Jimquisition: The Unholy Trinity Of Blind Greedy Bastards
- Thread starter Jimothy Sterling
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Excellent episode. It's horrifying to think that big companies are being lead by people who are just so cripplingly clueless about games.
Still, good thing indies and smaller-budget titles can pick up the slack and provide fresh new stuff - for example, I just finished a playthrough of the Freedom Planet beta to see what's been added since alpha (for Kickstarter backers, mind you, not early access), this game is so fucking good, an easy contender for GOTY in my eyes.
Still, good thing indies and smaller-budget titles can pick up the slack and provide fresh new stuff - for example, I just finished a playthrough of the Freedom Planet beta to see what's been added since alpha (for Kickstarter backers, mind you, not early access), this game is so fucking good, an easy contender for GOTY in my eyes.
Jim, just tell them that it's "buyer beware," and if they don't like what you have to say, they shouldn't buy it. This defense even applies to F2P games, so the fact that people don't inherently pay money into the Jimquisition shouldn't matter (And many F2P games are ad-supported, so there's that).
Especially since he'd be preaching to the choir and telling us all exactly what we want to hear. >.>
Businesses can, in the short term, be very successful with an incestuous streak. Businesses running business for the sake of business will look for businesspeople first. And it will work to some degree, if not for the right reasons. It's sort of like those hair transplant surgeries. It doesn't so much give you more success (automatically) as it reallocates success. You can improve revenue streams relying on what has already been established, but the problem (and not just in gaming) is that you need to eventually have someone with a clue come along and come up with new things.canadamus_prime said:
As per Steam's quality control, Jimquisition has no set date for final version, no full list of planned features, and no time table. And this is all 100% okay because that's the standard we've set.WildFire15 said:
I'm a fan of Occam's Razor. And in gaming "journalism," one doesn't need to claim an anonymous source to be disingenuous. As such, I'm inclined to believe this is real. Otherwise, Jim could have stated it as fact with no claimed source to the same end. As you do.connall said:
Especially since he'd be preaching to the choir and telling us all exactly what we want to hear. >.>
It is right now assuredly making millions of dollars a day. No exact figures are usually released but when something can be extrapolated it points to millions of dollars.C14N said:
The largest generator (world wide) is Puzzle and Dragons, which makes 10s of Millions a day I believe? And on the high end.
Close, in some regards. It's an old boys club of very wealthy CEOs and power players. Normally the C-Level executives have very little knowledge, so they hire people who are analysts from larger companies (EA, etc) who haven't actually had experience making a game to keep them informed. In general most C-Level executives work within circles to generate support for their company and need to know the language of business -- and often times have rarely played or even had experience within the industry.Zachary Amaranth said:
Ideally early access in gaming is exactly as you described; an alpha or beta build that is put out so the community can bug test and refine issues.jehk said:
In practice companies have learned that you just need to stick a 'Beta' onto the end of your title and you can pass off all criticism (and convince a lot of your playerbase that the issues aren't a bad thing) because the game is 'early access' and it's 'still being worked on' (This is increasingly the case in mmo style games that have a long term development cycle, where the developers hide behind the 'beta' flag to avoid all criticism because any issue whatsoever can be brushed off as 'but we haven't finished the game yet')
I was in a thread on this site a couple of days ago and someone joked that a particular game they played was practically in 'gamma' now because it had had so many major updates since the beta was opened up years ago (although I cannot remember the name of the game unfortunately.)
A few examples:
Battlefield Play4free: In Beta since April 2011, no release date.
Firefall: Beta since September 2011, no release date.
The War Z: Caused an unintentional war of it's own because the game was practically unplayable, but the developers just said 'lol beta' and banned everyone complaining
The entire Ninjakiwi developers website is a beta (as in, they have actually beta'd the webpage that hosts the games - Now that's a new one!)
Claiming the game is a beta and therefore basically beyond criticism is a nasty trick that developers have been using for quite a while.
It's success is, in my opinion, due to a few factors:C14N said:
1) Simple, clean user interface. You would be surprised at how many games on mobile are terrible at this.
