Farewell Konami *Snake salute*

[Jason]

So is it going to be as bad as all that? Maybe. Hard to say. It could be possible that there's still going to be a division of Konami that will focus on console stuff... that would be fine I suppose.

Normally I agree with most all that James here has to say in this videos but I gotta say, especially after our conversation about crowd funding, I really don't like the idea of the publishers coming directly to people to get the money to make the game. You can see more of my reasoning for this at the page there in that link but I will say if a company (Konami, Capcom, whoever) does go to crowd funding to get the money for a game... makes waaaaaaaay more than the goal is set for and then still demands full retail for the game (and probably a digital copy only if we're being honest with ourselves), I will walk away from that publisher faster than I did SquareEnix.

If you need $6 million to make a game (big time title here), and raise $30 million and still want people to pay $50+ for your game and not give them a physical copy of it... then I'm sorry... you're doing business right but the gaming business wrong and I cannot and will not support that.

[JadePharaoh]

The publishers seem to be losing their power in the gaming market. Rather than going to a publisher to pitch a game and have them back the project, the developers have cut out that middle man and are going right to the fans to back it instead. It seems to be working well for them; they don't have to pay the publisher, nor potentially give up the rights to their product for it. It does seem that the days of the big AAA publishers, the Konamis, the Capcoms, the Square-Enixs, having a vice-grip hold on developers seem to be coming to an end. The majority of their developers, their Inafunes, Igarashis, and Kojimas, have all left. All of them are going into mobile phones to try and grab that Candy Crush cash. The siren's song of Microtransations is too enthralling to resist. Hell, even Nintendo hasn't been immune. They had said for years that they weren't gonna do DLC; now most of their major games have them; they even have a Candy Crush clone (Pokemon Shuffle) for the 3DS with the 'free-to-play' model.

Jason, most KickStarters I've backed will give you a copy of the game when it comes out when you've pledged X amount; the tiers for that are usually FAR less than what it would retail for, so I feel they're usually pretty good in that regard.

[Jason]

I understand that if you donate $20 you get a copy of the game... or whatever... but if you've raised 18 times what your goal was to make the game... and you still want to sell it to everyone else for $50 that's where I have a problem.

[JadePharaoh]

What would be a good way to go about it then? It wouldn't make much sense for the devs to give the game away to the people that didn't back it; that doesn't give much incentive to donate then. And if they did that, then they WOULD be completely dependent on crowdfunding, as opposed to letting the sales of the game go toward their next project.

[Jason]

Like I said in that other post... if your funding goal is X and you make 4X you really don't have much incentive to make the best product you can after that... plus you've already made all the money you were going to selling the game at that point without actually having made the game.

That's why I think those things should be capped. If your goal is X you can raise 1.15X. You can run your kick starter or whatever for 90 days and after that you have to wait a preset amount of time before you can run another one.

That keeps the system from being abused and things like that egg salad sandwich or whatever it was from happening again.

I'm not against crowd funding, but I think there's a lot of flaws with it that should have been addressed before it got to the point it's reached.

[MephistoZX]

Very interesting article (from Polygon, of all places) about how the backing for Bloodstained was only 10% of what the actual budget for the game will be. Iga already secured 90% of the cost, he just needed to show "interest" from gamers.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/12/8592901...nia-reboot

Best Quote:
"But it's important to realize what's happening. Kickstarter is, in this case, being used by a developer and investors to ensure interest from the most dedicated fans while managing inventory and mitigating risk."

Also, I had to look up where my magic avatar came from. Never heard of Blue Exorcist.

[Jason]

Me either. I just typed in "Mephisto" and went with that one.

[JadePharaoh]

Very interesting. It does make a lot of sense, though. Presumably, Konami shifted the Castlevania series to the God of War-style hack-n-slash game because that's the type of game that's popular at the time. One of the reasons given for the MM Legends 3 cancellation was a perceived lack of interest from fans. The KickStarter scene is perhaps a way for them to give people the chance to literally put their money where their mouth is. Is it perfect? Probably not, for reasons Jason has already pointed out. But it's a way to reach a lot of people in a short amount of time.

[Ragnatz]

As someone who worked for a Japanese developer/publisher, all I can say is that this feels very typical of their style: "We're falling behind the curve, time to play catch up by doing what other companies are doing instead of doing what we do best."

[JadePharaoh]

Yep, everyone has been jumping on the bandwagons; as I said, Nintendo said for the longest time that they weren't gonna do DLC, now all of their AAA titles have it. Now the three kings among third-party development in the day - Capcom, Konami, Square - are now focusing on mobile gaming. As Ragnatz says, they're following the trend of what where they think the market demand is. I guess time will tell as to whether they find their audience, or if they come back to what made them so great to begin with.

Gaijin Goombah has a lot of great videos all about gamer culture. Here's one of his pertaining to the issue at hand: