Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Switchin' It Up
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2229 |
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Pretty much. The creators are the ones who make the products that lead to success, they're the actual revenue generators. It's why it's important to keep talent so institutional knowledge can be established. It's also why you have to see IP creation as a genuine, long-term investment. Just look at how Splatoon turned into a big name for Nintendo to the point where they do concerts for the in-game idol groups. It's such a world of difference and is better for everyone in the long run. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
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On the contrary, it's very important. We don't measure Game of Thrones' success by how much money it made; we measure it with how much it penetrated popular culture, coined phrases like "Winter is coming" or "A Stark remembers their debts", and all other manner of memes. That Game of Thrones' popularity died out overnight in the wake of the final season laying an egg the way it did is no little thing. Same with a lot of anime or games. Touhou, Fate, Azur Lane and the like dominating Comiket for as long as they have (regardless of how big they are--especially since Touhou is nowhere near Fate) is a really good barometer of popularity for these franchises. Nobody would be making so much Touhou doujin if there wasn't an audience for it. We're coming up on over a year out from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's release--folks are still thirsting for Purah. If an artist at Artist Alley has Fallout fanart, they're guaranteed to have art of Piper or Cassidy or Walter Goggins' new character. Nobody seems capable of even naming a character from Starfield. People love their Helldivers, even if they're generic grunts in armor. Call of Duty is one of the biggest franchises in the gaming industry--but no artist in Artist Alley sells CoD keychains. Genshin, though? You'll be tripping in Ganyu, Beidou, or Mona merch. Folks can't get enough of it. The kind of pop-culture ripples a media can make is still vastly important. A massive-selling game can come and go, but folks can and will hang on to their Scrimblo--and that passion for a scrimblo can lead to an exploitable niche, to say nothing of all that fanart and merch possibly getting new fans in from other sources. League of Legends' reputation is in the crapper, but people still love K/DA--it's why Riot can make a ton of LoL spin-offs and people will show up. All of that fanart is the difference between a sequel getting met with "Who asked for this?" or a "Oh yeah, that's that [x]-thing a lot of people like." And in today's internet, there are a lot more people who got into games or anime because they saw smut of a character and their activated neurons led them to learn more.
Well, Microsoft had nothing but wonderful things about how HFR was selling and exceeding their expectations, so either they're lying or they were just that obsessed with pinching pennies that they shut down a studio that gave them a verified AA-hit.
You underestimate how much people in Japan like and watch American media. And regardless: Microsoft again was making noise about how much they needed to make inroads with Japanese studios/developers. They had one, and they shut it down. Not very promising for any possible Japanese developer that might want to work with them. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6001 |
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Guess this isn’t a good time to reopen wounds by reminding people that Microsoft cancelled Scalebound once upon a time.
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2267 Location: Online Terminal |
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I really don't understand the attempts to bury HFR when 10 seconds of google show that it had a player base of 3 million well before it hit the PS5. Even if the PS5 rollout was incredibly disastrous and/or everyone only played on Game Pass, that sounds like Tango delivered a successful game and most of the negatives were out of their control.
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2223 |
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Treating fanart and anime convention merch as the sole measure of a game's success is terribly myopic. There are other ways in which a game can enter the zeitgeist; the most obvious one of course being a bunch of people buying and playing it on the regular, like with CoD, FIFA, Madden, and so on. |
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psh_fun
 Posts: 47 |
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I always side-eye when companies say "players" instead of giving actual sales numbers. Game Pass has really muddied the waters when talking about sales now for specific games. Companies used to do it with physical copies too when they say "shipped" instead of sold which means there could be thousands of unsold copies sitting on shelves for all we know. Although is Palworld technically Microsoft? It reached 25 million "players" last I heard them bragging about it so as far as smaller games go I suppose 3 million is on the lower end for something with the Game Pass boost. At least the PalWorld devs specified 15 million sales came from Steam and Xbox had 10 million "players" so we have a better idea with that game. From what I could find the statement about Hi Fi Rush meeting expectations was an off handed comment one employee made on X and not an official statement put out by Microsoft or the company in a press release. Other off handed comments I saw from employees and insiders said it didn't make the money it needed so who knows. I assume the latter is probably more accurate given the closure. |
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Joe Mello
Posts: 2267 Location: Online Terminal |
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That's fine--companies are always going to go with the biggest number that's suitable for them--but if we're saying that GamePass is so pervasive that it diluted a number that's now 8 months old and factors in one less console from "modest success" to "fatal" then the problem is either GamePass, Microsoft/Bethesda's own projections, or both. If two out of three users got it for free, then that's still selling a million copies. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2229 |
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A lot of it seems to stem from trying not to admit the obvious: that the XBox division's leadership are bad at their jobs, don't care about creators, and don't actually care about games. I've seen people use passive voice with them, like this was some unavoidable act of god when in fact it was a choice by a bunch of bone-headed, glue-sniffing executives that are clueless a to what they're doing. Furthermore, it would require people to start looking even deeper into the game industry's problems, specifically the cost of these AAA titles everyone craves. It's easier to enjoy someone when you can ignore how many people lost their jobs. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6001 |
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While complaining about changes that suck or sameness that also sucks and annual releases in general. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 521 |
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Let he who doesn't have a dakimakura of his favorite characters throw the first stone. |
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Covnam
 Posts: 3688 |
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Perhaps if Nintendo ever put the Famicom Detective Club games or bundle on sale it might move a few more copies... :/
I wonder if this is territories and not countries? PSN lists more than 23 countries on their site and wiki has it at about 70 iirc. Not that this wasn't an issue regardless of the numbers, but it seems like someone threw out a large (possibly) inaccurate number and everyone just repeated it. If Sony wasn't able to have this requirement at launch, they should have just left it optional and given an incentive like a skin or something for sign in to PSN. They would have had far less controversy and gotten plenty of people to happily sign up.
PR wise they'll be fine. Mainstream players that don't keep up with the industry won't know about it and plenty of people have short memories for this kind of thing, especially if (big if there) they can put out some good games. |
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DKL
 Posts: 1956 Location: California, USA |
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I find it strange that there seems to be what appears to be speculation of what the experience of playing Hi-Fi Rush is actually like in this thread, when you can, you know, go out and actually play it.
A large part of the art of video games is the part where you play it, unless I’m misunderstanding something. Watching your favorite influencer or reviewer play or talk about the thing feels like it’s seldom adequate since you’re missing out on a lot of the game’s nuance. These random internet people can maybe guide you in a desired direction (though I find it rare for people to not feed into their preconceptions and they just want confirmation bias most of the time), but I feel like this is just really different from the experience of sitting there and hitting buttons. Now, I understand that people don’t have all the time and money in the world to play everything… but we apparently have enough time to talk about the experience of playing the thing, despite not playing the thing. I just find this aspect of video game discourse to be consistently very weird and maybe even toxic since I feel like people, in this instance, in using their second hand experience of the game, are moving in the direction that art and artists are only ever justified if there’s substanial returns or “reasons” for it. My very unsophisticated view of the artistic process is that I’m happy when something cool exists and I would hope the actual creatives make at least enough money to hobble to the next battlefield to make the next cool thing. It’s sounding like this game did OK sales and exposure-wise based on the back and forth I’m seeing in the thread, but apparently this isn’t enough and we need it to be the next GTA5 or something to justify keeping the studio open? And it can’t be the next AA hit or whatever because the gameplay or production values, based on not experiencing the game meaningfully, is not good enough? (I will maybe fight people on the animation though… the cutscene stuff is probably some of the best in-industry for this art style) But then, I don’t know: you don’t need to play Basketball to enjoy Basketball (or play fighting games to enjoy fighting games, actually… I believe there is in fact a large subset of people that watch EVO or whatever even though they don’t play these types of games), so maybe that’s what this is and people aren’t really interested in playing games, they’re just interested in watching people play it (which is fine as I watched a fair share of vtubers when my PC was still alive, but I almost never assumed I really understood the game enough to justify putting time into formulating talking points based on this second hand gameplay) or discussing all that (usually) pointless shit in the background, like game sales, which I’m admittedly not too interested in since I’m only incidentally a stockholder as my ROTH IRA and 401k accounts are managed by other people and I seldom check what they are doing with said accounts since I’m too busy earning the money to put into these things to begin with. (Or learning how to play these games I actually want to talk about in a meaningful way) Anyway, the deluxe edition of Hi-Fi Rush is cheaper than the regular edition at $23 on PSN and the game itself is readily available to play if you are on Gamepass, though I’m now weary of this second option given that apparently being on the thing is not enough to shield devs from being cut off like this. I can definitely say that my interest in these types of subscription services has waned after this incident, despite the deal being very beneficial to consumers, financially speaking (I think the most recent Yakuza/Like a Dragon games are on there, so there is in fact a lot of stuff on there that you get for your subscription money… I find it very hard to argue otherwise if we’re just looking at it from the perspective of what you get for your money). I did actually kind of mash the first stage when Hi-Fi Rush first came out, but didn’t progress further than that since I was admittedly too lazy to open GamePass at the time and it kind of fell off after that since I was probably doing other things. This is kind of bit of a strange incident with me since I did in fact pre-order stuff like Team Ninja’s Wo Long when it came out. It’s likely that Hi-Fi Rush being handed to me with minimal notice on the subscription discouraged me from just buying it and I always put the actual purchase off with the idea that it was technically sitting in my PC game library already. My bad. That said, based on my time with it since last night where I’ve now sat down and properly engaged with the game, I feel like the game is worth playing and that we are probably missing out since there isn’t a likely more ambitious sequel on the horizon now. This is easily the best Tango game I’ve played from what it feels like. Here is my gameplay footage of what fresh save Very Hard difficulty plays like (I don’t think you’re meant to dive into the deep end like I’m doing, but if there’s a mountain of hotdogs in front of me, then…): https://youtu.be/PIlubQ2vOHs?si=yyvT0jniMdS51eWi Personally speaking, I find the game to be quite a bit hard and am struggling more with