Topic: Capcom announce plan to add even more DLC, cut ties with Western developers.

[Ratty]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.406116-Capcom-Wants-to-Cut-Ties-With-The-West-Increase-DLC

Because clearly when drowning the best plan is to stubbornly sit there and try to grow gills.

[VladCT]

Welp, I'm now officially pessimistic about the state of big-name game companies.
I hope an indie revolution happens soon...

[Kale]

It technically already has. It is still in it's infancy but it's there and growing. Not enough coverage though, with exception of a few.

[Neobelmont]

There was a time I thought Capcom could change but I quit. Let them burn. Yet I still do not understand why their still in business, oh wait it's because there are people that gobble up their crap I remember talking to a Gamestop employee about capcom and he stuck up for them, it was at this moment that I knew we were not going to get along the guy is bs to me I remember he was talking about the prices of the gem system like it was a good thing oh it's going to be 100 and something dollars  how well how does that  things better Sherlock? or how their  pratices is not as bad as say activision  . How can you defend these guys?

[Inccubus]

This is kinda pathetic. Inafune-san was 100% spot on. At this point if Capcom folds, then I hop Comcept will be able to pick up some of their franchises. 'Specially a certain blue robot.

[Munchy]

On one hand, I only tend to buy DLC for games I really like.

On the other hand, since it's Capcom, I see the translation for this statement being: "We will do what we did for SFxT for every game."

Glad to see them finally acknowledge the large quality drop from outsourcing every game at least. (Then again, Resident Evil 6 was in house...) The best thing to do would be to not spend billions of dollars per game and have a sales expectation from fucking Fantasy Land. But again, this is Capcom, which means they will do the exact opposite.

[KaZudra]

I find it bad that the best DLC comes from the least successful Capcom games like DmC and Asura's Wrath. This paints a very painful picture since seemingly Sales is all the Capcom seems to care about

[Ratty]

Glad to see them finally acknowledge the large quality drop from outsourcing every game at least. (Then again, Resident Evil 6 was in house...) The best thing to do would be to not spend billions of dollars per game and have a sales expectation from fucking Fantasy Land. But again, this is Capcom, which means they will do the exact opposite.

Most of the big companies who can afford Triple A budgets are going this way. Corporations have an obligation to the shareholders to maximize profits, and this combined with out-of-touch corporate management leads to disaster. How many of these 50 - 70 somethings running the show at these companies have actually been interested in playing a game for the game's sake since the Atari 2600?

Simply put non-gamer moneymen/management failing to recognize or respect the unique properties of their fairly well organized and increasingly tech savvy customers is biting them in the ass. To give the most obvious example it is because of this lack of understanding of their own market that such companies keep chasing the CoD money instead of admitting that CoD is an anomaly, an outlier. And no matter how much they spend they're not going to steal that brogamer market because CoD already gives them what they want. Even if they copy CoD's brilliant (from a business standpoint) multiplayer design that turns the whole thing into a sort of kill streak slot-machine to make unskilled players feel awesome, CoD players don't care because they already have CoD.

This same lesson applies for all the currently big franchises, Halo, Madden, World of Warcraft etc. The audiences are huge but not very interested in knock-offs. And the audience for most other games, whatever they may be, is going to be considerably smaller, and a sane person would budget accordingly. Not to mention the whole "It's a recession and people are buying fewer luxuries which your $60 game certainly qualifies as." thing. But we'll see if someone in power at one of these companies finally "gets it" before it's too late, personally I doubt it.

[Pfil]

What I fear about an indie revolution and potential flop of the big companies is that my beloved Castlevania (and some other brands I like, like Tales, Megaman and Sonic) is property of a big company, and it would flop along with the rest of the industry.
If not for that, I wouldn't care much about who makes my games.
I've recently obtained more pleasure from little games like Rosenkreuzstilette or La Mulana than I've had from "big" games.

[VladCT]

When a company that owns a particular franchise flops, it's up to the fans to keep it alive.
Who knows? Maybe someone else will notice and buy the licenses.

[TheouAegis]

Another crash is imminent. The stock market system is a failed ancient system that leads to the desctruction of businesses and is horrible for commerce. I do sincerely hope Capcom falls in the Crash, along with some other companies, and I hope Nintendo hangs on over the years (especially since they own the Seattle Mariners and I remember how happy I was seeing Nintendo ads behind home plate whenever I'd watch a game on TV) even though they seem to be behind the push to stop making game manuals. I was reading about some hacker of the E.T. game and noticed this line in the article:

The instructions did provide answers, but much as they would today, gamers in 1982 expected to hit Start and begin figuring out gameplay in real time.

I am one of those gamers. I rarely read instruction manuals. However, that doesn't mean they are useless. In fact, that article covered also the very reason why game manuals are a necessity:

Unfortunately, the instructions were also long and complicated, and about as likely to serve as reading material for a kid on Christmas morning—or really any time—as a terms-of-service agreement.

It's not about reading the manuals. I don't know how many of my friends actually read the instruction manuals that came with our games, nor do I know how many of us here have actually read instruction manuals, but I do know many of us have opened at least one. Why is a game worth 3x or 4x as much in an auction if it has the manual if manuals are so unnecessary?

More than anything though, the manuals gave the kids something to look at, to whet their appetites while they sat in the living room waiting for grandma and grandpa to fall asleep, waiting for mom/dad to say it's time to go home, waiting for that fateful moment when they finally get to plug the game into the console. No, the best video game instruction manuals weren't about telling you how to play the game, they were intended to make you salivate and gnaw at your parents' patience until you could play it. If you learned something about the game in the meantime, even better.

Now they view it as something that cuts into profits. Developers are starting to rush things more and more. They get an idea and then just put off doing anything about it until finally someone says, "We have to get a new game out by Christmas; let's go ahead with that [insert franchise] game, but you have 4 months to do it." Then they pump all their money into extraneous hires. I don't think games have larger staff these days because the technology requires it, but because companies are too focus-driven on getting something dished out in the shortest time possible and to do so requires large teams of people. In the golden era, games were made by 4 to 8 people and the staff roll was just the same names over and over. Now they have staff rolls with a different name for each department and 20 or 30 departments. That requires even more funding to be wasted on staff meetings to get everything together.

Enter the indie game developers with small staff again.

Personally, I don't think video companies will ever truly succeed until capitalism falls to socialism. I just don't see video gaming as an industry that can succeed in a capitalist society. In fact most industries can't function in a capitalist society, but we won't go into that.

[Pfil]

Anything that happens, I just want Castlevania to live on.
I'd be still happy as a fan in an hypothetical world if I had Castlevania and nothing else to play.

[TheouAegis]

I only want them to live if they bring back the game manuals of old, with hand-drawn artwork depicting the hero(es) and monsters. Developers have forgotten what the instruction manual was really about.

Oh, and now you have to play through TUTORIAL LEVELS. Not all games do this, but oh my fucking god it's so fucking annoying! You play a game, then go replay it or just start over because you were doing so bad the first time. And they tell you how to play the game. You beat it and play again. They tell you how to play the game. They tell you how to play the game. They tell you how to play the game. They tell you how to play the game. They tell you how to play the game.

I'M ON FUCKING HARD MODE! QUIT TELLING ME HOW TO PLAY THE FUCKING GAME!

Bring back the instruction manuals and quit telling me how to play the fucking games in-game!


By the way, here's the ET game fixed:
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

The game's original coder approved it. But you do need to read the manual to understand what the hell you're supposed to do.

[VladCT]

They should've made it like Megaman Legends 2, or more recently, Metal Gear Rising, where it was optional.

[Lelygax]

New fighthing game from Capcom will be Marvel vs Capcom 4. This game will feature every character, arena and music that appeared in the series before, but you will only start with Ryu and Spiderman packs (char, stage and music), you need to buy the other ones as DLCs. lol