason I didn't grab it too was because I have this rule about impulse buying a game when I'm already set on buying another.

Anyway, I'm really glad Jim brought this up. I've seen discussions like this crop up on these forums every now and then, about the state of survival horror games, and there seemed to be two very distinct camps involved in these discussions. There's the "Ugh, survival horror is dead, you never see these games anymore" camp, and the "What the fuck are you all on, have you not seen survival horror games X, Y, and Z appear on Steam just in the last couple of months to rave reviews and great sales?" camp. Both of these camps can't be right at the same time, so if the second camp is correct then the first camp must just not be paying attention.

And I have noticed a slight blind spot in some console gamers who don't play PC games, and thus are completely unaware when games like Amnesia and Slender and LIMBO become huge hits. So perhaps these devs have the same sort of blind spots, where if a genre like survival horror is finding most of its success on PC and it's a developer like Capcom we're talking about who mostly deals with console games, then perhaps they are aware of these games but for some reason assume that because they're all on PC they simply cannot succeed anywhere else, and thus simply do not exist to them.

Along with that, I think there's definitely an element of trying to make headlines by "changing things up" as Square did with FFXII, and then rather than admitting their mistake and getting back to basics simply running with it and hoping for the best. Changing things up can work, just look at how the Mario and Zelda games have changed throughout their histories. But when those games changed, it was to bring a brand new experience to the table, not to water down the current experience with other elements to appeal to a particular audience's sensibilities.

 

[KazeAizen]

Personally I didn't see a problem with Square Enix and what it did with Final Fantasy XIII series. I mean the other big series they made is an action based RPG. I mean I understand the video and I agree but I still think people over reacted to the XIII series as a whole.