Trust me, people in America did know that the PS2 played DVD's. It was one of Sony's huge marketing points when the system launched. As a matter of fact, it was exactly that feature that sold me on the system in the first place.
And seriously, other than Gran Turismo 3 (which was released close to a year after the console), exactly which games are you referring to that "sold the system"? The PS2's game library was pathetically anemic for close to a year and a half after launch -- I don't know a single person that was waiting with baited breath for Tekken Tag Tournament, Fantavision, Kessen, or Ready 2 Rumble Boxing 2, and those were arguably the biggest 'standouts' of the system's 29 title launch.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with you that games become a selling point for a console later on in its life, but at launch date, I think sales are controlled more by brand loyalty and fanboyism than they are by any dearth of software for the systems. The X360 launch illustrated vividly to me that a large contingency of people WILL buy a system with basically no games if they believe in the company behind it. I think this is where Sony might be misjudging their consumer base.
Or you could just blame 'viral marketing' and astroturf marketing techniques. That's what I do.
I find it hard to believe that this many (ahem) journalists would actually WANT to copy Sony press releases verbatim and pass them off as news or some kind of insight. I'm willing to bet that somewhere, somebody has greasy palms.
Attention, Blizzard -- This means you. You dropped the ball, and now you must feel the wrath of the post-Christmas consumer dead zone.
Excellent point.
As a former designer at a very large video game company that will remain unnamed so nobody comes after me with baseball bats for vaguely speaking in defiance of an NDA, I saw first-hand the nightmare that was PS3 development. We had a team assigned to 'port' one of our 360 titles to the PS3 for launch, and the porting process took almost as long as building the game did in the first place. As a non-developer, I don't know too many of the nuts-and-bolts of it, but I do know that the PS3's texture memory seems to be substantially more limited and/or volatile than Microsoft's and many of our game assets had to be retooled into lower bit-depths and smaller sizes to keep the system from crashing in areas where the 360 performed like a champ. New SDK's were released almost weekly right up until the bitter end of the PS3 'development period', many of these containing sweeping changes that required massive retooling of key aspects of the title, and nothing to do with the PS3 system, be it the OS, hardware, ever really seemed finalized or stable.
While I'm positive that these issues have been resolved (or at least, hopeful) -- I'm still going to wait quite a while before I even consider purchasing a new Sony box. With the massive amounts of hurdles developers have been jumping through to appease the flaky nature of this product launch, I don't expect to see very many quality games for this system for quite some time.
I would definitely file Earthbound's US success more under the Okami style of 'success', to use a modern example. It was a game that recieved great reviews, a huge promotional push (even though it WAS the freebie in-house Nintendo Power treatment), critical accolades, and a rabid fan base, yet still managed to be almost completely ignored by the gaming mainstream.
There certainly was a lot of difficulty finding the title when it was released, but I think that was due much more to a limited pressing and the fact that the game had been so popular in Japan for so long by the time it hit the shores here. To refer back to Okami again, it was a game with a stellar reputation before it ended up in the US, which means a lot to hardcore fans of its particular genre, but was still virtually unknown to the average games consumer. You can count on a dedicated 'cultish' fan base to buy a certain amount of units, but once those sales die off, you really do need the support of the market in general to sustain profits. Nintendo has never historically been a company that puts faith in "burst" sales and short-term profits and their titles and franchises that end up being incredibly financially succesful (Zelda, Mario) are titles that usually continue to sell impressively LONG after their release.
I'd say that the big problem with this line of logic is that Earthbound, at best, is a "cult classic" type of game. It has a rabid following in America amongst its niche, sure, and the fans are voracious -- but there's simply not ENOUGH of them to make "throwing more money at it" a logical solution. Your statement is obviously colored by your love for the title, which is understandable, but it would do well to recognize that the original Earthbound itself was a commercial flop in the US and that, traditionally, RPG titles are among the worst-selling games on this side of the world (with a few notable exceptions, ala, Final Fantasy.)
Simply put, throwing ANY money at the game at this point would be a rather large risk for Nintendo to take, especially with a new console looming that will require its own substantial chunk of change to promote. Due to the diminishing returns Nintendo has seen in the American market over the past ten years or so, I can understand completely why they would not want to take such a substantial gamble on a game which, while desperately sought after by most hardcore fans, would not be more than a blip on the radar to the average American gamer.
For the sake of full disclosure, I'd like to add that Earthbound is, by far, one of my favorite titles of all time. I do, however, think it's important to understand its position in the marketplace at large. Much like a lot of foreign cinema, while there is a very well-defined and eager consumer base for this title, it's just not simply a large enough niche to justify the costs entailed to 'port' it to the US. Your argument, while fairly rational, is basically akin to arguing that anime films should be released in American theatres -- you may like them, and your friends may like them, but the simple fact of the matter is that you're in the minority. With the Gears of War/Halo model of FPS currently ruling the roost, it seems quite clear to me that the 'big money' in gaming is most certainly not coming from RPG's these days, and especially not ones that are fairly esoteric and 'thought-provoking.'
