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Ban second hand games! says Crytek (kind of)
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Join Date:Posts: 50635
The publishers have a lot to blame for that as well, sending out titles like shadows of the damned and binary domain to die with zero marketing. I think publishers should sort themselves out instead of blaming the second hand market on everything.
Also I only see developers going bust usually because they can't secure publisher funding when a game they make fails to sell, sometimes because of publisher ineptitude. I've not seen any publishers struggling, the ones imposing ridiculous practices like only paying out some of the money to developers if a certain metacritic score is reached.
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Join Date:Posts: 50635
Last I heard Sega are turning a decent profit. And they've only got themselves to blame as well what with Binary Domain and other games receiving zero marketing and releasing Resonance of Fate on the same date as the FFXIII/SMT Strange Journey double whammy. That's just two examples of Sega's bad management. It's that kind of stupidity and not used game sales that have been damaging Sega in the past. Not sure about Take 2, haven't heard much there.
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Surely you see the problem with that though? If games require a baseline marketing spend, thus increasing the average development budget even further, then they'll be even less likely to fund riskier development.Retr0gamer wrote: »The publishers have a lot to blame for that as well, sending out titles like shadows of the damned and binary domain to die with zero marketing. I think publishers should sort themselves out instead of blaming the second hand market on everything.
Also, look at the fan reaction to Demon's Souls, it was touted as being a true grass roots success with little in the way of publisher support but because of the quality, it sold really well?
As for gamers, should they be exempt from all blame despite not doing what could be considered their due diligence on new releases? Should they need everything spoon fed to them? How would they react if every major title released had equal marketing budgets put into them?
Hell, even in the context of the posts so far in this thread, we had Binary Domain offering a fantastic single player experience, no tacked on multiplayer, no pre-order incentives, no horrible DLC, a PC port which made the front page of Steam and, most importantly, it was sold for around the £25 on most places. Even in the face of all of this, and with a thread on these and other forums pointing all of this out, are publishers still the only ones to blame for it not doing well?
Note: Not "doing well" is a nice way of putting it. The game ****ing bombed selling around 20k copies in NA.
Or when they rely on trying to get funding for riskier games which publishers are reluctant to do? It's of no particular surprise when you see so many developers relying on "safe" titles in cases like this. For them, the need to keep the studio open, pay their staff and hope to eventually make the games they really want to make is what drives these kinds of decisions.Retr0gamer wrote: »Also I only see developers going bust usually because they can't secure publisher funding when a game they make fails to sell, sometimes because of publisher ineptitude.
This Sega?Retr0gamer wrote: »I've not seen any publishers struggling, the ones imposing ridiculous practices like only paying out some of the money to developers if a certain metacritic score is reached.
“It is hereby notified that Sega Sammy Holdings Inc. is expected to record extraordinary loss in the year ending March 2012,” a financial document published today by Sega begins.0 -
Surely you see the problem with that though? If games require a baseline marketing spend, thus increasing the average development budget even further, then they'll be even less likely to fund riskier development.
Also, look at the fan reaction to Demon's Souls, it was touted as being a true grass roots success with little in the way of publisher support but because of the quality, it sold really well?
As for gamers, should they be exempt from all blame despite not doing what could be considered their due diligence on new releases? Should they need everything spoon fed to them? How would they react if every major title released had equal marketing budgets put into them?
Hell, even in the context of the posts so far in this thread, we had Binary Domain offering a fantastic single player experience, no tacked on multiplayer, no pre-order incentives, no horrible DLC, a PC port which made the front page of Steam and, most importantly, it was sold for around the £25 on most places. Even in the face of all of this, and with a thread on these and other forums pointing all of this out, are publishers still the only ones to blame for it not doing well?
Note: Not "doing well" is a nice way of putting it. The game ****ing bombed selling around 20k copies in NA.
Or when they rely on trying to get funding for riskier games which publishers are reluctant to do? It's of no particular surprise when you see so many developers relying on "safe" titles in cases like this. For them, the need to keep the studio open, pay their staff and hope to eventually make the games they really want to make is what drives these kinds of decisions.
