Come on Ref!
Imagine gaming was a sport. Not the game itself, but being a fan, and how the companies are working at things. When fans see the opponent, they do all they can to stop the enemy. It’s part of the game.
When the game starts and both teams are on the field, the best tactic by fans is to get the refs against the other team. The constant call by fans is for the ref to notice the slightest infraction made by the opponent. At football games -American or regular- you will hear constant yells for the ref to notice these things. The fans never yell at their own team, or even notice their own screw ups.
To be honest, this is such a common thing within videogames, it would take a while to explain all of them. Which is more important, First Person Shooters or Japanese Role Playing Games? The answer is not a simple one or the the other, but based on the opinion of the person being questioned. They would see all of the mistakes of the First Person Shooter without even thinking about it. For example, cutscenes break the mood of the game in FPS, but work great in JRPG style.
It is more noticeable for the larger arguments within videogames, usually pushed by the console companies. Nintendo is about the games, but is fully willing to protect itself. Microsoft is for the PC, but will promote Xbox as a way to keep Sony away. Sony wants to take over the computing business by way of the living room, which they intend to run. We speak of the big three, but there are others who deserve a lot of credit and talk as well.
The big question isn’t about whether or not it is happening, it is who the ref is. The answer is game companies, investors, and fans. The console companies know they make more money if game companies make something for them. Then it goes to the fans, who are the ultimate deciders on what gets bought and what doesn’t. Investors pay for a game to be made. Telling fans that the console isn’t worth it, or should be flagged for bad acts means better sales for the other companies.
Nintendo
Nintendo has set itself in a very specific form. Talking about the company usually gives off the vibe of a talented toymaker who is very dedicated to his work. He owns a small shop with a vast warehouse of amazing toys. If you found out more about him, you would realize he gave up his life as a Yakuza to pursue his dream. The action movie set up is near perfect, and fairly accurate.
People complain that Nintendo doesn’t work hard for the best graphics, or lacks voice acting. They did try for that, but found that the toy was more joyful than some kind of graphical fidelity. It’s a small crew (a few hundred game makers in total), so a large game would mean other games couldn’t be made easily or quickly. Things like that are an afterthought to the toymaker. However, if you ever try to borrow a toy without asking, get ready to have every lawyer in the world appear and tell you to stop.
Nintendo can and will fight with lawyers or use tricks on competitors. They know who they are dealing with. You as a fan might complain about them, but Nintendo is watching out for others who will misuse laws and tricks to take power from Nintendo. So the company itself will be harsh to anyone that tries to use an IP or something else for a fan game.
As said before, Nintendo failing is a common joke now throughout the internet. Even the News sites that have reported it themselves are making fun of it. But the articles continue to come.
(Insert quotes here, while talking about it.)
We will start with the DMCA comments, because I found them first. DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Nintendo explains on their own website. The law is pretty harsh, and states that if you hold the copyright, you must defend it, or the law will consider it open. Not an easy thing when fans are making games based on their products. A fan and lawyer commented on an Ars Technica article with this response.
“Good.
This is the unrealized amateur game designer in me talking, because he also knows everything the lawyer in me knows. If the product is good, and not a literal romhack (well, even then, potentially) then mere cosmetic changes would probably be enough for it to not be derivative of existing works.
I personally am totally cool with people building fan projects, but when there's such a narrow line between a derivative product and something that could be commercially successful... it just... nnnngh. And the existential threat constantly leaning over their heads... nnnngh.
'mon games are not the property of Nintendo or the company that actually made Pokemon. Nintendo doesn't own the side-scrolling adventure game starring bounty hunters exploring ancient ruins on aliens planets. What Nintendo does own is a bunch of graphics and trademarks. Pokemon Uranium scrubbed free of Pokemon references is a $4.99 purchase on Steam.
I don't get the desire to not go commercial, especially when the barrier to commercial seems so attainable. As a realized fanfiction author (principle requirements: Notepad.exe and a pulse) I understand that established canon can be a comfortable blanket to work in, but are any of Nintendo's characters (possible exception of Samus) so personable that anything about them could not be expressed in a non-infringing way? Just.. nnnngh.