I could just be reading too much into things here, but $750 per song seems very interesting to me when you consider the fact that the standard mechanical royalty rate for recorded music is 7.5 cents per song (unless the song exceeds five minutes in length). If this figure of $750 is somehow based on this rate (a concept to which simple mathematics provdes some serious weight), I'd be very interested in how this would affect intellectual property issues in general. The idea behind mechanical licensing is that it's a compulsory license paid to a music publishing entity and is routinely provided to entities that want to re-record, embellish upon, or redistribute a piece of work. While I understand that this suit is geared more towards the distributors of music, and not the consumers, if the company is expected to raise their price points and we pay more for these songs (and, as an direct effect, contribute to this mechanical licensing fee), does that mean everybody who purchases a song now has a legal right to redistribute and/or modify it?
I know very little about copyright law and things of that nature outside of the machinations of the "music biz", so if there is anybody who could explain this in detail, I'd love to hear about it. Of course, this entire argument is conjecture based on the similarity between these two numbers -- However, it seems a little too coincidental to me. Thoughts?
But isn't this just the way the human brain works? Admittedly, I don't know much about cognitive neuroscience, but it doesn't seem to me that free-associating to recall the answers to simple trivia questions. I appreciate academia as much as the next guy, but to champion the use of mnemonic devices and mental cues on a game-show as some kind of scientific vindication seems somewhat rhetorically overblown.
Maybe I'm projecting, but isn't this how everybody's memory functions? I can't count how many times daily that I think back to physiological cues (gesticulations, expressions, etc) and other unrelated events to recall information and conversations. I've been under the distinct impression for most of my life that this sort of non-linear association is a common part of human thought and not some sort of 'technique' or 'skill.' Am I totally wrong about this, or is this just a simple case of inflated journalistic hyperbole?
I think a decent drumming game along these lines would be a huge hit. When you figure that the closest thing American audiences to exposure to that genre is "Donkey Konga" and that godawful MIDI arcade game, and you combine that with our distinct propensity to "air drum," I think you have the recipe for a really succesful game. Wii controller, anybody?
A friend of mine removed the wiring from his Guitar Hero controller and placed it all into an old broken Flying V copy he had routed out to accept everything. It looks pretty ugly, but it really changed the feel of the game a lot -- holding a guitar that's properly weighted and the correct size does make it much more comfortable if you're used to playing in real life. Kind of a neat little project, if nothing else.
The "I play guitar in real life, so why would I want to play this game" are just symptomatic of a self-entitled attitude that I've found to be somewhat pervasive throughout the world of 'unsigned musicians.' After spending years and years and years slugging it out in several local music scenes (with marginal aptitude, at best, I admit), I have come to realize that many musicians, who subconsciously realize the real-world triviality of their pursuits, ultimately look to rationalize and justify their stake in the pursuit by painting their efforts as far more Herculean than they are.
This is one of the main reasons why it's rare to meet a musician that doesn't consider his creations to be his "life's work" or to view his status as a musician as anything other than a divine calling or a reason for being. The simple fact is that many people are uncomfortable with the realization that what they do is, ultimately, entertainment and seek instead to find karmic value for their priorities by portraying the act of strumming a guitar to be somehow akin to finding a cure for cancer or (and this is ALL to common) actively working towards social change.
Yes, I play guitar in real life, and yes -- I love Guitar Hero. Why? Because it's fun. Yes, I can plug in a real guitar and learn those songs and play them (if, of course, that was something I felt any desire to do), as can any moderately skilled player with an instrument and access to transcriptions of the tunes. But the simple fact of the matter is that Guitar Hero is a completely different kind of enjoyable activity than that of actual 'music making.' For some of us who exert a good deal of mental energy in their songwriting and playing, a game like Guitar Hero presents a refuge from intellectualizing things like "having fun." It's a way to enjoy myself casually and to do so using a skillset I'm already decent with (moving my fingers in a guitar-like motion) as opposed to something that's frustrating and foreign to my brain (first-person shooters and the like.)
I firmly believe that those who feel the need to point out that Guitar Hero is somehow 'beneath them' because of their musical abilities are simply looking for a pedestal from which to impart "wisdom-on-high." No, playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing a real guitar -- Hell, neither is checkers. But I'm still at a loss as to how those components could be even remotely analogous to anyone's mind unless they were merely searching for a "deeper meaning" where it doesn't exist.
