Xbox Was Red Ringing From Day One

I’ve written these same words in different orders throughout the years now. I don’t enjoy seeing Xbox imploding on itself because of gross mismanagement, standard bad Microsoft practices and absolutely stupid use of money. Hell, if Microsoft had been visionary, they would’ve tackled Steam way ahead of the game, but if we’re real for a moment,  that’s not the sort of thing Microsoft excels at in any manner.

The way living memory goes for Xbox is that it was hugely successful and kicked the competition’s ass, until Microsoft dropped the ball after the Xbox 360. Hindsight and internal information are 20/20. The Xbox model was never sustainable. Asha Sharma saying that Xbox was always subsidised is a bitter pill to swallow when the reality sinks in. Everything Microsoft has done to make their gaming console and brand a success, everything from revising their controller for people with normal-sized hands to making the hurdurdest of core gaming like Gears of War was largely for nothing. Microsoft’s strategy has always been buying out studios that were already making games and having those titles on their console. You can’t buy yourself out of being a mediocre company.

Whenever I talk about Xbox, I’m five or six days of significant news cycles behind. There’s just nothing significant going on. When Bethesda and company were acquired into the leagues of the green giant, I saw people going on and on about how gaming has changed, how nothing will ever be the same. Yet this was just the same thing Microsoft had been doing with Xbox since the beginning. Buying companies and not having them work their magic exclusively for your console is one of the mistakes Microsoft never learns from, but that probably doesn’t really matter considering Xbox was always subsidized. Whatever games Microsoft acquired companies put out on the ‘box just never made the console business successful.

The console business is harder than Microsoft understands. They got all the second-hand experience for the Xbox from Sega when they were cooperating during the Dreamcast days, thinking they could just move their PC market knowledge into the console market sphere and call it a day. The original Xbox was just a dumbed-down PC, which is a small marvel that it worked in terms of hardware. Microsoft dropped the ball with the X360 though, as its design was junk. Sure, the outer shell is nice and sleek, but the insides were a shambles. The motherboard was disorganized at best, with so many damn capacitors and inductors to keep the voltage steady. Because the case was so cluttered inside, as heat sinks and fans couldn’t get heat out fast enough. The lack of proper heat transfer killed consoles. I got my X360 free back in the day, and the first thing I did before turning it on was crack the bitch open and install a stronger fan. The later revisions were more about keeping the X360 from eating all the money the games could’ve raked in. You can talk about Kinect however much you want, but without Slim’s serious hardware revision, the 360 would’ve eaten even more money from Microsoft’s coffins.

The point being, console business requires knowledge of how to make good hardware and software, then put that knowledge into proper action.

Putting that aside, what about the current situation? Xbox’s grand strategy was to be the centre of home media, same as PlayStation. Both ultimately have now been replaced with smartphones and built-in apps. Buying a console to watch Netflix is not worth it when you’ve already got a phone. Want something else? Buy a television cheaper than the console. There’s no good reason to buy a console to run streaming applications.

Game Pass is in the same place. It’s not exactly making money for Microsoft or the devs and publishers who put games there.

Both Microsoft and Sony have seen some of the writing on the wall when it comes to cloud gaming. It’s a form of ecosystem both companies would want, as they’d have total control over the customer. Microsoft’s solution for this would be to buy some other company and run on whatever software solution they’d offer on their hardware. It’s always the same pattern.

What then happens when throwing money at something isn’t a solution anymore? Cull it, kill it, pack it up and cut your losses. That’s a Microsoft and EA tradition. Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and “several other studios” are now queuing up to the guillotine. The buzzword went from Xbox Everywhere to Xbox Reset. This full-scale restructuring is two console generations late and you can expect to see studios being closed and people being fired. Whatever Microsoft did with Xbox since its inception has kept failing again and again without making a dent in the industry. Hell, they even bet on the wrong horse during the HD-DVD and BD format war. Xbox never justified its existence, but Microsoft didn’t care, playing sugar daddy until they couldn’t anymore.

Microsoft’s gaming division failing doesn’t mean its competitors are succeeding. It means they can try less hard. I think that is what is partially going on with Nintendo at the moment with all the remakes of remakes.

I don’t think the Xbox Reset will change things much. The console side of the business might die and the team heading this experiment might double down on digital-only. Nobody at Microsoft is visionary enough to shake the ground underneath. Xbox Reset will look great on paper and will have good PR push behind it, but again, Microsoft doesn’t have its own experience with console business. Up until now they’ve functioned on the foundation they learned from Sega and PC games market.

They are blind to console gaming’s past. Microsoft needs to realize that Xbox needs to integrate its hardware and software. Because Microsoft needs Xbox to make money now, they won’t do this. The studios under them will be third parties, making the same games for all the competing platforms as well. You can’t do both and see success. The hardware requires the software. Whatever lessons they learned from Sega, they were taught lousy lessons from a company that was failing at console business. Nobody who led Xbox from the very start have understood console business all that well and what they’d need to do to be successful in the console business. I don’t expect Sharma get it either, as she comes from the AI division.

Perhaps it would be prudent to completely kill Xbox as a console and make it a fully fledged Steam competitor rather than whatever half-assed attempt there is on Windows right now. Put that hardware effort into making top-notch but affordable controllers, mice and keyboards with Xbox branding. However, at that point Xbox might as well be killed off as a brand too.

#electronicGames #entertainment #games #gaming #microsoft #xbox

Galleries of Art, Rules of Play, and the Problem of Agency

Games and art share a common spot in the Calvinistic world view; they’re both largely useless entertainment that are suited for children and are not considered a suitable profession. If you’ve ever visited art galleries, you probably have heard at least some mutter that their five-year old child could do the same kind of painting. Nevertheless, the art world is as serious as it can get. Millions of dollars are at stake, depending on getting the right people to consider a painting or a sculpture as proper art. Modern electronic gaming is in a similar position, where millions are poured into developing games that aim to satisfy a very niche audience that isn’t necessarily even the paying one, but one that would appreciate the contents the game presents. Game journalists are then presented incentives to portray this game in a positive light for the masses to consume.

In traditional art galleries, having interactive installations is still somewhat uncommon. In the 1990s and after the change of the new millennium, some galleries had experience with video installations and interactive devices. While video installations offered something between inert art and a film, interactive devices were more often than not relegated to be teaching experiences for children. When art becomes interactive, it becomes less serious and commoditised. When the distinction between art and entertainment becomes vague or non-existent, art has been institutionalised as a common consumer good.

Film has been walking a razor thin line, where it is equally considered a form of high art and a consumer goods. Despite junk-food-equivalent media like the Marvel Cinematic Universe raking in millions, you see serious filmmakers making serious art. It’s not about the subject, not always, but also the way movies are made. A daring director putting everything he has on the line may revolutionise special effects and how films are made, while others are still stuck making and thus presenting their visions in an old fashioned manner. When you have film that is serious art”, its intention is not to entertain, but present a vision and a message. It’s not a commodity to consume, but something to experience and to analyse as serious art. Perhaps this is why video and computer game media want to use the term experience as in order to present games as a form of serious art. Interactivity, however, damages this view as games are by their very nature built to entertain. Numerous developers who refuse or forbid the term fun within their house reflect this; they are making serious games, not fast food for the soul, not the games equivalent of the MCU.

