Jimquisition: An Industry Of Pitiful Cowards

[Redd the Sock]

Well, the fear isn't entirely unjustified. I've said it before, gamers can be fickle and over prone to hype. Series like Shin Megami Tensei, Etrian Odessa, or the Atelier series try to give us more traditional JRPGs, but if they don't get the marketing and /or 10/0 metacritic scores, they don't get piked up by anyone looking for the shiniest object. It's not hard to get to the genre not being popular when your competition only sell a couple hundred thousand at best and only keep the doors open by extreme cost cutting. You'd have to be pretty think to wonder why a company would rather emulate something selling 10 million than the game selling 2% of that.

Of course, to do that you have to have talent (Saint's Row spawned out of a me too for GTA, and some of these companies are out of their depth. When I play even something shitty from NIS I get a sense to trying to appeal to an audience, however small. FF-XIII I get one sense of a developers vanity project they won't let go wrapped in ideas that are at best poorly thought out and at worst, acts of sabotage. RE6 didn't do well on a poor COD clone without the cheesy soap opera like story that we like in the original 4 games. Hell, history is repeating. There was a time we though we'd seen the last 2D fighter or platformer, only to have MvC3 or New super Mario kill in sales.

Guess the lesson is not to count anything out.

 

[Sticky]

You may notice that after FFIX, the series started to slowly decline. This is no coincidence, FF9 really was the beginning of the end for traditional Final Fantasy. It was where FF began to stagnate and Square started trying to find more and more places to take the series as a whole. We can see where that has taken the series so far.

Um, what? FF10 is a far better game than FF9. FF9 is probably my least favorite FF game excluding the two awful ones (FF2 and FF3). FF9 was a low point for sure, that rebounded with FF10. (Not so much FF10-2, and DEFINITELY not with Dirge of Cerberus) And it's not like FF10 wasn't that different of a game compared to FF8, so what did they abandon, exactly?

I said nothing about the quality of FFX. FFX actually did a lot better than FF9.

Also this thread brings up another good point: What did Bravely Default do right to where it didn't have to have a lavish budget in order to be considered successful? It didn't sell as much as even the typical FF game that's considered a huge failure, but it didn't have to. So what made Square suddenly consider that it was a 'good direction'?

 

[Daemascus]

The same happened to space fighter games... The industry dropped them cause they thought they weren't popular, after great stuff like X-Wing versus Tie Fighter and Freespace 2. Right up till Star Citizen proved them 41 million dollars wrong. And still counting.

And I have to question, outside of those that have backed the project, and thus are already going ot get the game, who else is going to get it after being completed?

Anyone who purchases it after release, just like any other game. Some people may want to wait for a finshed product before putting money on it(wisely, unlike me).

 

[editor729]

@Jim - spot on observations as always, and I hope you get the new wall covering soon - feel your pain.

I just wanted to give one observation - I do not know the reason for your skirting of the issue regarding what caused the publishers to run scared of their own shadow, but I would like to give you my take.

When you mention the 'suits' I see a more insidious group - retirement of the "The Emperor's New Clothes" tale; the consumer games trade resembling that vain Emperor who cares about nothing except wearing and displaying clothes, who goes on to hire some swindlers who promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit.

For the console trade, those swindlers are the same that advised the publishers they knew best regarding what games to develop, whats best in how Microsoft should develop their next-gen console, and that they knew best regarding DRM and freemium. And what happens after these swindlers are asked to prove themselves after failure - they jump ship, leave the corporations in debt and try and fake into another corporation! What hold do these 'suits' have over their fellow executives that their BS is swallowed hock and line? Should the consumer media start reporting the failed strategies more than the hype - and start printing their names!

More power to your elbow Jim.

 

[Strazdas]

so i guess ill be maknig the unpopular opinion here because i actually liked the different music you had last week. oh well, hopefully youll be getting a nice new backdrop out of it.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Why the sudden change? Especially following the boom of the PS2 era?
Three causes.

