One of the few games with truly successful downloadable content sales. The game itself may not have been perfect -- far from it -- but seeing its ingame footage almost single-handedly boost one of Japan's Youtube clones, NicoNico Douga, to popularity rivaling the video giant was a sight to behold.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss subscriber-based services. A Japanese Youtube clone called NicoNico Video has approx. 2million IDs (considering that most people have multiple accts for no good reason the actual viewer count's probably closer to 1million) to date, and latest reports they have 50,000+ users on a 500yen/month 'premium' account. It's still a minority group, but if Youtube could get a similar percentage of people to sign up for a premium account, that's a good amount of money they could be making.
Wonder if it's got anything to do with Kadokawa Group's deal with Google. I found it amusing that they were helping develop this kind of system for Google, since they're probably one of the few groups that have really gotten some sales/publicity boost from user-generated content on Youtube and NiconicoVideo.
There are many MMOs that agree wholeheartedly with you -- games where you can purchase power-ups and equipment from the official store, using real money. With those I don't see a problem -- everyone's entitled to go and spend a few hundred bucks for a nice set of armor, double-speed potions, etc etc etc. Those that do not have the money can spend the extra time w/o experience bonuses or insane stat boosts and pay extra game money for the same armor.
So why do it on a game where the rule tells you it's not OK to purchase game items w/ real world currency? It's like playing a game of pickup Ultimate (or soccer or whathaveyou) with a pair of cleats, when the rules are calling for a barefoot game. Sure, you might be able to burn everyone (or play evenly w/ someone else that you'd be no match to otherwise) since you're the only one on the field with any sort of traction, but is that really fun?
Having said that though, I guess this is the internet, and any rules that can be broken, will be.
WoW is not talked about in Japan because there is no official service for WoW in Japan. I believe the reason was that it wasn't a worthwhile venture to enter Japan, where everything would have to be retranslated, and having to compete in a market where MMOs with cutesy characters (Ragnarok Online, FF11) are extremely popular and styles similar to WoW not entirely appreciated.
Also, I'm not sure about your impression of the 'dating sim' genre, but that is just another very small piece of game sales in Japan. I mean, within the genre sales of 10,000 copies is consider a hit, and 100,000 is astronomical. Social prejudice against fans of comics/animation/games is still very strong (they would probably let it slide if you were a gaijin), and like the way you have politicians blaming GTA for school shootings you have news crews blaming those dating sims for child kidnappings. There are insane amounts of third-party figurines, comics, etc produced within this genre for sure, but it is still confined to a very niche market.
FF is indeed mainly cooperatively played. The PvP is there, but I'm sure most people stopped after the first time a group of blackmages slept the entire opposing group and then beat them into pulp one by one (I hear it's somewhat more balanced now, but with so few people showing up for Ballista I don't feel like participating).
Is this really a good thing though? The focus on cooperative play on a MMO means that the only time you can show your superiority in skill is against CPU mobs, and being able to smash Merit mobs 1.5times faster than the average player doesn't provide the same satisfaction of beating down other players with double-digit scores.
I got the DS after I've had a PSP for about a year, and I felt exactly the opposite - since I was used to the PSP sleep mode, I was constantly turning off DS games in progress by accident. This is obviously a matter of preference, and while I like the DS's sleep mode now that I know how it works, I still believe the PSP's a little more idiot-proof, as you have to consciously hold onto the power to shut it down.
Remember those "Choose your own adventure" books? They were too often filled with instantaneous dead-ends, but the idea was a good one and it gave the readers a little bit of interaction in between (even if the grand finale was the same no matter what route they took to get there).
Japan has gone one step further and have created a whole market of somewhat interactive, visual novels. A few choice extra audio and visual cues like background art, applicable background noise and sound effects can make a world of difference to the reading inexperienced in 'seeing' what is going on in a scene while still leaving a lot to the imagination. Though most of these games still use the Choose-your-own-adventure approach (exceptions exist but are few and far between), it really is capable of pulling in people that would otherwise never pull out a paperback unless they were told to.
English and History classes could certainly make use of this sort of interactive reading in their coursework, and all it would take to develop are a few writers, an event scripter and some sound-effect / stock photo collections.