This Sega?
article bit ott, they are going to get a loss alright but nothing to extreme, they are still going to expect grow a profit at the end of Q4
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Well while the use of extraordinary in financial documents can generally mean a wide variety of things, I'd still consider a loss of $86m to be quite damaging to any company.richymcdermott wrote: »article bit ott, they are going to get a loss alright but nothing to extreme, they are still going to expect grow a profit at the end of Q4
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Well while the use of extraordinary in financial documents can generally mean a wide variety of things, I'd still consider a loss of $86m to be quite damaging to any company.
oh it is dont get me wrong it is but its more of a japanesse market decline than anything sega are doing wrong as a company , even look at nintendo who are dropping serious dough but 3ds sales are all time high its more of a market thing , why it was smart for sega i think to lay off their q and a team which are basically useless, im trying to find the article but they are still expecting to profit at Q4 from panicko machines and concentrating on there key ips.
following sega for awhile its inevitable they are slowly moving towards the digital market than retail , i expect the next couple of months you see alot more sega games on steam while only seeing there key titles like mario and sonic olympic titles, sonic, total war , aliens and football manager at retail0 -
Yup, that's pretty much it alright.richymcdermott wrote: »oh it is dont get me wrong it is but its more of a japanesse market decline than anything sega are doing wrong as a company , even look at nintendo who are dropping serious dough but 3ds sales are all time high its more of a market thing , why it was smart for sega i think to lay off their q and a team which are basically useless, im trying to find the article but they are still expecting to profit at Q4 from panicko machines and concentrating on there key ips.
following sega for awhile its inevitable they are slowly moving towards the digital market than retail , i expect the next couple of months you see alot more sega games on steam while only seeing there key titles like mario and sonic olympic titles, sonic, total war , aliens and football manager at retail
As a gamer though it's extremely dismaying to see that happen given the utterly fantastic quality of some of their releases over the past two years.
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Yup, that's pretty much it alright.
As a gamer though it's extremely dismaying to see that happen given the utterly fantastic quality of some of their releases over the past two years.
agreed, as i was talking about with retro past few days you will see less games from companies taking risk and just concentrating on their strong ips, japanesse studios will only have two options 1. try cater to the western audience or 2 and this is the most likely source they stick with their own crowd and you wont see games like valkyria chronicles 3 coming over.
such a shame and i dont know quite whos to blame for it. i tend to think as wrong i could be its the shooter market that has taken off this generation , when games try to break away from the shooter market they sale pretty badly.
theres still a market for japan but they will be moving away from consoles and just concentrating on the handheld market0 -
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Join Date:Posts: 50635
Isn't Sammy's side of the business that is losing money while Sega remain profitable? It's the same with Atlus who are making record profits but the parent company Index Holdings Inc. are making a loss across the board.
As for Demon's Souls/Dark Souls, every year you'll get a game like that that succeeds despite the odds and no marketing. There's a lot more projects though that go under for the those reasons, it's more an outlier than a trend.
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richymcdermott wrote: »binary domain is nothing like vanquish , only thing they share are they are 3rd person shooters
richy, I'll assume that you have played BD but do you need to review your understanding of the word 'nothing' in the context of your post. I admit again I have not played the game but I have seen the gameplay vids and it does not take much searching on the net for BD to find such phrases as 'lovechild of Yakuza and Vanquish' or 'best in the genre since Vanquish'.0 -
Let me put it like this, writing off Binary Domain for this reason is like writing off Vanquish because it looks like faster paced version of Gears Of War.Gizmo, you brought up Binary Domain, which I think is a good example of what I feel is a (perceived) problem with the current direction of the industry.
I, like all invested gamers I'm sure, was interested in Binary Domain initially. Then I watched some game play vids around the launch date and I looked at my copy of vanquish (which I have yet to even start a second play through) in my game stash and thought ‘I think I have already bought this game’, albeit under a different name and different cover (maybe I was wrong, but looked damn familiar).