1) Golden Geese.
Halo (series), World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4.
Highly polished, highly formulaic, multiplayer-centric.
Makes ludicrous amounts of money relative to everything we had seen prior to that, and consistently.

2) Economic Recession. The threat of folks giving up their luxuries due to reduced income.

3) Booming media. Basically, games started competing indirectly with this huge surge of entertainment media.
An audience's time (and money) is finite and with that comes shortened attention spans by necessity.
Leading to bloating costs in advertising, and thus marketing.

And thus, the new mentality shifted to blockbusters-only.
Those other guys are making stupid amounts of money, so copy them! Copy EVERYTHING!

"Throw more money at it! More bombastic! More advertising!"
"What? That didn't work? Well Call of Duty broke more sales records, so obviously we just need to copy MOAR! THROW EVEN MOAR MONEY AT IT!! I don't care if we have to sell 6 million units just to break even, DO IT!"

 

[daxterx2005]

I wish Platformers were back on top again...

 

[Cecilthedarkknight_234]

This is a tad off topic but why is there no love for dragon quest/warrior. In all honesty this is the only series square-enix has been faithful over the years aside from their experiment with 10 on the wii/wii-u. Yet I hardly ever hear any one complain about the lack of localization's for the franchise. We still have Dragon quest 7 remake on the 3ds along with the monster remakes that where released for the GBC.

Please don't get me wrong I love final fantasy and I've been a fan of the franchise since II or IV on the snes. I'm also really happy that bravery default sold well enough to open their damn eyes and see a traditional jrpg can still sell just fine. All I'm asking is one thing will the bravery default sales be enough to get the games I mentioned earlier localized or are dq fans just screwed??

 

[themilo504]

A lot of people have mentioned chasing call of duty money as the big reason for why this happened, I agree and I want to add that I think there?s also a element of overconfidence, Publishers have deluded themselves into thinking that fans will always keep buying their products, no matter how much they change them to appeal to a wider audience.

 

[Thanatos2k]

You may notice that after FFIX, the series started to slowly decline. This is no coincidence, FF9 really was the beginning of the end for traditional Final Fantasy. It was where FF began to stagnate and Square started trying to find more and more places to take the series as a whole. We can see where that has taken the series so far.

Um, what? FF10 is a far better game than FF9. FF9 is probably my least favorite FF game excluding the two awful ones (FF2 and FF3). FF9 was a low point for sure, that rebounded with FF10. (Not so much FF10-2, and DEFINITELY not with Dirge of Cerberus) And it's not like FF10 wasn't that different of a game compared to FF8, so what did they abandon, exactly?

I said nothing about the quality of FFX. FFX actually did a lot better than FF9.

Also this thread brings up another good point: What did Bravely Default do right to where it didn't have to have a lavish budget in order to be considered successful? It didn't sell as much as even the typical FF game that's considered a huge failure, but it didn't have to. So what made Square suddenly consider that it was a 'good direction'?

I'm going to say because it sold that much being a completely new IP that DIDN'T have the Final Fantasy name on it at all.

It's pretty impressive actually.

This is a tad off topic but why is there no love for dragon quest/warrior. In all honesty this is the only series square-enix has been faithful over the years aside from their experiment with 10 on the wii/wii-u. Yet I hardly ever hear any one complain about the lack of localization's for the franchise. We still have Dragon quest 7 remake on the 3ds along with the monster remakes that where released for the GBC.

After the Square Enix merger they've done a WHOLE lot to emphasize the Square and bury the Enix. When was the last Tri-Ace game that was made for SE?

Dragon Warrior has never been about the characters, and that's why Square doesn't care about it. They can't shove cameos of Dragon Warrior into Kingdom Hearts, or scam you with mobile games design to exploit retro character nostalgia like All the Bravest.

Plus they've kinda ruined the series by shoving in multiplayer and then making it an MMO. RIP Dragon Warrior.