With download sales picking up and episodic content getting more common, it'll probably be possible to do what you described a little easier in those few-hour segments. You could probably have just as good a console RPG by taking all but the story-significant battles away, and yet if the developer actually does that they'll be slammed for the game being short. I can recall this exact thing happening with Disc 2 of Xenogears: the characters launch into a monologue for a bit which fleshes out the story, with boss battles in between so that the content remains interactive. Many reviews complained of this lack of freedom to move around, talk to NPCs and battle your way to the bosses on your own -- I didn't really miss this lack of a timesink myself, probably because I'd done a good 20hours of that prior to this scene.
And as those games become cheaper and cheaper to produce, they'll become available on more convenient mediums like portable game devices, cell phones, free flash games littered on the web, etc.
At some point, users will decide this type of game isn't worth forking over money for (or at least, not the 49.99/59.99 you'd pay for a fullblown sandbox game), at which time you have games that might cost nothing to make, but doesn't earn you any money.
They probably need to do something about their animators as well, where a significant portion get below-minimum wage pay. (I've seen much better breakdowns of the pay scheme, though they were in Japanese)
"I've just had my ass kicked by the player, but little does he suspect that that was only my shadow/I haven't used my trump card/I'm going to kick his ass anyway."
But all the fanboys bitch and whine over an incomplete game if that doesn't happen, as was shown with all the people who believed there HAD to be some way to revive Aeris in Final Fantasy VII.
FFXI is actually VERY non-item reliant from an equipment POV, in the leveling phase anyway. The level system of the player works so that an extra status boost from a 'rare' item adds little to nothing of value. That's not to say that powerful gears don't exist, but the vast majority of those are raid drops that bind on pickup, and they don't come into play until you approach level75, FFXI's level cap. Hell, for most players the level 50~60 'artifact' armor will last them for the rest of the game. If anything, the problem may be pressure from other players in a leveling party to get better gear -- which is also a non-issue, as the player population in the mid-levels is next to nonexistent.
As of late, Square's also been relatively good at slightly lower-quality replacements to some of the more powerful gear, drops of which ARE being monopolized by the gold farmers. In many servers, the only way to get a riddill (same attack power as most weapons, except you attack two to three times per turn), byakko pants (the only leg-equipment that increases attack speed by 5%) or a speed belt (a 6% boost) would be through a gold farmer. While these items are all but impossible to get w/o some sort of gil trading, most of them have slightly lower-grade cousins that can be obtained via side-quests.
Consumables are a slightly different matter: accuracy-raising items with a 30minute timer are a virtual necessity to play will cost you ~20K gil a dozen, and if you're playing the ninja job properly it would cost you that much an hour to cast their spells. While equipment can generally be sold off at prices equivalent to the purchasing price, the consumables have no refunds other than in the form of levels for the user -- and not using them will change a player to anywhere between half-as-effective and completely useless. Players grinding for cash can expect to earn ~10K~30K an hour. Mob hunting, fishing and mining are still viable income-earning opportunities, and they're as dry as the rest of the game.
What Square doesn't have is a half-decent game management structure to control goldfarming. They pulled a silly move by not splitting servers by region, forcing US players to start from scratch in a world where there were maxed-out level Japanese players everywhere, most of whom had already taken up most cash-making opportunities. Rampant begging for items and powerleveling ensued, animosity between Japanese and the 'no-skills' US players (how in the hell should we know how to play when the game just came out over here?!) grew almost immediately, and thousands of players decided they needed a shortcut to catch up.
Goldfarmers followed and quickly started filling up game servers to service these new customers; for some reason most farmers were not banned for upwards of a year despite constant report-ins by both the US and JP community, which may have sent further messages to players that purchasing gils is OK. They have just recently come up with a 'Special Task Team' to combat goldfarming, but as far as I've seen the landscape hasn't changed much.
I don't see a problem, as they're releasing it on a console as well. Besides, isn't the whole point of the game being DX10 only to increase the Vista user base? Considering how reluctant people seem to be to adopt Vista, this seems like a fairly wise decision.
They may have fixed that one, but on the CD version I hit a wall at Mission 9.4 or somewhere along that line; can't remember the mission sequence anymore, but you were stuck on your lonesome on a Tie Defender, with T/A's firing advanced missiles at you like there's no tomorrow.
if you're talking about the bars that show up when you're in 4:3 mode, the color on those can be adjusted to pitch black through the options if you're playing with the Panasonic plasmas. Turning down the overbrightened screen setting would probably help as well, if it isn't too late to save your TV anyway.
A Blue Dragon comic started running last week on comic magazine Weekly Shonen Jump to coincide with the game release. The fact that the artist for another popular series, Death Note, is creating the comic is drawing just as much attention as the game's Toriyama-based characters.
How many were available for preorder, though?
I believe a similar thing occurred for preorders on one of Konami or Namco's arcade games that is being released on the 360: low expectations lead to a low supply of pre-order 'limited editions' available, which sold out very quickly.
With PS3s and Wiis being nearly impossible to purchase though, the xbox is in a good position as it's the only one working parents would have a chance of getting. Now that they have a Blue Dragon comic started to coincide w/ the game release, I'll see how much they're pushing this game in the Osaka area.
The 360's definitely proven in Japan that a hardware flop is difficult to overcome. Though, with little widespread availability of reasonably-priced HDTVs (your only choices are the Japanese brands which charge ~$2000 for 32-inch LCDs), lack of popularity of FPSs, and resistance to non-Japanese brands it's not too surprising.
Their loss per unit will be dropping, so it's not like each system they sell will have to have 30 game sales associated with it. 500,000 games to make a profit seems a little more painful. Sure, a more average-looking game might cost less than that to produce, but in that case it'll cost less to produce and have a larger market on the PS2 anyway. And if you want to bring last-gen graphics to next-gen hardware while claiming to create innovative games, there's the Wii...
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One of the few games with truly successful downloadable content sales. The game itself may not have been perfect -- far from it -- but seeing its ingame footage almost single-handedly boost one of Japan's Youtube clones, NicoNico Douga, to popularity rivaling the video giant was a sight to behold.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss subscriber-based services. A Japanese Youtube clone called NicoNico Video has approx. 2million IDs (considering that most people have multiple accts for no good reason the actual viewer count's probably closer to 1million) to date, and latest reports they have 50,000+ users on a 500yen/month 'premium' account. It's still a minority group, but if Youtube could get a similar percentage of people to sign up for a premium account, that's a good amount of money they could be making.
Wonder if it's got anything to do with Kadokawa Group's deal with Google. I found it amusing that they were helping develop this kind of system for Google, since they're probably one of the few groups that have really gotten some sales/publicity boost from user-generated content on Youtube and NiconicoVideo.
There are many MMOs that agree wholeheartedly with you -- games where you can purchase power-ups and equipment from the official store, using real money. With those I don't see a problem -- everyone's entitled to go and spend a few hundred bucks for a nice set of armor, double-speed potions, etc etc etc. Those that do not have the money can spend the extra time w/o experience bonuses or insane stat boosts and pay extra game money for the same armor. So why do it on a game where the rule tells you it's not OK to purchase game items w/ real world currency? It's like playing a game of pickup Ultimate (or soccer or whathaveyou) with a pair of cleats, when the rules are calling for a barefoot game. Sure, you might be able to burn everyone (or play evenly w/ someone else that you'd be no match to otherwise) since you're the only one on the field with any sort of traction, but is that really fun? Having said that though, I guess this is the internet, and any rules that can be broken, will be.
WoW is not talked about in Japan because there is no official service for WoW in Japan. I believe the reason was that it wasn't a worthwhile venture to enter Japan, where everything would have to be retranslated, and having to compete in a market where MMOs with cutesy characters (Ragnarok Online, FF11) are extremely popular and styles similar to WoW not entirely appreciated.
