I don't even know with happened with that one. People harped on Square for skipping it in their summer presser (or was it Sony's? Don't remember), but I actually felt that it had alright marketing. It was absent from some key events yeah, but it had a decent amount of trailers. More than most other mid budget Square titles at least. Then again, the titles that got even less marketing did poorly too lol, so I guess that's not saying much. I guess being a sequel to a niche handheld RPG didn't do it any favors. God what a shame, game was so good. Liked it better than the first oneI always go back to their atrocious handling of TWEWY2.
Correct. Simply put, Nintendo does not belong in this conversation at all.Gotta give Nintendo credit though more than 10 in this modern environment is an absolute smorgasbord.
Development tools and standardized engines being significantly better than ever really boggle my mind in relation to this issue. You would think that would help mitigate the impact of these 5-7+ year dev cycles.Sucks if you bounce off 1 game, you get wait another 5-8 for a game by the same dev team. Woohoo.
Whats wild is the dev tools and technology/productivity are better than ever. You could make what is functionally a 360 title+ so much more easily today. And it would look better and run better with a combination of brute forced specs and more mature tools. Engines and resources do more and lighting/rigging etcs have much broader options now.
But expectations are simply way higher. Why settle for a 360 game plus, when a PS5 game may have a world the size of a small state, with animation/motion capture up there with top tier movie studios and detail down to hairs and pores on a characters skin etc and you can get it for $60/70, (before it halves in price over a year or two).
And then indies fill the $1-$30 niche handily, with much smaller resources (but still usually using at least some of the modern engine/improved tools we have today). And even then, its waaay more competitive and less safe that people think. Indi devs collapse every day. Downright good titles get canned regularly, and angel/big dev funding often stifles them too.
People keep voting with their wallets. They simply don't want AA games for the most part, or aren't willing to pay for them at any rate.
And yet the industry is at an impasse, it cannot release games that are so expensive and time consuming to make, there will be a brick wall, Microsoft is there (given their market penetration), Sony might in if they can't get budgets under control and Nintendo is taking their first steps in to that reality themselves. But that's whats floated that industry for decades now and gamers expect it. It is what sells, well safely that is. Luckily for Nintendo expectations are lower and they can smooth it over with stylized visuals (not that other developers cannot). But even they will see what happens if they want to push the Switch 2 as hard as Sony pushed the PS4. It wont be cheap.
We do see GaaS and your breakouts like Minecraft and such every now and then, but that seems even riskier and not much easier to actually make. Maybe harder when the market gets saturated.
What does game dev look like when we hit market saturation? When new kids join more slowly, when gamer moms and dads and jocks and businessman already know about gaming and already spend what they are comfortable with?
There was a lot of hoo ha about the PS4 generation maybe having a decline competing with mobile. It didn't reaaaally happen, mostly, kinda. But we do see a slowing of new customers in console/pc gaming outside of developing countries (which are already post-mid transition to phone/pc/ and sometimes switch).
I don't see a crash, but I do see a lowered interest, stifling of creativity/qol for workers and still growing expenses. I see a slow but noticeable decline. Or arguably a correction. Maybe there simply isn't enough money to be made to be worth the investment. So lets stop hiring and firing like everything is a big tech hype stock.
But on the plus side, plenty, in fact loads of great games come out constantly. And thankfully plenty of creative titles do succeed. If less money and dev resources go in to gaming. Honestly, oh well? Its a cool medium, but its a luxury. Talent may go in to TV/movies/books/animation, or even just back in to staple roles that keeps your food, water and lifestyle reasonable. It does suck for people who lose their jobs, but hopefully everyone will find some new employment somewhere and can find value in new roles and with friends/families and other hobbies.