If we reverse the view, and apply games’ paradigm as is to art, we end up with inter-passivity. This does not work in an art gallery context, where Pavlovian reaction to stimuli is not expected or even wanted. However, that’s what video games largely are, where players need to learn rules in order to reap rewards. Arguably, numerous games have become Skinner boxes by design. Loot boxes especially have become a reward system that publishers and developers abuse through micro-transactions. This is the furthest thing from art, which in a romanticised world would unapologetically not chase money.

The physical presence art requires from a person is something a digital thing you interact with via a controller opposes. Within a game, you must touch, that is the point. However, motion in games is merely a metaphor for the physical motion found in galleries, but the core concept of a person moving through carefully laid-out environment where art is carefully laid in sequence for consideration. The difference of course is that rarely set-pieces like rocks or trees in games get the same consideration as a sculpture or a painting in a gallery would. Gaming generally wants you to see the forest, while galleries require you to see the individual trees. In this sense, games are digital space for art, where each individual asset and texture represent an intentional formation to interact with the game. However, the gaming view of these is  largely How good it looks? rather than considering whether or not it represents an intentional art selection and how it functions within the given space. Countless hi-res texture packs shows that rather than considering games as valid art in their time and place, they’re considered outdated images that were limited by technology and not part of the art that builds an electronic game.

Thus, visual fidelity, as much as some publishers and players tout as an important aspect for their game, can barely be considered as art. The increased commoditisation of these assets and how PC gaming culture is willing to “upgrade” them puts the dot on the i how easily these are swapped around. Mod culture itself can represent itself as a form of rebel-art, where replacing existing art is the point. Modders in general don’t represent themselves as this though, and the point is to increase the fidelity of the game rather than change it as art.

The modern modding is a descendant of hacker culture from the 1970s. The Homebrew Computer Club is probably the starting point for modern hacker ethics, where information was regarded as something freely shared and gained. The modern Personal Computer, and ethics of digital piracy, can trace their origins here too. The same people would code or modify existing code to develop their own programs and games, and by the 1980s, these same university kids would end up building cornerstones all modern gaming stands on, like the Wizardry series.

The term mod wasn’t as common as it is now. The term patch predates it, and only a few certain games had their own terms for their hacks. Doom’s WADs are probably the first many people think of, with mod coming from Quake’s different patches. Hacking games with patches and modifying them is as old as digital gaming and was seen as part of the gaming culture as a whole. With the emergence of arcade and console gaming, it solidified its position as a major part of PC gaming. While patching and modding games wasn’t in conflict with publishers’ or developers’ interests, nowadays there are cases were a publisher like Be aims to monetise community mods for themselves. In Bethesda’s case, it could be even said that they expect the community to fix their games and modify them to cater to wide interest. Their more popular games work more like a groundwork and tools modders then go to work with, changing the game’s world and characters, even the rules, for whatever interest or fetish they might fancy.

Mods and patches used to be very important for the publishers and developers, as it offered an incredibly cheap way to start R&D on current trends among consumers and what certain engines could do. The faster the Internet allowed people to exchange mods, the more data the people selling games had.

Hacker art, at its most basic, aims to replace something that they see as disagreeable with something of their own. Simcopter raised some eyebrows when it came out, as one of its coders, Jacques Servin, included scantily clad gay men kissing each other when he was asked to include scantily clad women kissing each other. Due to a bug, rather than only a few appearing in the game, hundreds of them would spawn. This was fixed in revision B, but Servin was fired for it. An anti-consumerist activity group RTMark claims they paid Servin $5000 for the prank. It should be noted that Servin was a founding member of the group. This hacker art “prank” stemmed from RTMark’s views and Servin’s own homosexuality to undermine the demand for eyecandy for the men playing Simcopter.

Total conversion mods change everything about the game while retaining the underlying rules. Doom is the most recognised example of this, making the game live for the rest of time with all the mods and patches it gets on a monthly basis, with some being more political than others. Rather than looking at a Doom wad, I’d like to introduce you to Los Disneys, a mod for Marathon Infinite, where Disney has bought Florida from the US government. As the mod’s site puts it;

You have been hired by a special interest group to infiltrate it’s capital located in the Magic Kingdom. Shoot your way through tourists, brats and yes, Michael Eisner clones to find and destroy the cryonically-suspended head and torso of Walt Disney, located right beneath Cinderella’s Castle. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Terminating Disney initiates the Doomsday Device which will wipe out all mankind- unless you can stop it.

The mod’s very over the top, as subtlety is for cowards. While the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the game now puts the player in a morally questionable role in shooting kids and visitors in order to stop the Doomsday Device.

The best point of comparison for patches, wads, mods and whatnot snots would be to sound sampling and reggae dubbing in music. Mixers manipulate and change the existing assets and cores for their own ends. Hackivists and hacker artists tend to have a message, something to say when they’re doing this. Game mods and hacks have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts, as they could not exist otherwise. Through these methods, people have found a way to bring out cultural criticism and commentary outside the closed gallery doors.

Hacking and modding is intervening with existing systems, usually by outsiders. It’d be outsider art at best. Artists who embrace modern technology often find themselves balancing between interaction and passivity.

Virtual Reality at one point met the gallery and the virtual space halfway through. Art, however, has traditionally aimed to avoid commercial terms wherever possible. Rather than talking about virtual reality, art has opted for terms like immersive virtual space, as Char Davies did with Osmose.

Modern VR is just as much about the interaction with the software as any game. Paper Beast Enhanced Edition offers an interactive art installation, where the player explores a surreal ecosystem. Museum of Other Realities forces the player to walk through artworks that supposedly can only exist in VR. REZ Infinite is the latest version of the game, probably delivering the best synesthetic experience VR can offer. All these, however, still break the watch-but-don’t-touch rule traditional galleries have and necessitate personal interaction due to the nature of them being games first, art second.

Another major difference that separates modern games and art is the space. Galleries, by their nature, are public spaces. You share art with others and automatically have to interact with fellow people to some extent. As for gaming, it is personal. It is up to each person if they want to share their game with another, be it via couch co-op or just someone watching on the side. Streaming and online multiplayer games have changed this significantly, but not to the extent of taking that freedom of choice away. Some consider online gaming and streaming depersonalised as there is no physical closeness. Parasocial interactions with streamers and unknown players have become a common thing, but these are still done through a screen in a largely solitary environment at home. Arcades used to offer a public space where players could meet and interact face to face, yet even in these spaces there are rules to follow, and people could play their coin alone if they so choose. Only games where contest was a major factor, like in Street Fighter II, would it be allowable to injure solo play.

Galleries as public places don’t have such rules. Whatever rules there are come from the establishment and interaction with each individual person there. The time of the “activity” at a gallery is murky at best compared to the structured play and length a game has. The people you used to see in galleries were more varied, but nowadays the Internet and online interaction have changed that drastically. However, the people you meet at galleries are more reserved, as online offers people no reason to hold back on their words and virtual actions.

Gaming and gallery spaces can be described as having similarities with each other in general, but cultural contexts alone make them very different. In fact, modern game spaces have more in common with other game spaces, like hockey halls or football stadiums. This holds especially in streaming, where a population of viewers watch one or more people playing a game, cheering on or mocking all the while interacting with fellow benchies. eSports has made this similarity apparent, as video and computer games get designed more around sports concepts rather than solitary games to share with a friend or two.

Trying to marry game and art together as a gallery space means that one has to give room to the other. Either the art suffers from the game’s need to allow interaction with its elements, or the game has to suffer from the art’s need to be viewed and appreciated. In addition, no matter how structured a game is, player actions will always take the agenda away from the developer. Developer versus player agenda is another balancing act developers have to deal with, as taking away agenda and consequence of action turns any game into a linear movie-like product. These tensions have become clearer with time, especially with contemporary games.