Edit: I will say that any disruption of the fan-culture that increases appreciation of Nintendo games, or encourages individuals to make even the shallowest of forays into computer science, sucks. Nintendo made a bad choice here, no question. It might help some of the programmers 'mature' as creators, but this is a bit north of 'tough love'.”
But other fans on the same article commented with:
“It's like they don't want people to buy the NX. This is a company that is what? Over a hundred years-old and they should know better than to garner such negative publicity so close to the release of a new product which they are going to rely on for at least five years.
I'm a rabid Nintendo fan so it hurts me a lot to say this:
Sega does what Nintendon't
“when companies do this, the best way to retalliate is to drop all interest in their work. sad for a sinking ship like nintendo to do this to their true fans”
And then another comment:
“I've got a great idea, maybe Nintendo should actually make some of these games themselves!? *shocking* Then perhaps the efforts of indie developed projects would be made insignificant next to regularly released 1st party additions to the series? I guess it'd be hard though, making video games is tough I suppose for a video game company..
I just find it baffling that instead of developing a new Metroid game since Other M released 6 years ago (sorry Federation Force, you don't count), that they are actually contributing to a negative number of new Metroid games from coming out. smh.. So let's not only let the tree die, let's also burn it down and salt the Earth from which it sprang.
Ok I'm done ty.”
Now let’s talk about the graphics part. This is supposed to be a short overview. The best comment was about the Wii during its show off period by Chris Hecker during the Game Developers Conference. He said, “The Wii is Shit. It’s two gamecubes duct taped together.”
Eurogamer has a great article on it several years after the fact. The best quote from the article is this.
"Game design and gameplay is not separable from CPU power," he told Eurogamer.
"You can do more interesting games with a faster CPU. Nintendo made an underpowered platform, relative to what you could have made at the time.
"You can see the ramification of that now with the games. They're just not as interesting, for a lot of reasons.
"They did a lot of interesting stuff with the control system, but unfortunately there's not enough horsepower behind the thing to actually really explore a lot of that stuff. You can see that in the games.”
The argument is pretty well said here. Many game designers view the power of the CPU, and graphical engine as more important than designing a game within specific parameters. Several companies had expected Nintendo to release a console that was the equivalent power of the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. They had spent years preparing game engines, and other work to make games with those specifications in mind. When Nintendo released the Wii, it was underpowered, and could not play all of the games.
Hecker voiced his concerns about the design in a grandiose way, but it was felt throughout the game design community. Oddly enough, the Gamecube was more powerful than the Playstation 2 in the generation before, and it had not helped Nintendo. The company placed third in sales that generation.
The Wii with it’s lack of power sold better, and to more people, than any console in the business. The PS2 sold more, but that turned out to be to the same people several times. Because of the sales, journalists began to write articles about how the Wii was a fad. C-Net in 2007 -the same year as Hecker’s comment- said the company was a fad, and not really being played by fans.
“Every time someone says something to put a damper on the Wii's success, people are quick to point out lofty Wii sales numbers. Listen, we all know the Wii is selling well, but that doesn't mean people are actually playing the console. And it is this fact that scares the developer community. If people decide to buy a Wii because it looks nice at a friend's house and proceed to play it until they get bored with it, where are the opportunities for third-party developers to make money?”
This became the rallying cry for designers. Nintendo made better games, so people only played those games on the Wii. It was felt so strongly that the same comments were said for the Wii U. Third party support for the Wii U has been weird.
This comes in contrast with how many games the fans actually want to play. The DMCA, and other things shows that people enjoy Metroid, or Star Tropics. The problem is the company is small, and can’t make tons of games at the same time. It took the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 5 years to be made. It skipped an entire console because of how much work and sweat it took to make a giant open world Zelda game.
“I only have issues with pricing and size. Seven or eight bucks to play GBA games on my Wii U?! Why are these files around 150MB? I added funds to play F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, but I question the logic to Nintendo's eShop strategy. They have gotten plenty of my money over the years to be charging me these bloated non-physical ROM prices.”
A reddit discussion gets a huge amount of discussion. The basic idea is that the game was made 20 years ago, so they shouldn’t charge for it anymore. To them, the vast warehouse of toys needs to be released for all the kids to enjoy. They don’t realize the toymaker has to make money, and those are actually popular toys.