it than I did with stuff like FFVII part 2 dynamic mode (where, depending on how underleveled I am, I can be in fights with high APM for like 10-20 minutes and some things even have an unblockable kill move they spam that can wipe the party during that time unless you interrupt or set up defense for it… it’s an extremely fun 10-20 minutes for me (except for that stupid double dog fight in Corel prison, which is the worst 3 minutes of game I’ve played in recent memory, but it might be my fault since I didn’t read the assessment closely enough to learn that you can block the dogs’ wakeup move in addition to dodging it to make the enemy go into pressure), but I imagine most people don’t like sitting in training mode and doing setups and combos where you have to use all the game mechanics), Stellar Blade (which I don’t find too bad because of how powerful meter is) and Rise of the Ronin or whatever. The above gameplay is probably the cleanest stage I’ve managed to play and it was still only an A rank, so I’m still not decent enough. My general experience with other stages has been dying a lot (since the damage is high) and trying to figure out why the “score” part of my ranking is always so low and not hitting S rank. I’ve speculated that it has to do with me not using special moves with the score x2 or x3 modifiers, but I’m not completely sure yet since I’m too busy being broke and not being able to afford any of the shop upgrades. I’ve been able to hit an S rank for individual fights here and there and even with sloppy play, so it does feel like it’s something that’s vaguely within my reach since damageless (which I’m almost never good at unless the defensive options are very good, like in the Team Ninja Final Fantasy game, for example) isn’t one of the requirements: https://youtu.be/PAIcuaGUhyk?si=FaJDYgBlABc7AkU- I also think that I should use parry more since there’s a soft exploit with it you can do where you just preemptively do it and if you’re doing it to the beat (there’s a guide you can turn on that shows you where it is visually, but I’m noticing that I’m not really able to look at it a lot), you will auto-parry most of the attacks (but there are in fact things that hit you because there are hitboxes thrown out between the normal beats, which is admittedly kind of annoying… the Samurai robot is probably the best example of this I’ve seen so far and missing the full parry on this thing’s string of attacks is fairly punishing since, in addition to you taking a lot of damage, it doesn’t go into a downed state where you can wail on it). I’ve not really had experience with action games with rhythm elements built into it. I vaguely mashed that Legend of Zelda game from the Crypt of the Necrodancer dev, but I cannot give a detailed account of it, but I do remember thinking it was interesting, outside of traveling which felt kind of like a slog to do since it felt like you can’t really zoom around from what I remember since movement is a bit weird. I would assume that Hi-Fi rush seems like fairly good variation of either action games, rhythm games or the combination of both, but I could be wrong and there might be better examples. Based on my limited experience with the genre, I think this game is cool enough. I initially thought that the whole rhythm part of the game would be limiting, but it seems like you can get a fair bit creative with your combos as long as you know what you’re doing. It’s hard, but feels rewarding to get better at. Based on my experience with the game, and assuming the game kind of at least made money, I feel like the closure of the studio that made the thing is not justified, unless money is the sole parameter that we care about, then I guess close away. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2229 |
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Funnily enough it also makes me think of how little merch MS has made for their franchises over the years. You'd think they would be churning out all sorts of figurines and apparel, but they really don't do anything with that. There's a reason why media companies invest so much in merch as they know it helps sell a franchise and establishes an image. They were weirdly flatfooted with the Fallout show when they should have done all sorts of stuff with the franchise to hype it up. Instead, it caught them out of nowhere and now they're playing catch up. Just very baffling. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 521 |
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Or worse: they completely bungle the merch. The Nuka Dark controversy (a $100 drink sold in a cheap plastic shell covering a bottle), the advertised canvas bags made as pre-order bonuses for Fallout 76 that were replaced with cheap nylon bags (without any notice to people who bought the pre-order set) because they were "too expensive"--but not too expensive to produce for the influencers that Bethesda wanted to butter up... |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2229 |
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Oh yeah, forgot about that. And then there was the power armor helmet that later turned out to have mold problems that could cause lung infections. Just very cheap and lazy, especially when hardcore fans always shell out extra money for quality merch. It just shows how MS doesn't really understand that games are ENTERTAINMENT, not tech, you're not just selling software but cultural capital. There's a reason why Disney has an entertainment empire. |
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