Also, I'm not sure about your impression of the 'dating sim' genre, but that is just another very small piece of game sales in Japan. I mean, within the genre sales of 10,000 copies is consider a hit, and 100,000 is astronomical. Social prejudice against fans of comics/animation/games is still very strong (they would probably let it slide if you were a gaijin), and like the way you have politicians blaming GTA for school shootings you have news crews blaming those dating sims for child kidnappings. There are insane amounts of third-party figurines, comics, etc produced within this genre for sure, but it is still confined to a very niche market.
FF is indeed mainly cooperatively played. The PvP is there, but I'm sure most people stopped after the first time a group of blackmages slept the entire opposing group and then beat them into pulp one by one (I hear it's somewhat more balanced now, but with so few people showing up for Ballista I don't feel like participating).
Is this really a good thing though? The focus on cooperative play on a MMO means that the only time you can show your superiority in skill is against CPU mobs, and being able to smash Merit mobs 1.5times faster than the average player doesn't provide the same satisfaction of beating down other players with double-digit scores.
I got the DS after I've had a PSP for about a year, and I felt exactly the opposite - since I was used to the PSP sleep mode, I was constantly turning off DS games in progress by accident. This is obviously a matter of preference, and while I like the DS's sleep mode now that I know how it works, I still believe the PSP's a little more idiot-proof, as you have to consciously hold onto the power to shut it down.
What's with almost every pro-DS post pointing out the sleep mode feature? The PSP can do the exact same thing by tapping the power button.
Then make reading a game.
Remember those "Choose your own adventure" books? They were too often filled with instantaneous dead-ends, but the idea was a good one and it gave the readers a little bit of interaction in between (even if the grand finale was the same no matter what route they took to get there).
Japan has gone one step further and have created a whole market of somewhat interactive, visual novels. A few choice extra audio and visual cues like background art, applicable background noise and sound effects can make a world of difference to the reading inexperienced in 'seeing' what is going on in a scene while still leaving a lot to the imagination. Though most of these games still use the Choose-your-own-adventure approach (exceptions exist but are few and far between), it really is capable of pulling in people that would otherwise never pull out a paperback unless they were told to.
English and History classes could certainly make use of this sort of interactive reading in their coursework, and all it would take to develop are a few writers, an event scripter and some sound-effect / stock photo collections.
With download sales picking up and episodic content getting more common, it'll probably be possible to do what you described a little easier in those few-hour segments. You could probably have just as good a console RPG by taking all but the story-significant battles away, and yet if the developer actually does that they'll be slammed for the game being short. I can recall this exact thing happening with Disc 2 of Xenogears: the characters launch into a monologue for a bit which fleshes out the story, with boss battles in between so that the content remains interactive. Many reviews complained of this lack of freedom to move around, talk to NPCs and battle your way to the bosses on your own -- I didn't really miss this lack of a timesink myself, probably because I'd done a good 20hours of that prior to this scene.
And as those games become cheaper and cheaper to produce, they'll become available on more convenient mediums like portable game devices, cell phones, free flash games littered on the web, etc.
At some point, users will decide this type of game isn't worth forking over money for (or at least, not the 49.99/59.99 you'd pay for a fullblown sandbox game), at which time you have games that might cost nothing to make, but doesn't earn you any money.
They probably need to do something about their animators as well, where a significant portion get below-minimum wage pay. (I've seen much better breakdowns of the pay scheme, though they were in Japanese)
This guy would be a prime candidate for some power-leveling services.
"I've just had my ass kicked by the player, but little does he suspect that that was only my shadow/I haven't used my trump card/I'm going to kick his ass anyway." But all the fanboys bitch and whine over an incomplete game if that doesn't happen, as was shown with all the people who believed there HAD to be some way to revive Aeris in Final Fantasy VII.
FFXI is actually VERY non-item reliant from an equipment POV, in the leveling phase anyway. The level system of the player works so that an extra status boost from a 'rare' item adds little to nothing of value. That's not to say that powerful gears don't exist, but the vast majority of those are raid drops that bind on pickup, and they don't come into play until you approach level75, FFXI's level cap. Hell, for most players the level 50~60 'artifact' armor will last them for the rest of the game. If anything, the problem may be pressure from other players in a leveling party to get better gear -- which is also a non-issue, as the player population in the mid-levels is next to nonexistent.