 

[Branindain]

SQENIX dropped the ball on FFIX. Marketing for the game was poor compare to FFVIII and FFX and it was obvious that SQENIX wanted focus more on FFX and FFXI. Even with all the problems FFIX sold over 5 million copies on name recognition alone. I still see people asking about what happened FFIX (and these are people who played all the latest FF games).

I can attest to this. I've played and enjoyed FF7, 8, 10 & 12 (rented 13 and never thought about it again, yikes!) and I never played 9 for the simple reason that it completely slipped past me, I never saw it or heard about it anywhere. I should probably buy the downloadable version actually.

OT: I actually find this pretty momentous. I've seen a couple of signs that things are slowly improving, but this is actual direct evidence that the message we've been collectively screaming from every rooftop on the internet for years has actually penetrated the eardrums of a suit somewhere. It's a shame, though, that if they only just shifted course in this way then it's probably too late to salvage FF15.

 

[Ipsen]

Except, as Jim and others in this thread have pointed out, the Final Fantasy and Resident Evil series weren't suffering due to a change in people's tastes. FFX was a smash hit, and after Square put FFXI out on the MMO market and returned to their single player games with FFXII, for some reason they suddenly decided that in spite of FFX selling wonderfully turn-based combat was holding them back. So they made the slightly confused gambit system, and that eventually escalated into FFXIII's also confused combat system. There were no drops in sales or criticisms to indicate they should leave turn-based combat. They just...did.

Same thing with Resident Evil. The series was doing just fine, and Capcom decides to gut the series right as soon as they make it to the top. That had nothing to do with a shifting of tastes.

Going out on a limb to speculate Final Fantasy and Resident Evil share a peculiar relationship, specifically FFX and RE4. They were both hugely popular, and that's probably due to (emphasis here) arguably reaching some form of the holy 'middle ground'. FFX and RE4 are noticable departures from the formulas of the games before them, yet a large portion of ingrained fans of both series still loved them. However, I don't think these games would be considered 'successful' without a chunk of newcomers to these franchises too (but gaming, and some of its more cherished franchises are in more words of mouth by this time).

You get what we have today because, from that critical intersection of design directions, neither Square Enix or Capcom knew what were the best decisions. Arguably, becoming successful in these ventures screwed them up; in the time from developing FFX/RE4, PROFIT!!!, and then their next games, they unintentionally lost their eye for what their base fans were looking for, and never knew what the newcomers were looking for in the first place. Square Enix and Capcom COULD have been honest at this point, and took a reevaluating step back to gauge fan interest, but the call of money in the growing industry was too strong.

But perhaps I discredit the direction the industry has grown in. For FFXIII and RE5/6 to be as successful as they are, while still enduring the panning to this day says at least something about the people who have/had consoles in the home. Atmos Duality puts up some enticing evidence as to why:

Spoiler: snip

Why the sudden change? Especially following the boom of the PS2 era?
Three causes.

1) Golden Geese.
Halo (series), World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4.
Highly polished, highly formulaic, multiplayer-centric.
Makes ludicrous amounts of money relative to everything we had seen prior to that, and consistently.

2) Economic Recession. The threat of folks giving up their luxuries due to reduced income.

3) Booming media. Basically, games started competing indirectly with this huge surge of entertainment media.
An audience's time (and money) is finite and with that comes shortened attention spans by necessity.
Leading to bloating costs in advertising, and thus marketing.

And thus, the new mentality shifted to blockbusters-only.
Those other guys are making stupid amounts of money, so copy them! Copy EVERYTHING!

"Throw more money at it! More bombastic! More advertising!"
"What? That didn't work? Well Call of Duty broke more sales records, so obviously we just need to copy MOAR! THROW EVEN MOAR MONEY AT IT!! I don't care if we have to sell 6 million units just to break even, DO IT!"

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

Which is why I think that to survive the most expensive AAA games are going to become prestige projects: that is, expensive games not meant to be profitable on their own but which exist to showcase the talent of a company developers and increase the brand recognition.

much like Satoshi Kon's films... man... they were great films...

 

[heroicbob]

maybe I can finally call myself a final fantasy fan without an asterisk again

if I were to add another genre to the list I would say classic deathmatch games which I blame halo for killing off
its the same follow the leader mentality thats always cursed the games industry, an extremely popular action game gets made so everyone makes them. minecraft gets popular and a million clones appear trying desperately to cash in with deliberately similar names like fortress-craft

and now with dayz a barebones unfinished mod boosting sales of arma suddenly people start rushing out their own versions of it to preemptively steal its thunder

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

I have to disagree in large part about your Final Fantasy suppositions, Jim. Traditional Final Fantasy was not doing "Fine". Traditional Final Fantasy has been on its deathbed since FF9 flopped at the end of the PSX era, when these kind of games basically stopped selling at the numbers they were. Compare FF8 sales numbers to FF9 and you get a pretty clear picture of the mindset Square Enix had when it decided that this kind of game was basically dead and they had to adapt or die out.

Square Enix, instead of taking the path of trying to resurrect something that many viewed as a dying genre, took the path of trying to change what Final Fantasy itself has meant. Gradually taking the series more and more off the rails of what we viewed the series to mean. This isn't something I can't fault them on and I really don't understand why people still rail on them for "abandoning" traditional final fantasy when it was clear that it just wasn't working anymore. Ever since then they've only been going in more crazy directions to try and find a traditional final fantasy that would give them those FF8 sales numbers.

And people really can't sit on their high horse and throw shit at Square Enix for doing that when the most egregious Final Fantasy games so far, one that many view to be the most outlandish, insane entries into the series that makes no sense and is completely unfun to play, Final Fantasy 13, has been the best selling game in the franchise since Final Fantasy 8 [http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/lightning-returns-final-fantasy-xiiis-creators-justify-a-third-game-in-a-se].

So no Jim, this IS our fault, we DID tell Square Enix that the traditional RPG is dead and we want this slurry of action oriented combat and traditional combat, we did it with our wallets. We can scream and cry that Squarenix is killing traditional RPGs and releasing half-baked mannequin simulator trash like Lightning Returns, but our cries land on deaf ears if there are still six million customers out there throwing money at that business model while we gnash our teeth at Squarenix making what is unarguably a good business decision even if it's a terrible gaming decision.

I don't want to say Final Fantasy and changed and we just need to move on, mostly because Bravely Default is proof that they are perfectly capable of making good JRPGs still, but it's time to admit that people do actually like this stuff and buy it instead of proclaiming every time they release a new game that Final Fantasy is dead and they'll be bankrupt within the quarter. Really those cries are just background noise at this point.

FFIX flopped because they announced that FFX was going to be released a year later on the PS2. when people saw the difference between FFIX and FFX graphically, which do yo think they would choose?

 

[Demonchaser27]

It's the issue with publicly traded companies in this current financial industry. With a lot of them, it doesn't really matter because the companies don't produce art. It's kind of easy to make more steel and sell it and get a higher profit. Steel is steel, it can be judged objectively. Videogames, provided they function, always have to be judged subjectively. This is where shareholders and publishers come in and fuck with things to try to increase potential profits. Where they fuck up is the execution of this often makes something neither crowd wanted.

If they want Gears of War, they can play Gears of War. Give them Resident Evil. If they want an action RPG, they can go find one. Give them Final Fantasy. It's one trap Nintendo didn't fall into. Sure, they did it via what I would call stagnation, but Nintendo games have always felt like Nintendo games. Their first party stuff generally doesn't try to be something it isn't.

