Various video game stuff not deserving its own thread

[rusty_shackleford]

need a game like postal 2 but set in japan and dedicated to destroying japanese stuff

You're in luck.

They ****** out

[Tangerine]

My brother bought battlefield 6 on his steam account, so I wanted to try it out and the menu is an absolute catastrophy. It's just a Netflix menu, what happened to UI design in general? It took me 5 minutes just to find conquest so I can play it.

UI designers are ******* who take too much inspiration from mobile slop and IKEA.

[Tweed]

Tessera, a mentally ill modder who was pretty e-famous two decades ago, has apparently died and his brother has spent the past few weeks grave dancing on his dead forum http://www.tessmage.com/forum/index.php?board=74.0

I loaded the box of ashes into a bag on my 2009 Harley Low Rider, and I rode them to her place. The box of ashes didn't weigh much, mostly because 135 of Tessera's 140 pounds was his huge bloated ego. Once there, at my mother's house, the package was taken and placed on an upper shelf in a hallway coat closet. Tessera sits there, in the dark, among the dust bunnies and winter hats and gloves. He's been sort of quiet lately and doesn't speak much, for once.

[rusty_shackleford]

the UI designers for the latest god of bore did a GDC talk and they claimed to have put over 100 man-years into designing the UI(or something silly) and it looks like this

[Breathe]

Found a pretty cool site with lots of links to free media sites. Not sure if it's been posted here before. I've linked the gaming section but there are many others on the side panel.

Free Media Heck Yeah

[RangerBoo]

>Myles looks very stereotypically Jewish.
>VA name is David Goldstein (I am not kidding)
>Myles manages things called "Golems"
They are boasting at this point.

[Vergil]

>Myles looks very stereotypically Jewish.
>VA name is David Goldstein (I am not kidding)
>Myles manages things called "Golems"
They are boasting at this point.

[Finarfin]

[Irenaeus]

Looks pretty cool in all honesty. Don't know it it's actually good or even complete, but it looks good at first glance. This is how games should strive to look (minor nitpick, Atari/8-bit squares for blood effects - not a fan) and if well designed/programed/tested, be made. Glad to see small companies trying (and maybe suceeding?) to release good games. Hope it's not a bait and switch and you meet a surly niggress in level 2 or something equally woke.

[Finarfin]

Looks pretty cool in all honesty. Don't know it it's actually good or even complete, but it looks good at first glance. This is how games should strive to look (minor nitpick, Atari/8-bit squares for blood effects - not a fan) and if well designed/programed/tested, be made. Glad to see small companies trying (and maybe suceeding?) to release good games. Hope it's not a bait and switch and you meet a surly niggress in level 2 or something equally woke.

[Acrux]

The only post on the Steam forum is someone asking if there will be romance...

[rusty_shackleford]

The only post on the Steam forum is someone asking if there will be romance...

you could make a thread here for it
(in the arr-peg section)

[logincrash]

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

[Manny V]

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

Idk if there's anything you NEED to have thralls for, but they generally just speed up and automate crafting stuff and base ****

They can also be pretty handy as companions to fight alongside you/haul ****, and there's the dancer ******* that remove corruption, which is a health debuff you get from some areas and dungeons n ****

If it's a moral issue of enslaving people, just nab the cannibal ******* from the desert, it's what me and my boyz did, made a proper ****** plantation

[rusty_shackleford]

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

Idk if there's anything you NEED to have thralls for, but they generally just speed up and automate crafting stuff and base ****

They can also be pretty handy as companions to fight alongside you/haul ****, and there's the dancer ******* that remove corruption, which is a health debuff you get from some areas and dungeons n ****

If it's a moral issue of enslaving people, just nab the cannibal ******* from the desert, it's what me and my boyz did, made a proper ****** plantation

my adventures of playing conan exiles where nobody showed up and I played alone
viewtopic.php?t=345-rpghq-conan-exiles-server

negro slave being dragged up my lift by ****, no idea how the game journos let this game go under the radar

[Manny V]

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

A question for any of you resident Conanheads. Is it possible to play Conan Exile without enslaving thralls? I can't be ****** having to tame pets. I just wanna explore and build solo.

