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The Worth of the GTA Franchise
GameDailyBiz has a piece analyzing the value of the Grand Theft Auto Franchise for developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Entertainment. At something like $900 Million over the next five years, the franchise is almost 80% of Take-Two's market value. From the article: " ... While it's hard to blame Take-Two for its reliance on a blockbuster franchise, eventually gamers are likely to tire of the GTA formula, or the games will no longer feel fresh when placed side-by-side with titles that perhaps improve on that formula. To be fair, Take-Two has made attempts to diversify itself through acquisitions and new IP, but the publisher's value right now is heavily dependent upon GTA and that could be a double-edged sword for potential suitors, or investors in general. "
GTA's not worth a cup of hot coffee.
GTA, IMO, is one of the best games ever. Not just for it's content but for it's gameplay. It is open ended in ways other games only wish they could be. I'd love to see Take Two team up with someone like Square to product a really open ended RPG style game that has a Final Fantasy feel and GTA's attitude. Something for us big kids. I think GTA itself is destined to become a great online game. City of Villians wants to be but doesn't have what it takes but I think GTA could do it because it's already open ended and fun. They just have to make it multiplayer which doesn't seem to much of a stretch for the game. You don't need to be the hero in GTA so the stories work better for the masses than in a game like Final Fantasy online. Gang wars, lone gunmen, etc could all be a lot of fun.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I couldn't bring myself to spend the time to finish Vice City, or get more than a few hours into San Andreas. They didn't seem like anything new, just more.
I recall GTA: London 1969, which is still probably my favourite GTA game - simply because it let me play at being Michael Caine. I drove madly around that map on a variety of exciting heists all the while singing The Self-Preservation Society very loudly. And then got on a scooter and zipped around with some Mods. And then there were James Bond missions. All a wonderful parody of a certain era.
It was too short. It was too easy. But damn, it was fun while it lasted.
So: my proposal for the next instalment of GTA?
GTA: Tokyo 2050.
Just imagine it. GTA... except the most expensive sports cars can fly, and if you piss off the military then they turn up in tanks that transform into mecha. A futuristic GTA playing off anime and SF cliches, with fully destructible buildings - which will, of course, have been mysteriously repaired by the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division when you come back to the same spot ten minutes later...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The next game should be "GTA: Minding your own business".
Instead of starting off as a smalltime thug trying to make it big, you're an upper-middle class guy driving home from work to his nice house, wife, dog, and 2.5 kids when suddenly some smalltime thug yanks you out of your Lexus at a stoplight and speeds off. You aren't going to take this lying down, are you? After all, you're 40, underappreciated, and the guy in the next cubicle over keeps smacking his gum all day long. You're overdue for your midlife crisis, and it's time to snap.
You're going to take on that gang single handedly. Your PDA's got a lock on the lojack signal, and no smalltime thug is a match for your fearsome arsenal of staplers, tps reports, and the powerful LAW(yer) rocket. You're getting that car back, if it's the last thing you do.
Besides, you've still got $15k of payments to go on that baby.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Well, iD seems to be barrelling along just fine on the strength of the same game. Epic is doing Gears of War but that's probably the first non-Unreal game to come out of them in the past 8 years. (To be fair, both of these companies, to my knowledge, derive or derived income by licensing their game engine).
McDonald's seems to be doing OK only selling hamburgers.
Take Two's reliance on a blockbuster franchise is only bad if having one bad game can crumble their company. If they can publish a GTA game that sells only "OK" (say, 1 million copies) and still run the business profitably, then they're fine. Otherwise, they're a bloated company with few cash reserves. GTA is not the problem in that case.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I love that Idea, sounds vaguely like that terrible movie, Falling Down. I'm thinking GTA: Bangalore, where you can outsource your jackings for like 1/4 the price of a domestic jacking.
music lover since 1969
...which is what I think they were getting at. I bought every id game from wolfenstein3d to ...wolfenstein redux. I did not buy doom 3 nor quake 4 and have no desire to do so; I'm just not interested in either one anymore. Walk, get spooked, shoot, repeat. Graphics look awesome but it seems to me just a rehash of the games I played in the early 90s.
Same thing with GTA...GTA 3 was fun, Vice City was *really* fun, SA was neither here nor there for me. Besides, where can they go with it?
I went nuts with Unreal Tournament, even designing some levels, but UT3 and 4 didn't impress (why they take away the *best* weapon in the game (snipers rifle) is beyond me). I still play the original UT because it "felt right". Years after the fact and I'm still haunting the halls of CTF-November.
The only franchises that I've seen work over time are the "story"-type ones of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and the like. If Doom had a story (I mean a *real* story, a la Half-Life) I might be interested to see "what happens next", but they didn't do that.
Sadly, the one true franchise that relies on a continuous story, Shenmue, doesn't seem like it'll see the light of day.
People will come back for more if there's a reason to come back for more. In the age of OpenGL-based desktops, dual core processors, gigabytes of ram, SLI video cards, etc. etc., graphics are no longer the "more" and any franchise that doesn't see that is doomed.
GTASA was a good game
GTA:SA Sucked!!!!
I loved the series up to that point, but then the first mission on GTA:SA began.
You go through a way-to-long series of really boring cut-scenes (which sadky lack the humor of the preivious two games), and then you find yourself running from a rival drive-by game by riding a bicycle.
Let's stop right there for a moment.
The whole thing that made GTA so beautiful was the open-ended nature of it. If you wanted to take the "obvious" path to complete a mission, you could, but it encouraged lateral thinking.
Classic example: In GTA-III, there's a mission where you are "supposed" to use a sniper rifle to assasinate a rival mob boss as he leaves his favorite restaurant. While there are a couple of vantage points from which you can pull this off, you can also steal a big vehicle (like a bus), go to HIS HOME, block the entry to his garage, and you lob grenades at his entire entourage while they try to pound their way through the driveway.
Back to San Andreas.
So, I'm on this mission where I gotta follow the other kids in my gang on a sad-looking bike, when I decide to say "screw this" and boost a car.
The moment I step off the bike, I can't continue the mission! The little nav guide I was following fanishes, and an urgent "GET BACK ON THE BIKE" message flashes on the screen. To use any means of transport, other than the crappy bike I stole, is forbidden.
Lame, lame, lame.
It's especially lame when you consider that riding little bicycles is BORING. They are slow to begin with, and waaaay slower when you try to take a hill. (Getting off the bike and walking it up is not an option, even though it would sometimes be faster.)
Then, if you want to be able to use these gay-ass bikes with any utility at all, or even if you want to run more than twenty paces or so without grabbing your knees and vomiting, you have to go to a gym and work out!
Who the hell thought it would be fun to play a weight-training simulator???
GTA used to be about being a clever, cold-blooded, hardened mafia goon who would joyride in hot cars and often had to McGuyver his way out of tight scrapes. That was the game I fell in love with.
GTA:SA is about being a mush-mouthed, scrawny, out-of-shape, dead-broke loser thug who needs to do hours of pilates just to pedal a sissy-bar bike up a resivior embankment. Put up with hours and hours of this crap, and you don't get to infiltrate the mob or yakuza or anything nearly that cool... no, you get gain cred with a bunch of california street hoodlums. Yay.
Their games are moving in the wrong direction. The game has become more rigid, less fun, and more reliant on cut-scenes to pad out a game with very little replay value. If this trend continues, their "franchise" will be worth less than that of Duke Nukem.
IMHO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.