To be fair to the investor, who was probably asking the questions more as a fanboy…do they usually sell better? There are more variables here, like platform exclusivity, to blame for poor sales in Square Enix’s recent efforts, but when games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Persona, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are outselling Square Enix’s real-time games, I don’t think we can say turn-based sells worse in such a blanket way.
Regarding the desire for Final Fantasy to return to traditional turn-based combat, Square Enix said “they are aware of Expedition 33 and consider command-based RPGs to be Square Enix’s origin and foundation”. For Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Square Enix insisted “They value the command-based RPG genre and plan to continue delivering games in this style in the future”. For fans disappointed by FF16, this is fantastic news as it means Square Enix intend to return the series to the command-based formula it made popular.
No it doesn’t. Assuming the translation is accurate, they said they still like turn-based games and will continue making turn-based games. Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default would fit here, especially in reference to their desire to make more “mid tier” games when asked about Clair Obscur. “For Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest” does not appear in the translated text as context to making more turn-based games, though I don’t think Dragon Quest has been real-time to date? Hey, maybe I’m wildly off base here, but it appears to me like the author of this article added what they wanted the tweet to say rather than what it actually says.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
Congrats on the cabin! Is that more of a home or a getaway?
Also, I’m one of those guys who grew up on Lego Island. I can’t say I’d want to revisit it for anything other than a history lesson, but it was in fact important to a lot of us.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
It’s an unreliable solution, because there’s no guarantee that even dedicated and talented individuals will be able to reverse engineer every online server, if that game has those individuals in its customer base in the first place. The solution seems to be either legislation, which this campaign is seeking, or for the market to outright reject online-only games, which it isn’t doing. I don’t even really have an alternative to online-only games in some genres, like FPS for instance, to send my dollars toward instead; sports games are in a similar position, since the sports organizations all signed exclusivity contracts.
From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
Neither time was that my response. I have asked developers via social media for LAN or listen servers or offline modes, and I’ve never been nasty about it. Being doxxed or getting hate campaigns is not okay. Customers asking for features for a video game that are important to them are not harassment, and listening to requests for those features is part of the job. If everyone at a company wanted their game to live forever, from the bottom all the way to the top, and it didn’t launch with an offline mode, then I don’t believe they wanted it to live forever; it simply didn’t make their list of priorities.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
It’s interesting to note that the Game Awards started having a tangible effect on sales in the past handful of years. Games that used to come out in November now come out in October at the latest, because that’s the deadline for Game Awards nominations.