Hurdles for a Legendary Collection

Whenever I see someone asking why there isn’t a collection for the Mega Man Legends games, I point them to the Japanese-exclusive PSP ports. Of course, these get ignored as they’re in Japanese and don’t fit the schema that the Legends series doesn’t have a port on then- and now-current consoles and Steam. The PSP ports are important, however. That handheld console was the locus for Mega Man trying to get a new start. It had both remakes of the original Mega Man and Mega Man X, both of which were intended to remake both series and move them. Both ended up as curiosities rather than sales hits.

I don’t like to admit it, but Mega Man was no longer the same icon in the mainstream culture as it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. The Blue Bomber would remain an icon for gaming for sure, but Capcom moving to the evergreen model also meant pretty much everything was put on ice. Merch would appear on the figurative store shelves, that one cartoon that most seem to have passed by, and the collections. Those collections, alongside Mega Man 11, kept Mega Man relevant and afloat. As much as I have a personal distaste for the evergreen model, it does allow people to buy and get into these games much easier. You could argue that emulation already did that, but just buying the games and launching them rather than finding the ROMs and ISOs, then setting up the emulator to run the games really is that much more work.

We’re not in a Mega Man Renaissance. It’d need a whole lot of new games across the different Mega Man series to be that.

Because we live in the era of Evergreen Collections, there have been some expectations for a new Mega Man Legends Collection. I fully admit that I am one of these people, because there are no real ways to show any support for that particular section of Mega Man outside the new comic miniseries that just came out. That is honestly the only way you can show support for Legends at this moment in time. I would always recommend caution and not expect any sort of new releases for the Legends games that weren’t just PSN PS1 Classic releases.

With a recent interview, this suggestion has been more or less justified. Shingo Izumi, the current Producer for Mega Man, stated that there are no plans to develop such a collection, but it would be one of the possible candidates. The Legends games have issues that the rest of the Mega Man series don’t. Some aren’t Capcom’s own fault, while others are directly related to how late 1990s Capcom liked to do business.

Let’s start with the biggest one, and that is the constant and steady drop of sales. I’ll have to trust VGChartz and Namu.wiki for these numbers, but they align with what I recall seeing across the years.

Mega Man Legends was released in 1996 in Japan and a year later elsewhere. It sold around 830,000 units across all regions. Breaking this down, Japanese sales were 120,000, North America 390,000, Europe 260,000, and the rest of the world bought 50,000. The N64 port would see 130,000 units sold, with most of them being in the US at 127,000 sold units.

1999’s The Misadventures of Tron Bonne saw a very limited print in the West, limiting its availability and making it stupidly expensive, which gives some colour why I’m having some hard time finding solid sales numbers. Estimations cap at 110,000 sold units, with Japan seeing 61,127 units, North America 20,000, and Europe only 5,000 due to that extremely limited distribution. Bought mine for 15€ back then. Other regions added 25,000 sold units. Even for a side game, these are sad numbers.

In the year 2000, Legends 2 would sell worse than the first game did at 420,000 sold units. 100,000 in Japan, 170,000 in North America, 120,000 in European regions, and 30,000 in the rest of the world. By this point, it was clear that the series had failed to establish itself and the market wasn’t interested in it.

This would be the end of the series, with mobile games taking the slot. Not that these games would contribute much to the survival of the series, but at least they’re something.

The PSP ports of the first two games, initially released as stand-alone, saw sales at 11,500 and 2,500 units respectively. The 1+2 Value Pack sold only 10,000 units. When the three games hit PSN, their sales have been described as “negligible.” Digital sales that sell low don’t get their numbers published. Despite hype and loud fandom, this didn’t translate to sales.

The history of the series’ sales starts relatively strong with the first game, but it was less than expected. It nailed the Greatest Hits/Platinum status and managed to build a niche fanbase, but as Keiji Inafune would admit later, the game wasn’t the hit they had wished for. The devs had expected the main audience, elementary school kids, to follow the name Mega Man (or rather, Rockman) from 2D action to 3D action-adventure with RPG elements. This would appeal to the older otaku audience, however. Inafune called it arrogance in his book What Kind of Decision is That!

While the sales of the first game were strong enough to warrant a sequel and a spin-off, in hindsight we should call those numbers poor sales as the game cost Capcom around a billion yen, or about $10 million. That’s 1997 USD too. This was the reason why Legends 2 saw a delay. This was still in an era where three years between titles was considered to be long.

There were other reasons for the games’ lack of success other than the core audience rejecting the Free Running RPG nature of the series. First is that the devs were inexperienced with 3D game design, as Inafune admits in the aforementioned book. The game is, in the end, surprisingly flat with verticality mostly being used to fence player progression until Springs are found. Platforming itself was awkward at best. Controls were janky, as left-right camera motion is controlled by L and R. It didn’t help that the turning speed in general was rather slow. This was the industry standard of sorts at the time, as the PS controller lacked the dual sticks at the time. Lock-On would freeze Mega Man in his place, making the accurate shooting a chore. The game would auto-aim a little bit for the player, as long as the enemy was in the middle of the screen.

Some of the same issues would persist in Legends 2. Some were changed, like how Lock-On allows the player to move around. Nevertheless, both games have the core tactic of circling the enemies and shooting, making it the de facto tactic for how to defeat pretty much any enemy in the game. Some controversy and fan criticism was given to how the first game’s single island had one dungeon connecting to all other dungeons in the game was lost when the second game was set on multiple islands. I’m not going to give a full review of the games. That’d be unfair, I am far too positively biased towards the games.

The main issues with Mega Man Legends 2 were that Capcom was expecting it to be a new Mega Man 2, where the series would properly kick off and find mainstream popularity. If the sales are anything to go by, there was never a large enough audience to justify the series’ continuation, something the fans who fell in love with the series would mourn. Yours truly included.