Idk if there's anything you NEED to have thralls for, but they generally just speed up and automate crafting stuff and base ****

They can also be pretty handy as companions to fight alongside you/haul ****, and there's the dancer ******* that remove corruption, which is a health debuff you get from some areas and dungeons n ****

If it's a moral issue of enslaving people, just nab the cannibal ******* from the desert, it's what me and my boyz did, made a proper ****** plantation

my adventures of playing conan exiles where nobody showed up and I played alone
viewtopic.php?t=345-rpghq-conan-exiles-server

negro slave being dragged up my lift by ****, no idea how the game journos let this game go under the radar

me and my mate often went on 'slave raids' to the south nabbing the Darfari ******, although he intended on yoinking only women, namely "Kushite Kweenz" as we'd call em

[TND]

I bet none of you was even aware this existed, yes that is a remaster of the first space marine game.

[logincrash]

Wanted to play Dying Light 2. Installed it. Some ******* weird bug where the audio sounds muted like you're underwater. Can't be ****** to do ******* troubleshooting. Uninstalled.
Fine, will replay Dying Light 1. It's better anyway. Installed it. Some ******* weird bug where there's an incredibly distracting shadow on the horizon that moves with your camera. Can't be ****** to do ******* troubleshooting. Uninstalled.
Fine, I'll replay Shadow of Mordor. All I'm looking for is play-and-podcast slop anyway. Installed it. Played for a couple of hours. Tried to launch it again later and Steam does this thing where it tries launching it, says "Synchronizing cloud saves" when my cloud saves are disabled and then exits the game to try again and again and again and again. Can't be ****** to do ******* troubleshooting. Uninstalled.
Pardon my French, but what the **** is going on? I just wanna get my game on, not fiddle with system settings and **** around with .ini files.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

One of Square Enix's shareholders have published a 100 page doc about their complaints with how the company is run. Most of this is stuff we already knew from earlier shareholder reports or deduced ourselves, and also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything, but there are a few interesting tidbits that I haven't seen pointed out before.

► summary

Square Enix revenue is falling across the board, both in high production value HD games and in cheaper mobile and handheld games.

Compared to competitors like EA, Koei, Bandai Namco, etc, Square Enix is the only one experiencing negative revenue growth. Profit margin is half of its competitors.

About 25% of SE's revenue was mobile games, 20% HD games, 20% MMOs (FF11, DQ11, FF14), 20% amusement, and the rest is miscellaneous publishing and licensing.

The MMO section has far and away the highest profit margin at 39%, followed closely by the publishing and licensing divisions. The profit margins for mobile games is low at 11%, and an abysmal 4% for HD games.





The slides claim that the issues for the decline in revenue are:

Mobile games: Dragon Quest Walk isn't making as much money anymore. And there isn't as much merch and licensing deals going on as there could be.

HD games: issues across the board. Quality of the games, marketing, ailing franchises, etc.


Reasons for the shrinking profit margins:

Mobile games: Administrative costs too high, operating costs too high, excessive platform fees (ie 30% Apple store cut).

HD games: development costs too high, marketing too high, wages too high, administrative costs too high


Criticisms of SE's medium term plans

- Focus on reboots and sequels rather than new flagship games. Aside from FF7R part 3, DQ12, and KH4, there is nothing interesting on the horizon for the next three years. SE has not demonstrated that they will have anything interesting on the horizon past that.

- SE isn't showing KPIs or promising to use them to identify problems and improve. Competitor companies like CAPCOM show more granular KPIs in their reports. It makes it more difficult to assess what is going on at SE.
- SE has not explained why they are keeping these core non gaming businesses around like publishing, or what their plans are to develop it.
- SE hasn't explained why they missed the optimal window of opportunity to buy back shares.
- SE hasn't explained why their revenue was falling and profit margins were shrinking. SE's report says stuff such as "unable to create hit titles" but doesn't specify how many games were launched, what they were using to qualify a hit and how many games fell short of that, metrics like MAUs, etc. Doesn't specify if the KPI shortfalls were because of bad planning in preproduction and development or due to issues during operations.


