Jimquisition: Guns Blazing

[Ickabod]

This is an old dead horse. Just look at all of the WoW clones that failed by trying to be WoW. People that wanted to play WoW played WoW, those that didn't, eventually left the market due to lack of options.

 

[RandV80]

This is more or less what you can expect whenever it's a publicly traded company. CEO's have to answer to shareholders, and shareholders will always want bigger profits.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

Extremely good episode but for any of this to matter, NamcoBandai needs to see this. EA and Activision are almost beyond saving, their greed has gotten the best of them.
Ubisoft, NamcoBandai and other smaller publishers need to be shown this.

I can't speak for every publisher, but I know some of them do. Konami watched the episode on Konami, which is why I'm blacklisted by Konami.

So I guess the lesson there is, even if they DO see it, they likely won't listen to it.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Jim, you must be getting sick and tired of having to flog that dead horse eh?

He's getting really anal about homogenization and unrealistic expectations.

Don't misunderstand me. I agree with everything he said. What I meant was that he must be getting sick and tired of having to say it because Publishers refuse to listen.

Or because publishers (in any industry) don't really listen to critiques, reviews, or video rants especially. They listen to the customers' wallets.

Yeah, that's the part I don't understand. Surely the market has already shown that that practice isn't sustainable.

Not necessarily, for instance the Battlefield and Medal of Honor games. They don't have to necessarily match the success of the original, they just have to be successful enough to make money. The very nature of publishing and even entertainment development is an incredibly risky gamble with large sums of money, even with something like Kickstarter, people are still paying through the nose to make something that will presumably be purchased enough to make that money back. Just like with any gamble, you don't want to go the riskiest way possible (i.e. focusing on a small niche market and hoping its popularity expands), you want to take the least risk, the way the market is trending. Now ironically enough, that sometimes means they'll never see one of the formulas for success: drawing in people to a niche with a well crafted niche game. But then I remember all the JRPGs I've gotten into because I've heard one was super awesome (none) and it's obvious that's not exactly a sound method of success when you're gambling with your life's savings.

But unless I'm mistaken they're not even doing that what with EA and Square-Enix losing their CEOs and what not.

 

[Aetrion]

Jim doesn't seem to understand that the people that make the decisions in corporations don't give a shit if the product makes any money, the only thing they care about is giving it as big of a budget as possible so they can pay themselves more. Ultimately they are screwing over their shareholders, who aren't knowledgeable enough about video games to hold the execudouches accountable, and instead buy into the same old narrative of every shitbrained business venture going wrong because of freeloaders who destroyed its profit potential through piracy or taxes or whatever.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

I'll be honest I really loved Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, these games felt sort of magical. You know one of things that will instantly make me forget about Dark Souls 2? Any kind of DLC. At all.
See, Dark Souls got DLC, but that's a fairly unique situation where a new SKU came out and it had added content which would have made previous versions inferior unless DLC is released. Still I never bought Dark Souls DLC, it feel like magic will be ruined if I do. Maybe I'll eventually get Prepare to Die edition, I'm still not sure.

The problem with videogame industry is that people managing it treat videogames like socks or dishwashers. Or cars. Which is moronic.
Dead Space 3... Yeah. I bought Dead Space 1 and 2 on launch at full price. Dead Space 3 I ignored and will never buy. It never happened in my universe.
Dark souls 2.. I'm not sure what Namco will do. Of course, if I hear of any DLC or other such stuff I won't buy it and advise several friends who I got into these games to ignore it too, but if it stays a complete and magical game like before... Well, I don't give a damn about marketing. To be honest, I never watch any trailers ads or such anyway. It's all hogwash. In cases when that's a new game and I don't know what to expect I search for most unprofessional reviews on youtube, the kind that would never be sponsored by anyone, and check if their criticism sounds reasonable or not.


You know, it's curious how this Jimquisition made me suddenly realize... The games that I adore the most and consider masterpieces... They never got any DLC, or got some DLC very, very late. It's like, game can't feel magical if you can buy stuff for it. IDK how to describe it...

 

[Gunjester]

Jim, you must be getting sick and tired of having to flog that dead horse eh?

The sad part is that "need" is too true in this situation. The lesson is there, it's been there for years, but publishers seem to have a hivemind that suffers from brain rot.

 

[Erttheking]

I don't think what you quoted in the video was quite damning enough. You are making some safe assumptions, but they are still just that: assumptions. Skyrim is referenced many times in this video and, interestingly enough, it's one of the best counterpoints to your video I can think of. TES started off as a super niche franchise. Hell, I didn't even know about it until TES III: Morrowind debuted on the original Xbox. In every TES since Daggerfall they have worked to widen that "net" and bring in as many new fans as possible.