In the same book, Inafune mentions how the lessons learned with Legends directly translated to the Battle Network series. From an outsider perspective, we can pinpoint a few things. First, the whole collecting cards and using them for battling was popular among the target audience at the change of the millennium. The linear RPG model with real-time action nailed interest down better. Connected life was becoming more common too, with Digimon taking advantage of this earlier. Link-Battling made for a more social game as well, with tournaments being held. Less expensive development turned in bigger bucks, and that’s all she wrote. Mega Man Legends walked so Mega Man Battle Network could run.

There is more to this than just sales numbers, however. Mega Man Legends games all have some elements that make their new releases inconvenient for Capcom.

First, there are some legal issues. The Japanese version of Legends had licensed the Oronamin C energy drink to appear in the game. These sorts of licensing agreements always come with territorial restrictions, time limits, and platform limitations. When the game hit PSN, Capcom had to relicense the drink, as Sony does not allow changes for PSN PS1 Classic titles. If Capcom had simply removed the drink license, like they did with the Western versions, they would’ve had to release Legends as a whole new title on PSN rather than as a Classic. Similar things happened with Rival Schools.

Similarly, the Yoyogi Animation Academy building in the game is an actual animation school and there is a character that gives out the school’s phone number the player could call. While this was removed in the later releases of Legends, this is another example of Capcom using real-world trademarks at the time for promotional licensing.

Is all the music in the games legally Capcom’s, or do they have a need to relicense the Japanese openings and ending songs?

Further legal complications could stem from Capcom opting to use non-union voice actors and actors under limited studio contracts in the late 1990s. This applies to all three Legends games, as there has been speculation on how legal complications can arise when voice actor contracts don’t include residual rights for later re-releases. In the worst case, Capcom might need to find the original VAs and make a new contract with them for each new release, and even then it might just be for a limited time. There is no major lawsuit of any kind regarding the voice actor contracts, but it can be an obstacle for any new release nevertheless.

Robert Norman Smith’s role as Tiesel Bonne could be an issue. He pleaded guilty to possession and distribution of CSAM in 2008 after being arrested in 2006. Unsurprisingly, this killed his career. He would be a repeat offender and see additional charges in 2020, and drowned later the same year. While we shouldn’t assume guilt by association, it would be worth questioning if Capcom themselves want to have one of their game series associated with a dead paedophile.

Outside Smith’s own doings, the Legends games carry some legal baggage that Capcom would need to address both in-game and in the real world before they can even put the games into a Collection.

I’m not sure how much bad blood Capcom wants to carry, but knowing certain aspects of Japanese corporation culture, Keiji Inafune’s and Capcom’s internal conflict didn’t leave anyone with a good aftertaste. He had been the public face of the franchise for decades and his resignation from Capcom was met with numerous Mega Man related cancellations. Legends had been Inafune’s baby, and it is possible that Capcom, at the time, simply clapped back the only way they could by hitting his possible legacy.

Legends 3 comes into the picture with this, as Inafune left in the middle of its early production. Capcom said that the game was cancelled due to the lack of fan support, which we can dispute however much we want. Capcom didn’t deal with the fallout and got tons of bad PR, but the main issue was again legal. Because fans could submit character designs, ideas for the plot and concept art, legal issues rose as to who actually would own the intellectual property created in this fashion, who would get the credit for the work done, and if there would be any compensation. At best, Capcom was getting supposedly free ideas and suggestions from fans, and at worst was outsourcing the game’s development to its customers without compensation. Capcom aimed to alleviate these concerns by sending gifts and letters to some of the participants. The official word from Capcom, however, was that the game didn’t meet the internal required criteria. Within Capcom, games don’t get just one greenlight to go, but there are multiple points of evaluation where they need to get that green light multiple times.

Because of this, I personally believe any work done on Legends 3 should be scrapped and started anew to avoid any issues. The ready demo that was meant to be released might work as some sort of window to how the game was intended originally, but as an extra only. We would see the game’s engine being recycled to the Gaist Crusher series, which honestly seems to share a lot of the same basic controls.

Legends 3 was a PR nightmare for Capcom, if we’re being straight about it.

The fans love the games and want at least one more entry to finish the story. The story, however, is the least of Capcom’s concerns. Inafune probably had more than a few ideas how the third game would’ve played out. Legends 2’s scenario writer Makazu Eguchi still works with Capcom, so he probably would be the person who has the best idea how the third game was intended to end the story. The Director and Story architect Yoshinori Kawano seems to be associated with Capcom still, so having two thirds of the core team making the story is still there.

However, whatever form a hypothetical Mega Man Legends 3 would end up being, it would be a completely different game from what it could’ve been if it had been made right after the second game, or from the Legends 3 on the 3DS. I’ve personally raised some questions as to whether I really want a sequel to a nearly thirty-year-old game by developers who have different sets of goals and values. It wouldn’t be the same after all this time. It would be, at best, a simulacrum of what it could’ve been updated for modern sensibilities.

All that said, sales numbers are very much what Capcom looks at when determining success and whether or not something gets new entries. They also need to be convinced by third parties with enough data to justify something. This isn’t anything new to Japanese corporations though; they run on established data. Looking at Capcom’s history, they’ve got some collections of their Arcade games for sure, but console-specific games rarely get collections. The Mega Man IP is different. Digital Eclipse had approached Capcom in 2015 with a suggestion of preserving the NES Mega Man games.

Understanding the difference between Digital Eclipse and Capcom’s mindset is important there. Capcom had already done collections of their arcade games in the 1990s because arcade hardware was becoming increasingly scarce and breaking down. This would accelerate with time. Console games, on the other hand, had already seen ports to the newer platforms. The Mega Man games had seen ports to the PlayStation, which were used for the Anniversary Collection.