As of late, Square's also been relatively good at slightly lower-quality replacements to some of the more powerful gear, drops of which ARE being monopolized by the gold farmers. In many servers, the only way to get a riddill (same attack power as most weapons, except you attack two to three times per turn), byakko pants (the only leg-equipment that increases attack speed by 5%) or a speed belt (a 6% boost) would be through a gold farmer. While these items are all but impossible to get w/o some sort of gil trading, most of them have slightly lower-grade cousins that can be obtained via side-quests.
Consumables are a slightly different matter: accuracy-raising items with a 30minute timer are a virtual necessity to play will cost you ~20K gil a dozen, and if you're playing the ninja job properly it would cost you that much an hour to cast their spells. While equipment can generally be sold off at prices equivalent to the purchasing price, the consumables have no refunds other than in the form of levels for the user -- and not using them will change a player to anywhere between half-as-effective and completely useless. Players grinding for cash can expect to earn ~10K~30K an hour. Mob hunting, fishing and mining are still viable income-earning opportunities, and they're as dry as the rest of the game.
What Square doesn't have is a half-decent game management structure to control goldfarming. They pulled a silly move by not splitting servers by region, forcing US players to start from scratch in a world where there were maxed-out level Japanese players everywhere, most of whom had already taken up most cash-making opportunities. Rampant begging for items and powerleveling ensued, animosity between Japanese and the 'no-skills' US players (how in the hell should we know how to play when the game just came out over here?!) grew almost immediately, and thousands of players decided they needed a shortcut to catch up.
Goldfarmers followed and quickly started filling up game servers to service these new customers; for some reason most farmers were not banned for upwards of a year despite constant report-ins by both the US and JP community, which may have sent further messages to players that purchasing gils is OK. They have just recently come up with a 'Special Task Team' to combat goldfarming, but as far as I've seen the landscape hasn't changed much.
Since 1080p is bigger than 720p it must be better! Buy buy buy!
I don't see a problem, as they're releasing it on a console as well. Besides, isn't the whole point of the game being DX10 only to increase the Vista user base? Considering how reluctant people seem to be to adopt Vista, this seems like a fairly wise decision.
They may have fixed that one, but on the CD version I hit a wall at Mission 9.4 or somewhere along that line; can't remember the mission sequence anymore, but you were stuck on your lonesome on a Tie Defender, with T/A's firing advanced missiles at you like there's no tomorrow.
if you're talking about the bars that show up when you're in 4:3 mode, the color on those can be adjusted to pitch black through the options if you're playing with the Panasonic plasmas. Turning down the overbrightened screen setting would probably help as well, if it isn't too late to save your TV anyway.
A Blue Dragon comic started running last week on comic magazine Weekly Shonen Jump to coincide with the game release. The fact that the artist for another popular series, Death Note, is creating the comic is drawing just as much attention as the game's Toriyama-based characters.
How many were available for preorder, though? I believe a similar thing occurred for preorders on one of Konami or Namco's arcade games that is being released on the 360: low expectations lead to a low supply of pre-order 'limited editions' available, which sold out very quickly. With PS3s and Wiis being nearly impossible to purchase though, the xbox is in a good position as it's the only one working parents would have a chance of getting. Now that they have a Blue Dragon comic started to coincide w/ the game release, I'll see how much they're pushing this game in the Osaka area.
The 360's definitely proven in Japan that a hardware flop is difficult to overcome. Though, with little widespread availability of reasonably-priced HDTVs (your only choices are the Japanese brands which charge ~$2000 for 32-inch LCDs), lack of popularity of FPSs, and resistance to non-Japanese brands it's not too surprising.
Their loss per unit will be dropping, so it's not like each system they sell will have to have 30 game sales associated with it. 500,000 games to make a profit seems a little more painful. Sure, a more average-looking game might cost less than that to produce, but in that case it'll cost less to produce and have a larger market on the PS2 anyway. And if you want to bring last-gen graphics to next-gen hardware while claiming to create innovative games, there's the Wii...
As an external CD drive maybe, but why rain on the parade of PS game conversions when that's what's keeping PSP afloat?