Mixtape is art. It represents itself as a coming-of-age story, mixing high framerate backgrounds with limited framerate for characters. The latter has been rather popular in animation features since that animated Spider-Man flick. The game’s main point is its presentation and music, which probably cost close to a million as the licenses are perpetual. The player has no agenda, however, he cannot affect the end result in the game. There is no Game Over, there are no game rules to break. Mixtape presents itself as an interactive video, where you can have the controlled character (but not avatar) do kickflips or jump over cars.

That’s not the point of Mixtape, the music is. The game says as much in the first ten minutes, explaining the main character’s yearning to become a Music Supervisor. Everything else is secondary to this masturbatory approach to music and songs presented in Mixtape, as the player is expected to sit down and accept their lack of control. Whenever the player has limited control and “fails,” the result is a rewind. This instant gratification is something that games are still being criticised for. In art, you can’t fail as you aren’t “in control” of it. The point is for the main author to tell you his views on music and who has right to sound and loudness.

It can’t be called hacker art either, as Mixtape is an establishment product, banked by one of the richest in the world. It’s not taking an existing base and building on top of it. What Mixtape does is taking a romanticised view on place and films from another continent, chasing something fleeting that never was as viewed by people who never lived in that time or place. It tries to say something deep, but ends up being shallow. It’s like watching a skinwalker prancing about.

To make a comparison to a game that was considered art space as well, Myst succeeds in balancing itself better. It became a game that everyone and their mothers played. Mixtape builds itself like a movie and uses film techniques married with limited interactivity as its backbone. Myst’s approach was the opposite as its backbone is in mystery and player freedom to interact with the world. While Mixtape is closer to the gallery mindset, Myst was/is highly regarded because it presents itself as a gallery of interaction, where the player is challenged to think and wonder. Its failure state is perpetual stagnation, slow movement forward and inspection of clues and writing, and literal worlds they lead to. Modern interactive digital art requires its makers to consider how they intend to have the person influenced by what they see and recognise it must be a result of action, however limited, rather than inter-passivity.

Mixtape could be a movie or a miniseries and not lose anything that makes it what it is. Myst can’t, and neither can be any game. Art is the same, it can’t be transformed into another form and not lose an integral aspect of it.

Mixtape is one of the end points where art has been common good. There’s no real point of it being a playable software, there’s nothing that warrants it. It has nothing special to say, and whatever it says is not noteworthy. It’s not even something players experience as much as they watch virtual caricatures have fun because of lack of theplayer agenda.

Games don’t need art galleries and their patrons’ approval to be art in their own right. Neither does art have any reason to bend away from its long roots to become something that caters to consumer whims. Nevertheless, games should not need acceptance as art. No other form of play has. What players value as art in games is very different from what is valued in classical art. The ground zero where art and play meet in video and computer games will continue to create tension, but as long as there are developers willing to push the medium forward on its own terms, rather than by applying the rules and techniques of film or literature, games will continue to be appreciated on their own merits.

English needs a new word for Play, Play, and Play

I’ve covered this topic before, but I need to expand it a bit. The English language doesn’t have a word making a distinction between playing (a game) and playing (with a toy.) For example, Finnish has two words for these two distinctly different actions: pelata (to play [a game]) and leikkiä (to play.) Arguably, gaming has become an activity of its own, but it applies strictly to video and computer games. It appears mostly in marketing materials and within hobbyist circles. However, whenever the term appears outside these ranges, it’s almost automatically a pejorative, a descriptor for some kind of unwanted person and their interest.

There really aren’t any other hobbyist circles that have the same kind of term. Cinephiles, for example, sometimes embrace the term and it has never seen use as a pejorative. There are other terms that we could use for people who find films as their main passion, but rarely these enter the common lexicon across the globe.

The best examples of gaming and gamer would be from a bit over a decade ago, when numerous media outlets pushed out an agenda about Gamers don’t need to be your customers and began extensively splitting the customers between players and gamers. Of course, this is an artificial split that was driven by then-current messaging, but it made an unintentional point, English language sucks in this regard.

English has also slowly but surely dropped the usage of computer and video game, making little to no distinction between the two. Console games are being called computer games by some older people or media that have no idea what’s the distinction, while the gaming media and consumers themselves call everything video games, more or less. Only when tribal connections are called for, we have people making a difference between PC gaming and console gaming, which naturally would indicate the difference. The now-vanished distinction between the two is mostly a memory, but they still represent a difference between the two hardware formats with their own insider cultures. You can consider one above the other and be that much more a fool.

Even the term game has become a common descriptor solely for electronic games in broad terms. It is the most common form of entertainment after all, so needing to add descriptors like tabletop or similar has become necessary, something a generation or two ago wasn’t necessary. What is a game and what is to play a game has changed, no matter how much people would like to quote Wargames.

I must admit that I dislike the term gaming, but for the sake of being clear I use it. However, I favour playing over gaming wherever plausible for the action, because I want to keep reminding people that video and computer games didn’t just pop up in the arcades and homes out of nowhere, but are a part of play culture that is as old as man itself. The methods and playthings have changed throughout the eras, but the inner drive to play for entertainment and for practice has never gone away. Storytelling is an important part of play, but not in the manner modern gaming wants to present it as. Let’s kick the dead horse once more and remind ourselves that the act of playing a game is to tell its story; the game’s FMV sequences and whatnot are there to justify and frame player actions, not to act as the story itself.

For whatever reason, because computer and video games lay in the lineage of play culture, they are seen as somehow worse in terms of storytelling. Partly because the games industry has been chasing Hollywood in terms of mutilating what a video game’s story is and now seeing the endpoint of the medium as being adapted to the silver screen. I find it odd that a more popular media format would want to turn into a lesser thing, but global culture at large still considers film as the peak when it comes to media. That’s good old-school Hollywood propaganda at work.

Films themselves descend from plays. Plays that people play parts in. That’s another layer of English not exactly distinguishing the term play, but actor at least showcases the major difference between a person playing (a role) and a person playing (a game or with something.) If we approached electronic gaming where the game serves as the stage for the player, and the story as the framing and stage the player acts his role out, we probably would find ourselves in a place where games would improve in quality as this would begin to use video and computer games’ inherent element of interactivity as a strength, not as a weakness.

Fifty years ago, when Atari and Space Invaders reigned supreme, it might’ve been hard to imagine these games telling compelling stories. Hence, PC gaming was the place. Different RPGs and MUDs did what they could, following in the wake made by traditional games. Arguably, these games had more freedom for the players to act out their stories in these early games’ frameworks and systems than what we have nowadays as the framing became increasingly more rigid and directive. Especially in games, where the developers are fearful of players who go off the rails and doing their own things, missing developer intended paths and ways of play.

Game’s framing and game’s play sometimes are in opposition with each other, as seen in e.g. Breath of the Wild. The game’s framing supposes that there is a hurry to beat Ganon, but the game’s play is nothing but. There are no consequences in dilly dallying around. This stands in opposition to Fallout, where the framing has a ticking clock in the background, further justifying player actions and what sort of role they choose to act. This isn’t the only kind of dissonance video and computer games can have. FMV sequences and cutscenes often portray the player character’s competence as opposite, able to take more damage than during play, showcasing actions that game doesn’t allow, or otherwise different enough from the play proper to cause a dissonant effect. An example of this would be Dante getting slashed to hell in cutscenes in Devil May Cry 3 but can’t take the same beating when the player is in control. All this would indicate that the framing of a game is treated and considered almost separate from the play proper.

