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.