Seeing the PSP remakes of Mega Man and Mega Man X failed to garner enough purchases, Mega Man remakes aren’t on the table despite remakes being the company’s modus operandi with classic games at the moment. Capcom considers remakes to be replacements for their older games, which don’t seem to meet their current level of demand for quality. Much like how Capcom’s internal staff had managed to convince higher ups of the need to port arcade games to new systems due to hardware failing, how Digital Eclipse wanted to make Criterion Collection of games with Mega Man collections, GOG had to convince Capcom to allow the original Resident Evil trilogy’s PC ports on GOG. Capcom was questioning if these games would even sell considering they’re so old and there are new, better versions of the games out there.

This is where an issue comes up. If we follow the idea of treating Legacy collections as definitive, preservative versions of the games, Capcom would have a need to re-license all the real-world materials. However, I don’t think this would be an issue; Capcom would probably opt to remove these. However, they’d probably have to make new contracts with the voice actors, and in case of dead ones, either negotiate with their estate executor, the heirs, or some rights management company.

Does Capcom have any data to justify a Legends Collection? All the sales data we have is now decades old, and even then it didn’t scratch up enough dough to keep The Misadventures of Tron Bonne on Japanese PSN too long. Some contract had expired; it was taken down. There has been no real Mega Man Legends merch to buy that wasn’t part of something else. Out of all series, Legends doesn’t even have a Complete Works book. A third party released the two main games’ music on vinyl a while back, but you can’t really gauge interest based on niche of a niche. The now-current comic is relatively easily available and probably is the best way to give some indication that there is an audience out there for the games.

That’s of course assuming they don’t already know that. Capcom knows Mega Man Legends has its dedicated core audience. They just don’t see it as a large enough audience. Would a remake be a better option, something that improves and fixes everything that’s wrong in the first game while expanding upon it now that designing 3D games is their bread and butter? They’d probably avoid all the licensing issues by recording all the voices from scratch. While I’d imagine this would make for better mainstream appeal, it’d probably leave many fans and preservationists dissatisfied.

Circling back to the interview, what Izumi said is still disheartening. They have no plans to make a new Collection at this moment. When they consider one in the future, Mega Man Legends would be one candidate among many. All things considered, for Capcom there would be more lucrative IPs they could farm into a modern collection than Legends. I don’t believe Monster Hunter Collection would become a thing, something like Onimusha, or a collection to hype up a new Sengoku Basara. Perhaps there is bad blood in Capcom still and keeping Legends is a jab at Inafune, but I wouldn’t want to believe in this.

Mega Man Legends Legacy Collection doesn’t have unsurmountable hurdles to beat. What it has is baggage that needs to be sorted out every time Capcom wants to re-release the games. A three-game collection would be a bit empty, so throwing in all the mobile phone games with translations would be a nice add-on. Perhaps having the Legends 2’s PSP port’s enhancements as selectable options would be nice; the game plays really well on PSP.

Here we’re met with two things: keep the development time as short as possible and cost-effective. Deliver a Collection that has minimal content and was cheap to make; hope it sells well so that cost-sales ratio looks good. Alternatively, make an enhanced Collection, add more value at a slightly higher price, and hope it’s enough to attract more people than just the core fans. The elephant in the room would be Legends 3. To be brutally honest, I don’t think Legends Collection would sell enough to warrant Legends 3’s production. I wish it could after all this time, after all the good word we’ve spread about the games throughout the years. However, game development doesn’t work on good vibes, especially nowadays when developing is costlier and takes longer than ever before, at least for big studios. There must be correct justifications for Mega Man Legends 3 to become a reality, and most of it has to come from inside Capcom’s staff championing for it and convincing the deciding body it would be worth the time and money. Improving customer relations isn’t enough, or finishing up the story. If the story was that important inside Capcom, somebody could’ve turned the third game’s plot into a comic or a book already.

Historically, Mega Man’s target audience has been elementary school kids. The X series aimed a bit older, but was still enjoyed by the same audience. Legends assumed this audience would follow the series everywhere, but didn’t. Battle Network took that slot, and after that, Mega Man never really found a way to entertain new generations of elementary school-aged kids. The more I look at Legends, Mega Man losing that core audience is why the series has languished. While I’d like to think a game series could stand on its own two feet without many changes, the Mega Man as a series always changed to try something new and be a hit with kids.

I’m afraid now the Blue Bomber only has older fans, people who grew up with the games. These things need to cycle in new fans of the same target age while the majority of the fans cycle out to other things as they grow older. Just as with comics, some fans will stay there for a lifetime, but even then the cycling must go on. Otherwise stagnation will set in and nothing will end up working. Trying to make new stuff for the target audience contradicts the need to make the old stuff for the older audience, often in a more mature manner for better or worse. Future Mega Man games have a very thin line they need to walk by not to veer off too much to either direction.

#CAPCOM #computerGames #culture #customerAndService #customers #videoGames #videogames

Highguard low-ball

Highguard is an interesting case study. It’s a game that developed within a safe bubble among a curated number of people, got a massive push at an awards gala, and then launched a generic, corporate-like PR campaign. Sure, let’s call the devs independent while ignoring the money they got from big investors, who put millions into the game. The culture Highguard was developed under wasn’t indie, but the same bubble corporate devs have.

Josh Sobiel was laid off, among other staff from Wildlight Studios, because Highguard wasn’t an immediate success. Sobiel went to his Twitter account and wrote a lengthy editorial about the game and the shitstorm it kicked up. That account is now deleted, and I didn’t have the foresight to save it, just like Highguard devs thought it was a good idea to develop the game inside a bubble and not do any beta testing with the actual audience they might have to get objective player feedback. Luckily, someone else archived it on Ghost Archive.

If you’ve given it a read, tell me what you think about the start of it, how Sobiel begins by telling us how the people connected to their team or the project said it was “lightning in a bottle,” or how they’d “play it all day.” It’s good to be positive, but not to this extent.