HD games

- SE's report says that revenue fell in part due to cannibalization but then does not elaborate on what that means.
- SE is not allocating enough money to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Competitors allocate significantly more resources to their core franchises.
- SE games are limited to certain platforms (ie FF16 being a PS5 exclusive, when PlayStation had become extremely unpopular in Japan and most people globally did not buy PS5s. In an age when Switch is dominant and Japan, and globally PC gaming and mobile has taken off). Competitors have their games available on more platforms.
- Recent major releases have upsetted fans. FF16 being action combat, Uematsu's genre variety and melodic synths being replaced by generic bombastic movie orchestra. DQ3 remake being bad.
- New IPs like Forspoken, Babylon's Fall, and Marvel's Avengers have been harshly criticized.
- ROI on SE's advertising is abysmal compared to competitors.


Mobile games

- Most of SE's mobile game revenue was from Dragon Quest Walk (60%, everything else is a combined 40%), but DQW is past its peak and SE has presented no plans to reverse it or to release a new hit mobile game to replace it.
- Most of SE's mobile game revenue relied exclusively on the saturated Japanese mobile game market. Meanwhile, mobile games have been taking off overseas (namely Genshin and HSR in China) but SE hasn't done anything about it.
- Overseas awareness of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest is higher than your average competing RPG, but SE isn't doing anything to capitalize on this.
- Cross media franchises rely on timely film adaptations. Ie the Pokemon anime coming out within a year of the games and then new seasons and movies being coordinated with new game releases. The Mario and Sonic movies. Etc. 40% of cross media franchise revenue comes from movies, 25% from music, 20% from anime, 15% from manga and novels. But SE isn't doing anything about this besides FF14 OST albums and concerts.


Costs

SE's low profit margins are due to high costs across all categories (development costs, wages, advertising, other costs).

SE's development costs for HD games is higher than its peers. The FF7 Remake series is primarily responsible for this. Forspoken, FF16, etc, were below average cost for RPGs.

SE has the largest write offs amongst its peers, twice as much as the next highest company SEGA.




SE's advertising costs are higher than its competitors. Marketing ROI significantly lags behind competitors. Forspoken is the primary offender here, costing the most amount to advertise compared to how many units it sold.




SG&A expenses (sales personnel costs, both in Japan and overseas) are extremely high compared to competitors. Mainly sales staff for the HD games. Mainly due to rent expenses/cost of living where these sales personnel are located. (I suppose the insinuation from the makers of the slides is that SE should lay off their Tokyo or LA and hire people from... where? Hokkaido? The Philippines? Tennessee?)





Mobile games

Mobile game profit margins are abysmal compared to competitors (ie Konami and Nintendo).

Mobile game costs are higher than competitors. The main offender here is that SE's platform fees are nearly double than that of their competitors. This is because SE relies on external platforms (ie IOS store) rather than their own proprietary games stores for mobile games (ie KONAMI mobile games app store).

The overwhelming vast majority of Square's mobile games fail to recoup their initial development costs and then cumulative operating costs. DQ Tact, FF7 Ever Crisis, and Octopath CotC turned a profit albeit not that amazing, as in 83% maximum profit. Nothing that's an amazing hit like FGO or GBF or Uma Musume. Everything else was a bomb and a big one, with most being at least -258%, a lot in the -500% range, and some even in the -800% range.




SE's franchises do not have synergy. People buy Final Fantasy games, and only buy Final Fantasy games. They don't buy SE's other stuff like Dragon Quest or Forspoken or Marvel's Avengers. Only FF appeals to them. Unlike other companies like Mihoyo, where people don't just spend on Genshin, but wind up spending on Mihoyo's other franchises like Honkai Star Rail or Zenless Zone Zero.

SE's competitors also have synergies such as arcade machines. Ie, spending money to develop one game that is not only sold for console but also is sold to arcades as a cabinet machine, like Tekken which you can buy on Steam or go to an arcade and play. 2 for the price of 1. SE does not do this.

SE is valued significantly lower than its competitors like Konami, EA, etc.

Since SE acquired an amusement division, it has not grown.

