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This Week in Games - Isekai Gaming

He has said that the live service push was "mutual" in that the studios pitched the ideas that the execs approved. But, let's be real. If the continued existence of your team depends on getting the boss to say yes, you're going to say what they want to hear. I still blame the execs for not stopping at two or three live services to see if they could get any to land.

Shuhei has been doing a series of interviews lately, and there is a running theme of how much of a mistake Sony has been making by going all-in on types of games. He has said that the live service push was "mutual" in that the studios pitched the ideas that the execs approved. But, let's be real. If the continued existence of your team depends on getting the boss to say yes, you're going to say what they want to hear. I still blame the execs for not stopping at two or three live services to see if they could get any to land.

He also talked about how the AA market supposedly disappeared, and it meant not approving interesting ideas from Japan Studio. But, this was in correlation to when the Sony brand was all about those big, expensive, cinematic games. It's not that the market disappeared, it's that good enough was no longer good enough. Those more modest games are how you fill the gaps between the flagships, and now we're seeing Sony do shows with barely anything of its own. Nintendo has so many games of varying scopes in its pipelines that it is able to shuffle around release dates when one game needs more time, but another is ready to go. That's the level of flexibility that comes from managing project size.

I mean, it's found on the same nonsense as "infinite growth" wherein everything must go up forever and nothing can be small, everything MUST be big and nothing but AAA. And that's before getting into how AAA has kind of become a meaningless term that is only defined as "too much money to ever turn a profit." When we saw Ubisoft's forever-developed game Skull & Bones bill itself as a "AAAA" game and inevitably flop, that's when the term was truly dead. Their obsession with bigger and bigger games is their own fault and them taking down so many jobs is shameful.

There's something I've been saying ever since streaming services started proliferating and every media company tried to silo content into their own service: You can't buy more time. Even if someone was able and willing to subscribe to everything, there simply isn't enough time in the day to watch all the new stuff coming out, never mind the bottomless catalogues. And that time has to be shared with sleep, jobs/classes, chores, and other commitments.

Similarly, there's only so much time in the day anyone can spend playing games. Just doing the dailies in two or three games can eat up a big share of one's gaming energy. Not many people are going to be willing or able to sink enough time or money into multiple live service games to keep more than a handful going long-term.

There's something I've been saying ever since streaming services started proliferating and every media company tried to silo content into their own service: You can't buy more time. Even if someone was able and willing to subscribe to everything, there simply isn't enough time in the day to watch all the new stuff coming out, never mind the bottomless catalogues. And that time has to be shared with sleep, jobs/classes, chores, and other commitments.

Similarly, there's only so much time in the day anyone can spend playing games. Just doing the dailies in two or three games can eat up a big share of one's gaming energy. Not many people are going to be willing or able to sink enough time or money into multiple live service games to keep more than a handful going long-term.

Similarly, there's only so much time in the day anyone can spend playing games. Just doing the dailies in two or three games can eat up a big share of one's gaming energy. Not many people are going to be willing or able to sink enough time or money into multiple live service games to keep more than a handful going long-term.

It's not that the market disappeared, it's that good enough was no longer good enough. Those more modest games are how you fill the gaps between the flagships, and now we're seeing Sony do shows with barely anything of its own. Nintendo has so many games of varying scopes in its pipelines that it is able to shuffle around release dates when one game needs more time, but another is ready to go. That's the level of flexibility that comes from managing project size.

Gonna do an article about Isekai video games and not bring up Final Fantasy Origins? Bullshit! *cranks up Limp Bizkit*

Nobody is expecting you to watch or play everything. The point of having so much media to consume is that you're able to freely choose which ones to watch and play and dedicate yourself to when they capture your interest. [...] Entertainment is ultimately about throwing as many darts at the wall as you can and seeing what sticks. There's a very good chance the show or game you do dedicate your time to wouldn't be around without the practices people are harping about.

I don't like them myself but they're undeniably popular. [...] A game could have only a few thousand players and still chug along for years because of the business model and still make more money than any other genre could A shame for us fans of single-player games but companies are going to follow the money. Blame the gaming community for being into this stuff.

I try really hard to not sound like I'm just absentmindedly gassing up Nintendo to the exclusion of everyone else, because goodness knows there's a lot they can be criticized for. But on the other hand, the past few years have really illustrated that maybe there's something to be said about Nintendo's decisions to not chase after every last gaming trend and instead focusing on delivering a wide variety of games to a mass audience at an affordable price. That people act like Nintendo doing this is clearly just an isolated phenomenon in some cordoned-off segment of a faraway land beats the crap out of me--it's a proven record of success if you can keep that gravy train running for the better part of a whole decade!