I don’t believe Highguard had unbiased sources reviewing the game at any point. Sobiel’s post affirms that gaming media is just an extended PR arm of the industry, naming numerous people who gave support to the game. Perhaps out of altruism, perhaps knowing that if they step too far out of line, they’ll lose access to other games or events. We know people were flown to a special Highguard event, where media personnel were given a curated and guided tour of the game. It’s an industry standard: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Unbiased, my ass. Does anyone even remember when Microsoft gave out brand new X360s to journalists attending E3 in 2010? People might miss E3, but it was a massive event to market things and bribe journalists.

Highguard got a spotlight at the Awards that should’ve gone to Mega Man 12, if I’m honest. Highguard got there because of nepotism, not because it deserved the spot. It deserved the reception it got—an honest reaction from the audience. Geoff is just as out of touch with what game consumers play and want to play as the game industry is.

The reason everything went downhill from The Game Awards trailer is because gaming consumers, especially the hardcore Red Ocean dwellers, are harsh critics. Time and money are limited, and if you don’t wow them in one go, you’re going to disappoint them.

Imagine not taking the customers into consideration and thinking you deserve more than ridicule for recycling existing ideas and concepts into a clashing whole with large, empty maps.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been making a game. Be it two and a half years, be it seven years or a damn decade, it doesn’t matter. You, as a person making a video game, don’t matter. You are only as good as your product is. The ultimate arbiter of everything in the market is the buyer. Listening to other industry people hailing your product as the best there is, something that’ll capture people in one moment, is suicidal. Sobiel’s post reads like the team never looked at market saturation and how hard it would be to compete with existing live-service games. In a vacuum, Highguard probably seemed cutting-edge, but when put against the competition, its edge is dull and rusty.

You can spend however many resources you want on a product, and it can still be violently rejected from the start. Why the game was turned into a joke from the word go isn’t hard to grasp; people have experience. The more experience a person has with games, especially within certain genres, the easier they can tell what sort of things are used as sources of inspiration, what kind of physics there are, and what mechanics are in play. That’s why gameplay footage is so goddamn important: it reveals how the game plays. Also a reason why certain publishers and devs push concept or story trailers first with as little play footage as possible. Also why demos and trials are almost extinct—because people could play the game and test it out before buying the main showcase.

Highguard didn’t get review-bombed either. These were dissatisfied customers leaving before the show was even over. These were potential customers who found the game lacking and walked away. If your game hasn’t put out the best it can offer within the first ten minutes, you’ve screwed up. Start high, start fast; then you can slow down. Highguard will be used as an example of failing to capture the audience.

An honest initial reaction is the minimum any game deserves.

The gaming industry must realize at some point that there are people who don’t deserve success by default. They are making million‑dollar entertainment products and failing at that. They are sitting in front of their desks all day long, be it at work or at home, in an air‑conditioned room where the only danger they have is a paper cut or drowsiness. It’s a cozy-as-hell job. You’re not going to get burned by flowing molten metal, you’re not coughing your lungs out due to dust, you don’t need to deal with people brandishing weapons against you, you don’t need to clean a toilet someone managed to plug with their massive shit. It’s the coziest, safest work there is, and all you need to do is make a game that people would like to buy. Making games is hard, but it’s safe and cozy. Is the Internet getting on your nerves? Get away from social media then.

Highguard didn’t fail because the customers slandered it. It failed on its own lack of merits. If you manage to garner a cult following, that following will defend your game to the very end and spread the good word for free. They’ll go crusading on your behalf if they fall in love with the game and will make sure anyone who would love the game will get to know about it. Maybe the game isn’t there yet, but the number of players already lost doesn’t bode well. Gaming consumers will look into any new big‑name title, and the rest is up to the game to make itself interesting enough. There’s a large number of games that have people hating on them on a daily basis. Difference is, these games also have managed to retain a player base that keeps ’em afloat. No amount of bad press or flaming can bring down a game once valid good word on it is out there.

The millennial financial curse can’t be broken by making a game people don’t want to play. Especially now that people have less time and money to spend on games, now that live‑service games are competing tooth and nail to keep their current customer base. The very model Highguard was built on is at least six years too late. In a contested market like this, you would’ve needed to hit the Blue Ocean market and shake the industry. Instead, the game was a dud on launch. It has a small window where it can carve a niche for itself, but that window is closing fast, if not already too small.

The additional thing is this wasn’t just rejected by chuds. The game was localized to ten different languages, meaning the devs burned all that money on localization instead of putting up a beta or something else to get feedback. The rejection of Highguard was global.

It feels like Wildlife did jack shit market research. The bubble they were living in was enough to convince that they had gold in their hands, and whatever curated group reviewed their game wasn’t large enough to pop it. You can’t really hope to make an impact on the market if you don’t know what the market wants or needs.

As for what this means for indie games, it means nothing. Indie games that want to innovate will keep doing so without resorting to millions of dollars of support. Hit DLSite or something and see what the latest hotness is there. Customers will continue to support games that meet their demands, needs, and standards.

I was going to end this post there, but seeing how I end up sitting on these posts for a while, things change. Now it has come to light that while Wildlife Entertainment presented themselves as an indie studio, they were backed up by Tencent. Highguard feels like Tencent’s attempt to speedrun to produce a popular hero shooter kind of game with microtransactions. That’d explain why the game seems so unoriginal and why it comes with intrusive kernel level anti-cheat program. This sort of lacking transparency is absolutely stupid to do if you claim to be an indie studio. The more times passes, Highguard looks less like Concord and more like Costa Concordia.

Xbox is now a watered down brand

Microsoft has a history with buying gaming companies, having exceedingly large expectations of them, and then proceeding to cull them for not meeting those expectations. They ultimately call the shots what Xbox as a department does. People were calling buying Activision Blizzard deal of the century, something that would forever change gaming. What we got was the same as usual, just with bigger dollars in the play.

