Slashdot Mirror
Square Enix President Looks To Online Play
Gamespot has a story detailing comments by Square Enix president Youichi Wada. In the article, they touch on the fact that Square is going to be increasingly looking to online play in their future games. From the article: "Wada predicted that online games will be Square Enix's main source of income in the future. 'I think that over half of our income and profit will be based on network content [including games] by 2008 or 2009.'"
The amount of people willing to pay a monthly fee to play a game is not that large. Unless they are willing to make online games that have free servers - SquareEnix-run or not - they will be chasing after the same small pool as everyone else. ;)
I'd rather pay an extra $10 for faster internet
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
What they are forgetting is that the lowest common denominator is the console - only a minority and that's a real definite minorirty but a *minority* none the less have or give a shit about online play
I dont have FFXI, because I liked FF games due to the plot and story created and the playability which while not hard was entertaining and kept you going.
The move to online-only games = the computer equivalent of reality TV. They don't need plots and people will kill each other (almost) to produce the content the developers don't need to anymore. The character interaction, etc., is what makes RPGs and l44t sk9i11z kids don't exactly imply adequate value.
But it's $60 + $15/month. You might cancel after a few months, probably 3-4 I would guess is what the board of directors figures. This means up to $120, well worth it even with a smaller userbase.
What a bunch of shit.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
So there are insightful intelligent people on slashdot, who knew;) In other words, thank you for your intelligent reply.
Campell's work deals with cultural reverse engineering: basically taking a bunch of works and analyzing them for commonality. The story-maker's role is the opposite. None of the great mystics or storytellers read Campell's work. They happened to make stories that followed his rubric quite unintentionally. Simply put, even if all great stories follow this formula, it's possible that anyone who attempts to follow the the formula intentionally fails.
Thus, I find ambivalence in your 3rd paragraph. It is precisely through experimentation that great creative works are made. Companies like Pixar and Retro studios have been doing great things precisely because of their independence. For some reason, companies don't understand math. It's simply a better business strategy to produce riskier products if their average return is greater. They're too focused on optimizing the worst case of the small picture.
I still want to pick up Square's previous games and have much more desire to play them than FFX2 (though Xenogears has the most repetitive battles known to man). Nintendo on the other hand, and maybe I'm going out on a limb, has managed to keep the most consistantly great/innovative games of any publisher for the longest period of time (from the original Mario to Animal Crossing; even their sequels try to do something different and novel. many people still consider Mario64 to be the first landmark 3D platformer just as Super Mario Bros was considered the first landmark 2D platformer).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.