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Trust me, people in America did know that the PS2 played DVD's. It was one of Sony's huge marketing points when the system launched. As a matter of fact, it was exactly that feature that sold me on the system in the first place.
And seriously, other than Gran Turismo 3 (which was released close to a year after the console), exactly which games are you referring to that "sold the system"? The PS2's game library was pathetically anemic for close to a year and a half after launch -- I don't know a single person that was waiting with baited breath for Tekken Tag Tournament, Fantavision, Kessen, or Ready 2 Rumble Boxing 2, and those were arguably the biggest 'standouts' of the system's 29 title launch.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with you that games become a selling point for a console later on in its life, but at launch date, I think sales are controlled more by brand loyalty and fanboyism than they are by any dearth of software for the systems. The X360 launch illustrated vividly to me that a large contingency of people WILL buy a system with basically no games if they believe in the company behind it. I think this is where Sony might be misjudging their consumer base.
Or you could just blame 'viral marketing' and astroturf marketing techniques. That's what I do.
I find it hard to believe that this many (ahem) journalists would actually WANT to copy Sony press releases verbatim and pass them off as news or some kind of insight. I'm willing to bet that somewhere, somebody has greasy palms.
Attention, Blizzard -- This means you. You dropped the ball, and now you must feel the wrath of the post-Christmas consumer dead zone. Excellent point.
As a former designer at a very large video game company that will remain unnamed so nobody comes after me with baseball bats for vaguely speaking in defiance of an NDA, I saw first-hand the nightmare that was PS3 development. We had a team assigned to 'port' one of our 360 titles to the PS3 for launch, and the porting process took almost as long as building the game did in the first place. As a non-developer, I don't know too many of the nuts-and-bolts of it, but I do know that the PS3's texture memory seems to be substantially more limited and/or volatile than Microsoft's and many of our game assets had to be retooled into lower bit-depths and smaller sizes to keep the system from crashing in areas where the 360 performed like a champ. New SDK's were released almost weekly right up until the bitter end of the PS3 'development period', many of these containing sweeping changes that required massive retooling of key aspects of the title, and nothing to do with the PS3 system, be it the OS, hardware, ever really seemed finalized or stable.
While I'm positive that these issues have been resolved (or at least, hopeful) -- I'm still going to wait quite a while before I even consider purchasing a new Sony box. With the massive amounts of hurdles developers have been jumping through to appease the flaky nature of this product launch, I don't expect to see very many quality games for this system for quite some time.
I would definitely file Earthbound's US success more under the Okami style of 'success', to use a modern example. It was a game that recieved great reviews, a huge promotional push (even though it WAS the freebie in-house Nintendo Power treatment), critical accolades, and a rabid fan base, yet still managed to be almost completely ignored by the gaming mainstream.
There certainly was a lot of difficulty finding the title when it was released, but I think that was due much more to a limited pressing and the fact that the game had been so popular in Japan for so long by the time it hit the shores here. To refer back to Okami again, it was a game with a stellar reputation before it ended up in the US, which means a lot to hardcore fans of its particular genre, but was still virtually unknown to the average games consumer. You can count on a dedicated 'cultish' fan base to buy a certain amount of units, but once those sales die off, you really do need the support of the market in general to sustain profits. Nintendo has never historically been a company that puts faith in "burst" sales and short-term profits and their titles and franchises that end up being incredibly financially succesful (Zelda, Mario) are titles that usually continue to sell impressively LONG after their release.
I'd say that the big problem with this line of logic is that Earthbound, at best, is a "cult classic" type of game. It has a rabid following in America amongst its niche, sure, and the fans are voracious -- but there's simply not ENOUGH of them to make "throwing more money at it" a logical solution. Your statement is obviously colored by your love for the title, which is understandable, but it would do well to recognize that the original Earthbound itself was a commercial flop in the US and that, traditionally, RPG titles are among the worst-selling games on this side of the world (with a few notable exceptions, ala, Final Fantasy.) Simply put, throwing ANY money at the game at this point would be a rather large risk for Nintendo to take, especially with a new console looming that will require its own substantial chunk of change to promote. Due to the diminishing returns Nintendo has seen in the American market over the past ten years or so, I can understand completely why they would not want to take such a substantial gamble on a game which, while desperately sought after by most hardcore fans, would not be more than a blip on the radar to the average American gamer. For the sake of full disclosure, I'd like to add that Earthbound is, by far, one of my favorite titles of all time. I do, however, think it's important to understand its position in the marketplace at large. Much like a lot of foreign cinema, while there is a very well-defined and eager consumer base for this title, it's just not simply a large enough niche to justify the costs entailed to 'port' it to the US. Your argument, while fairly rational, is basically akin to arguing that anime films should be released in American theatres -- you may like them, and your friends may like them, but the simple fact of the matter is that you're in the minority. With the Gears of War/Halo model of FPS currently ruling the roost, it seems quite clear to me that the 'big money' in gaming is most certainly not coming from RPG's these days, and especially not ones that are fairly esoteric and 'thought-provoking.'
