Skyway VS EVIL PUBLISHER!

[FeelTheRads]

So, in other words, the conclusion is that most publishers interfering is a ridiculous idea, but most publishers wanting to risk their money on original ideas is totally true and reasonable.

 

[Infinitron]

There's a simple litmus test here for publishers: Could one of their subsidiary developer call them up and ask for 3 million dollars to create a niche game?

Could the Biodocs have gotten permission from the CEO of EA to allocate a handful of personnel to make a low budget Baldur's Gate-style PC RPG, to make the oldschool fans happy? They couldn't, right? The idea sounds outlandish.

Find me a publisher willing to do that, and I'll happily declare it non-"evil". Ubisoft might be doing it these days, so it's obviously not impossible.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I agree with Skyway here. Additionally, I remember that when talking with fellow RPG grognards in the times before , a big part of conversations was criticism of gameplay and various other aspects of the games.

Devs are prone to fucking up even when they have freedom to act.

 

[tuluse]

I'm just going to point out one thing: According to Tim Cain, all 3 Troika games sold enough copies to be profitable, and he couldn't find a publisher for a 4th game.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Could one of their subsidiary developer call them up and ask for 3 million dollars to create a niche game?

Dude, obviously the reason we didn't get RPGs anymore is because nobody pitched them. If they did, publishers would have been all over them and given them much more than 3 million.

Ubisoft might be doing it these days, so it's obviously not impossible.

They do it to jump on the bandwagon which is the only thing most (we are on Beth forums now so we must not generalize, cuz it's bad and retards like skyway and raw can't understand it) publishers understand. Which of course doesn't matter if the result is good, but you wouldn't have seen that done if it wasn't for the current trend of "reviving" classics. They wouldn't have risked it. And even now they barely risk anything with that game being a budget game.

As for blaming the developers for everything... the Kickstarters should be the ultimate test. Then they wouldn't be able to blame publishers so all the blame for anything will fall on then. Then we'll how much publisher interference affected their games and how much was their fault. So far, from the games I'm interested in it looks like the popamole will be missing so huh... what do you know, maybe they didn't want to do popamole after all.

I'm just going to point out one thing: According to Tim Cain, all 3 Troika games sold enough copies to be profitable, and he couldn't find a publisher for a 4th game.

He didn't know how to pitch them. You know you can go to a publisher and make him believe a type of game that usually doesn't bring tens of millions will suddenly bring tens of millions because you're special and can make it happen. They will totally fall for it.

And take a look at those that know how to pitch, like Feargus. The amount of awesome games that resulted from that is mindblowing.

 

[Lancehead]

I'm just going to point out one thing: According to Tim Cain, all 3 Troika games sold enough copies to be profitable, and he couldn't find a publisher for a 4th game.

That tells me the industry is far from reaching maturity, and relatively-niche genres barely stay alive. Doesn't really indict publishers.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Doesn't really indict publishers.

Not completely. The market is too blame too, obviously. But when everybody wants to cash it on the latest trend and forgets about doing any niche product, who's to blame?

 

[dnf]

Delightful thread.

CDV didn't hold a gun to Larian's head and tell them to fill the last levels full of trash mobs, they just wanted an orange area. And the last dungeon isn't even orange. Makin' excuses for terrible developers: the thread.

Why Larian didn't try to fix that pos release?

 

[Lancehead]

Doesn't really indict publishers.

Not completely. The market is too blame too, obviously. But when everybody wants to cash it on the latest trend and forgets about doing any niche product, who's to blame?

Well, as I see it the nature of publishers never really changed, which is to at the end of the day make as much as money as possible. As the market expanded, so did they, and stopped catering to smaller audiences such as the Codex. I don't really blame publishers for that shift; everyone would like to be catered but no one owes to be. Which is why I think the dearth of classical-type cRPGs is largely due to there being a lack of supporting market mechanism, like the crowdfunding now promises to be.