While I believe Morrowind to be the best in the series, I recognize Oblivion and Skyrim are still great games that have not yet abandoned the things that make TES games great. There's a right way and a wrong way to widen the net. Yes, Bethesda's made some mistakes in this regard (over reliance on voice acting, hand-holding mechanics, etc.) but overall I would say that they're doing good work. If a niche game can garner new fans without losing its soul... more power to it.

I think it's too early to say that Dark Souls 2 will drop the ball, but I can certainly see where you are coming from. As you've sited, there are plenty of franchises who've recently done the same thing and failed miserably.

As always,

Thank God for Jim.

Pretty much this. If Dark Souls 2 wants to widen it's audience by getting rid of some of the more frustrating mechanics that turned people that would be interested in playing it off in the first place. X-COM Enemy Unknown is a very streamlined version of the original game, but people still love it because while it is less complex, the developers kept what made X-COM, X-COM in there, but made it more accessible to newcomers to the franchise. And it sucked me in and got me hooked successfully. If Dark Souls 2 can become more mainstream and more accessible, but do it while keeping it's soul (heh) then there's nothing wrong with that. Actually explain how the fucking covenants work, explain how magic works, maybe make it so that you don't have to kill every last person in the game to get their equipment and examine it so you can actually learn the history of the world. These are the kinds of changes that would make the game more mainstream without dumbing it down.

I just pray that's the direction they're going.

 

[Living Contradiction]

But surely the market has already started to show that this practice isn't sustainable. I mean isn't Battlefield and Medel of Honour's constant attempts to copy Call of Duty's success evidence enough of that? Besides, I don't know how well Dead Space 3 did, but I'm sure it failed to capture the Call of Duty audience.

Regarding something being obvious in the market, it rarely if ever is. It can be obvious after the fact, but if it was obvious prior, the failures wouldn't have happened. EA doesn't like throwing money away, whatever their executives may pull down in salary, and watching a product fail isn't something any business wants to endure. Call of Duty was the late kid to the match, coming along after both Medal of Honour and Battlefield had established themselves in the gaming market. If Call of Duty was the better game and it was obvious, EA would've packed up and conceded rather than fight a long and expensive battle with Activision.

As well, EA did not fail, as a company, based on Battlefield and Medal of Honour. It discontinued the latter and may not be pushing the sales of the former, but EA is still very much alive as a business and continues to make money loan defaults [https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NASDAQ:EA&fstype=ii] with the games released by the publisher being treated as delicious treats to be sought after in auction instead of horrors that broke the company. Crytek didn't pay half a million bucks for Homefront so it could lose money; it secured what it hopes will be a profitable venture.

That's why I think Dark Souls 2 will be the poster child for the failure of AAA gaming. It will show a publisher making the conscious decision to chase the sparkly that is the AAA market using its well-known and popular IP. What will follow will be slow-but-inevitable ruin. Namco-Bandai is not a newcomer to the gaming market and they will probably do everything that is expected of a AAA title, from advertising to resource allocation. When that doesn't work and they tell everyone "We're sorry. We did everything we were supposed to and it just didn't pan out," that is when it will become obvious to the market that AAA is dead.

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

Myself and a friend absolutely adore Dark Souls, and this was our fear as soon as we watched the new trailer and read some of the initial comments. We bought the game because it promised to never hold your hand, and we loved every second of being brutally murdered, lost, confused, scared etc.; then the developers go and say that they want to make the sequel easier to get into, to appeal to more people. If we wanted a game that was easy to get into we could buy almost any other game on the market. The prospect of losing a game like Dark Souls is frightening because it seemed to have an ethos that was virtually unique, and once that's gone then what's left?

 

[GamemasterAnthony]

You know...for some reason "going all in and hoping it works" sounds like the mentality of many a braindead before they setup a camera to catch themselves doing some Johnny Knoxville style stunt only to rip open their scrotums at the ends of said stunts.

I wonder if we should just let it happen for our amusement?

 

[BrainBlow]

Sure, they make more money in the short term, but in the long run they just end up alienating the fans. Hell, look at Bioware fans before ME3 and DA2, and now look at them. Yes, there are still plenty of them, but I imagine Bioware have also lost a hell of a lot of them too. Or else they have made people unwilling to trust them enough to get a day one purchase, and so people are more wary.

I don't bring up Bioware and EA to beat a dead horse, but they are the people with this attitude with whom I have the most experience, so I apologise if people have a "Oh here we go again" reaction.

Cover based shooting alienates fans? Are you kidding?
ME3 was an EXCELLENT game until the last ten minutes!
Both ME3 and ME2 were far more fun to play then ME1.
Dragging the ME3 ending into this as an example is nonsense.

 

[scorptatious]

Well said Jim. It is important not to have incredibly high expectations in this kind of situation.

Still, I do hope Dark Souls 2 does do well in terms of the game itself and financially. I really enjoyed the first game despite how much it kicked my ass.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

...why did Jim use Battlefield 3 as an example of overambition killing sales? The game has sold over 15 million copies to date and continues to have around 150,000 players playing it DAILY across all platforms. No it still hasn't beaten Call Of Duty numbers, but that's not the point, the point is that the game was a massive success and the DLC strategy (aka Premium) also turned out to be a massive success.

 

[Xariat]

huh, surprised no one has posted this yet.


Anyways, agree with your video Jim, I wish publishers and developers would realize that niche games and audiences are niche for a reason. those who like the niche game want more of that only improved. those who the niche game didn't appeal to don't want said game wrapped in a shitty mainstream game disguise, there's a reason why it did or didn't appeal in the first place.

also "hoping to god it works" must be the dumbest thing anyone has ever said while making a big budget AAA title, it kills my hope for Dark souls 2 every time I hear it.

 

[ZexionSephiroth]

So... The Preffered Process here should be something like this:

Step One: Do whatever takes your fancy, but do it cheap.

Step Two: Once released, sequels should have a budget approximating the money racked in from the previous game. Because at least you have data on that.

Step Three: Reuse some assets where appropriate. If it's the same character, there's no excuse not to reuse part of the model and render and just put the same amount of budget as used for the original model on improving it. Or better yet, if it already looks good enough for the style you're going for, put the money somewhere else. In fact, use a fair few of the previous locations and add a few more using what fans liked about other locations. And for places like Cities, definitely expand into the surrounding countryside, but only as far as the budget for the original city was.

Step Four: Repeat Steps Two and Three; adjusting Budjet to match the sales of the previous game, while making improvements to old assets that are proportional in the cost of improvement to that of the original cost of the first assets.

Warning: Never go over budget of what you made with the previous game. You are more likely to fail miserably than succeed in what you're trying to do.

Am I missing anything?

 

[Catrixa]

Urgh, as an Elder Scrolls fan, this frustrates me. I go to games like Skyrim for the things that got me into the series to begin with: exploration, depth, and mod support (to increase depth). If I wanted to get into Dark Souls/Demon Souls, I would go there because I want a challenge. Taking the challenge out to appeal to me doesn't appeal to me, because I don't usually consider how easy/hard TES is (there's a difficulty slider, and I'll use it when I need it), or how good the combat is (one does not play Morrowind for the fluidity of its combat...), because that's not what I want from it. Remaking your franchise to appeal to me would be making a completely different game from the one I've heard about, and would probably just be a bad hybrid between the two (too easy, not enough exploration and depth).

So, publishers, seriously now: If you want to compete with Skyrim, find out what makes people like Skyrim and make a new game like that. If you want to make a super challenging RPG that appeals to people who like both of those things, keep making Dark Souls as is. If you want to try to force people who like Dark Souls to like Skyrim, buy them copies of Skyrim and pay them to play it, because people who just like Skyrim now have no reason to change (I guess you could buy them Dark Souls and pay them to play it as well). No one really wants to buy a game that's vaguely like another game, just because that other game did really well. If you're going to make a clone, freaking actually learn what makes it fun.

 

[Irridium]

I'm thinking the Belladonna ***** Fist was intially a sex toy sent to Jim as an insult. It has in fact become a very cool prop doing exactly the opposite of what it's message might have been.

Nah, I know the guy who sent it. He's a fan of my Podtoid podcast. Given the subject matter we often broach on the show, it's a fitting gift.

A disturbing gift, but a fitting one.

Not fitting in *that* way. Yet.

I was expecting you to pull out a cum tribute.

Oh god what has Podtoid done to my life...

 

[mybabyateadingo]

Is Jim Kurtz?

 

[Jimmy T. Malice]

That was an astonishingly angry rant, even for Jimquisition. I'm inclined to think that this one comment by Namco Bandai is being taken massively out of proportion, just as the claims about 'accessibility' and such were proven to be most likely wrong by the first gameplay video.

I do agree that publishers have unrealistic expectations, though. You can't expect a niche title to suddenly appeal to a huge audience.