Perhaps partially because of this chase of out-of-media ways to build up games’ framing, game-like description in modern movie parlance describes inane, long action scenes that don’t really do anything for the movie. From an outsider perspective, video and computer games with action sequences may seem the same, short in story and all mundane hack ‘n’ slashing. Naturally, this is the opposite. A player is in active role in a game (or at least should be) and that action is part of the main story that is being told via decisions the player is actively making. These sequences in film have also been described as the director smashing two toys together. We find the connecting line between the two plays from earlier, and both are considered beneath something more proper.

However, that’s why turning any game into a film will suck whatever value the game had as an action. A player walking an hour through a desert would find value in it as it is they, through the avatar they control, doing the walking.  In a movie, this would be boring as the viewer is simply watching someone wading through the desert. Only the action of walking, nothing else. No surprise scorpions or mirages, nothing to pull the viewer in. In a game, the player would be making decisions all the time; Would he walk the shortest route, would he try to veer off to see if there are other things to see, how would the sand dunes change as you walk on them from different angles. The player’s action can make it interesting in the given framework, whereas a film will always be someone walking through the desert.

Despite video and computer games enjoying being at the most popular form of entertainment, they’re overlooked and frowned upon. whether from sports fans, music lovers or cinephiles, the act of playing a game is seen as lesser. It’s immaterial for this conversation why exactly. What matters is that because the games industry chases Hollywood in style and status, it never has tried to justify games as an art by its own merits. When game’s writing becomes more text-heavy, it becomes compared to literary works. The reason games like Metal Gear Solid got compared to movies was their heavy reliance on cutscenes. Interestingly enough, the MGS games also showcase great ways of making the game world tell the story with little details and attention to what players may do outside the intended. When the player agenda is taken into account the game world becomes that much more interesting, even in linear titles. However, these examples are still rare. Instead of moving toward games that would encourage player agenda, we’ve got more games that restrict these and construct games to be Skinner boxes to placate customers like DarkSydePhil, holding players’ hands and constantly reminding them to do X or task Y being a thing. It’s easy to see why supposing games as art gets scoffed at when they’re as subtle as a hammer in a pottery shop.

The discussion was very different in the 1990s and after the change of the millennium. There was a significant movement, for a short while, to use games as interactive spaces for art. It wasn’t games as art per se, but games’ space used for art. A vestige of this is the use of experience with games. (I’m going to write about this more next time.)

Games became experiences, things that have music to awe you, things that will make you feel things and showcase high graphical fidelity, and so on. This in a manner is the games industry justifying how the framing is the work of art that Hollywood and others should admire and see, not the act of playing. The Super Mario movies don’t exactly depict any of the Mario games per se as they are, or even adapt them, but adapt the concept of a Mario game and the property’s concepts. Another example would be Prince of Persia’s movie adaptation, which does what any film adaptation of a game can really do; work with the framing and hint the gameplay with action scenes. The reason why the original Mortal Kombat is/was considered one of the best game-movies is because martial arts tournament is a genre, and Mortal Kombat the movie added more to the story and world of the games. Fighting games would naturally loan their play to the action scenes, but often, these scenes end up being depicted like they’re in the games. This is where the original MK movie walked a good middle line.

Thus, if movies are experiences to behold, then the framing of video and computer games follow the same path; they’re the things to behold. Cinematic sequences and non-interactive plot points follow this same path, forcing the player to experience the game world the exact same way repeatedly rather than allowing the agency for the player to make decisions how to experience it themselves. How much freedom to “experience” a game gives to the player is one good indicator on the quality of the game.

That’s perhaps a key here. A game that you game isn’t about the experience, thus it’s free to get all the flak media can muster. The approved games that aim to deliver some sort of art experience often enjoy high ratings and reviews from the games media. It’s partly because how the review industry works as an extended PR of game publishers, where nepotism and corruption are daily things. The more you have an experience, the less there is game to play.

Computer and video games are a collection of different people working toward one end result. With films, the director is largely credited as the driving force behind the film’s vision despite hundreds or thousands of people working blood and sweat on the production. For literature, it’s often the writer who gets the sole credit even if there are more people behind the scenes giving a helping hand. Video games have a couple of names that can be listed in the superstar status, names that get similar treatment as directors, team leads, or whatever Todd Howard wants to call himself. Gaming has been trying to implement the auteur theory into practice, but rarely it works as consumers recognize how many different visions have to come together in a big budget title. The auteur theory proposes the director has an unbound influence on the project they are working on, imprinting their unique personal vision and focus on every aspect of the finished piece. There are numerous games that we could identify this with. Nintendo specifically wants to sell Shigeru Miyamoto as an auteur director, someone who has a magical touch and is responsible for all great things in gaming. It’s like how Disney used to portray Walt Disney making all the comics over the real authors, like Carl Barks.

Much like films, perhaps even more so, video and computer games are geared toward popular culture. The difference was that being a coder or a director wasn’t exactly cool or a desired position, unlike being a writer or a film director. Companies were afraid of losing their coders. The superstar game developer would come a bit later, perhaps iD being one of the bigger examples of this in the wake of Doom‘s popularity. Nintendo had the aforementioned Shigsy, and Capcom showcased Keiji Inafune as their posterboy for Mega Man. Konami would have Hideo Kojima breaking to the scene with the Metal Gear Solid‘s success. These and numerous more would trickle down the line to the mainstream consciousness. It’s no coincidence that games that were taken in with more artistic value than other had a recognizable name attached to them. The name that delivers that experience has become more important than the play, often cited in a tertiary manner. Framing has become more important as that’s what people who don’t play video and computer games understand. These people don’t realize that the best point of comparison with games isn’t other media, but their own history of playing when they were younger. Starting from there, they might realize that modern electronic gaming has become acting out the worst and the best parts of our imagination rather than just watching things passively.

Star Fox on repeat

At times I really have to wonder what’s with Nintendo, but then I recall that they’ve always been jealous when another company does something better with their IP than they themselves. I’m almost certain there hasn’t been a new F-Zero because they don’t want it to take any light away from Mario Kart, which allows them change the format however they want, and that AM2 did F-Zero so well with GX that Nintendo recognized right away that they can’t do it any better. Hence, 2D F-Zero fetishism and trying to keep the series “clean,” so to speak.

As for Star Fox, Argonaut did the original and the second game so well, that Shigsy wanted to make a clear split between capabilities between the SNES and the N64. It was marketing bullshit, which allowed them to develop their own reboot of the franchise with Lylat Wars, the superior name to Star Fox 64. Alright, a showcase how much better N64 was for 3D over the SNES, but what then? For whatever reason, Shigsy wanted Rare to use Star Fox license to their Dinosaur Planet game and that was a disaster and a half in terms of development and reception. You’d think at this point Nintendo would’ve realized that people didn’t exactly want on-foot sections for their furry Star Wars clone, but the Triforce agreement with Namco nevertheless split the game with on-foot sections and starfighter battles. Star Fox Assault is a fine game, but again, not something fans glamoured for.

Star Fox Command is an odd duck, because it tries to move things forward but again fails to grasp that what made the series tick in the first place. Considering one of its head devs was an ex-Argonaut head, I’d wager Command was his way to bring back then-lost Star Fox 2 in a new form. Though maybe that’s also why Nintendo has then proceeded to remaster the the reboot in Star Fox 64 3D, another N64 port to the 3DS in hopes of people finding new appreciation for these games. However, rather than pushing things forward, like with Assault and Command, Platinum’s Star Fox Zero is a reimagined version the N64 reboot, which is now booted to the side because Nintendo is fully remaking the N64 reboot.

As if they’re never satisfied with Star Fox and try to make it better without ever realizing they can’t. Nintendo never had the chops for something like Star Fox themselves. It was the SNES original that made its mark with its technical wizardry. All that was on Argonaut Software. It was the right time at the right place. As long as Nintendo keeps getting stuck with the original game, remaking it over and over again, the series will languish in place. All the attempts at trying to expand the series has failed to realize that Star Fox is an arcade shooter first and foremost. Much like why people want Star Wars games where you just fly the ships and nothing else (a reason why Rogue Squadron III is considered the worst in the series), Star Fox is a game where you fly on rails towards the end with the difficulty increasing each stage, with the game’s overall difficulty being determined by which route you to take to the end.

At its core, Star Fox‘s core design isn’t hard. What’s hard is planning out all the planets’ designs, the obstacles, the finely tuned ship controls and enemy appearances. It’s not even all that fun, in the end, as it requires gruesome levels of consideration and iteration. Effectively everything the player faces in the classic Star Fox games had to be planned out. The best real-world example would be one of those thematic rides you see in Universal Studios, where the whole ride has been timed to a perfection. It’s all about fine tuning it, and once you get it down, you can’t really improve it. The only option is to make a new ride, with new theming, with blackjack and hookers. Instead, Star Fox has been relegated to fight Andross in the same fight again and again.

While stage layouts have been kept the same, the visuals have received a major upgrade.

That’s what we used to call being creatively bankrupt. Instead of making a whole new big Star Fox game that would push everything forwards, we’re yet again at the starting point. It’s like if Super Mario Bros. never moved forwards after the first game, just retreading the same paths with better graphics with a tweak or two here and there. Players know what a Star Fox is. There was never a reason to make another revised version of the original game. Instead, making a whole new game, moving the series’ forwards with new enemies, new characters to the supporting cast and everything else sequels usually bring with ’em would’ve been the best option. However, that would’ve required making whole new concepts and settings that the audience wouldn’t be familiar with, and we can’t have that nowadays. Only safe options. If players aren’t fighting Andross’ forces and end up fighting a big floating head at Venom, how could they recognize this as a real Star Fox game?

You could argue that pushing Star Fox forwards has been tried and it has more or less failed every time. That remaking the first game has been the only good move the series has seen. I would rather take that as more evidence that Nintendo can’t deal with the series at its own terms, much like they can’t deal with Metroid and F-Zero. I’d bet that if Nintendo would enter into an agreement with Sega and AM2 again to develop a new Star Fox game, we’d see something that’d blow Nintendo’s own remakes out of the water. Why? Because Sega has always been the more innovative in terms of play and hardware over Nintendo. That was always required in the arcade business far more than in the home console space. Difference was, Nintendo had Yamauchi doing better business… until the N64.

To use Star Fox as an example, it’s the main Super FX chip showcase. Full 3D on a console isn’t something to scoff at, even if the framerate is on the low end. However, by 1992 Sega already had 3D tech in the arcades with Virtua Racing, and a year later Virtua Fighter would hit the scene. They’d counter the Super FX with their Sega Virtual Processor, which powered one single game; Virtua Racing. A homebrew demo of Star Fox running on SVP exists, and for a demo it’s impressive stuff. Nintendo has always been for 3D in their games, but the technology for them has mostly been developed outside their doors. That’s fine by itself, as Nintendo does better by using mature technology in an innovative manner rather than creating innovative technology itself. Take the stereoscopic 3D Nintendo did with the 3DS. Pretty great. Sega had an arcade game in 1982 that already was using the same principle in SubRoc-3D.

I don’t find this new Star Fox remake worth it. What’s to add to this game? Oh, story cutscenes to make a more compelling story? Then make it a movie, not a game. The resources these movies take would’ve been better served in making new stages, new enemies, and new vehicles. Challenge Mode is just busywork trying to extend the time players spend with the game, meaning Nintendo too recognized that the game should’ve been expanded, not its framing. Multiplayer? Half-baked at best as a secondary thought. Three stages, all tied to a format. Single-player campaign split between pilot and gunner, rather than campaign coop. That kind of multiplayer would require more work to optimize the rails and events, after all. We can’t have that.

We’ve seen this game at least three times now and the more Nintendo removes it from its arcade railshooter roots, the more bloated it’ll get. If Nintendo really wants to make Star Fox a golden goose like some of their other IPs, they need to embrace its core in technology pushing the play rules’ limits rather than bolt on heavy framing. However, this isn’t in Nintendo’s DNA. What’s the value playing Star Fox Remake over any of the older games? Face tracking avatars? Does this add anything else but take resources from running the game itself and potentially create security issues with privacy?

Nintendo has been remaking some of their core N64 games for newer hardware. The issue with the N64 wasn’t the graphics per se, but the games themselves. If the rumours for another Ocarina of Time remake are true, then it’s just showing that its easy for them to upgrade these games for modern platforms with bells and whistles that add nothing of value. I’d rather see them touching up older games from their arcade and earlier consoles, giving them a whole new facelift and making them a whole new game. If Breath of the Wild was at its core the original The Legend of Zelda, they can take fucktons of other successful games just as well and give them the same treatment. However, that’s be much more hard work than repeating a remake of a remake.

I don’t even care about the visuals. All of it seems like safe, corporate approved visual language. The game looks like any other generic SF title with glowy lights aiming for some kind of realism instead of trying to stand above the rest in style. It would’ve been more interesting if Nintendo had embraced the original game’s visuals and recreated the puppet models accurately and simplified the Arwings’ models.

Maybe I’m just tired of seeing things I’ve enjoyed never moving forwards, but staying in one place and grinding away the same old shit over and over. Star Fox is a sort of example that its first game laid out the best case for itself, and people have been trying to do something new and better with it, but always they end up missing something vital about the design and play, or make a whole different kind of game. I don’t even dislike Starfox Adventures, but I know everyone would’ve been better off of Rare had stood by their ground and refused the Star Fox branding.

Ampere Analysis makes speculation on female gamers, not hard data

Ampere Analysis presented a study earlier this year where they concluded that women make up 48% of the gaming community. We can say that’s effectively half. That’s approximately 922 million people across 21 countries. Big numbers for sure. Supposedly, the gaming industry is largely ignoring this major possible market segment, as there is a serious lack of games for women who would like to play story-driven single-player games with a social aspect and romance. They came to this conclusion by looking at what kind of media outside games these women consume and made a beeline assumption that women want the same thing from their games. What their data seems to indicate is that there is a large section of women who are interested in playing games but don’t. Either they don’t know how to play games or don’t know what kind of game content exists.

Let’s pause here and point out that Ampere showcases data in a biased manner. That 48% includes any woman who has played a game, be it Candy Crush or FarmVille. If you’re a woman who has played a game of any kind, you’re counted in this number. The quality of these stats is messy, as that equates players who spend about ten minutes with games per week with people who spend most of their waking hours gaming. This is an important point, as any person wanting to sell something realizes that these two kinds of customers are completely different and need to be valued in a different manner.

The inquiry had 52 video and computer games listed. Only three titles had more women playing than men: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Sims 4, and Roblox. From a list of 50 mobile games, some 13 titles had more women players. This would indicate, then, that the higher concentration of women in gaming can be found outside the usual big sellers, and on mobile devices rather than consoles and computers.

The market is functioning as you’d expect; nothing has really changed in behavioural differences between the two sexes. Early on in this blog’s life, I wrote about girl games as part of a series where I illustrated how video and computer games aren’t a special phenomenon in and of themselves, but a continuation of a long play culture. Gaming in general mostly adheres to boys’ play culture, as it builds on competition and readily set rules. It’s much easier to make a soccer or a tennis video game because these rules exist and are set in stone. Playing house is something classically part of girls’ play culture, as playing with dolls and other miniature house equipment readies them for motherhood. It’s much harder to make a simulacrum of playing house because it has no readily set rules. Here’s mother, dad, kid, and maybe a dog. Here’s the house. Now play house. I’ve used The Sims as an example of this being successfully adapted, and I’m not surprised The Sims 4 is on the above list.

Making girl games is hard because historically they’ve been misunderstood and misapplied by powers that be in the gaming industry. You might have a good memory of some Barbie game out there, but none of them would win any prizes. What most of these girl games lacked in the 1980s and 1990s was holding power, or the way a game keeps attracting the player back to itself to maintain their attention span and immerse them in its world. Because gaming is largely based on boys’ play culture, its holding power over girls is less due to the different schema the two have classically worked under. In a manner, girls and women as gamers were treated like some sort of invalids because of this. Girl games were colourful, with horses and puppies galore, with about as much gameplay as a wet towel on a wall.

However, as demand grew for games specifically catering to girls and women, a few began to understand that the differences in play cultures were a possibility rather than a ball and chain. Brenda Laurel founded Purple Moon in 1999 to make, as she called it in 2009, a cultural intervention. Purple Moon’s games targeted girls between 8 and 14, and rather than making games about competition and confrontation, their games were more like interactive story worlds the players could explore. However, as we can see from Ampere’s data, games-for-all are more popular among modern women and girls than games directly aimed at girls.

Purple Moon games were criticized for doing the same gender stereotyping they wanted to intervene

In a way, girl games dried out early in the millennium because games in general had already begun to emphasize story framing and expanded world-building in mainstream titles. I would hazard a guess that World of Warcraft offered much of the very same story-driven exploration and interactivity, not just with the game but with other players as well.

Barbie Fashion Designer may have sold well and left an unwanted mark, but a game like New Style Boutique 3 found itself with a cult following from the opposite sex. The game didn’t just require players to design new clothing combinations, but had a framing narrative of the player needing to run a clothes boutique, making the game deep enough to have holding power over both boys and men as well as girls and women. Unlike the Barbie game, this 3DS game had some depth to it. The lack of a license probably hurt the game’s sales, but its cult status shows that games stemming from girl play culture can have universal acceptance, even if it’s marginal. Of course, The Sims is the titan in this.

Girl game as a term has become rare, as it became associated with terrible shovelware. They were represented as the opposite of boys’ games, which frankly is just the de facto standard for the game industry. That’s not to say girls and women were ignored, as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda games still make big sales and are more or less equally popular between the sexes. As gaming has moved away from public places and now solely resides at home, there is no longer any pressure for girls and women to give whatever games they might fancy a go. Why did more females play Tetris than Pac-Man? Because the physical placement of the game had moved away from arcades to home computers and consoles.

This study seems to ignore a few genres that have an overwhelming female audience, and they even make the whole girl game concept sound good: otome games and romance video games. Otome games have been specifically designed to cater to the sensibilities girls and women have, so it’s not surprising that over 90% of otome game players are women. We can argue whether or not visual novels count, but some fantasy otome games also have elements like running a kingdom, meaning they’re not just text but have meaningful gameplay elements that impact the social aspect.

As games have gotten heavier on delivering framing and allowing players to wander the world, we’ve seen a sort of coming together between the two play cultures. Especially with RPGs like Dragon Age series or The Witcher 3, we see that social aspect becoming a major component, with the ability to romance characters and that being an essential part of the story. However, the bulk of the play is still dictated by rules and regulations that largely stem from boys’ play culture. Acknowledging this, we can see how the two complement each other in a manner where they couldn’t exist separately. You get action gameplay with whatever character you choose to make, and then engage in extensive dialogue options between NPCs that might affect anything from what coloured shoes they wear to who stabs you in the back.

I see that if gaming would take its interactivity into account more, allowing players to dynamically change framing directions as much as systems could, and not stick to linear storytelling as seen in films and literature, we could find ourselves in places where games combine the two play cultures in a more holistic manner and embrace the medium’s inherent properties rather than stick with ready-made stories.

However, that wouldn’t automatically mean more women would want to play such a game. The number of hardcore male gamers who put more money into gaming is larger than females, and that is a lifestyle choice. The linkage between visual novels and women reading books is easy to understand; they’re almost the same thing in different packaging. However, there is no hard proof or individual linkage showcasing cross-media consumption. Anecdotes and niche demographics do suggest an overlap, but a large number of romance book readers don’t play games, even when there are already options that cater to them.

Even when we ignore romance as a genre, there are no studies that link cross-media consumption. Ampere is making the argument that because women consume X kind of content in media Y, then they should also be interested in X content in media Z. While this seems like a no-brainer at surface value, it’s a pretty big leap from opening a book and reading what’s on the page to installing a 50GB game on your computer and learning system mechanics that enable a similar story to that of a Harlequin book. That’s why girl games had that bad reputation; they tried to meet a supposedly invalid audience by cutting away gameplay to match a level where other media offered a more enjoyable pastime. The claims Ampere makes are circumstantial at best. We would first need studies showcasing that people, especially women, actually consume the same kinds of genres and styles across all media. Ampere’s conclusion about what women would look for in a game based on what they watch and read is no less than harmful stereotyping.

The argument of women needing an easier entry point for gaming is petty at best and sexist at worst. It’s the whole notion of girl games and females being seen as gaming invalids raising its head again. There has never been a better time in history to get into gaming than now. Endless amounts of YouTube tutorials and guides exist, games quite literally hold the player’s hand to pass even the slightest obstacle, no-failure states exist across the board, and even gameplay can be skipped in some cases. Saying that there’s a subset of female non-gamers who are interested in gaming but lack the knowledge of how to play these games and what content is out there, and then demanding entry-level content, is misguided. If women are interested in something and want to give it a shot, they are just as capable of finding things out themselves. They need the same thing as men: motivation and reason.

We have more games than ever before, from small indie developers to large AAA studios, and they’re all easy to find as long as your search skills are decent. However, if there is no reason to take up gaming as a hobby or lifestyle, then that person is not as valuable a customer as someone who already is. You can’t force people to become something, just like you can’t force men and women to choose a certain kind of career path simply because statistics look off. The same applies to hobbies. It might be cultural or biological; it doesn’t matter.

When you have people who are not interested in your product and are aware it exists, they’re not even untapped customers. You would have to fundamentally change their perceptions to turn them into customers. Ampere disregards its own results: 47% of female non-gamers say they would never consider playing. That’s 10% less than non-gaming males. If there are more boys and men willing to give gaming a shot than girls and women, then wouldn’t that be the more viable market segment to pursue?

We should, of course, question Ampere’s data, as it’s all done via surveys. Ampere gave out a generalised survey that doesn’t really go into detail, nor did they conduct any behavioural study over time. 46,000 respondents self-reported their preferences and habits. This is probably one of the worst ways to gather consumer information, as customers don’t always know what they want. I often use the example of why there are so many different kinds of tomato pasta on store shelves. Consumers think they know what they want, but often don’t. It’s not because they’re unintelligent, but because we are creatures of habit and environment.

Everything in this study is just speculation. There are no strong scientific grounds presented.

No industry would take a study like this and its recommendations seriously. You can’t turn someone who doesn’t want mustard into a mustard customer. It simply won’t happen.

The approach is also flawed. Rather than directly asking what games women play or what media they consume elsewhere, a study examining what kinds of games and play current girls engage in would yield more valid data. Similarly, researching past play habits of adult women and their current non-digital hobbies could provide valuable insights. This would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It would also require researchers who understand differences in play cultures across various societies if conducted globally.

However, there’s still one thorn in my side I need to pick: games for general audiences. I mentioned Mario and Zelda earlier, and the reason they attract both sexes is because they are well-designed, high-quality games. Data over decades suggests that boys and girls, men and women, gravitate toward games that are enjoyable and have strong holding power. The more explicitly gendered a game is, the worse its design tends to be, and the less successful it becomes.

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.

The many games of The Most Successful

With Rockstar and Grant Theft Auto 6 in the news for some unsavory reasons, I saw quite a lot of hubbubs about the success of the fifth game in the franchise and its comparative success compared to other games, and other forms entertainment. I’m slightly flabbergasted that someone would claim that GTA5 was the most successful form of entertainment, when people without much contact with the modern world knew about Michael Jackson. Thriller permeated everywhere, you can’t beat it.

Nevertheless, this made an interesting thought experiment on what counts as The Most Successful Video Game. It didn’t help that I saw the goal being pushed after one or two rounds of discussion, under which at least few realized that there’s more than one way of seeing this. Business has a different view on things compared to the customers, and then you have the historical view that has a longer view on how games have affected culture in general. This is why Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout and Pac-Man still live on in the cultural memory, even if the amount of success they’ve seen in terms of money is less than whatever big Triple A title that’s come after.

I should probably note that there’s also a slight difference in how some use the term franchise. While I tend to use it wrong as a synonym with Intellectual Property, an example of a franchise would be Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III would be its own franchise, while all falling under the same umbrella of IP. This is because of merchandising rights and all that business jazz.

Units Sold is of course a big one, the cumulative sales made by one game, or a series of games. For example, the Mario games have a cumulative sale of 957 million units, while Mega Man has 43 million units.

As for individual titles, Minecraft is an evergreen title that hits 350 units sold. GTAV follows It at 220 million units.

Units sold doesn’t really keep you afloat a lot, unless you have Revenue. This is the total gross the series does through game sales, possible DLC, merch, and other licensed material. Pokémon tops this chart with $115, followed by Call of Duty with $31 million.

The way digital games are consumed is different from purchased titles, of course. That’s why something like Candy Crush or Dungeon Fighter Online can top the chart of games with most revenue, as individuals put more money into these games. This compares apples and oranges; the business models are ultimately very different and the amount of money you can squeeze out of a customer via single sold title plus DLC is ultimately less than digital-only but squeezing small amounts throughout their play time. Gacha mixes things with the whole gambling aspect.

I don’t think we should count individual downloads. This is because a download doesn’t translate to a purchase, or revenue. There are numerous cases of curious people testing a free game out and then proceeding not to continue. These people are often counted to the player metric nonetheless, which shows that the total number of players can be skewed to showcase a more positive statistic for PR reasons. This is the same reason why Sony cites the total number of PlayStation 2’s when asked about the total number of consoles sold. It just looks better, and they can fudge the numbers for their benefit.

Then again, Subway Surfers has 2.05 billion individual downloads and spawned numerous imitators so there’s something value in that too.

Player Count is also something that seems to be a significant metric, with Roblox topping the list with the estimated number of players being in billions cumulative. Minecraft hitting a nice spot of 600 million plus players shows that it really is the Tetris of the modern age.

I would argue that the peak number of players, and how long that plateau is held, is a more significant counter simply because it shows how many players consume the game in each span of time. Through this, we get an idea whether a game holds its audience, which is far more important in the long-term in terms of customer satisfaction and how well customers make emotional connection to the game. A game that gets massive sales at the start but sees the player count sink like a rock in water has no lasting hold on the market.

While I don’t give much weight on the Critical Acclaim the journalists give to games (as they are nothing more than just an extra arm in the PR machine), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Soul Calibur top the chart with 99 and 98 according to Metacritic. I’d like to say the User Score is the metric we should use, but seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topping the current list reminds me how customers can’t be any more objective than the journalists most of the time.

If we count Spacewar! as the progenitor of all modern video and computer games (and we are,) gaming is 63 at the time of writing. There are only a handful of game names from the early era of electronic gaming that are still strongly alive. Pac-Man and Mario are the handful, with the rest of their brethren being relocated to nostalgic revivals and retro collections. While we may think the most popular games we have now will last for all time, we’ve seen so many game names simply vanishing, dying out or otherwise fall into torpor. Mega Man is a great example of this, sometimes popping its head up only to fall back into Capcom archives. Maybe we’ll get another game by 2030. Prince of Persia seemed like a name that would never die, but overexposure and simply being owned by Ubisoft clearly took its toll on the name. Same thing could be happening to Assassin Creed now, one can only hope.

Some of you might’ve noticed that I counted Donkey Kong as a Mario title. So does Nintendo, as that’s the first appearance of Mario, then named Jumpman. If you want, we can count Mario being started in 1983, making Mario 42 to Pac-Man’s 45. These are still small numbers compared to something like Universal Monsters, which have lasted for good 117 years. Looking at the comic book world, both Superman and Batman are in their 80s.

However, the gaming industry influences itself. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was influenced by Final Fantasy, which was seen as the premier gaming IP at one point in the Western World. However, going back and seeing what influenced Final Fantasy we find Dragon Quest and its numerous copycats and imitators. Going further back we find both Utima and Wizardry influencing the game, which also influenced so many other Japanese computer RPGs like The Black Onyx, which inspired the creation of The Legend of Zelda. Ultima and Wizardry have their roots in MUDs, which have roots in table-top RPGs, mainly Dungeon and Dragons, which have their roots in the military games generals and other army leaders would play to train their leadership.

The roots of video and computer gaming lie in the games and play of children and adults alike, alongside how stories were told by acting and playing them out. This tangent is to remind ourselves that gaming is not something that just came along with computers and consoles but is just the latest iteration of mankind has been doing ever since we dwelled in caves.

Nevertheless, the game with most cultural impact is probably Pokémon. Its Trading Card Game sales generate about one to three billion dollars per year, which rivals the top-most successful film’s revenue in their lifetime. Of course, TCG is an evergreen product compared to film’s finite runs, so this should illustrate how different the media are. Still, the franchise IP generated that $150 billion plus dollars and probably is Japan’s single most important import product. Pikachu is the face and mascot of the franchise, well-known across the glob, and served as an ambassador to 2014 World Cup, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and in 2025 World Expo. Its yellow face is featured in over fifty embassies across the world. Surprisingly, Pokémon has shown itself to be a multi-generational product, a cornerstone of sorts that sees constant parodies in other shows and games while drawing tourists of all ages to Pokémon Centers across the world, especially to Japan.