“They don’t make games for the true fans,” says the fans. “I just want them to release all of their games from that vast storehouse for free!”
Sony
Sony is a vast company with hundreds of thousands, even millions of people working for them. There is a music department, a movie department, a TV department, an electronics department, and finally the videogame department. When they got into the console business, it was specifically to combine these departments for a single ecosystem in your living room. They believed the console would take over the PC market, and thus would be the perfect spot to move in. The controller is a SNES controller with thumbsticks and rumble added on later. They will wholsale steal ideas from other companies to move ahead.
The ecosystem of the living room would be run by Sony. Sony has a music department, and an electronics department. They actually have partial ownership of the CD format. So if a company makes a CD, Sony gets paid. The first playstation would play CD’s, and support music formats. This way you played games, discs, music, and the console itself by paying Sony for each of those items. They didn’t care who made games, so long as they used the format, and thus won the format wars.
The Playstation 2 had a linux format, various computer functions, and played DVD’s. It was often the go to DVD player for some folks. Before you ask, DVD format was another one owned by Sony. So you see the slow expansion of Sony products working together to take over the livingroom and PC market.
The biggest complaint about Sony is the majority of the games are lackluster. Even the games that were really popular are mostly forgotten today. The company tried to have a Super Smash Bros type game, and it didn’t work because most players couldn’t recognize the characters. The games have a of walking through straight paths, beating things up, fixing a puzzle, and then having a cut scene. To Sony, the games should be like movies, only they are games. Having great graphics is just part of the movie enjoyment.
There is also an artistic push by Sony. The games should compete with movies and music as art forms. This has caused a lot of artistic games that don’t last very long.
What they also introduced was load times. You can’t play a quick game, because it took ten minutes to load the game from the disc. So if you have a quick break between projects or something, the game is unplayable.
My personal biggest complaint about Sony games, is how dark a lot of their games are. I enjoyed GTA, but eventually can’t play it because of how bad I feel. The best selling games for Sony has been Mature rated, kind of dumb games that follow corridors, using a movie like quality to it.
“...Anyway, I've got a few days off work and see thaf Tomb Raider is going cheap on Amazon.
It's supposed to be a really good game, critics loved it and the amazon reviews are good.
I've just 'played' two hours of this game and can honestly say that I'm left bitterly dissapointed.
Of my two hours of 'gameplay' I'd say that I've spent the majority of my time either watching cutscenes, reading menus, or being funnelled down highly scripted events - basically running down corridors while the scenery shakes and breaks up around me....
Where is the actual gameplay? Why do I feel like I'm simply watching the action unfold around me with minimal input from me?
Is this what modern AAA gaming is?”
Another commenter says:
“Outside of a few companies people would seemingly rather make movies than games.”
The Tomb Raider game had a sequel, and the sequel is being shown off for the Playstation Pro as a major reason to buy the upgraded console.Tomb Raider is not the only one. Many games made for Sony systems can be described this way. In fact, they are often promoted by the company as good reasons to buy it.
“It’s not a real game ref,” yell the fans. “It’s just a netflix box with graphical stuff.”
Microsoft
Microsoft got into the console business to stop Sony. They are a PC company that makes consoles. To them, the console is something like a poor man’s computer, and they work to have something like that. If the threat to the PC left, Microsoft would leave, and have no problems with it. Losing money over this doesn’t bother the empire too much.
The original Xbox is big. Like a nice end table big. I actually like it a lot. There are some fun games for it, and Sega really supported it well. It’s biggest game was an FPS, properly introducing the perfect controls for FPS games using the standard controller.
Microsoft introduced game achievements, and other things to make you feel cool, but not as cool as PC. In fact, the aim is to always make the PC look way cooler in comparison. Sure you can play some mods on the console, or watch some netflix, but it will always feel second fiddle.
Complaints about Microsoft are that it makes consoles that break down easily. Actually that really isn’t a complaint so much as a truth. The company actually lost $5 Billion on their first console, and may not have made money at all on their second. Many of the investors and managers of the company have complained about the waste of money the console is.
Since Sony is the main enemy, Xbox will have a lot of the same complaints. Dark, dumb, linear, and don’t age well. Only a few games really last, and the rest get forgotten quickly.
Microsoft loses money in console sales every year. The exact amount is unknown, but it is high enough that investing firms recommend not putting money into it. Speaking of which, investors are another kind of referee. They will pay for the cost of making something, on the promise that it will sell well enough to make a ton back. If the investment seems like a bad idea, then it won’t get the money. The height of the XBox power was a money drain on the main company of microsoft.
Venture Beat has a great article on the Red Ring of Death, and how it cost the company billions of dollars.
I am not quoting as much for the Microsoft section, and the reason why is the articles don’t have an easy point to just quote and show. It’s all long reads, and hopes for explanations. People who look at Microsoft as a game division seem to think in economic terms, and not videogamer terms. The product itself is fun, but otherwise not talked about much. Even the fans on forums seem to be speaking like this.
“The long term plans of Microsoft are bleeding the company dry at the videogame market!” yell the fans. “The ref should stop investing in these whacked out ideas.”
You are probably thinking I have covered it, but really there are two others. Smartphones and PC are major factors in gaming as well. If you really want to take it further, Arcades are making a comeback.
Smartphones
Smartphones are screens with computers on them. They have no buttons, and tend to play lighter style games. Playing a game on one tends to take a ton of battery, and the graphics will be weird.
The first major complaint is that smartphone games are very simple. For example, Nintendo released a simple runner game. All that Mario does is run forward, and you control his jumps. That’s all you can control, jumps. It doesn’t feel like a full game.
Although there have been attempts at porting games to these consoles, they don’t feel the same. You smudge your screen with the bigger games, and fake controls. As you play, the graphical heavy games will mean it is only be an hour at most to play before you need to recharge your phone.
Many people who consider themselves gamers do not think of smartphones as worthy. In fact, most people who play these games do not consider themselves gamers.
When the Wii released, the term casual gamer started popping up on internet forums. They described the people playing Facebook games, Smartphone games, or the Wii. These weren’t true gamers, they were something else. They were hardcore.
While these comments were being made, some game makers decided to move over to phones. Ben Cousins wrote that the reason to have a console seemed to be losing to the need for the smartphone. He bet his career on it, and moved over to phones.
The idea is that hardcore games are being ruined for the casual gamers. In a forum on Gamespot, someone writes
“And with the launching of Kinect and Move it feels as if games are becoming incredibly simple with little to no thought behind them except for a few hours of a "That was kind of cool" feeling followed by zero replay value. How many people bought a Wii to play games such as Wii Play/ Wii Sports, and Mario Kart? How many people then grew bored of how boring the feature of being more physically active because the games were just carbon copies of each other with no innovation behind them?
And now that my rant is over, do you feel as if casual gamers are ruining our community?”
There is truth to this. The games are being made with a simpler interface than regular games. The buttons are actually just spots on the phone or tablet screen for your thumbs to touch but no actual interaction. The top selling games are not hardcore styled games, and much easier to handle. You want to play a game while waiting at the bus stop? Go for it.
Also, for a game designer, you are lucky if the game gets any notice at all. A major complaint is how more and more games are released, which means competition is killing the ability to make a profit.
“Can’t you see they aren’t real gamers ref!” yell the fans. “They don’t even belong on this list.”
Personal Computer
The PC is the hardcore of the hardcore. Many players spend thousands of dollars to make their games play slightly better than their previous PC. If you see a console game, you know there is a superior game for the PC. Heck, if you know how to look, you can make a PC that is somewhat better than a console, at the same price. I actually did that with one of my PC’s, and it lasted for years.
Steam is basically how you play PC games, but Microsoft is trying to sneak in somehow from time to time. You have cloud saves, graphical controls, and can hook up whatever controller you want.
The complaints are that there is a lot of unworthy games for the PC. Some kid learned how to make a game using tutorials for Unity, and released his broken game for all to scream at. You will find games for sale coming at you every day on Steam, and then disappear, having no idea if the company made money or if it was worth buying.