I could just be reading too much into things here, but $750 per song seems very interesting to me when you consider the fact that the standard mechanical royalty rate for recorded music is 7.5 cents per song (unless the song exceeds five minutes in length). If this figure of $750 is somehow based on this rate (a concept to which simple mathematics provdes some serious weight), I'd be very interested in how this would affect intellectual property issues in general. The idea behind mechanical licensing is that it's a compulsory license paid to a music publishing entity and is routinely provided to entities that want to re-record, embellish upon, or redistribute a piece of work. While I understand that this suit is geared more towards the distributors of music, and not the consumers, if the company is expected to raise their price points and we pay more for these songs (and, as an direct effect, contribute to this mechanical licensing fee), does that mean everybody who purchases a song now has a legal right to redistribute and/or modify it?
I know very little about copyright law and things of that nature outside of the machinations of the "music biz", so if there is anybody who could explain this in detail, I'd love to hear about it. Of course, this entire argument is conjecture based on the similarity between these two numbers -- However, it seems a little too coincidental to me. Thoughts?
But isn't this just the way the human brain works? Admittedly, I don't know much about cognitive neuroscience, but it doesn't seem to me that free-associating to recall the answers to simple trivia questions. I appreciate academia as much as the next guy, but to champion the use of mnemonic devices and mental cues on a game-show as some kind of scientific vindication seems somewhat rhetorically overblown. Maybe I'm projecting, but isn't this how everybody's memory functions? I can't count how many times daily that I think back to physiological cues (gesticulations, expressions, etc) and other unrelated events to recall information and conversations. I've been under the distinct impression for most of my life that this sort of non-linear association is a common part of human thought and not some sort of 'technique' or 'skill.' Am I totally wrong about this, or is this just a simple case of inflated journalistic hyperbole?
I think a decent drumming game along these lines would be a huge hit. When you figure that the closest thing American audiences to exposure to that genre is "Donkey Konga" and that godawful MIDI arcade game, and you combine that with our distinct propensity to "air drum," I think you have the recipe for a really succesful game. Wii controller, anybody?
A friend of mine removed the wiring from his Guitar Hero controller and placed it all into an old broken Flying V copy he had routed out to accept everything. It looks pretty ugly, but it really changed the feel of the game a lot -- holding a guitar that's properly weighted and the correct size does make it much more comfortable if you're used to playing in real life. Kind of a neat little project, if nothing else.
The "I play guitar in real life, so why would I want to play this game" are just symptomatic of a self-entitled attitude that I've found to be somewhat pervasive throughout the world of 'unsigned musicians.' After spending years and years and years slugging it out in several local music scenes (with marginal aptitude, at best, I admit), I have come to realize that many musicians, who subconsciously realize the real-world triviality of their pursuits, ultimately look to rationalize and justify their stake in the pursuit by painting their efforts as far more Herculean than they are. This is one of the main reasons why it's rare to meet a musician that doesn't consider his creations to be his "life's work" or to view his status as a musician as anything other than a divine calling or a reason for being. The simple fact is that many people are uncomfortable with the realization that what they do is, ultimately, entertainment and seek instead to find karmic value for their priorities by portraying the act of strumming a guitar to be somehow akin to finding a cure for cancer or (and this is ALL to common) actively working towards social change. Yes, I play guitar in real life, and yes -- I love Guitar Hero. Why? Because it's fun. Yes, I can plug in a real guitar and learn those songs and play them (if, of course, that was something I felt any desire to do), as can any moderately skilled player with an instrument and access to transcriptions of the tunes. But the simple fact of the matter is that Guitar Hero is a completely different kind of enjoyable activity than that of actual 'music making.' For some of us who exert a good deal of mental energy in their songwriting and playing, a game like Guitar Hero presents a refuge from intellectualizing things like "having fun." It's a way to enjoy myself casually and to do so using a skillset I'm already decent with (moving my fingers in a guitar-like motion) as opposed to something that's frustrating and foreign to my brain (first-person shooters and the like.) I firmly believe that those who feel the need to point out that Guitar Hero is somehow 'beneath them' because of their musical abilities are simply looking for a pedestal from which to impart "wisdom-on-high." No, playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing a real guitar -- Hell, neither is checkers. But I'm still at a loss as to how those components could be even remotely analogous to anyone's mind unless they were merely searching for a "deeper meaning" where it doesn't exist.