Sequels and the Death of Novelty

CaitSeith

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Lightknight said:
Your definition of IP is... interesting... There's nothing copywritable about being able to shoot down targets on the screen? The House of the Dead and Time Crisis say hello. And measuring how good games are, with sales numbers? Really? If a good game doesn't sell well, the publisher will more likelly to not make more games for its IP, and focus on more sellable products instead. But that IP is usually never used again (no matter how good the game was), because the publisher is the exclusive propetary (unless the developers managed to keep it during negotiations, which is unfrequent), and they prefer to own a dead IP than to sell it to people who may make it relevant.

Now, all this talk about big name IPs has become a red herring. Your first post didn't mention anything about big names or even being good games (neither my first reply). Only that there are new IPs at the same rate that the 90s (not counting indies). And you might not consider concepts as legit IPs; but as long as the game is copyrighted, the game is (by law) as much of an IP as Mario, Mickey Mouse and Nyan Cat (with the owners having the right of sueing those who make a game out of it without their permission).
 

Lightknight

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CaitSeith said:
Lightknight said:
Your definition of IP is... interesting... There's nothing copywritable about being able to shoot down targets on the screen? The House of the Dead and Time Crisis say hello. And measuring how good games are, with sales numbers? Really? If a good game doesn't sell well, the publisher will more likelly to not make more games for its IP, and focus on more sellable products instead. But that IP is usually never used again (no matter how good the game was), because the publisher is the exclusive propetary (unless the developers managed to keep it during negotiations, which is unfrequent), and they prefer to own a dead IP than to sell it to people who may make it relevant.
Shooting a target is not a new IP. I mean, do you really think if you created a whack-a-mole game in which you shot the moles that pops up that the makers of Super Scope 6 would be able to sue you? Maybe if the mole that pops up looks like the alien they used in theirs or if you copied the background exactly. What if you made a side scrolling game in which slow missiles go from right to left in order for you to shoot them down or lose? As long as you're not copying the game directly then they aren't protected IPs. Only the code itself is the IP and not any elements of the game.

Think of this like baseball games. Anyone can make a baseball game. It's not copy writable. You may not be able to use official jerseys or logos without brokering deals with the teams, but you can certainly make a game about it. You can even make a franchise of it. But in general it's it isn't an IP because it isn't your property. You don't own the right to make baseball games. You just own the code to a game that is centered around baseball. In most cases, people could write new code that almost verbatim copies you without running a risk of copy write infringement as long as they don't steal your assets or code.

Legally speaking the games of Super Scope 6 would be filed as an IP, but it couldn't be enforced in the same sense that Zelda or Mario or any recurring series could.

Regardless, my contention for the inclusion of Super Scope 6 was that it wasn't a mainstream game. Very few people ever saw or played it. It was part of the biggest flop of Nintendo history.

Now, all this talk about big name IPs has become a red herring. Your first post didn't mention anything about big names or even being good games (neither my first reply). Only that there are new IPs at the same rate that the 90s (not counting indies). And you might not consider concepts as legit IPs; but as long as the game is copyrighted, the game is (by law) as much of an IP as Mario, Mickey Mouse and Nyan Cat (with the owners having the right of sueing those who make a game out of it without their permission).
Do you care about the new IPs that are garbage throwaways which no one sees? If that's the case then we have absolutely no shortage of new IPs coming out every year from terrible developers. Far more with indie developers and stuff.

You were the one that wanted to limit it to AA and higher. But look at the list of games I listed by name in my post. Nearly all AAA.

What definition do you think would make your claim correct? We have more overall IPs now too. There is no metric you can come up with that would result in us having fewer IPs or new IPs or new AAA IPs. We've got more everything. It's really just that the major sequels get the most news and sell better than new IPs. . What are you imagining that we have less of today than we had back in whatever time period you're trying to imagine?

Crap games? We have more.
Good games? We have more.
New IPs? We have more.
Sequels? We have more.

We have expanded in the same way that movies expanded but at an accelerated rate due to the availability of technology already around in our age as compared to the limited technology existing with the inception of movies.
 

Rad Party God

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Broslinger said:
Rad Party God said:
The Souls series also got this right, aside from Dark Souls and it's sequels

So Demon's Souls got this right by not having any sequels? Wat?
By "Souls series" I meant Demon's Souls, Dark Souls (and 2 to some extent) and Bloodborne, games with similar themes and gameplay, but different on their own.
 

Lightknight

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Rad Party God said:
Broslinger said:
Rad Party God said:
The Souls series also got this right, aside from Dark Souls and it's sequels

So Demon's Souls got this right by not having any sequels? Wat?
By "Souls series" I meant Demon's Souls, Dark Souls (and 2 to some extent) and Bloodborne, games with similar themes and gameplay, but different on their own.
Not really sure I agree. Skyrim is just as different from Oblivion as the souls games are with each other.
 

Broslinger

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Lightknight said:
Rad Party God said:
Broslinger said:
Rad Party God said:
The Souls series also got this right, aside from Dark Souls and it's sequels

So Demon's Souls got this right by not having any sequels? Wat?
By "Souls series" I meant Demon's Souls, Dark Souls (and 2 to some extent) and Bloodborne, games with similar themes and gameplay, but different on their own.
Not really sure I agree. Skyrim is just as different from Oblivion as the souls games are with each other.
Oh okay. I forgot about Bloodborne.
 

CaitSeith

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Lightknight said:
Alright, I agree.