Yeah I would actually like to see public traded companies eventually vanish in all businesses over time. This is because of what you said. The types of business that these shareholders/execs relish in can all be automated in the near future. And creative businesses have no real valuable use from them, as you said. It could (IMO would) be a good thing to get back to business based around values other than just money.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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 (except it was there, if you bothered to speak to the NPCs instead of waiting to be spoon-fed everything in the next expository cutscene), that the protagonists deeds felt meaningless (ignoring the fact that "Big Epic Clashes of Armies that storytellers love to talk about so much are Not the most important historical events" is one of the main recurring themes of Matsuno's games), that its battle system was boring (because of course having a great customizable IA which spared players the busywork of micromanaging every meaningless encounter with mooks meant that you spent a lot less time fiddling with the battle menues: oh the heresy), that the protagonist was a non-entity (despite the fact that he acts as the commoner foil to Ashe's aristocratic self-righteous vengefulness, who, by rejecting his own desire of revenge and embracing his childlike curiosity about the world and its inhabitants ends up teaching compassion to his queen and stops her from becoming the genocidal puppet-tyrant she was about to become, gaining the unbridled freedom he craved for in the process).

Yeah, I'll be honest. I love that you can "discover" the story in FF12. I just couldn't play it because I disliked the combat system. It's fine that they made it. It was an honest try, but I couldn't keep playing using it. I'm big on gameplay, and if I don't like it and I'm going to have to use it constantly throughout the game, I'm out.

I don't know what others really felt about the game. But sometimes you just try an idea and it doesn't work. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try new things. You win some and you lose some.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I think part of it is that "doing fine" isn't good enough for large shareholder driven companies. You always want to be doing better, growing etc... So in some ways this is Square giving up and saying we aren't going to get "big market" money.

I think that's a big part of the problem right there. Publishers don't give a crap about satisfying gamers, their priority is satisfying the shareholders, who themselves don't care about games, they just care about the stock price and what kind of dividends they're looking forward to.

I've often promoted the idea that gamers should be the primary investors in the game industry. I myself hold some game related stock and I think if the majority shareholders were actual gamers, the publishers would think more about the integrity of their product than what sort of attractive buzzwords they can attach to their "brand."

Seriously people, pick out your three favorite recent games, go to one of those low transaction fee trading sites, and invest in those publishers. Yes, even if it's EA, you know why, because EA will take a shareholder more seriously than a customer when he writes in about the quality of a product they've released.

It's some decent advice. The problem is that stocks are kind of a skewed game. Rich get richer, poor get poorer kind of thing most of the time. Its good to try but the chances that gamers will ever be the biggest shareholders (remember that the biggest shareholders get the biggest say and the most attention) is slim to none. The biggest shareholders are also generally just a few select people. Like 70% of stock is usually held by like 10-15 big fat cats. And if a whole other business holds stock, remember that business' decisions are made by a select few at the top anyway.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

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.

i don't think he is making it to be simplistic... he has talked about the other facets before and in great detail, and with this video he wanted to focus on the fear that publishers had, the imaginary boogie men that publishers have created to justify their decisions. the kind of fear mongering that created DRM, multiplayer passes, etc. and how it has affected what publishers produce.

 

[Demonchaser27]

I just find it odd that people ***** about Halo/Battlefield/Call of Duty being the same every year when Final Fantasy and Resident Evil were basically the same every year. They didn't even improve the game play, just the graphics

Resident Evil, yeah. Final Fantasy, not so much. Yes there were always take turn RPGs. But the systems inside those take-turn RPGs and the stories/secrets/battles were largely different. And to be honest, whats the big difference between COD/Halo vs. Final Fantasy of old? COD and Halo actually do feel like your doing the same thing over and over and their generally very short games, meaning that the singleplayer is okay at best. Ideas and new gameplay aren't able to be fully fleshed out in 5-6 hours. Final Fantasy games had extremely varied types of take-turn systems with varying levels of depth and incredibly long, deep, and detailed stories and characters to boot. Its like comparing a short story to a massive epic. There is so much more to see and its very very rare that you get the same regurgitated stuff. Sure some ideas stayed. Usually the good ones. But they grew and changed plenty in those games, both in gameplay and story.