Microsoft has never really got console gaming. They were decent when it came to PC market, but console gaming was beyond them. Maybe that’s why they resorted on delivering PC gaming on consoles. Looking back, the Xbox 360 probably wouldn’t have been the limited success it was if the macro-economics hadn’t been in a good shape and a new generation of consumers had come around. Xbox kiddies are now grown up and remember the days they were throwing slurs to each other in online matches with rose-tinted goggles.

MS and Xbox are doing the mistake all businesses tend to do when there’s a downward spiral; hard sale the decreasing customer base. When these last customers realise that they’re paying at least twice as much as they used to, with less other people around, they tend to explore other venues where they get better value for their money. Only the hardest of the core customer will stay to the sad end, and they’ll be monetarily abused all the way. It’ll help to get some money short term, but on the long term it’ll bust the business.

It’s comedic how much Microsoft’s console gaming is only a pale shadow of PC gaming, as now we’re seeing plans and methods of monetization that have been prevalent in mobile gaming, which itself is an extension of PC gaming. Xboxes have always been just dumbed down PCs with the games largely mirroring this. Microsoft never understood console gaming, which is why they’ve always been a massive failure in Japan, and why X360 didn’t sell as well as the Wii, or the PS3 in the end. The same can be said about modern Sony, where their big name titles all look the same, and their pricing has gone to high heavens. Nintendo lost the plot after Iwata as well.

It’s not a big secret what console gaming is supposed to be; an option for home gaming that is uncomplicated, direct and has high value with relatively low pricing point. It has its own culture around it that is different from PC gaming, both among players and developers. Some publishers saw this, but as the division between the two (and the arcade being the third pillar in this house) has been diminished, so has the quality of the product. PC gamers bemoan how games get dumbed down to console gamers with simplified controls or how ports of console games lack options they expect from PC games. Console gamers then get the same deal, dregs and scraps of PC games that are forced into a mold these games don’t really fit. Double stick controls are still only a bad emulation for Mouse and Keyboard. At the same time, M+KB can never beat the immediacy and tactile controls a console pad has. Probably why people are using first and third party console controllers on PCs nowadays a lot. Both sides suffer (while the arcades stay dead.)

The rising prices and chasing higher-end graphics that contribute nothing to the play has been a detriment for consoles. The more expensive and the more inconvenient a console is, the less it performs. The first point we can clearly say Microsoft started the downfall of Xbox was during X360’s and Xbox One’s transition, when they told customers that couldn’t have an always-online console to buy their older machine rather than invest into their newer hotness. Nintendo’s rep said the same thing when asked about customers who wouldn’t afford the Switch 2. It’s not good form and show how little these companies care about their customers. We’ll see if history rhymes.

If the Game Pass has been disastrous to game sales and money gotten out of MS brand games, mainly Call of Duty, then what does that say about smaller publishers’ and developers’ games on it? They’re probably seeing even less individual sales on their games. Game Pass has simply devalued gaming in general and MS is now feeling it themselves. It appears that individual game sales makes more profit than bundling them into an equivalent of Netflix of gaming. So, nickle and diming become the standard because the Netflix model as it is now with games doesn’t work. You will see ads becoming a standard down the line when maximum amount of nickel and diming is met, and then every other thing will be monetized in some fashion. Hell, I can see things like higher graphics settings being monetized on the long run if things keep going on like this.

Then you have the watering down of Xbox as a brand. If everything that can have Game Pass in some form is a Xbox, Xbox is worthless as a brand. Game Pass has replaced it. If rumours about the next Xbox console are true, then having Steam on the system makes it yet another dumbed down PC that offers nothing over buying a standard PC. The same games appear on Steam, Epic and Windows Store anyway. What’s the point of Xbox as a console at this point? At least Nintendo is still offering first party titles that aren’t available anywhere else, even if they’re insane with their pricing.

When services get more expensive and what’s deliver gets worse, people will turn away and spend their money where they get more value. Alternatively, people will go back to piracy, like in Finland. If people running Xbox as a brand wants it to do better, they have to go back to what made the original and 360 cultural touchstones while learning from the mistakes they’ve been doing all this time. Like Xbox brand name on a $1k ROG handheld. They’re contracting the market instead of expanding it, making their hard business even harder for them.

#consoleGaming #customerAndService #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #videoGames #videogames #xbox

I’m done with modern Super Robot Wars

I’m done with modern Super Robot Wars, because the mainline series deserves to be better than the mobile slop it is becoming. You, as a consumer of video and computer games, deserve better treatment from Bandai Namco. Modern SRW has become yet another DLC hell, a platform to sell you bits and parts of the game you already bought at full price.

You deserve not get fucked in the ass by people who sell you games. Especially when they’re selling you a game with Denuvo attached to it.

Super Robot Wars Y, in terms of SRW games, is shaping up to be trash. Everything about the game screams both lack of budget, recycling and ambitionless direction. You can argue that SRW has always recycled sprites. However, in the past these sprites were made to accommodate a general art direction that meshed together visually. On the GameBoy Advance, the portable games recycled some of the PlayStation 2 sprites, but the lower fidelity requiring to re-adapt the sprites made them fit together better. Then, Super Robot Wars OGS would rework all these sprites, making it a standout game in the series. This was in an era when 2D games were still largely overlooked.

Recycling animations for SRW is standard, but the way recycling was done in the aforementioned manner; adapted to fit. Even when jumping from the GBA to the DS, the reused sprites fit in with the new ones, creating a cohesive style. If you’re hardcore enough, you can tell which sprite creator made which sprites in a game, but their overall presentation makes them fit together. You can’t tell from a glance how they’re clearly from separate sources.

