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Xavier434 posted:I do miss RTS being a big thing on PC. I remember being hugely pumped for Starcraft 2 and playing it a ton and now I don't know when/if the Protoss expansion is coming out. That genre just totally got eaten up by a Warcraft 3 mod and over 10 years of C&C being the same damned thing. Re: mobile gaming, I'm always interested in seeing how this plays out. It was huge for a while and man I like my own mindless pooping games at work, but last I heard, the number of people downloading new apps off of Apple App store and Google Playstore was decreasing. I doubt that market is going to crash but it's looking more like an enthusiast traditional gaming market isn't going anywhere soon either, at least in the west. edit: and I know "my nephews" aren't great marketing research, but those kids actually started getting into retro gaming and they grew up with iPod touches. They just like games in general I guess. bloodychill fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 22:44
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Guys. People pay money in order to have different and desirable experiences. F2P is fine but the experience offered is different(not to be confused with better or worse). The gaming industry is no different. As long as the experience is desired, people will pay for a particular genre of game. My 12 year old plays a lot of f2p games but he will jump at any chance he can to buy a game off Steam as long as he has the money. The tried and true rule over the past several decades continues to reign supreme: It is all about the games.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:45
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bloodychill posted:Re: mobile gaming, I'm always interested in seeing how this plays out. It was huge for a while and man I like my own mindless pooping games at work, but last I heard, the number of people downloading new apps off of Apple App store and Google Playstore was decreasing. I doubt that market is going to crash but it's looking more like an enthusiast traditional gaming market isn't going anywhere soon either, at least in the west. Well, there are two things to discuss. Traditional gaming and high-budget gaming are not intertwined. There will always be a market for all kinds of niche games. The market for something like Final Fantasy and its huge budgets and extreme production values however? That's more debatable. There will always been an audience for RPGs. Will there always be an audience for Final Fantasy is a bigger question. Like people joke "indies are the future of gaming" but low-budget small-team games sold digitally for modest prices is a lot more likely as a future of RPGs than anything else. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 22:47
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Yeah that's the thing, betting tens of millions on a AAA game for a very likely but not guaranteed decent profit instead of betting a couple mil on a game that could potentially make ten to twenty times that if not a lot more and is very likely to at least break even is probably starting to look at lot less tempting to publishers. the AAA game market's been unsustainable for anyone but the biggest big dogs anyway, it's not unlikely that smaller publishers and people with IPs that they can capitalize on heavily are going to move over to f2p mobile games or at the very least longer cheap games like FFD on mobile platforms. it's just good business for them
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Apr 29, 2015 22:59
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ImpAtom posted:Like people joke "indies are the future of gaming" but low-budget small-team games sold digitally for modest prices is a lot more likely as a future of RPGs than anything else. Yeah, I won't argue with that. At least for the time being, that looks like where we're headed. It's not an altogether terrible thing. Final Fantasy could make it but it would mean redefining itself on a pretty fundamental level. For the past few iterations, it's been so focused on graphical fidelity and insane world scope... but without the reuse of game systems that make that possible for other games like TES and GTA. bloodychill fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:10
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I mean, gaming has also had the problem Hollywood has for a while where those bloated budgets that games like the FF13s have also aren't translating into a better end experience in terms of perceptible improvements to graphics, music, or depth of content. They've gotten away with wasting a lot of money for a long time, developing new engines from scratch that they use for one or two games and restarting productions halfway through and canceling things that are 80% finished and poo poo like that. They can produce the games we're already seeing now more efficiently without penalizing us or slashing salaries for the rank-and-file people on dev teams. Of course, whether they'll actually do that...
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Apr 29, 2015 23:14
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ImpAtom posted:We went from expensive small games to expensive big games. Freemium represents a new model where people who get bored can move on to a new game in a moment and if they get invested in a game they can play it for a small eternity because most of the games are designed for near-infinite play. There's no reason you couldn't make a game like FFXV into a Freemium game, though.  I really hope they don't, but if that's what the market demands they absolutely could. It wouldn't mean the end of traditional AAA games, just a shift in the business model. Honestly the business model of games needs to change anyways, for lots of other reasons too. $60 boxes aren't ideal for anybody. That's why DLC has been popping up so much lately. Games are already exploring the business models you seem to think they can't.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:23
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Zaphod42 posted:There's no reason you couldn't make a game like FFXV into a Freemium game, though. yes there is, there's the insane amount of money they've already sunk into it. making 40-50 mil off a freemium game doesn't sound as tempting when you've already spent twice that at least making the game.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:27
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Fungah! posted:yes there is, there's the insane amount of money they've already sunk into it. making 40-50 mil off a freemium game doesn't sound as tempting when you've already spent twice that at least making the game. I'm pretty sure Zaphod is speaking in the abstract, hence "like FFXV".
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Apr 29, 2015 23:31
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Fungah! posted:yes there is, there's the insane amount of money they've already sunk into it. making 40-50 mil off a freemium game doesn't sound as tempting when you've already spent twice that at least making the game. If FFXV was freemium it would make more than other lovely freemium games do. What, is there an upper limit on freemium purchases? That doesn't make sense. There are like 0 freemium games with the production value of FFXV, unless you count something like LOL. And that's not even close. You know LOL's made like 624 Million Dollars, right?  TF2 makes over 100M each year, with barely any development at this point. Where did you get 50M from? Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:31
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Zaphod42 posted:You know LOL's made like 624 Million Dollars, right? It helps (for making shitfucktons of money, at least) when being competitive requires spending considerably more than on a $60 AAA title, though.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:34
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Kyrosiris posted:It helps (for making shitfucktons of money, at least) when being competitive requires spending considerably more than on a $60 AAA title, though. Well, yeah. Duh. That's how you game the freemium thing. They're all pretty exploitive. That's literally like the definition of Freemium. But LoL is way fairer than most (you can unlock all the characters for free over time) and it sure seems like people enjoy LoL and don't mind paying for it. At the end of the day LoL proves that you can totally profit even on an XV scale budget as long as your game is fun and popular, whether its freemium or a paid box. Checkmate bitches.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:37
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Zaphod42 posted:At the end of the day LoL proves that you can totally profit even on an XV scale budget as long as your game is fun and popular, whether its freemium or a paid box. You have a really funny idea of LoL's budget. LoL began as an absurdly low budget game. I was literally at their initial E3 debut thing (which was held at a bowling alley.) They were not big-budget developers. They got a huge influx of cash from Chinese investors after the game began to pick up but that was after it was a proven success. The initial LoL was (by their own admission) basically low-budget models on an engine held together with shoestring. Even now LoL isn't exactly pushing bounderies. It is (intentionally) designed to run on toasters. it isn't the same realm as big budget AAA games. (except in terms of making All The Dollars.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:49
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LOL is in a genre that is currently blowing the gently caress up and getting TV time and arena shows. They also have many many characters that like you said that have tons of costumes that you can show off to your opponents, since it's a game you can play with friends and other people worldwide and show up on leaderboards and feel good at the end of the day about spending money on because you can show the world how worth it it was and how better you are. FFXV is a console JRPG. Ain't no way they can pull anything close to that poo poo.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:54
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Zaphod42 posted:Well, yeah. Duh. That's how you game the freemium thing. They're all pretty exploitive. That's literally like the definition of Freemium. But LoL is way fairer than most (you can unlock all the characters for free over time) and it sure seems like people enjoy LoL and don't mind paying for it. No one's arguing scale, only apples and oranges. Freemium has proven to work for (sort of) big multiplayer games. No one is arguing about that. For single player games and RPG's, it has worked but so far it's been mostly with tiny budget games on mobile. I can say that successful single player freemiums tend to have really boring lovely gameplay that seems intentionally unfun while multiplayer freemium games are actually, you know, fun games. How would this even apply to something like high budget FF and would you want to play the monstrosity that was created? I can't even honestly answer that question for myself because I don't know what such a game would look like. I can say that I personally have no interest in FF:MOBA or FF:Clash Of Clans while I do have interest in FF:Lower Budget Smaller Scope (aka Bravely Default) or even FF:Medium Budget Medium Scope (something like Xenoblade). bloodychill fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:56
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Zaphod42 posted:Well, yeah. Duh. That's how you game the freemium thing. They're all pretty exploitive. That's literally like the definition of Freemium. But LoL is way fairer than most (you can unlock all the characters for free over time) and it sure seems like people enjoy LoL and don't mind paying for it. expecting to make as much as literally the most popular freemium game ever made over its entire six years of existence within the first year or two would be actually insane. like, there's aggressive projections and then there's that. also like impatom said their initial budget was loving peanuts and nowhere near comparable to a normal AAA game let alone XV's insane development cycle
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Apr 29, 2015 23:58
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It would probably be things like only limited weapons being accessible, better food being cash items, camping out being a real time wait timer unless you paid to accelerate it, poo poo like that.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:59
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bloodychill posted:No one's arguing scale, only apples and oranges. Freemium has proven to work for (sort of) big multiplayer games. No one is arguing about that. For single player games and RPG's, it has worked but so far it's been mostly with tiny budget games on mobile. I can say that successful single player freemiums tend to have really boring lovely gameplay that seems intentionally unfun while multiplayer freemium games are actually, you know, fun games. How would this even apply to something like FF15 and would you want to play the monstrosity that was created? I can't even honestly answer that question for myself because I don't know what such a game would look like. You can kind of see an example of that with Bravely Default's Bravely Second feature. A handicap you can pay real-world money to access. Now imagine a game with a lot more of those, maybe some form of Stamina system, characters and jobs all gated behind IAP or fakebux. focus the design around being juuuust hard enough that you really want to pay $10 for access to a job that can easily defeat a current boss... Still, I don't think FFXV is a good basis for that kind of game. You know what would kill in Freemium? Atelier games. Add in an energy system, Pay To Win for rare drops, additional increases in difficulty and complexity of getting items to further encourage IAP, goofy-rear end costumes... you'd do quite well at the cost of being goddamn intolerable to play.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:01
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Though tbh if they went that route and made buyable characters I would totally buy YRP and all their outfits and the entire cast of FF12. But only if they include the guests, Larsa is the best fourth man.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:01
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ImpAtom posted:You have a really funny idea of LoL's budget. LoL began as an absurdly low budget game. I was literally at their initial E3 debut thing (which was held at a bowling alley.) They were not big-budget developers. They got a huge influx of cash from Chinese investors after the game began to pick up but that was after it was a proven success. The initial LoL was (by their own admission) basically low-budget models on an engine held together with shoestring. That is completely irrelevant. The argument was that XV can't go freemium because of the budget, but if they were LoL they'd be massively profitable even on FFXV's budget. Your argument that LoL was made on a smaller budget doesn't really apply at all? Like, are you saying that if LoL had a bigger budget and made a better game they'd somehow make less profit? That doesn't make sense. How is the income dependent upon the game being a shoestring budget? If they only made like 100M and that wasn't enough to make XV, you'd have a point. But they made 600M. As long as the income beats the cost to develop you're making profit. Why does the initial cost matter? It doesn't. (Unless you go bankrupt in the meantime) bloodychill posted:How would this even apply to something like high budget FF and would you want to play the monstrosity that was created? I can't even honestly answer that question for myself because I don't know what such a game would look like. Yeah, there's definitely lots of questions and it could be handled right or wrong. Would the community flock to it? Who knows. I was just objecting to the assertion that "you could never do anything like XV on a freemium business model". You can't prove that definitively. Maybe Square would handle it right or maybe they wouldn't, but you can't say its loving impossible. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 00:07
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Zaphod42 posted:That is completely irrelevant. The argument was that XV can't go freemium because of the budget, but if they were LoL they'd be massively profitable even on FFXV's budget. LoL is literally the story of an unexpected success. You can't assume that your games will do as well as LoL because almost nothing does. It is exactly an example of why doing a low-budget game is a better idea than a big-budget game because if it fails you've invested less while if it succeeds you're making money off it regardless. There is no reason to invest a ton of money in it and no benefit to doing so. That is what you don't seem to get. There is basically no situation where a big-budget freemium game is superior to a low-budget low-requirement game. Like if LoL had FFXV-style graphics? Yes, it would make less money because fewer people could play it. Part of LoL's strength is that it is free to download and runs on almost any computer that can reasonably be expected to run a game. Part of why LoL is so massively successful is that it is big in Korea and China where the ability to run the game on lovely machines is a drat-near requirement. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 00:10
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bloodychill posted:No one's arguing scale, only apples and oranges. Freemium has proven to work for (sort of) big multiplayer games. No one is arguing about that. For single player games and RPG's, it has worked but so far it's been mostly with tiny budget games on mobile. I can say that successful single player freemiums tend to have really boring lovely gameplay that seems intentionally unfun while multiplayer freemium games are actually, you know, fun games. How would this even apply to something like high budget FF and would you want to play the monstrosity that was created? I can't even honestly answer that question for myself because I don't know what such a game would look like. did you play ac3? thats how.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:13
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The GIG posted:Though tbh if they went that route and made buyable characters I would totally buy YRP and all their outfits and the entire cast of FF12. But only if they include the guests, Larsa is the best fourth man. Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladiolus as Bartz, Lenna, Faris, and Galuf. Each job's outfit can be bought separately for $5, and gives them that ability. Anyway, the only way to stop mobile gaming ruining everything is to be cool gamer parents. A strict regimen of retro classics, and they can only advance to the 16-bit era once they've achieved the true ending in Ghosts and Goblins.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:25
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ImpAtom posted:LoL is literally the story of an unexpected success. You can't assume that your games will do as well as LoL because almost nothing does. It is exactly an example of why doing a low-budget game is a better idea than a big-budget game because if it fails you've invested less while if it succeeds you're making money off it regardless. There is no reason to invest a ton of money in it and no benefit to doing so. That is what you don't seem to get. There is basically no situation where a big-budget freemium game is superior to a low-budget low-requirement game. I'm not saying you should bank on it happening, I'm saying its possible somebody could pull it off. You wanna say it'd be hard to do XV as freemium? Fine, go ahead. But don't act like it absolutely fundamentally can't be done by some part of XV's nature. It could. I mean the same is true of normal AAA games anyways; some of them get COD levels of success and others are massive bombs. You can't expect you'll get COD numbers but people still try anyways. There's no way a big budget freemium game can beat a low-budget freemium game?  Did players just stop caring about graphics and content and polish in the last 10 years?If anything games like that tend to have one big winner who owns a big slice of the market share. Investing more into your game than your competitors could be a viable strategy to be seen as the best in the industry, and thus get most people's attention by default. Which can then allow you to edge out your competitors and then make huge profits. You're being ridiculous dude. Its like saying "Movies cost X? In the modern world of netflix, that'll never be sustainable". Its much more complicated than that.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:41
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Zaphod42 posted:I'm not saying you should bank on it happening, I'm saying its possible somebody could pull it off. You wanna say it'd be hard to do XV as freemium? Fine, go ahead. But don't act like it absolutely fundamentally can't be done by some part of XV's nature. It could. F2P games tend to be designed to be played perpetually, and microtransactions are used to make progress possible without increasingly large amounts of time and effort. A F2P version would need to prevent you from progressing too quickly or easily, even if you're skilled at the combat, and would need a lot of post-game content to keep players interested after the story has finished. Capcom tried a big-budget F2P game on a brand new engine with Deep Down, and that's been quietly cancelled or put on hold.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:01
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Zaphod42 posted:There's no way a big budget freemium game can beat a low-budget freemium game? Yes. Did you miss the part where for top-tier graphics you need something that can provide those graphics. A person can play LoL on almost any computer on the planet which matters a lot because they're not just targeting traditional players. They are targeting a wide audience of people from many countries with many different economic situations. Your theoretical big-budget freemium game will cost more to develop and have a smaller and more restrictive audience. No amount of marketing can make up for that because the people they're targeting are people playing casually on machines they already own, not people putting out $800 for a new gaming rig. Meanwhile a low budget game costs less to make, less to keep up (because a regular wave of new content is a big part of freemium), and has a wider audience, while also hurting them less if it fails. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 01:05
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The future of video games is going to be decided here and now in the Final Fantasy megathread. Welcome to the new age motherfuckers.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:13
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Why is there no option to hear a preview of the songs on the DLC menu in Theatrhythm? I have to go to Youtube to look up these songs to see if I want to buy them, that's just annoying.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:18
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Xavier434 posted:The future of video games is going to be decided here and now in the Final Fantasy megathread. So long as darkness exists in men's hearts, video games... shall... r... return...
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Apr 30, 2015 01:29
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What is happening to Japan won't happen over here, there are too many companies with too much money on the line for them to just let mobile gaming have their way. That being said, I'm not really worried of the "casualification" of gaming. Games like the Souls series spread based on word of mouth hype. You can see kids on Youtube who would never have heard of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts blazing through those games like nothing. Pillars of Eternity sold like gangbusters for a game trying to revive a genre that died in 2000 and some of the pre-release marketing involved sending preview copies to Youtube streamers, the vast majority who have never even seen an Infinity Engine game or probably don't even know what D&D is. Besides, if you're playing dotes or LoL you can easily slip from playing casually into being that nerd who takes gaming too god drat seriously without having to "graduate" to big games. Zaphod42 posted:Well, yeah. Duh. That's how you game the freemium thing. They're all pretty exploitive. That's literally like the definition of Freemium. But LoL is way fairer than most (you can unlock all the characters for free over time) and it sure seems like people enjoy LoL and don't mind paying for it. You need to play on average 4,200+ hours of LoL to unlock every champion in the game and almost double that to unlock everything else that can be purchased with in game currency. There's no fairness involved.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:01
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The White Dragon posted:So long as darkness exists in men's hearts, video games... shall... r... return...  This is what the current generation is missing out on. A guy who beat himself up in a mirror place run by his moon father on top of a mountain beating up the embodiment of hatred of some really pissed off guy too angry to sleep. I can't believe they ruined such an elegant concept for the sequel. Mega64 fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 02:03
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Mega64 posted:
lightning returns final fantasy
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Apr 30, 2015 02:26
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Beef Waifu posted:That's a lot of Japanese developers honestly. I think it's just a Japanese thing that they don't realize they're pandering as much as they are even though half of the designs usually are honest effort and the other half is pandering. It's a game industry thing and don't try to kid yourself in to believing otherwise. It's by no means something that only happens in Japan. The GIG posted:FFXV is a console JRPG. Ain't no way they can pull anything close to that poo poo. Why not? PAD pulls in over a billion a year and it's a match 3 mobile game. Throw a Gacha in to FFXV and let people drop  to do a couple rolls for cosmetic pretty princess dressup for their boy band. XP Boosters, DLC areas/characters/skills/gear/etc.
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Apr 30, 2015 08:19
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Evil Fluffy posted:It's a game industry thing and don't try to kid yourself in to believing otherwise. It's by no means something that only happens in Japan. Western developers don't do this poo poo nearly as much as they used to and even when they used to, they were pretty transparent about it. Every time some criticism about a woman's outfit being risque in some interview with some member of the staff on a Japanese game they respond with some response about their design having an actual reason behind it, but it's also quite obvious with it being pandering too. Unless their names are George Kamitani or Hideki Kamiya in which case they will tell you to gently caress off and not bring that poo poo around their game or in George's case you insinuate one of the Kotaku idiots that's hassling you is gay and post a ton of really buff dwarves.
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Apr 30, 2015 08:25
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There's a new trailer for Imperial SaGa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBGQya5_Cog This is the PC Browser game. It's not to be confused with the SaGa game that was announced for Vita. Or Emperor's SaGa which is a F2P mobile game based around collecting cards. Convoluted, I know. Imperial SaGa is a F2P game and it looks similar to Final Fantasy Record Keeper. It has several notable series alumni working on it.  Now, we just need to know what dungeon Hiroyuki Ito is rotting in.
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Apr 30, 2015 14:01
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Xavier434 posted:It is all about the games. That's what I'm talkin' about 
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Apr 30, 2015 14:17
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Just going to put things in perspective. Zaphod's general point isn't necessarily wrong. Where he is wrong is on so many of the little details and rhetoricals he's peppered his arguments with that a bunch of people were trying to correct him on those things specifically and the discussion just digressed to the point where thisZaphod42 posted:Well, yeah. Duh. That's how you game the freemium thing. They're all pretty exploitive. That's literally like the definition of Freemium. But LoL is way fairer than most (you can unlock all the characters for free over time) and it sure seems like people enjoy LoL and don't mind paying for it. is literally a thing that got posted in a discussion that was started because Sunning expressed his fears of a worst-case scenario wrt the games industry in the West a la the death of console games (including Final Fantasy) in Japan. And yes, the discussion was started because Zaphod decided to take offense to Sunning's worries. So, to dial it all back to what's important: Xavier434 posted:It is all about the games.
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Apr 30, 2015 14:59
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But seriously though "AAA on Vita or 3DS"  Triple-A might be as close to meaningless a marketing label as you can get, but the term implies something more specific than just "any core market gaming experience"
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Apr 30, 2015 15:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Its like saying "Movies cost X? In the modern world of netflix, that'll never be sustainable". This is true though, since most of the majors who aren't making Marvel movies are having to shrink and refocus on smaller gambles or just poach critical darlings from the festival circuit.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:10
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Eh. As far as I'm concerned, the industry has changed, and for the most part, video games aren't for me anymore. I'm a fuddy duddy stuck in the past. Most of the really hot things right now (multiplayer fpses, open world RPGs, MOBAs, minecraft, angry birds etc.) just don't appeal to me. I'm actually okay with this, because as I grow older, I have to devote more time to well, non-videogame things. As someone who is mainly used to Japanese console games, I can kind of understand why the Japanese are a little leery towards totally open ended games like Skyrim. I could never get into the Elder Scrolls games because they are so open ended that I'm not sure what I want to do or what my immediate goals are. Not to mention that Bethesda games generally lack polish. Of course, as with everything thing, moderation is the key. FF13 took things to the opposite extreme in that it was so linear that the game was a series of very pretty hallways.
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