Vice versa, you buy a lot of games for your Steam account, but never play them. It was on sale some time, and you bought it for cheap then. After a few years, you have hundreds of unplayed games with no chance of actually playing them all.
If your computer doesn’t quite meet the standards for a game, it can run slow or not at all. There won’t be a warning for this, just a stutter and a stop as the opening screen shows up.
Perhaps the worst is some of the console ports are poor. The company decided that the console is better, so even though better graphics and abilities are available, they are not released. You will get odd controls, or characters that don’t work well.
“I know this is sort of a running joke amongst steam users, but this is starting to become a problem for me.
My Steam collection is sitting pretty at about 80 games (if you include what's in the inventory). However, because of indie bundles and sales, I've been buying a lot of games on whim - a highly rated $5 game here, a $15 indie bundle there, etc, since I was never used to having access to so many games for such low cost.
However, I'm now reaching a point where I own games I've never played. Even worse, I don't even know the genre of some of these.
Now I know I'm not the only one out there who has this kind of problem - my library is tiny compared to some of you fellows out there who've been around longer than me. So to you all I ask: how do you handle having so many games? How do you determine which to play first when you have multiple unplayed games?”
Then we have games that are badly made for PC. Watch Dogs for the console was considered a sight to behold, but the PC was promised to be great. It turned out to look about the same as the consoles. The reason why was the company specifically stopped any graphical betterments on its own end. Modders went in and fixed that quickly. They gave long explanations on how to fix the problems, without the permission of the company.
With the ability to download the game without permission, mod it, and release a superior version the game company is actually scared to work on PC. Kotaku has a long article on why people pirate games. The ending has a swipe at Nintendo as well. My personal favorite quote is this one.
“After reading terrible things about Phil Fish (yes him again) I somehow decided he didn’t deserve money and torrented Fez.”
“Come on Ref!” they yell, “PC is expensive and difficult to design for!”
Arcade
Most gamers don’t realize that Arcades are still around. They remember an era of time when they went to arcades, and only look for that. It would surprise them to know that arcade companies are not only still around, but doing well. Sega still makes arcade games. Squaresoft has some amazing games. The guy who made Robotron 2084 is not only still around, but his crew are all game makers from different eras, making really fun games.
There are ways now to save your place in a game, or play card games with one. It can blow minds how advanced and cool things have gotten. Some people have said the future of VR is arcades, because the cost won’t bother them as much.
The biggest complaint is that arcades don’t exist. The common story is that they died off in the early 00’s and no one goes to them anymore. Even if you see a new arcade, you want to play the old school memories fill your mind.
Also, the portability of the games means you would have to carry around a several hundred pound machine to play. They are not easy to fit into a back pocket. Not only that, the game takes work to maintain.
If you want long time immersive, then arcades would be terrible. They can go immersive, but it would be for a short amount of time, because the arcade owner makes money off of amount of plays.
An arcade owner got so tired of the different myths he has heard, he wrote a book about modern arcades. It is the best ethnography on modern arcade culture, and how it works from a business point of view. He runs an arcade in Utah, and has written several times about how his business seems to be doing fine, but everyone thinks it is a dinosaur.
“Having grown up in San Francisco, I watched arcades slowly begin their disappearing act in the late 1990s. Perhaps the most painful arcade decline I've watched was that of the Airtight Garage in the Sony Metreon: when the shopping center opened, it contained an impressive video arcade featuring a hefty number of classic games alongside newer machines, and was entirely themed around the sci-fi comics of legendary artist Moebius. However, as the center declined in popularity, the classic games were shoved off into a small corner and the Moebius themes and souvenir store eventually disappeared. The arcade was shut down last year and then reopened as a far less impressive operation called "Tilt" that rarely seems to have more than a few players in it at any one time. As sad as it was to watch, it was hard to justify going downtown just to play games that sometimes cost more than $2 a pop when renting a better title from Blockbuster would only cost $5.”
For arcade owners this is the biggest problem. They are making money, but journalists truly believe the arcade is dead, or somehow dying. The Journalists then tell readers not to worry about that place, its dying.
“Come on Ref!” they yell, “the arcade is dying, just pull it out of the game entirely.”
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