This doesn’t apply to SRW Y, where you can tell just with a glance whether or not a sprite is specifically made for older games, for this game, or lifted from the mobile phone game DD. It makes a mess, when you have sprites with different styles in all manner vomited together and calling it a day. Mind, you, this was already the case with the previous anniversary game, SRW 30, so that’s the precedent. I’ve seen someone argue that it makes these units stand apart more, especially when its emphasizing the different source styles (I call this coping and a bad argument.) If this was the aim, then all units should have a unique style, following their main source material closely, but this isn’t the case. The lack of cohesive style jumps out even more when all units in the game still use SRW-style special effects, making the incohesive mess even more jarring. These range from explosions to projectile effects that aren’t part of a cut-in. The argument fails because all the different visual styles in SRW Y aren’t to make the units look different, but because they’re from different games with different styles. Because they’re throwing all different kind of sprites together without unifying the style, it looks like a slop in a puddle.

It’s funny how the fangame SRW ST manages to look more cohesive and professional than the actual series despite having less everything resource-wise. f

It doesn’t help that the attack animation, which once used to be stunning and full of life, are now largely lifeless, stiff and filled with cut-ins. Again, we find a kind of precedent in SRW 30, where you had tons of fade-ins to black. I’m honestly thinking they should just cut out the normal standing battle-sprite and follow the mobile game SD Gundam Eternal and make all attacks just the cut-ins. If you’re not doing anything with the base sprite, just remove it altogether. These sprites aren’t even proper SD anymore and haven’t been for a long time. The side effect of this is that the size differences between units makes less sense in the battle scenes, as sprites don’t scale based on their size. They’re not even proper 1:3 SD sprites, but some kind of perversion. If you look at Alpha-era sprites, there’s so much life in them, so much emotion without cutting it all the time. The basic battle-sprites have worth by doing the attacks in their animations proper, with bigger attacks getting more worth out of the cut-ins. Now that almost every attack animation is treated like as some kind of ender, it’s tiresome. Skipping and fast-forwarding has become enticing with time. When we get the basic battle-sprite doing these things, the stiffness and jank of the animation grinds the sight.

Perhaps not the best example, but note how the animations are quick and done most of the part, with cut-in saved for Fire Blaster, where it makes a proper effect

Sprite and animation recycling is forgivable as long as they’re renewed from time to time when they’re outdated. Going from the Super Famicom to PlayStation and to PlayStation 2 is still the best evolution in the series, showcasing how the sprites and animations can be smartly recycled and then during hardware upgrade, made new. The fandom largely forgave recycling with the portable games, especially when they introduced new series with each entry and slightly tweaked older ones if necessary. With the 3DS games, the game was made compatible with its 3D gimmick, and things had to be renewed. With some units, it seems like we’ve been running on same animations since 2008, when the sprite style changed. The mainline games should’ve seen an upgrade in visuals already, but instead its become a quilt jacket of bit of everything. We’re well past the point of this visual renewal the series so successful in the past.

By all means, SRW is just a marketing vehicle for Bandai Namco. If they have something they want to advertise in the game, it’s going to find its way in somehow. One of the best examples of this can be found in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, which was riling its story into deep space, but due to Sunrise and Bandai wanting Gundam Seed into the story, the staff had to make a weird pivot in the story and return circling Earth in parts for marketing reasons. Most of the series that find themselves in these games is more about marketing them and giving certain IPs visibility. This ensures the game can find bit more sales, as introducing popular [Series A] into SRW probably will attract [Series A]’s fans to pick up SRW for the first time. Recycling popular series also keeps fans of the other series with the games, but also cuts down development time when sprites and voice acting already exist.

SRW Y really looks like an amalgamation of all the bad brushstrokes SRW must go through to get made. Including an engine switch to Unity, though the mobile game Super Robot Wars DD already ran on it. The series has been running on the same engine since 2000’s Super Robot Wars Alpha, with updates to it whenever needed. I’m betting the engine switch was made to make it easier to cross DD, Y and whatever future SRW assets will be. While smart in terms of business and development, it also means mainline series, and probably future OGs titles, will be based on mobile slop. At least modding the game should be a bit easier. I’m not going to touch Unity as an engine at all, it’s a mess.

What grinds me the most though is how blasé SRW Y is. Sure, the series hasn’t exactly wowed anyone with its changes in time. Throughout the latter 1980s and 1990s these SD-driven games tried something new all the time, from RPG cross-overs like Hero Senki to action games akin to Great Battle and all the cross-over sports games. Super Robot Wars and SD Gundam series are the last vestiges of this, with both periodically giving their patterns of play a new lick of paint. SRW hasn’t exactly changed the core of its grid-based strategy in the mainline, but at least they’ve given it a go a few times around. SRW NEO on the Wii didn’t just use 3D models, but also gave each unit a range where they could walk freely, removing the grid system. The 3D games always tried something new like this, whereas the 2D games made great improvements in dealing with the ever-growing cast with Partner and Squad systems, combining multiple units into one squad, this affecting how battles would go down. SRW Y is as basic as it gets, offering literally nothing new in terms of play. It’s the same shit in different pants.

This of course applies to the presentation as well, which is largely boring. However, what’s even more boring is that the developers are very much stuck in the tried-and-tested Visual Novel presentation of the game and the ever-expanding number of lines these fanfiction games have. Of course, this is the most economical and cheapest way to deliver exposition, but thirty years now, and it’s the dullest possible way. At this point, Bandai Namco and Sunrise should hit their heads together and give SRW enough budget to get animated sequences between stages to ease out how lacking the series’ presentation has become. Hell, the devs should first make the story sequences during Battle Maps proper rather than have the models mash together like some capsule toys. Despite the new engine under the hood, SRW Y doesn’t seem to take any advantages of it as the devs are reusing twenty years old way to deliver battles outside battles. They can do anything during these sequences, and they choose to not to do anything creative.