2) Extremely great polish and theme / art style
3) Easy to purchase, and lots of incentives to do so. They actually charge the least if I recall in their genre. I could be wrong on that.
They also were incredibly viral. Which again, I attribute to the above. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of minute factors in there (being able to see the top player's base layout for instance) but in general this game pushed itself to the top by being playable and in some ways fun. Build timers, though, so many build timers.
So when we've been saying that those games are "destroying gaming" we've actually been right? Huh. Fancy that. It's not hyperbole when it's true, now is it?
I'm surprised World of Warcraft wasn't the 4th game on the tunnel vision list. Maybe it would have been 5-10 years ago.
I'm surprised World of Warcraft wasn't the 4th game on the tunnel vision list. Maybe it would have been 5-10 years ago.
Oh that's simple, the companies got big, decided the go corporate, and then hired experts in running corporations. As there weren't any big video game corporations previously, the only people to put in charge were those who ran other kinds of industries. Being experts in packaged goods, they largely turned video games into another kind of packaged good. It's something that worked for a few big companies like EA and Activision so everyone started following that model. I've been saying largely the same thing as Jim for years, it's not about making a fair profit, it's about everyone always chasing the biggest profit possible. A lot of the huge failures in video gaming is because you have too many giant hogs all trying to push each other out of the way for the same trough, while they totally forget about everything else they could be making money at with far less competition leading to spectacular failures.canadamus_prime said:
The odd thing is that the whole "free to pay" market blindsided the AAA market who had no respect for that kind of gaming, all fighting over Call Of Duty and AAA shooters, until people started making huge money at it. Then you saw AAA companies pushing the whole "pay to win" envelope hoping to find the next big thing. Ironically when someone actually makes a huge success off of one of these neglected markets, that will be the next huge trough all the pigs will rush and breed the next big generation of failures since they will all be doing the same thing.
Honestly I am sort of surprised we haven't seen a AAA publisher more or less cast a wide net and try and become the dominant force in numerous neglected secondary markets all at once. You do see lesser publishers trying things like this, but none of the really big ones. Cumulatively getting control of all those markets (or a lot of them), which will eventually breed an uncontested success on the level of one of the "trinity" seems like the move you'd expect at least one or two huge corporations trying to make, sort of out maneuvering the competition.
I feel so behind.
I mean ok, I don't give a cr@p about Call of Duty, but at least I have a general idea as to what it is.
But it's the first time I even heard the title Clash of Clans, and I had absolutely no idea that Candy Crash was really that famous.
And yet, I probably still know more than those corporate fools.
It goes without saying that one corporation will know a few more things than the other one.
What did you expect?
Someone to come out and start giving names and details?!?
"So, company A, B, and C know only about these three games, while company D knows about these same three games plus one more, and company E..."
You get the picture.
Took them long enough.
Of course, it will help if they don't have Motomu Toriyama ever again barfing out mediocre/s**tty rpgs one after the other.
I mean ok, I don't give a cr@p about Call of Duty, but at least I have a general idea as to what it is.
But it's the first time I even heard the title Clash of Clans, and I had absolutely no idea that Candy Crash was really that famous.
And yet, I probably still know more than those corporate fools.
I'm positive it's just a general idea of what is going on inside the industry.canadamus_prime said:
It goes without saying that one corporation will know a few more things than the other one.
What did you expect?
Someone to come out and start giving names and details?!?
"So, company A, B, and C know only about these three games, while company D knows about these same three games plus one more, and company E..."
You get the picture.
Except Square Enix did when one of THEIR games succeeded.Evonisia said:
Took them long enough.
Of course, it will help if they don't have Motomu Toriyama ever again barfing out mediocre/s**tty rpgs one after the other.
I think that's inherently incorrect. It's doing a lot of things that long-term will be effective. A lot of people who never played video games are now playing them on mobile. The downside is that some of those experiences are taking advantage of them. BUT when their pallet grows and they experience better titles, their expectations will be adjusted.Thanatos2k said:
There are also a lot of spectacular mobile games that still "monitize" but create positive experiences. Even Clash of Clans has some merits, and I still posit that despite KING (ugh) Candy Crush is probably these most video-game like game on the top 10 grossing.