Publishers do deserve plenty blame for ruining some old franchises, though.

 

[wergle]

I bet Josh Sawyer would never fill an area full of trash mobs, he'd paint that shit orange as a motherfucker because he knows what's up

Lots of retards with agendas in this thread. Sometimes publishers make games worse, sometimes devs make games worse, sometimes both.

 

[Infinitron]

They do it to jump on the bandwagon which is the only thing most (we are on Beth forums now so we must not generalize, cuz it's bad and retards like skyway and raw can't understand it) publishers understand. Which of course doesn't matter if the result is good, but you wouldn't have seen that done if it wasn't for the current trend of "reviving" classics. They wouldn't have risked it. And even now they barely risk anything with that game being a budget game.

That's true, but it's a "bandwagon" they know won't sell multi-million copies, and that means something. Other publishers would not/do not consider that a bandwagon worth jumping on.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Which is why I think the dearth of classical-type cRPGs is largely due to there being a lack of supporting market mechanism, like the crowdfunding now promises to be.

The market was there, though, if Kickstarter proves anything. So why didn't they take advantage of it?

Publishers do deserve plenty blame for ruining some old franchises, though.

Didn't you read this thread? Basically the whole thing was about whether the developers or the publishers ruined those games. Only now it started being about whether they fund niche games or not.

 

[:Flash:]

Delightful thread.

CDV didn't hold a gun to Larian's head and tell them to fill the last levels full of trash mobs, they just wanted an orange area. And the last dungeon isn't even orange. Makin' excuses for terrible developers: the thread.

Why Larian didn't try to fix that pos release?

Because after the release of Divinity, Larian was completely broke. They hadn't received advance payments in a while and never received a single dime of royalties. In other words CDV screwed them because Divinity certainly didn't sell too bad. Swen had to fire almost the entire team and they had to slave on work-for-hire projects to stay afloat and made the patches for Divinity without receiving any payment.
Larian was in this situation twice, and they only managed to survive because they were the only Flemish speaking developer and could therefore ask for high prices for their hire work on Casino and TV games.

 

[Kane]

OK, so it's a Lawful Neutral publisher barrier. Why should I give a fuck what their motivation is? It's preventing me from getting what I want.

Because if you gave a fuck you would be able to reason with yourself about the quality of your pitch and you will most probably discover that it's simply not up to standards and that's why your weird ass game isn't finding a publisher.

Bwahahahaha.

You can laugh all you want, but the people running the show @ publisherHQ aren't stupid. They know what they have with their money printing machines, and they know what they have not. Should, say, CoD fall from grace Activision is in trouble. They want to diversify their portfolio and they want to do that sooner than later. They are looking for games with "the sauce", everyone is. If you go there with a good pitch you will get to make your game, believe it or not. There is no "evil publisher wall".

In any case, noone can tell me that Infinity Ward is oppressed by Activision to make CoD every year. They want to do that shit, because it earns them money. Neither publisher nor developer are doing anything because of some hounoureful higher principles. Both want to make money, plain and simple. Both parties in this relationship signed a contract and agreed to deliver, there is zero reason to single out publishers and shift responsibility from the dev. Developers are just as guilty for a fuck up, and in the general case they are more guilty because it's the developer that has the creative control about the game and not the publisher.

OE doesn't get to make the games they want, because their track record is shit. I understand that this is somewhat of an chicken/egg problem, and there is certainly some bad publisher here and there, but if all your games over the last 10 years end up being either shit to mediocre or outright canceled, it's not just the publishers fault.
InXile makes shitty popamole console bullshit, and now they want to do a high-level ultra-complex (in comparison) cRPG. Why would you trust them to deliver?

Understandable that both parties go "GRRR PUBLISHERS!!!", but the reasoning of publishers is generally speaking just as understandable. There is no conspiracy to bring the poor developer down afoot.

Which is why the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men was forced by movie producers to include killer cyborg action scenes and voice overs explaining the plot. Thank god that the gaming industry is so much more creatively independent than Hollywood.

SIngle examples hardly compare to the general case. Are you suggesting that all developers are forced to include killer cyborg action scenes and voice overs? How do voice overs even make a game worse?

 

[catfood]

If KotC2 will be just as shitty as KotC

What's so fucking hard to understand? The graphics sucked.

 

[Kane]

Because after the release of Divinity, Larian was completely broke. They hadn't received advance payments in a while and never received a single dime of royalties. In other words CDV screwed them because Divinity certainly didn't sell too bad.

See, and this is the spot where the train departs into wishful-thinking-land. Because Larian didn't receive advance payments and royalities CDV fucked them? Larian signed a fucking contract! There is no one being fucked here, both parties mutually agreed on the status quo. If that turns out shit for Larian, well, SHIT. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Your fuck up is not the responsibility of anyone but you.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Infinitron is ... For a Jew. Big Publishers won't touch game which costs let say 3 millions of Jewgold which will sell for 3,5 Millions of Doritos the profit margin is too small for them.

 

[Hoodoo]

glad I read this thread and feel ive come away with some valuable insights into the games industry

 

[Lancehead]

Which is why I think the dearth of classical-type cRPGs is largely due to there being a lack of supporting market mechanism, like the crowdfunding now promises to be.

The market was there, though, if Kickstarter proves anything. So why didn't they take advantage of it?

They probably see the opportunity cost too high. I mean that someone like EA could be making low risk, low investment, niche games alongside their AAA games, but they probably think the ~ 2 year development time for the niche game could be used to make another AAA game and earn bigger revenues.

Publishers do deserve plenty blame for ruining some old franchises, though.

Didn't you read this thread? Basically the whole thing was about whether the developers or the publishers ruined those games. Only now it started being about whether they fund niche games or not.

I did, which is why I thought I'd make a general comment on that separately.

 

[Infinitron]

They probably see the opportunity cost too high. I mean that someone like EA could be making low risk, low investment, niche games alongside their AAA games, but they probably think the ~ 2 year development time for the niche game could be used to make another AAA game and earn bigger revenues.

Too bad they're wrong. Azrael explains:

The AAA-only publishers are too big to 'crash' per se, but they've been demonstrating business incompetence for years. Best example is EA. You know how I talk about how in theory a company that makes one-size-fits-all products will get slowly picked apart by combinations of niche companies and large competitors who subdivide their production to target as many segments as possible? EA is a case in point. EA's share price has been going steadily down for years - there's been the occasional lift, but overall you look at their share chart over the past decade, put it against the share market as a whole, and you see a company in what looks like steep irreversible decline.

An insight into the reason for this came from the Biodoc who said 'TOR didn't affect EA's share price - we'd have to be 10 times our size to even come close to moving the EA shar eprice one way or the other'. It's typical of an attitude that Warren Spector noted when EA bought Ultima - they keep trying to find the 'big megahit' that will be the entire answer to their long-term decline in share value. They're looking for a miracle - a CoD-but-bigger-selling hit that they can sell to the entire gaming market and get that share price up.

Compare this to industries and companies that are true masters of capitalism. Note that I don't actually like these companies or their practices, and I'm really glad that Walmart never managed to get a foothold in Australia with our higher minimum wage and welfare state. But, when it comes to succeeding at capitalism, they're a great example - they're much bigger than EA, and yet they will scrounge for every little penny they can. If they can pay someone less and organise the store in a way that they don't need good employees (and hence don't need decent wages), they will - even if it's only a fraction of a percent of their profit. They'll sell products at a loss in order to prevent their customers from going elsewhere, even if those customers would end up only making them a few cents each after the loss-leading is taken into account. They'll milk every product they can, in every region they can. They will stomp on whatever corpse they need to in order to scrounge every tiny penny they can. And by making that the centre of their culture, they succeed despite never having a CoD equivalent - they aren't looking for some miracle, they're just damn determined to pick up every penny and rob every corpse in the knowledge that if they can do that all over the US it will eventually add up to an improved share price.

If a Walmart exec was to say 'let's drop that product line - it only makes us $200,000 a year', they'd be out of a job. The CEO would tell the guy that he should be milking everything out of the mainstream AND every litttle piece of profit they can find, no matter how small it is (because since when was it an 'either/or' thing? Why do AAA publishers think 'we don't want to make a game with a safe $200,000 profit because we want to go for the centre of the market and make a $100,000,000 profit', when they should instead be making as many of those multi-billion dollar games as possible UNTIL THE MARKET IS SATURATED and then go grab that extra $200,000 AS WELL. Once they adopt that attitude, they might find that there's actually a whole host of untapped markets worth $200,000 each, which might end up making the difference between long-term profit and long-term decline.

Which is why in the 'real world' of business (not the bullshit from 'game journalism') EA and half the other major publishers are in long-term decline. They've forgotten how to scrounge. Now that might be good for their employees, as they're less likely to be aggressively overworking and underpaying them. But niche markets, or even broad segments (I put the Codex in the latter category - there wasn't any 'crpg crash' that forced the decline, and there's little reason to assume that there isn't a sizeable market segment for those games) benefit from ruthless competition. And if you're an investor who wants to buy retail stocks and who actually does your research, and you see that the game industry has a clusterfuck of companies going for the mass market with no attention paid to other segments, you're going to avoid those shares like the plague and instead buy into a retailer that knows to scrounge for every penny and exploit any potential market.

Hence even compared to the rest of the struggling US/European shares, many of the large game publishers are in long-term decline. Oddly enough, the best thing that someone like EA could do is actually hire more execs from OUTSIDE the gaming industry - i.e. hire guys from genuinely cut-throat competitive markets, who are going to squeeze every penny from any game genre they can think of.

Who's better at capitalism? EA, or Walmart?

 

[Kane]

Which is why in the 'real world' of business (not the bullshit from 'game journalism') EA and half the other major publishers are in long-term decline. They've forgotten how to scrounge. Now that might be good for their employees, as they're less likely to be aggressively overworking and underpaying them. But niche markets, or even broad segments (I put the Codex in the latter category - there wasn't any 'crpg crash' that forced the decline, and there's little reason to assume that there isn't a sizeable market segment for those games) benefit from ruthless competition. And if you're an investor who wants to buy retail stocks and who actually does your research, and you see that the game industry has a clusterfuck of companies going for the mass market with no attention paid to other segments, you're going to avoid those shares like the plague and instead buy into a retailer that knows to scrounge for every penny and exploit any potential market.

Heyyyyy, that is


exactly what I have been saying.

EA is just a shit publishing company. But from that does not follow that all publishers are shit at their job, nor that there is some evil publisher wall that is conspiring to gut the poor developers.

That EA is shit hasn't been in the news for decades, but still there are studios that sign contracts with EA to publish their games. How does that make any sense? Lazyness, EA is secure money and you can develop your game. Sure it will be shit, cause EA will aquire you in the middle of the cycle, but hey, you wanted that contract.

 

[Infinitron]

You're delusional. Go back to NeoGAF please.

Seriously man, what the fuck happened to you? You used to be the guy who posted lulzy anti-capitalist news stories in GD. Go back to your old avatar, will you? Maybe that'll change you back.

 

[Kane]

You're delusional. Go back to NeoGAF please.

Yes, I am delusional because the truth is simply too harsh.

I can't go "back" to NeoGAF either, because I never had an account there.

People don't change based on their avatars either, you're living in a bubble.

 

[Infinitron]

You're delusional. Go back to NeoGAF please.

Yes, I am delusional because the truth is simply too harsh.

BRING BACK THE OLD RAW

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM YOU BASTARDS

 

[Kane]

fuck off infinitron. you have little clue of how the real world works, yet you try talking the talk.