I’m just so done with the newer entries in the series. If they’re not going to improve from what the series was twenty years ago, why bother? I still got some of the older titles unfinished on my shelf that are more unique in their own ways, like SRW 64. There are tons of games from the SD-character driven era that I can find to get my SD-battle fix.

I’m demanding something better. You can too, and the devs and publishers can deliver. They won’t if they’re not demanded that. The marketing forces and sycophants will tell you how true fans will buy anything they put out, no matter what’s the quality and we all recognize that it’s abusing behaviour. Knowing your self-worth matters, and a true fan would want their loved series to be better, to achieve new heights and become an even better version of what it already is. Not lay down spread the cheeks when told them to do so. The first step is stop paying for worse products, and the second step is to make your voice heard why that is. The third step is to ignore the sycophants that are yelling at you while their asses are bleeding.

I don’t like having this stance, but I like even less the direction the series has been going and how much less value the series has made itself to the customers. All the DLC shenanigans and market expansion with English versions have been a boon to Bandai Namco, but we’re not seeing any of that in the games themselves. Seeing the thumbnail for the first DLC for SRW Y just had me going Why am I even interested? I’m done with this without even clicking it. Yeah, I’m going to miss Godzilla and other cool stuff, but why bother? As a series veteran, I can tell how this is going to play out. I didn’t like it one bit in 30 or when Operation Extend tried to cash me over and over again, so I have to put my foot down and say No. I won’t allow myself to be taken advantage of anymore.

If you see me playing Super Robot Wars Y in the future, call me out on my bullshit.

#customerAndService #customerService #games #gaming #superRobotTaisen #superRobotWars

Nintendo games and consoles are for adults now, the expanded media for children

I end up reading quarterly reports now and then from Capcom and Nintendo, and outside few posts I let them go by. They are usually full of non-answers, but there are gems here and there. My favourite is the knowledge that when Square and Enix merged, the surviving company was Enix. This trips a lot of Square fans who don’t realize how badly Square was suffering in terms of finance back then. The Spirits Within movie had inflicted lasted damage to the company and was the main reason why the merger  was delayed. Enix was in a much better position.

Nintendo’s 85th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is more of the same. There’s a question about if the Switch 2 supply is meeting with the demand, but there’s a non-answer. Nintendo doesn’t know, it’s been on the market too short a time. Which is also why Nintendo had to shoot down reports about those five million units sold too. 3.5 million is what Nintendo is saying. That’s still a good number and there is room for growth, but be either the price or the supply, Nintendo has already changed their strategy.

Q12:

Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than past platforms like the Family Computer system
(Famicom). I am concerned that this might reduce opportunities for young children to engage with
it. How will you address this issue?
A12 Furukawa:
We believe the pricing of Nintendo Switch 2 is appropriate for the gaming experience it offers,
and what is most important is to provide entertaining experiences that demonstrate the value to
consumers. To achieve this goal, we have incorporated various features into Nintendo Switch 2.
It is true that Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than our past gaming systems. We are
creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with
Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually
play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system
might become a barrier.

Nintendo acknowledges the Switch 2 is beyond most children at the moment. The reason Nintendo has the reputation of a family friendly, kids console is because they appealed to the whole family, not just kids or the parents, or the shut-in hardcore gamer in the basement. This explains the Switch 2’s design and addition of using the controllers as computer mice. The more muted colours of the console are there to make the console look less like a toy, the colours pop less. It’s the more mature option of the two, and keeping the Switch on the side might be a crutch solution to deliver games to children who can’t move on to the newer system.

This didn’t really work for Sony, as the PlayStation 5 ended up being largely a noteworthy console for it being about nothing. Sony let the PlayStation 4 live too long and had cross-system games draining any reasons to migrate to the newer system. Constant multiplatform games despite of their timed exclusivity damaged to console on the long run to the point of PS5 being irrelevant. I would’ve bought the system for Final Fantasy VI if it had anything else I would’ve wanted to buy, but PS5 has a very lacklustre library.

We are creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system might become a barrier. Nintendo seems to know that the price is too much. More importantly, they are intending to leverage other media to sell to kids. Nintendo has always had cartoons, comics, cereals and other mulimedia ventures next to their games, but they’re ramping them up now because of the Switch 2’s status as a high-price, prestige system. The Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda movies are an example of this, and these are kids movies. They’re also doing more concerts, which aren’t exactly for children but for Nintendo Adults, equivalent of Disney Adults.

That’s the main target audience for the Switch 2; people who grew up with Nintendo and are now between thirty and fifty, with enough income to put down enough cash without thinking too much whether or not the system warrants its high price. Nintendo acknowledges in this QA that the Switch 2 wasn’t priced high because of inflation. Because of this higher set price, Nintendo has created other opportunities for children (and people who can’t or won’t buy the Switch 2) to consume their properties in other media forms, aiming to make those emotional connections that are so important in keeping long-term, lifelong customers that won’t question much of the corporation’s actions and decisions. Some call these true fans, others call them more accurately as sycophants.

Can Nintendo make their business plan succeed without the larger children as their main target market, or will the Nintendo Adults be enough? Too early to tell, but this feels like abandoning a long-lasting and successful approach for something the corporate body got told by the shareholders.

QA14 more or less confirms what’s already said earlier. Based on our strategy of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, since the launch of Nintendo Switch, we have pursued parallel development in mobile apps, theme parks, movies, and official stores. These are now in place. These all eat Nintendo’s general budget and I have to question if they’re a good direction for a combined hardware and software provider. Spreading yourself too thin might cost them back. Are they intending to become some sort of Asian response to Disney?