I went back and watched his video on the subject. It's easy to point to good and bad examples of early access. I don't think we really disagree on the matter much.Hero in a half shell said:
Honestly, I'm shocked anyone would say a game is beyond criticism while its in early access. In my mind, that's the whole point. I thought Jim was constructing a strawman here.
I hate how devs and publishers look to games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans as models of games. In my view these titles are only tangentially related to video gaming. A better comparison would be to harlequin romance novels or tabloid newspapers, these 'games' don't have the same market or appeal as 'real' video games do, they don't target the same audience and there's no way to make that so. They have mass appeal in a completely different way to the rest of video gaming and trying to lump them in the same category is silly.
I just pictured a scene in my head...
Asking a room of these executives to list their top 10 favourite video games, and if they can't even think of 10 to list, telling them to get the fuck out.
Remember, they're not allowed to use the internet to help, so I'd expect this to be a real challenge for them.
Asking a room of these executives to list their top 10 favourite video games, and if they can't even think of 10 to list, telling them to get the fuck out.
Remember, they're not allowed to use the internet to help, so I'd expect this to be a real challenge for them.
I don't think they care who they target, so long as it makes all of the money.Johnson McGee said:
Cool profile image. Very 'gangster'Jimothy Sterling said:
But seriously thank you for this. Thank you immensely. The executive naivety we're seeing is beyond the pale. I wish Micheal Mondo would walk up to these offices as Vaas and explain to them the definition of insanity regarding selling games.
It looks like the tech industry is suffering this same horrid disease of executive daftness where consumer devices and software are concerned as well as gaming. The evolution in gaming and consumer technology was brought about by people who knew what they were investing in, what they wanted to see made, and its meat and potatoes benefit to the user.
Now were in the age where cynical opportunists have seen money exchanging hands, and won't even stop to educate themselves on why or what makes said product valuable to them in the first place. I honestly wonder how hard it is for some marketers to play a good deal of video games in between bean counting, and understand the value of GTA, minecraft, Tekken, Outlast, Portal, Half-life, FFVI (since its finally on mobile) or Resident Evil for themselves.
I know i'm just pulling from my comments on the vid earlier but its really like farms run by folks who don't know how to raise crops without steroids. This is just another cold reminder of our economic gap. Entertainment is where we come to not focus on how financially divided or disadvantaged we are compared to the 1 percent. And yet we're being painfully reminded of it by too much exploitation ruining our entertainment. There's no honest exchange or 'a lot of bang for your buck' anymore.
Would this massive resounding yell of "OHH! I GET IT NOW!" ever happen in those mega story offices if marketers started playing ? Who really knows sadly.
Nice background Jim, the lighting makes me wanna lick it. also if you close your eyes after looking at it, it has a weird afterburn effect on your retina.
I wanted to point out some irony. A couple of years back when modern warfare was released I remember there being a lot of contention between Activision and Infinity ward because IW wanted to make a modern shooter while Activision wanted another WW2 thing. However they found some middle ground when Activision made IW include a single player portion (the concept started out as being multiplayer only). This was daring and bold and COD dominates nowadays.
On the flipside, however, by being forced to create the singleplayer campaign IW made one of the best games ever, and when the ghost of IW did get to make their multiplayer only game... well... titanfall...
So ja, there are two sides to this coin.
I wanted to point out some irony. A couple of years back when modern warfare was released I remember there being a lot of contention between Activision and Infinity ward because IW wanted to make a modern shooter while Activision wanted another WW2 thing. However they found some middle ground when Activision made IW include a single player portion (the concept started out as being multiplayer only). This was daring and bold and COD dominates nowadays.
On the flipside, however, by being forced to create the singleplayer campaign IW made one of the best games ever, and when the ghost of IW did get to make their multiplayer only game... well... titanfall...
So ja, there are two sides to this coin.
Wierd, I've never heard of of Clash of Clans. Is it popular? I gotta assume so since apparently these marketers a CEO's feel that all games ever made should be based on it.