The issue wasn’t so much the trailers but marketing after that. It essentially became one of those titles that got even less marketing. Overall SE is generally pretty bad on their non-AAA catalogue.I don't even know with happened with that one. People harped on Square for skipping it in their summer presser (or was it Sony's? Don't remember), but I actually felt that it had alright marketing. It was absent from some key events yeah, but it had a decent amount of trailers. More than most other mid budget Square titles at least. Then again, the titles that got even less marketing did poorly too lol, so I guess that's not saying much. I guess being a sequel to a niche handheld RPG didn't do it any favors. God what a shame, game was so good. Liked it better than the first one
I love indie games and Nintendo's gameplay creativity, but I'm definitely not going to say that after eschewing big video games I'm going to go with Falcom's outdated games with no growth in design, it's just not a good choice.I prefer the Falcom approach of more small video games
Solution: do smaller ones. Bam, winwinwin.
I never understood the need of big Devs and publishers to push the hardware with more and bigger assets. Higher resolution, better ilumination and shadows, higher frame rates don't scale as expensive as better assets, still help games look better, and aren't as taxing on development
Just as Nintendo did often.
The connection here between Nintendo and other publishers feels a little off, partially because it ignores that Nintendo's team sizes and production scales don't necessarily always mean 'big game' or 'major software' by the metrics that the rest of the games industry deals in or prioritises. Equally, it doesn't acknowledge that some of the reduction in output is down to what would've been software redundancy: there's now no need for two Animal Crossings, two Mario Karts, two Mario Tennis etc per generation because Nintendo are selling to a single platform, while Nintendo's eventual embrace of DLC further reduces the number of individual titles.Nintendo hasn’t outright said it, but, without any visible decline in its development resources, it appears to be putting more of its people onto fewer games.
Simply: it's "easy" to put together a vertical slice for a trailer with unreal 5 and high Def assets from the asset store or 3d scanned locations... To get buzz and investors.What really baffles me is that in today's industry, you have new dev teams of various size starting-up, sometimes with experienced folks, sometimes with less of those, and doing a "techshowcase AAAAA game experience additional keywords", only to overpromise, underdeliver and basically shutting down due to the missing success.
Like ... what? Folks, please stay in reality.
Exactly, and I think this is the same case with various other of their studios. We'd get a handheld and home console entry in series, now it's only one entry since the consolidation. The output didn't increase. They've relied way more on remasters and ports, otherwise I'd even go as far as to say we would have seen some software droughts here and there (though Nintendo sits on finished games a lot, so the release schedule could have looked totally different from what we've seen).Zelda Team EPD produced those titles. They didn't internally develop them.
Nintendo producing titles is usually a couple of higher-up producers working together with external partner studios who handle the development. A good example is Kensuke Tanabe serving as the producer for Retro Studios.
Zelda team isn't using their development resources to make handheld-style/2D Zelda games anymore.
What really baffles me is that in today's industry, you have new dev teams of various size starting-up, sometimes with experienced folks, sometimes with less of those, and doing a "techshowcase AAAAA game experience additional keywords", only to overpromise, underdeliver and basically shutting down due to the missing success.
Like ... what? Folks, please stay in reality.
I’d say their execution on that was pretty bad for the most part especially over the last two generations. As you say time will tell if they can do better.I feel like Square Enix was already following the "Nintendo model" of having a few big games and several smaller ones. It feels like they're moving to something closer to what Capcom is doing, namely focusing on a few key games and cutting down on the smaller stuff. I guess time will tell.
Square Enix's problem has been that their published output is mostly RPGs or RPG-adjacent, which isn't conducive to expanding the customer base that modern game development requires to sustain itself, even for what are now considered mid-budget games. Selling lengthy single-player games without additional monetization is a real challenge, and their attempts to expand beyond that – Babylon's Fall, Chocobo GP, Foamstars – have all landed flat.I feel like Square Enix was already following the "Nintendo model" of having a few big games and several smaller ones. It feels like they're moving to something closer to what Capcom is doing, namely focusing on a few key games and cutting down on the smaller stuff. I guess time will tell.