Even if Pokémon is a 1990s product, it can be placed alongside Mario and Pac-Man as a long-lasting face of gaming, with it probably ending up as the face of gaming on the long run if we had to choose one, for better or worse. This also illustrates some why Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and to a lesser extent GameFreak would be freakishly overprotective of their IP. There are numerous other contenders we could put there, but I’m making a point there; there must be generationally recognizable face for all without really any breaks.

The list of games that influenced other games is as wide as the library of games out there. Talking about First-Person Shooting ends up someone tracing back to Halo, then Half-Life, a mention of Quake’s code still running in some modern games, another mentioning Goldeneye 007, with usually ending with either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D in a similar fashion I did with RPGs above.

While we have been seeing the influence of video and computer games on the culture ever since the 1970s in an increasing fashion, it’s hard to determine how well a game or a name will endure as history happens. Only in hindsight can we properly determine the ebbs and flows of masses, something the current gaming industry seems to ignore in favour of trying to appease each other with the press as their echo chamber. When Demon’s Souls was put out for the first time, nobody expected it to become a cultural cornerstone. However, history has shown us that people like to play challenging games, and from that challenge comes customer satisfaction. Well-built world and framing, with play-first mentality, is a sort of silver bullet. It’s not a game for everyone, and that’s fine. You can’t please everyone with one product, and trying to is simply being dishonest toward the game and the customer.

#electronicGames #entertainment #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames

Terminado de copiar el programa "Missione Luna" de la revista Electronic Games / EG Computer nº 13. Un arcade de acción, hecho parte en BASIC y parte en código máquina. Al archivo de Spectrum Computing que va.

Esta vez comparto con vosotros el programa entero. Puede que lo vuelva a hacer con otros programas que merezcan la pena:

Os lo podéis descargar desde aquí: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yq1cqkd3zwiig0kr0bihw/EG_Computer13-MissioneLuna.zip?rlkey=c023znhxguwfbl8nd3roiwpo7&dl=0

#ZXSpectrum #Preservación #Listados #TypeIns #Revistas #Magazines #ElectronicGames #rivista #Italy

The second Microsoft rant of the Month

Satya Nadella says Xbox isn’t competing with other game consoles. He says Xbox is competing with TikTok. This is Nadella effectively admitting Xbox has lost its primary market and must find something else to compare themselves to in order not to look so bad in the eyes of the market, or investors. People thought the Activision Blizzard buyout would’ve changed gaming in a way that Xbox would get all these exclusives, concentrating large swaths of games to one or two platforms, or something along those lines. As it turns out, none of these people looked at how Microsoft has worked, buying out companies and then gutting them when they haven’t turned out to be moneymakers. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The buyout didn’t increase the number of customers. Simply buying a company and having it produce games doesn’t expand the market. You must deliver something that the Blue Ocean customer might want to have. The issue with Xbox is that it was a lifestyle brand for young boys and teenagers, as well as for some young adults, especially in the US and parts of Europe. It’s a very American brand, loud and obnoxious in a way. Xbox is Sega 2.0, doing the same bit in a different decade. This can carry a gaming console for a generation or two, when it must either expand its audience or try to appease its aging consumer base. Neither is a very good option, as the former is often seen as abandoning existing customers and will fail even worse if the new console and games aren’t disrupting the market, and the latter will be diminishing returns as younger generations or expanding families won’t find the system appealing. The Apple lifestyle brand model doesn’t work in console gaming, as consoles require games, not just expensive looks.

Gaming is changing not because of consolidation of companies. It’s changing because of customer behaviour and lack of competition between game companies. If Xbox is in competition with TikTok, then they are in competition with every other form of entertainment media and that is a losing battle. They’re stretching their battlefield too thin and are now losing in their own market. This is like dick envy from Microsoft, seeing the numbers something completely different from their business is doing and wanting some of that. This is a repeat of Microsoft wanting to get into console gaming with the Xbox after seeing what sort of magic Nintendo and Sony were brewing. This small dick energy has always been something Microsoft, and by extension Xbox, has always had.

Gaming has changed due to the game market changing, i.e. people changing. Currently, the average age of a gamer in the US is 36. European media is 31, the same as China, but Italy tops out at 50. The numbers don’t change much across the world, even in Japan the number is 33. These are people who have some eighteen years of gaming behind them, these all are part of a particular generation in global terms that took up gaming us a hobby in their childhood.  These people now have families and jobs that require their attention. Time to play games grows shorter and thus what kind of games people play.

Why are younger generations going for TikTok and other shortform content instead of playing video games? Because the games that these big companies are bloated mess that hold your hand all the way down and don’t give the kicks. The children yearn for arcade games. Games that get you in fast, give you exhilaration and get you out just as fast. Keep it simple, stupid. Not these tens to hundreds of hours of bloat and framing, these kids want to be entertained now, not in five minutes after the cutscene is over.

I guess this is why Xbox is now whatever. They can’t sell themselves as a lifestyle brand with Mountain Dew and Doritos anymore, so they’re going to brand your phone as an Xbox you can play games on while taking a shit at school or work. Gaming has been competing for the same set of customers without expanding. The Hollywood Approach in gaming dooms it to develop and publish games that take over half a decade to develop and try to appease everyone while being aimed at the core audience. It doesn’t work on the long run. There is always a need for variety, and in this grey mass of Triple A all you get is disappointment.

Sure, Nadella, Xbox is competing with other media for the attention of the customer. Xbox becoming a dedicated gaming PC with windows and Steam is just admitting Microsoft failed at console business. You can’t compete with TikTok by offering the same things that are already offered elsewhere better. If you’re selling tomato sauce, you can’t just offer the same kind of tomato sauce your competition is already selling and then say you’re competing with chocolate bars.

This is why I find Xbox as a console so boring in terms of business and games. They never do anything original, and when they do something that causes an uproar, they do the exact same things they’ve always done as a tech company. They don’t create disruptions, they don’t create better value alternatives, they don’t create original IPs that could last (and when they do, they just kill ‘em off), and now you can pick their games wherever the fuck you want. They’re not even a Triple A gaming company, they’re a tech company with all the woes and none of the benefits when it comes to gaming.

Why would you buy a console that has less unique titles than the competition? If Sony’s getting Xbox titles, there is no reason to buy an Xbox outside brand loyalty. But then you’re missing all the Sony titles. But then why buy a PlayStation when you could just buy a gaming PC at the same price and get both systems’ titles? When you’re not competing with Sony, your biggest gaming rival, then who are you competing against? Everything else, it seems.

Xbox isn’t even Pepsi of gaming. When they can’t win at PC gaming, they asked What else people want to play. Then they went to learn lessons from Sega with the Dreamcast and shat out the Xbox. Now that’s failing, and they’re asking What else people are spending their time one, and here we are. Xbox didn’t grow the gaming market in any significant manner, it simply wallowed what was already there. If Microsoft wants to see growth, they need to grow the market itself. This isn’t “modern audiences” garbage, this is about lapsed gamers and people who have never played games before. The industry will not grow unless these people are met with on a level ground.

What these companies need to do is to tear down the walls that are between games and people who would like to, might want to, play them.

We’ve seen what kind of games the younger generation plays. Roblox is what they enjoy, something older gamers have a tough time understanding, and what other publishers don’t get either but still want to replicate the results. We saw the exact same with Fortnite.

“The graveyard of any industry is filled with the headstones of companies who decided to keep doing things the same old way. Playing only on the margin, making things just a little bit better. That strategy works….for a while, but ultimately it’s fatal.”

You can’t disrupt and hope to come at the top in a market if you abandon it.

“We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.”

#customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #xbox