The problem is, with publishers having a finite amount of resources to fund development, and developers relying on these resources for development, then it follows that publishers will concentrate on funding the titles which give them the biggest return. So in this case, why would Activision not task Infinity Ward, Treyarch and/or Sledgehammer to create another CoD when it will sell around 30m copies and generate even more revenue from post-release DLC?I am not looking for a new IP every game (looking forward to Darksiders 2, Borderlands 2, HL3:), AnythingfromFromSoftwaregamenameyournumber) I just want the industry to recognise that its is not just the consumer who should change their practices, the gaming industry has some internal issues to address also if we all want this to be a rewarding activity for us all equally into the future.
You could make the argument that they could fund titles with smaller budgets from smaller studios and, relatively speaking, make a healthy profit but then you have the counter point from gamers that these games are "sent out to die" with little support from publishers. This support, it seems, is primarily marketing-based, but is also something which is rather expensive. You see the problem with this?
To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying this is a nice situation to be in, as I've posted in the Bayonetta 2 thread I lament this fact, but that's the reality of the situation and, from a business perspective, unless customers change their purchasing habits, it's unlikely to change. That doesn't mean we still won't get some original titles along the way but when it does happen, I feel it's important for gamers to, as the saying generally goes (albeit used generally in the protest context) vote with their wallet and buy them on release for their original RRP, not nine months later for 50-75% off.
The reason you'll see opposition to the blanket statement of no more than three games is because when done right, there's no problem with this. Technically speaking the recently released Trials Evolution is the fourth game in the series, should they not have made that? Should Epic not make another Unreal Tournament game (preferably in the vein of UT2K4)? Should EA not make BF4 in two years time? Should Nintendo stop making Mario and Zelda games? All despite the fact that these games have, in the majority of cases, been highly regarded by both fans and critics alike?tldr: I will just not buy that fourth game & I hope for themselves that they have enough money at release date to purchase the game.:)0 -
Let me put it like this, writing off Binary Domain for this reason is like writing off Vanquish because it looks like faster paced version of Gears Of War.
Ah go way will ya! Vanquish looked way better that Gears (and was), BD does not look better than Vanquish (imho). Maybe ......similarish.The problem is, with publishers ............ You see the problem with this?
I do, and I hope I don't come across insulting here, but with what I perceive to be your sometimes inflexible defence of the industry I'm not sure that you fully do and I'll try to explain with your next point.To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying this is a nice situation to be in, as I've posted in the Bayonetta 2 thread I lament this fact, but that's the reality of the situation and, from a business perspective, unless customers change their purchasing habits, it's unlikely to change.
I'll reiterate what I, and others here, have said that the industry needs to have a look at itself and not just look to everyone else for a fix, to problems that, at source, they make the decisions on. During your Bayonetta 2 discussion with richymcdermott, he stated that the first game sold enough for a sequel and you posted that the first game took too long, therefore too costly and they also compounded development cost issues by outsourcing the PS3 development, which no gamer should have purchased as it was completely sub standard. Couple this with the OP article that finished with the comment regarding that Crysis 3 will be contender for best looker ever.
So..... the strawman is now whispering in my ear that you said;) we gamers should 1. pay for their bad budgeting/ development durations 2. pay for their bad choices 3. pay for their polishing dept to....... polish more?
I think this is symptomatic of the industry currently, yet it seems to resolutely choose to ignore. My question now is....do you see the problem here? Your section I quoted above just cannot exist in isolation. The industry needs to have a look at itself and understand the implications of the decisions it is making, which is the key point of source here.The reason you'll see opposition to the blanket statement of no more than three games is because when done right, there's no problem with this.
:)Sorry, I wasn't really being literal. Of course you cannot have a rule that limits any series to three, particularly a good series (and probably not even a popular bad series, unfortunately with some). Just generally I don't want the industry to 'rock band/ guitar hero' itself to extinction and I don't want gamers to be left with only serialised games choice, which by its nature could result in suffication of new IP.
Eh, are we on topic at all here?0 -
But Binary Domain looks nothing like Vanquish, it looks like a more fun and less brown version of Gears of War.Ah go way will ya! Vanquish looked way better that Gears (and was), BD does not look better than Vanquish (imho). Maybe ......similarish.
Well the bit you quoted dealt with a rather different point, one which has been put forward by some folk and relies on a simple breakdown in logic as far as I'm concerned. If people make the suggestion that budgets need to be kept under control in order to lessen the risk associated with developing original IPs, then they cannot turn around and complain when the marketing budget suits the scale of the project. Do you not agree?I do, and I hope I don't come across insulting here, but with what I perceive to be your sometimes inflexible defence of the industry I'm not sure that you fully do and I'll try to explain with your next point.
Just to deal with this before continuing, while those factors all affected the situation differently, my main point was the idea of "sold enough for a sequel" cannot apply to all projects equally.I'll reiterate what I, and others here, have said that the industry needs to have a look at itself and not just look to everyone else for a fix, to problems that, at source, they make the decisions on. During your Bayonetta 2 discussion with richymcdermott, he stated that the first game sold enough for a sequel and you posted that the first game took too long, therefore too costly and they also compounded development cost issues by outsourcing the PS3 development, which no gamer should have purchased as it was completely sub standard. Couple this with the OP article that finished with the comment regarding that Crysis 3 will be contender for best looker ever.
Not at all. Gamers need only do only two things as far as I'm concerned, look out for stuff they may like and if they find something, pay for it when it's released. The unfortunate fact is, not enough payed for Bayonetta, Vanquish, Binary Domain et al so we probably won't see further entries. Nearly 30m people paid for CoD so we will. Over 1.5m people paid for a yearly sub for CoD: Elite so it will continue to be pushed and emulated by other companies.So..... the strawman is now whispering in my ear that you said;) we gamers should 1. pay for their bad budgeting/ development durations 2. pay for their bad choices 3. pay for their polishing dept to....... polish more?
To refer back to my inflexible defense of the industry (:)), many people point out Activision's greed at these releases whereas I simply point out that if people didn't pay for them then they wouldn't make them.
Back to the original point. Now, I'm not saying any of the above games should be aiming for that number of sales. Let's face it, no one in their right minds would think that Sega looked at any of them in their design phase and said "Yes, this game is going to sell as much as Call Of Duty". But at the same time, they probably did look at them (along with the team making them in the case of Platinum and Grasshopper) and say "These guys are going to make a ****ing great game and we think it will make a profit". Now, I'd imagine it did make a profit in the end but given Sega's financial state, perhaps it didn't make enough of a one to justify it.
Binary Domain, on the other hand, sold 20k units in North America soooo, yea, that's slightly different.
On a sidenote, two years to make a game like Bayonetta is nothing. Or, to put it all in context, I don't think Platinum could have made Bayonetta in the amount of time where 1.3m sales would have made it a reasonable financial success, PS3 port issue aside.
In the context of the above, I don't know what you mean, what problem are you referring to?I think this is symptomatic of the industry currently, yet it seems to resolutely choose to ignore. My question now is....do you see the problem here? Your section I quoted above just cannot exist in isolation. The industry needs to have a look at itself and understand the implications of the decisions it is making, which is the key point of source here. 0 -
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I agree with Gizmo on this, and to paraphrase yahtzee on his decision to make bf3 and mw3 his two worst games of 2011 "I don't hate them for what they are, I hate them for what they represent."
With game budgets gone into the millions, creating games had become almost formulaic, and is constantly a triumph of style over substance and a complete recycling of the safety genres. As far as I can see, we are in a gaming bubble of mediocre substandard genres and games being prominent (I'm looking at you nfs, gow, mw, bf, eldar scrolls, gta, and YOU NINTENDO! AND ESPECIALLY EA!!!!!!!!!) and innovative titles being reduced by a limited budget or to an indie platform. This needs to be changed, and the only way to do it is to curb stomp budgets... As well as shut down EA...
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