But I still think it was a shame you restricted your list of 90's games to only the ones developed by Nintendo and Sega. From all the developers I listed, roughly 80% made good games. Why no mention of them? Is it because their games had critical acclaim, but flopped commercially (like Shadowrun)? Or because their games were ports from arcade games (like Mortal Kombat)? Or because their games weren't part of the most popular genres back then (like Harvest Moon, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger)? And those were only from the SNES and Sega. We didn't even mention the PS1!
 

Lightknight

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CaitSeith said:
Lightknight said:
Alright, I agree.
This is one of the reasons I like discussing things with you. You're intelligent and if you're right, you'll stick to your guns, if you're wrong, you'll learn from it and adjust. It means you, me or both of us come away from our discussions better informed and I appreciate that in an age of people screaming their opinions past each other.

But I still think it was a shame you restricted your list of 90's games to only the ones developed by Nintendo and Sega. From all the developers I listed, roughly 80% made good games. Why no mention of them? Is it because their games had critical acclaim, but flopped commercially (like Shadowrun)? Or because their games were ports from arcade games (like Mortal Kombat)? Or because their games weren't part of the most popular genres back then (like Harvest Moon, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger)? And those were only from the SNES and Sega. We didn't even mention the PS1!
Since the current generation is only three years in I decided to do it over a particular time span constituting the last ten years with a set decade in the past instead of by console generation. The last five years in particular have seen an explosion in revenue thanks to iOS gaming which has introduced a lot more people to gaming and has encouraged more people to try traditional gaming at home. The reason why I didn't branch out into other publishers during the 90's was really just a time thing. I didn't find any good resources on just top new IPs of the 90's. The only thing I eventually found were the top performing IPs listed by year. So I decided to show the performance of the biggest guns in town, Nintendo. If they only developed a handful of new IPs back then at their strongest then it should be apparent how the rest of the industry was doing. Sony has been king of new IPs ever since. The 90's saw Nintendo's hay day of production along with multiple console releases and even the arrival of Sony (which did add a lot of IPs). I figured it would just be a kick-ass decade and if our past decade beat that one then it would be clear how massive the industry has gotten, and it has gotten hugely massive.


The reason why I think it's important to stick with numbers sold is because those define if they really hit the industry or were only niche. It's the same reason why you saw fit to disregard indie titles even though many of those are the most beloved games in recent memory and would absolutely be considered new IPs (I mean, Bastion, Stanley Parable, Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddies, and Banner Saga... these aren't trivial titles). You mention ShadowRun and I certainly feel what you're saying there because I LOVED that game. One of the few games I played multiple times. But it pretty much died there even after an attempted reboot on Windows Vista (I remember because the moment I saw it requiring Vista was the moment I realized I wouldn't be playing it any time soon) until recently where crowd funding got us a legitimate reboot that I've been loving. But the truth of the matter is that if I consider lower budget poor performing games then we absolutely should begin considering well performing Indie games and you know that's only going to tip in my favor thanks to Steam.

I didn't list Harvest Moon under Nintendo's label because it wasn't Nintendo at the time and can't justifiably be called one now. The only role Nintendo had in that whole thing was releasing it in France and Germany. In fact, Nintendo is still only responsible for publishing it in EU and AUS, not Japan or America where it is most popular. It is almost entirely a Marvelous Interactive title. This can help explain why their games got released for Sony hardware too (PS1, PS2, PSP).
 

Something Amyss

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3asytarg3t said:
The marketplace is the only thing that could stop this, and from all indications, it's doing the exact opposite.

PC Gaming when it grew up, or I should say turned 5 years old, decided to mimic it's older brother the movie industry.

PC Gaming just needs a better role model, say literature perhaps, or even cinema released in December rather than the comic book pablum spewed out every summer.
But you said it yourself: the marketplace looks at what's there and buys it. What motivation does the video game industry have to change if people overwhelmingly encourage (and even demand) sequels?
 

Lightknight

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Something Amyss said:
3asytarg3t said:
The marketplace is the only thing that could stop this, and from all indications, it's doing the exact opposite.

PC Gaming when it grew up, or I should say turned 5 years old, decided to mimic it's older brother the movie industry.

PC Gaming just needs a better role model, say literature perhaps, or even cinema released in December rather than the comic book pablum spewed out every summer.
But you said it yourself: the marketplace looks at what's there and buys it. What motivation does the video game industry have to change if people overwhelmingly encourage (and even demand) sequels?
The same reason why they are currently motivated and DO produce more new IPs now than ever before.

Because even though new IPs perform poorly compared to sequels, establishing a quality franchise means you gain access to the sequel money later.
 

Mangod

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Here's a question: Fallout 4 takes place in New England, right? New England is defined as: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The bolded areas all border Canada, the country that the US (in Fallout) annexed before the bombs dropped. Is this ever brought up in any way in the game?

I'll also lend my voice to the question: why are there radscorpions and deathclaws in Massachusetts? Shouldn't there be mutant turtles and -mammals instead?
 

Lightknight

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Mangod said:
Here's a question: Fallout 4 takes place in New England, right? New England is defined as: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The bolded areas all border Canada, the country that the US (in Fallout) annexed before the bombs dropped. Is this ever brought up in any way in the game?

I'll also lend my voice to the question: why are there radscorpions and deathclaws in Massachusetts? Shouldn't there be mutant turtles and -mammals instead?
Deathclaws are a sentient species made by man. They will settle in regions the same way people do.

Also, I don't know what impact the nuclear fallout had on the climate in New England. Is there any snow?