Lastly, there are repetition about concerns over rising game development costs. Let’s kick that dead horse again and remind that nobody but the publishers and developers are ultimately responsible of these. Very few big name publisher/ developer produces smaller budget games with less high-budget fat. Just look at how successful Mega Man 11 has been for Capcom with a very modest budget, yet Capcom hasn’t put out a new Mega Man game because that’s not how they roll. Nintendo could similarly put out tighter budget games more often, hitting that 16-bit SNES nostalgia with sprite based Zelda or Mario and they’d make a bank. We’re not in the late 1990s-early 2000s anymore. If the Indie boom of the New Millennium showed anything, we’re well pass the Oooh Aaah 3D phase. 3D has become mundane long time ago and consumers have accepted how it was absolutely silly to shun 2D games after the launch of the PlayStation. Nintendo has leveraged their 2D roots many times over the years, but have never done a new and true 2D game with a proper budget on their flagship console. Hence, why the indies deliver some of the best stuff out there still.

#customerAndService #gaming #Nintendo #videoGames #videogames

Want to own the games you buy in the future and have them accessible after the publisher ceases support? Do you live in a European country that’s party of the EU? Then you can help by signing this initiative.

Stop Killing Games. The project has a goal; have games in functional state at the end of their life. Lot of games already have this built-in. However, every game that requires always-online functionality has a high probability of just dying on you. You won’t get to play the game because the publisher doesn’t support it anymore. The game’s obsolescence is built-in, planned to get you off that game and move to another product of their. Shut up and consume products, you have no right to this license. I don’t think many will agree with my take here, but this is something I want to get out of my system. Give the above links a read if consider the idea of Stop Killing Games a good one.

I hate the idea of government needing to tell companies to stop being abusive towards their customers. However, current laws across the globe largely benefit the companies, as they’ve had lobbyists doing that for them. The balance of power between consumers and corporations is grossly unbalanced. Consumers are expected to pay up and be happy to own nothing.

Therefore, you go in bed with the devil yourself in the best way you can. This EU Initiative is not making a law. It can be a start for a ruling. It’s a far shot, as members of the EU parliament are largely clueless idiots, who don’t read the papers and rulings they vote on. These parliament members are informed by their assistants, whose job is to read through these papers and help to make informed voting decisions. Of course, these assistants have their own agendas and will mislead the parliament members if they want.

I have no love for the EU, but this is a chance consumers can’t really sit on. On the long run, this isn’t just about having all video and computer games independently functional. This is also about ownership and license purchases work. There’s only a net positive if purchasing a license would end up equating to purchasing a physical product. Think it much like buying a music CD. You own that particular copy of the CD, but not the intellectual property on it. That’s your copy to do what you want with, even sell it to someone else. We should have the right to sell digital goods we’ve bought. The only reason you can’t is because the gaming industry might lose revenue from that. Again, the teeter-totter is against the consumer.

If this initiative would pass and the ruling would require publishers to ensure games would be in a reasonably working condition, it would also make a precedent for other industries. For example, a music player that requires an always-Online connection to the provider servers might be required to ensure the player would still work after they drop support and close the servers down. This naturally ties to Right to Repair, where customers fixing their own stuff to make them work again would be that much easier and simpler if the companies wouldn’t fight them to tooth and nail.

Unlike some buzz on the Internet about this initiative solely being to kill Live Service model games, that’s not the case. Live service games would be heavily impacted, but that’s just because they’re inherently anti-consumer. The core audience of video games have been treated like trash for long enough, and if this initiative doesn’t pass, and then hit its intended target, the industry will end up even more draconian. In no part of history has an industry looked at itself and considered whether or not they’re going too far. Instead, they’ll plough straight through into injuring other consumer protection laws and then decimate them through lobbyists and gerrymandering.

The game industry won’t stop the bad, anti-consumer practices and standards they have going on wilfully. It’d be nice if they’d start being consumer friendly and transparent, yet only a few developer and publisher ever seems to go for that. Instead, there have been even more layers obfuscating the separation between the consumers, developers and publishers. It doesn’t help that the gaming media is just another arm of the publisher PR machine. Hype the Big Game, buy the Big Game and a year later the Big Game is announced a disappointment after million dollars initial sales. There’s no monetary benefit for the industry to be pro-consumer, not at this point. Some talking heads have raised worries of this initiative opening publishers and developers for abuse from the consumers, but that’s goddamn rich talk when the industry is openly abusing its customers. To be make a very extreme point, anyone who sells you something should be treated with high suspicion, like they’re a drug seller trying to sell you bad juju instead of the good and pure stuff.

The initiative isn’t perfect and is intentionally rather vague. There are tons of stuff that can’t be pinpointed down until the later by the parliament starts their discussions on the topic. Some people want to know the details how these games would be kept functional. All that minutia would just slow down the conversation, and in the end, that’s up to the developers. Be it allowing consumers to access server binaries or built a multiplayer-only game to have AI opponents, that’s fully on the developers to figure out as far as I’m concerned. Every industry rejects and fights change that’s for the customer, but just like how car manufacturers nowadays have seatbelts, the game industry will too adjust and design games to be accessible in the future as well.

Future being the keyword, as it wouldn’t be fair to grandfather in games that have been already published and abandoned. I would include games that are currently active and live, e.g. Street Fighter 6 wouldn’t just go poof after Capcom shuts the servers down.

Which of course begs the question about console games. The Big N, MS and Sony would need to provide some method to access certain online functions after they drop support on their consoles. For example, they could patch the Wii to have an option to access a custom server that can run online-only game. Or maybe an older example, Capcom would need to offer a way to access Online-only quests in the original Monster Hunter. Not that either examples would be grandfathered in, they’re just examples. Still, that’s mostly beside the point. The minutia of how comes after.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that I support this initiative. Everything that’s pro-consumer, pro-Right to Repair and pro-ownership is only a net good thing. Anything that empowers individual more and allows individual rights and freedoms to be expressed without oppressive corporate oversight is one step toward a brighter future.

https://aaltomies.wordpress.com/2024/08/20/you-can-help-to-stop-killing-games-if-you-are-a-eu-citizen/

#customerAndService #customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames