Chuckles abound. By pricing Starcraft II ten dollars above the norm, Blizzard pulled a Bobby Kotick and sold the fuck out. Or something.
If you’re upset games are becoming more expensive because the industry is jerking to the joys of its own production values, fine. That price points are being determined by suits instead of production costs? Whatever. This is addressed to the crowd that thinks Activision was behind it: You’re fucking idiots.
What can a July of 2002 GameSpot sales rundown teach us about Blizzard’s pricing history?
You mean what was then the most anticipated PC game of all-time was priced at sixty dollars? And Activision had nothing to do with it? Gamers have no fucking clue what they’re talking about it? Unprecedented!
Gamers perplex me. I’ve worked jobs where people couldn’t make ends meet because life’s necessities skeet on their checkbook. “Necessities” such as getting their dog’s teeth cleaned, and eight-hundred-dollar rims. So it’s amusing that ten dollars can prove such a breaking point for a medium prided on bang for the buck.
But if you’re that concerned about an impending price war, let me explain something to you: Why do athletes get paid so much? As an example, the National Football League and National Basketball Association employ revenue sharing as part Collective Bargaining Agreements with their players. This ensures the athletes receive a percentage of all revenue (through television contracts, ticket sales, etc.) as part of their salaries. In other words, the salaries fans bitch about are a reflection of what they spend on the product.
In other words, the sixty-dollar price tag you bitch about is a direct reflection of what you will end up spending. If you want to be a defender of the free market, don’t buy the damn game. And while you’re at it, you can man up and not play it at all. But you already made up your mind on this one. Let me know what name you’re using when Starcraft II comes out.
Addendum: Yeah, I didn’t write anything for a week. I was sick. Sue me.
Not quite equals with the class of the first-person shooter genre, 1995’s Descent was closer to Steel Battalion than Doom. Winning an audience as the first true three-dimensional shooter, it firmly held the crown as “Game Most Likely to Induce Vomit” until the arrival of Mirror’s Edge. We’re now eleven years removed from Descent 3. And the current word is that Interplay, creator of the franchise and company risen from the dead, reclaimed the Descent copyright about two years ago.
I’m all for a return to one of my childhood time sinks. I just don’t know what audience Descent appeals to in 2010.
Certainly popular in its day, Descent was totally unapologetic about what audience it was appealing to. And when it now costs millions to make a video game for the shooter audience, who is going to buy in?
When older gamers claim newcomers have it easy, Descent is the archetype. Any synopsis of the game is disclaimered with “once you figure out the controls”. Yes, the game is too complicated for a mouse and keyboard.
The default controls, a.k.a. “wat”.
Let me put it this way: Know how real-time strategy players discussing what control groups they use? Descent players discuss what control schemes they use. By the time Descent 3 rolled around, some combination of the keyboard and a premium joystick was the best way to go. Descent is stuck in a bizarre void untouched by any other shooter in the history of the industry.
I’m going to assume there weren’t a lot of moms and dads who had their eyes on a Sidewinder joystick instead of a Nintendo 64. So not only was the game built for an older audience, it was built for one patient enough to drop the change for the equipment and master the learning curve.
The surprising thing? The twin thumbsticks on a controller are actually ideal for Descent. Shooting required you to orient the nose of the ship on whatever you wanted to die, so the game has no twitch factor. But there isn’t enough buttons to go around, nor is there a comfortable way to handle Descent’s third axis of movement, verified when the Playstation port of Descent proved inadequate.
And obviously, the economics bely producing the title for its proven audience. We’re now eleven years removed from any brand recognition the game may have had. And with shooters even more detached from Descent than they were in 1995, how are you going to sell Descent to the Call of Duty audience? A game whose combat is best compared to a bullet hell shooter?
So you have one option to make Descent work: Create a really fucking good video game that appeals to a wide audience. And while we never held it against the shooter, it never proved it could do that.
Let’s change pace. Who loves basketball? I do. Did you hear? Electronic Arts is digging up the corpse!
Though not exactly surprising, EA finally officially announced an NBA Jam revival on the Nintendo Wii. The game is due out sometime in 2010, and promises a nostalgic basketball trip, along with “new game modes, characters, and gameplay depth.” As predicted, the game is in development at the Vancouver studio. Mark Turmell, the creator of the series recently brought on at EA Tiburon, is likely to be taking an advisory role in the series reboot.
“NBA Jam is one of the most recognizable franchises in video game history,” said EA Sports president Peter Moore in the press release. “Diehard fans of the original game have been asking for a remake for more than a decade. We’re very excited to give them their wish this year with the return of this iconic franchise.”
You’d presume I’d want in? Hold that thought.
I’m not annoyed that eight-bit nostalgia is giving way to Generation Y’s Super Nintendo fetish. I’m not annoyed that the game is rekindlingthe franchise’s visual deficiencies. See, this isn’t about brand revival. Gamers didn’t care the last time that now-defunct Acclaim tried to exhume NBA Jam. This is about a casual competitive game (and consumer recollection of the title) mirroring the populsarity of its brand name.
Bo Jackson’s legendary Tecmo Bowl running accolades were the nature of simulation sports games in the eight-bit era. Video game tech could not handle the intricacies yet. So fuck it, let’s have the basketball catch fire. Midway’s NBA Jam was a casual in-road to the arcade gaming scene of the early nineties because it never tried to be Street Fighter. And it didn’t need to be.
But allow me note an important piece of information. NBA Jam came out in 1993. How was that year in NBA basketball?
The second Golden Age of Basketball came to a close with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls capping their first three-peat on one of the league’s greatest moments. But that sort of basketball couldn’t possibly explain the success of the most visible basketball game in the history of American gaming, right? A game built for those with passing interest in the product?
And five years later, the formula was so tired that “NBA Jam 99″ was a simulation basketball game. Yes, NBA Jam was dead. Don’t remember that part, huh?
Any sports game predicated on game mechanics (as opposed to accurate rosters) is going to have difficulty maintaining popularity. But the NBA was not helping. The Michael Jordan phenomenon was breeding a swath of imitators to lacked the talent to assume his offensive moxy or the will to play his defense. Thus, breeding a league of one-man offenses that were getting stomped by excellent defenses. What, you’re surprised a league dominated by the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons wouldn’t be conducive to shilling a no-defense basketball game?
In its place, Electronic Arts’ embraced Allen Iverson’s crappy shot selection with NBA Street, one of the most playable sports game franchises of all-time. Both games emphasized offense, but Street let you play both ends of the ball in a way NBA Jam never allowed. So even if Kobe Bryant was the do-it-all first option, Shaq was just as critical for eating any object thrown at the basket.
How popular was Street? It did go on to sell millions. And in 2003, Acclaim published an NBA Jam game to capitalize on its rival’s success (and failed spectacularly). But Street got little press in the mainstream because it wasn’t fighting on favorable terms. Madden was replicating the surging popularity of the National Football League at the same time the NBA was showcasing its most unwatchable basketball of the last half-century. And the control scheme? Real basketball is simpler than Volume 2’s control scheme:
Gamers complain their journalism overlords are there to push the message that’s best for business. And then gamers demand sequels they already got. This isn’t a matter of Deus Ex: Invisible war failing to match the accolades of its predecessor. When people complain they haven’t gotten a sequel to Kid Icarus, they’re really saying “They made a Kid Icarus sequel for the Game Boy in 1991? I never knew that!”
But if your passion for gaming wasn’t as pathetic as mine, you’d buy Peter Moore’s “asking for a remake for more than a decade” bullshit. News flash to the target audience: You got several sequels to NBA Jam. You just didn’t care. The only difference in the seven years since the last NBA Jam game is that the league has returned to respectability, where people are almost interested in watching NBA basketball. And along the way, the video game industry sucked in enough casual games to justify the reboot of a franchise that disappeared for a reason.
So when you said you wanted NBA Jam to return, you meant to say “LeBron James is pretty damn good.”
Shocked this went under the radar: Last month, the creators of Dance Dance Revolution released a game titled Walk It Out. South side walkin’ absent, the game is a Frankenstein of children’s fitness and the kind of box art that ruins kid-parent relationships…
…and the gameplay lives up to the billing, complete with the legendary “Why you turn off the announcer first thing in any Konami rhythm game made after 2006″. If you abhor Guitar Hero for its “go play a real guitar” factor, I can feel your rage for the game where you pretend to walk through neighborhoods.
You now know why fitness games marketed as fitness games aggravate me. Dance Dance Revolution hit arcades eight years before Wii Fit was a blip on the “Nintendo revolution”, and there is no shortage of physical education programs and diet success stories that have proven DDR as a legitimate part of any exercise routine. But back in 1998, flailing around on a dance pad looked stupid. It still does, but Just Dance and Wii Fit have made strides to soften that stigma. And during that time, Konami has not invested a single dollar in rejuvenating DDR, and hasn’t conceived a significant innovation since 2002’s freeze arrow. (Yes, in the the rhythm game genre, “press and hold” is creativity defined.)
Think about it: Someone in the Konami board room decided the company could make more money off the Bemani song list by packing it into a pseudo-fitness game instead of its flagship rhythm game franchise. The result is a game that features ten more songs than the Japanese edition of Dance Dance Revolution Extreme for the Playstation 2, undoubtedly the swan song for DDR’s adventures on gaming consoles.
Currently, the financial success of Walk It Out is in “wait and see” mode. But in 2010, we shouldn’t have to be waiting to see whether this game can justify its existence.
Don’t give me the “developers and designers will go without food because a millionaire CEO greenlighted a bucket of fail” crap. Between the pseudo-maturity and ad campaign, Dante’s Inferno needs to fail.
I lived through Mortal Kombat. The outcry wasn’t just “blood and guts”, it was the context it was presented in. The game was a candy bag. All you knew is that your opponent needed to be separated from his limbs. The nature of the arcade and the tech limitations of the time didn’t let you go deeper than that. And why bother? People wanted blood. When the Super Nintendo version failed to deliver on that, the Genesis port outsold it four-to-one.
Fun.
The culture’s moved past Mortal Kombat, a.k.a. “video game violence without rationale”. This torch was ceded to God of War, and even the protagonist behind that game’s laughable brutality has a motivation for it. The reason for Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game? “We have a poem and we need to make a game. Hell is about death, so let’s have the character create lots of it.”
And we ended up with God of War down to the mannerisms, animations, graphics, camera angles, and gameplay devices. And it ain’t good enough to justify it.
The second Golden Age of Video Games in the late nineties wasn’t limited to legendary titles; it was an era where companies won fans by empowering them. In Starcraft’s case, Blizzard dangled a free-to-play gaming service alongside a “spawn” function where potential buyers could beat the crap out of each other with a friend’s copy of the game. The corporatization of game development has caused this empowerment to regress. Hey, why would Sony want a backwards-compatible Playstation 3 when they can charge for digitally-downloaded Playstation 2 software?
In addition to the removal of true local area play and the increase of digital restrictions management, Blizzard Entertainment’s current platform for Starcraft II online play is “one game, one account, one name”. Why? Yeah, this approach is about making money. But it’s coming from more angles than you’d think.
At BlizzCon, Blizzard employees affirmed this decision was to prevent smurfing (talented players “resetting” their record by creating a new account). Smurfing has two purposes: To experiment with new strategies without tainting their “real record”, or to ego trip through the ranks of mediocrity. Neither situation addresses the Warcraft III matchmaking system that forces good players to make new accounts in order to find games, and it doesn’t address that bad players will complain anyway because that’s what bad players do.
It’s really a public relations ploy. Blizzard has plugged three strategy games into Battle.net since smurfing entered the culture, and only decided to hard-line the approach when “millions of World of Warcraft players” came into play. And since the MMORPG is predicated on making time and effort the most important assets for overcoming challenges, Blizzard is going to make every concession in making sure these players don’t become frustrated.
So, you’ve stripped functionality by convincing new gamers that experts won’t ruin your party. And thus, Blizzard can to grant that functionality back for a price.
Remember how Bayonetta was supposed to ride word of mouth towards redefining the genre? Tough to do that when your opening week in the Western World is summed as “We got outsold by Darksiders!?”
What to blame? Examine the sentiments scribed by Gus Mastrapa of Wired:
Playing Bayonetta made me feel genuinely embarrassed, and not for the pushy sexiness. It was everything else: the sounds, words and scenery draped all around the woman. The tired biblical allusions, the feigned trench coat cool and the towering, but ultimately hollow architectural wonder didn’t just bore me to tears — they offended me.
I don’t care how brilliant Bayonetta’s button mashing is. It doesn’t matter to me that Chris was pleasantly surprised by the way the game plays with conventions. I gave Bayonetta her chance and now I know where I stand: I don’t want to be seen in public with her, let alone her tacky friends.
Know how Starcraft fans hate Warcraft’s vivid colors? How long-time Zelda fans hated The Wind Waker? Well, Bayonetta’s sexuality wouldn’t be out of place in Pink’s music. She careens through sixteenth-century architecture with firearms strapped to her feet, and mauls the larger baddies with her hair. Welcome to another edition of “This is gay, yo.”
Remind anyone of another Japanese title that mocked its genre while employing deeper gameplay than the norm, was well-reviewed, and sold poorly like Bayonetta probably will?
Earthbound: The game that mocked your struggle against pallete swaps of Pack Rat by boasting a cup of coffee as one of its most feared enemies. When it was released in 1994, Final Fantasy VI had just become the benchmark for storytelling in a console game, the crown in a Super Nintendo role-playing lineup that was setting the system apart from the Sega Genesis. And here was Earthbound tearing apart a genre that had gone unchanged since Dragon Quest.
And despite selling poorly, Earthbound was right. We just managed to roll through a decade that the Japanese Role-Playing Game embraced its clichés a bit too tight.
Meanwhile, Bayonetta is a scathing criticism of modern beat ‘em ups, a mess of Dragon Ball Z characters who use quick-time events to slam a garage door on a dragon’s head. And people are embarrassed to play Bayonetta? Anyone notice that God of War II’s opening level pits you against the Colossus of Rhodes? A bronze statue that slams his foot through a building onto Kratos, only to be thrown flat on his ass because the player pressed Circle fast enough? Nobody laughed at that? It felt like the baby steps in a bad horror movie, an axe murderer putting holes through the top of a getaway car when it seemed the good guys made it out.
Gaming needs titles like Bayonetta and Earthbound to remind us of our complacency. Why? Played a first-person shooter lately? Most of the characters wouldn’t be out of place on the front cover of a bodybuilding magazine. Seen the latest one? It’s called Quantum Theory. No, it is not the Japanese-developed sequel to Gears of War.
Anyone up for eviscerating the first-person shooter? I’ll buy three of any game you put out.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke records this year as the biggest ever entertainment launch in history. With 4.7 million units sold in the US and UK during the first 24 hours, it pulled in revenues totaling $310 million.
…
With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.
Provided these numbers are indeed accurate, Activision has potentially lost more than $245 million in sales on the PC version alone.
We all know this is a line of bullshit. “Every download is a lost sale, costing the industry 874 kajillion dollars”, blah blah. Game publishers would love for societies to agree with this logic. So I have a question I’d like to put forward. Let’s tout some erroneous methodology and treat every download as though it was a lost sale.
On November 11th, VGChartz dropped jaws by estimating seven million copies of Modern Warfare 2 were sold in the twenty-four hours after its release. The site also estimated twelve percent of these sales were on the personal computer. (Despite the NPD’s recent tally, 840,000 units on day one sounds plausible. “[N]early 170,000 units at retail for Windows PC [in the United States for November]” is consistent with both the popularity of digital distribution and regional sales breakdowns.
So let’s look at the six-week sales total: To date, the Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 versions of Modern Warfare 2 have combined for 13.11 million units sold. If PC sales still represent twelve percent of the total, then Modern Warfare 2 has sold 1.79 million units on the personal computer.
Now, assume TorrentFreak’s piracy numbers are accurate. The Playstation 3 lived another year without a marriage to illicit downloads. Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded 4.1 million times for the PC and 910,000 times for the X-Box 360 version. So I dare ask: Treating these downloads as “people who would have bought the game if it wasn’t for those meddling pirate Swedes”, how does the size of our user bases pan out?
So by the definition and economic ramifications of piracy as propagated by anti-piracy groups, please explain to me how the personal computer is a niche genre with a small userbase.
Author’s Note: This is one entry in a series highlighting the “greatest” games of all-time. This is not a “best” games list. “Quality” is only part of the story. This list exists to recognize the impact and legacy of selected video games. It is written from the perspective of a North American gamer who has witnessed the North American reception to the business of video games. Thus, Pro Evolution Soccer will not make the list because soccer is just football without cage fighting. Mother 3 will not be featured because in the States, Mother 3 is a porno. And despite the injustice in a medium where Charlie’s Angels and Big Rigs were sold in the name of the dollar, Cave Story and Counter-Strike are disqualified because they weren’t intended as commercial releases. For that reason. I do not care if Game X was totally better than Game Y. I do not care if your friends jerked to Game Z until four in the morning. Don’t like a selection? Argue it on the criteria I’ve established. We good? Good.
Author’s Note, Part 2: This was originally intended to be a sliver of a year-end “Games of the Decade” entry. But given my criteria, it proved impossible. Go ahead: Argue that the three-month-old Uncharted 2: Among Thieves belongs on a list designed to highlight video games that changed the industry for years down the road.
Halo: Combat Evolved X-Box (Later Ported to PC) Developed: Bungie Studios Published: Microsoft Game Studios Released: November 15, 2001
It’s a dose of polarization: Halo is gaming’s modern-day, love-hate affair. If Doom or Unreal Tournament is your fancy, you hate it. You hate it because it’s driving the most shooter-capable platform to irrelevance. You hate it because it ripped Starsiege: Tribes’ blueprint and turned the dial to half-speed. You hate it because college campuses are now colonies for half-gamer-half-drunk adults who think they’re the baddest men in competitive gaming.
That hate is your concession: Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the most important video games in the medium’s history and one of the all-time greats. It was the perfect game for the right system and the right audience at the right time. And whether you think the industry is better or worse off, it changed a whole lot.
The story is too familiar: Final Fantasy XIII is unleashed on the world. It sells a million copies on its first day in Japan. Murmurs surface that the latest installment isn’t cutting it. Most notably, a copy-paste job of the game’s opening six hours have been making rounds on the internet. “Word on the street” is that it embodies the rest of the title.
As straight-forward and boring as you and your mom last night.
By all accounts, we’re going to get another “controversial” Final Fantasy game. VIII had a crappy battle system. IX was a regression. X was too linear. X-2 was a return to a previous universe. (Blasphemous, I know. ) XI was an MMORPG. XII played the game for you. We’re back to linear again. Joyous.
Jim Sterling is right: Final Fantasy is the Star Wars of gaming. Collectively as a community, Final Fantasy fans not been satisfied with the franchise for a decade. And here we are on the eve of another new Final Fantasy title. This one time, Square-Enix is going to get it right. And then they screw it up again. And then people await the next title. The last one was a practice. This one will get it right.
How many more years have to pass before people get it? Does the company have to become Square-Enix-Publix-Viacom before people get it? In the thirteen years since Sephiroth killed the pretty flower girl, Final Fantasy has become totally irrelevant.
The games still sell. But please, name the last Final Fantasy title that significantly impacted the direction of the video game industry. You know, the series that is single-handedly responsible for convincing console gamers that their games have room for story time. Alongisde Dragon Quest, the original Final Fantasy legitimized Japense Role-Playing Games. IV taught console gamers that characters could die. VII showed that video games could unleash the production values typically resigned for movie-making. Ever since, the franchise has been relegated to a run of titles that have been clowned by their Western counterparts.
This decade was the coming-out party for the hybrid genre. Resident Evil 4 was action-horror. Metroid Prime was the first-person adventure-shooter. Warcraft III was role-playing strategy. The JRPG won fans by convincing people it was the pre-eminent way to weave a narrative, and it was best exemplified by Final Fantasy. In the last three years alone, gamers have witnessed Bioshock, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Uncharted 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. Compelling interactive stories are now the norm at the top of the food chain, no matter what genre. They can do everything that Final Fantasy VII’s commercials lauded.
The game industry now has the technology to take a stab at what role-playing is actually supposed to be. The budgets and the minds are both there. But Square-Enix isn’t going to risk the well-being of their most profitable commodity. Why do you think the Japanese Role-Playing Game hasn’t changed? Why take a stab at new ground when heavy use of motion blur and lens flare are all you need to sell the title?
But go ahead, Square-Enix. Embody the JRPG. Embody everything that it is supposed to be. I wish you’d just realize it embodies none of what video games have become.
Addendum: Last Friday, Bioware’s Greg Zeschuk explained it to Destructoid’s Anthony Burch:
“The fall of the JRPG in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression,” Zeschuk said. “They kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it’s still the same experience.
“My favorite thing, it’s funny when you still see it, but the joke of some of the dialogue systems where it asks, ‘do you wanna do this or this,’ and you say no. ‘Do you wanna do this or this?’ No. ‘Do you wanna do this or this?’ No. Lemme think — you want me to say ‘yes.’ And that, unfortunately, really characterized the JRPG.”