SE's publishing business is being strangled in Japan's dying book industry, and SE is not growing it overseas. The slides recommend that SE needs to share books and information with their overseas offices/subsidiaries, get them to begin translation, approach American booksellers, advertise as anime conventions or do internet ads, etc. However, SE does not take the initiative in getting their stuff overseas. SE localizations are consistently poor. Chapters are not uploaded fast online like what competitors are doing. There aren't synergies with game development and publishing besides strategy guides. It is difficult for lucrative game franchises to originate from the publishing department because games typically sell for their gameplay, which IPs originated from novels do not have. Adapting books into games is also difficult because of the creative control that the author has, but game development means that stuff has to change or be experimented with a lot before settling into a final form. It's hard to have someone from outside of the dev team dictate what has to be rigid. A lot of the novel stories and settings are not suitable for use as a game.

PDF download rehosted on the vault

[Stack of Turtles]

also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything

Why do you think a shareholder would love to gut everything?

[Irenaeus]

40% operating margin in MMOs? Insanity

[rusty_shackleford]

Doesn't most of their money come from FF14 or something?

[Irenaeus]

I'd lol if it wasn't sad

[stormvermin]

I bet none of you was even aware this existed, yes that is a remaster of the first space marine game.

I was aware and I wish I wasn't. It's a cash grab riding on the coattails of SM2, though judging based off of the feedback, it didn't do so hot. Thankfully they didn't delist the original.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything

Why do you think a shareholder would love to gut everything?

They would want to cut costs as much as possible to get the most amount of ROI. It seems there is an insinuation that he wants the marketing staff in Tokyo and LA to get laid off and for the market department to be rehired elsewhere in areas with lower cost of living, but he doesn't specify where or who these people would be or how good they would be. There are also a few headscratching points, such as wanting Square to get into doing arcade cabinets. Konami has a big pachinko business but I don't think that means every videogame company has to get into that too. I have also seen some questions about the creator of the slides and what his agenda might be.

Doesn't most of their money come from FF14 or something?

Yes. FF11 singlehandedly kept Square Enix afloat in the 2000s and early 2010s when Square wasn't pumping much else of worth out, and then FF14 took over that role in the mid 2010s. A common joke is that most of that money is not reinvested back into making FF14 better but is instead used to subsidize all of these other ill fated projects that flop or are cancelled.

[Stack of Turtles]

also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything

Why do you think a shareholder would love to gut everything?

They would want to cut costs as much as possible to get the most amount of ROI. It seems there is an insinuation that he wants the marketing staff in Tokyo and LA to get laid off and for the market department to be rehired elsewhere in areas with lower cost of living, but he doesn't specify where or who these people would be or how good they would be. There are also a few headscratching points, such as wanting Square to get into doing arcade cabinets. Konami has a big pachinko business but I don't think that means every videogame company has to get into that too. I have also seen some questions about the creator of the slides and what his agenda might be.

Most shareholders don't actually want this, though. Generally, shareholders want to make money by growing the company, although not all of them know very well how to do it. "Cutting costs as much as possible" is something you do when a company's already tanking as a last-ditch effort. When I buy shares in a company, I intend for it to grow and pay me dividends, and I vote my proxy according to what I think will benefit the company most.

[rusty_shackleford]

FF11 regularly hits max server load and they undid sunsetting it iirc, would be a great time to modernize it for PC controls if they weren't ********

[rusty_shackleford]

FF11 regularly hits max server load and they undid sunsetting it iirc, would be a great time to modernize it for PC controls if they weren't ********

2 months ago
https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy- ... opulation/

Then again, SE touching it would probably just ruin it. A lot of these side projects ignored by big publishers tend to get ****** when the publisher notices it's doing well under new leadership and/or hands-off.

[Acrux]

also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything

Why do you think a shareholder would love to gut everything?

Too much listening to reddit types who don't understand investment.

[Stack of Turtles]

also this doc was written from the perspective of a shareholder who ofcourse would love to gut everything

Why do you think a shareholder would love to gut everything?

Too much listening to reddit types who don't understand investment.

It's depressing