TheGamer recently spoke with lead editor Josh Malone and senior translator Dan Sunstrum about their work localising the Like a Dragon series at Sega.
Here is a look at the new Joker Trailer. Warner Bros. Games today released a new MultiVersus trailer revealing the first look at gameplay for The Joker, who will join the roster as a playable character when the upcoming free-to-play platform fighter videogame launches on May 28th.
PlayStation names its successors to Jim Ryan
I predicted it would be Hermen Hulst as the new CEO, I never predicted there would be another…
Hulst will likely Host the PlayStation press event and hopefully there will be a positive energy at this new beginning for the division. I’m encouraged that both he and Hideaki Nishino reference the future so it sounds like Sony has a plan.
This is a really nice selection to me because Hulst is an actual game developer and has been doing so for decades. A developer in charge of making games. Not bad.
Plus the separation of responsibility is interesting and a nice way of handling an incredibly complex role.
PS studios has zero output under Hulst.
Only remasters and PC ports
Dude even managed to kill Naughty Dog
Joint venture could be very tricky. They need to be on the exact same page on things. It's two guys calling shots.
We know Herman, but we dont know the other guy or his motives/agendas. Obviously it's to make money but how he'll go about it we'll see soon enough.
Good luck to them and I hope they do great jobs. Let's see the games. Really hoping that rumored PlayStation Showcase is coming up soon.
Well...I do like Herman better than Jim I guess. We'll see how this duo does in the future.
Wishing them the best of luck in these hard times.
Let's hope they can find the perfect balance between profitability for Sony and the best value and INTERESTS for the gamers.
I believe it's a good thing to have more power back in the hands of Japanese headquarter.
Yes it is me. They banned me from commenting!
I posted too many positive things about Xbox
Hulst is going to bring all games to Steam day 1 and kill PlayStation!
In a town hall that took place on Monday, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu reportedly confirmed imminent layoffs in the U.S. and Europe.
Sad but true. It's the consequence of a shift in player habits, massive overhead, and out of control budgets across the industry.
What did NA and EU did anyways? Just translate or something? I would say it might help them get back to there roots but DK.
Actually, you are correct they play a hand in localization especially in Europe with the many languages. That and marketing.
They should of never of made those exclusive deals with Sony. If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game and would mostly likely would not of lead to layoffs.
Exclusive games to any platform is not only anti gamer but they are toxic to the gaming industry. All games made by Sony and other companies should be made multi platform.
20-30 million. Right. SE must be sleeping on Japanese CoD right here.
Battle
lol are you serious? Let’s see
First game is on PC and so will the rest
Switch can’t run FF remakes
Xbox again I ask are you serious? Xbox game sales accounts for such little piece of the pie in overall gaming that there are publishers doubting if they could recover their development and porting costs for Xbox versions
The real issue here is square enix just can’t stop releasing 1-2 really bad AAA games on year basis
Babylon's Fall
Left alive
Marvel avengers
For spoken
Lol I love how the "Publishers can sell tons of copies of JRPGs on Xbox" myth won't die. The failure of exclusive JRPGs on 360 (by far the most popular Xbox) couldn't kill it. The low Xbox sales of FF games that launched on Xbox and PlayStation at the same time couldn't kill it. The fact that Gamepass has the few players on Xbox who actually play JRPGs conditioned to expect them for free can't kill it.
Are you insane? Final Fantasy has historically not really sold close to those numbers, those are God of War and Spider-Man numbers dude. Final Fantasy 15 sold 5 million at launch, on both PS4 and Xbox One and had the benefit of releasing three years into the console lifecycle with no cross gen releases slowing the adoption rates. It sold a lifetime of ten million copies. Yet, 80% of sales were on PS4 and only 20% on Xbox One.
Are you going to seriously sit there and tell us the Game Pass crowd are going to double the sales of these games?
Put your mind onto the real problems. It isn't exclusivity. It's out of control budgets, over estimated and unrealistic sales expectations, bloated game development and poor management.
The budgets for Final Fantasy 16 and Remake and Rebirth far exceed Final Fantasy 15, exponentially so, yet did the audience grow exponentially? No.
Don't make this about something it's not, and don't fall for the crap from publishers that triple A games are unsustainable. The next stop on the station is games need to be more expensive and we need more monetisation methods like adverts in games. The problem is with publishers, not us.
It's like everyone just wants to hate on it. Fact of the matter is the install base for ps5 just isn't that big compared to ps4. Right now. I've read double packs weren't counted(remake, rebirth pack) I'm not sure if it's true, and then some are just waiting for the whole trilogy to be done. I know someone doing that.
"If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game"
Lmao.
I like how a lot of people are blaming the Sony exclusive deals. Yet in the last 4 years they have released about 50 games. 70% of them being multiplatform, 20% being Nintendo Exclusives and about 10% PlayStation Exclusives yet lets all blame the Sony deals lol.
Exactly. Where my dragon quest spinoff that only Nintendo do keeps getting. Stop crying about Sony. Hey Xbox players. Remember last remnant, squares exclusive Xbox 360 game Ms paid for, you guys were sht at supporting that. Same with lost odyssey, blue dragon, and infinite undiscovery. That's why Japanese devs don't wanna develop for it.
You mean pc
Wouldn't have sold sht on Xbox, and the switch couldn't hang
Xbox accounted for 9 percent of ff15 sales. Lol. Xbox ain't doing sht
To put it into perspective, take a studio like Black Box who went through a spell of churning out half decent Need for Speed games annually.
Need for Speed: Underground - 15 million+
Need for Speed: Underground 2 - 11 million+
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - 17.8 million
Need for Speed: Carbon - 15.6 million
Need for Speed: ProStreet - 10.9 million
Need for Speed: Undercover - 8.9 million
This was the norm for the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era.
A Need for Speed game now requires more employees, considerably more time than one year to develop and absolutely a whole load more capital to fund development, let alone the extra costs of developing Frostbite and adapting it to a racing game (if that's still a thing). And at the end of it, it will likely never sell anywhere near even the worst game in that list above.
In that same era, Rockstar Games (albeit, various Rockstar studios) released GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA, State of Emergency, Manhunt, The Warriors, Red Dead Revolver, three Midnight Club games and Bully. We're lucky if we even see a single game from them this generation.
In summary, committing to making a big AAA game now is barely worth it. Unless you are lucky enough to be sat on a mega IP like CoD or GTA, it's a huge gamble. Games simply take too long, require too many employees and cost too much. Unless AI or Unreal Engine can fix this and QUICK, the industry is going to be reduced to mobile-like experiences.
The gaming industry needs to learn just like Hollywood. You cannot sustain "more, more, more" indefinitely if your sales are not increasing in line with your costs. But no, every sequel needs to be three times the size of its predecessor, have twice as many staff, have monetisation systems and 100 hours of padded content and six year development cycles. But are these sequels ever twice as good?
Godzilla Minus One, on a poultry budget of $15 million, blew anything Disney has done out of the water since 2021 in terms of visual effects and created the best monster movie I've seen in my life.
Asobo made A Plague Tale Requiem for $25 million and its visuals, writing and quality rival games with ten times its budget.
Am I against big production values? No, God of War, The Last of Us, and so on justify their budgets and sell ridiculously well. But I am against unrealistic excess. If a game sells two million copies, tripling its budget isn't going to get you six million copies.
Square Enix is facing the reality that Final Fantasy sales are in decline and have been since FF15, yet they seem to be ramping up their development costs exponentially. It's hard to find facts but word seems to be FF15 had a budget of $50 to $100 million and FF16 had a budget of like $250 million plus. Same goes for FF7 remakes.
Yet other factors affected their market potential, like years of cross-gen releases slowing the PS5 adoption rate.
These lay offs will keep happening until publishers make their costs sustainable and stop trying to make it seem like triple A development is impossible or that we need more monetisation and higher priced games to account for their hubris.
Talk about a sound explanation instead of it didn't sell well because it releases at the same time as X game or it's because it's only digital.
I've been saying this for a long time, game budgets have ballooned out of control. We don't need better graphics, we need FUN GAMES that feel complete and satisfying to play. But publishers have a one-track mind, they've all been convinced that better graphics and bigger and more detailed worlds are required or people will pass on their games. This logic obviously doesn't apply to Nintendo which sells games in excess of 15 million copies, with out-dated visuals.
Publishers need to lower the budgets, and stop killing themselves off, its pure insanity.
I actually don't think it's because they're pushing graphics, I mean, these massive budget titles are not actually that much greater visually or technically than smaller games these days. The talent of the graphics artists matters an enormous amount. Take the movie scene with Disney, their budgets are twenty times that of smaller films like Godzilla Minus One or Monkey Man, and more than double larger productions like 1917, yet they're outclassed by these lesser movies.
The reasons for the development costs ballooning in my opinion, is far too many staff working on projects leading to inefficient production (i.e like what we heard about Starfield), forced monetisation systems which eat up development time and resources and push for engagement in the hope of an uptake with in-game purchases, bloated game design and world building which increases time required to playtest and code all the filler content, prolonged development periods and repeated delays where the quality doesn't come close to the time spent (see Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), mismanagement, excessive spend on advertising beyond what the title is reasonably expected to sell, lack of focus in game development.
Dead Space remains the best example I can ever use. The original sold a million copies and was a breakout success. Dead Space sold two million copies but EA was disappointed in its performance. They then lost their minds and ramped up again for Dead Space 3, with an unrealistic sales target of like 5 million to breakeven. Of course, it crashed and burned, because they forgot their original audience was between one and two million. Exponentially increased their budget, unrealistically increased their sales expectations, kept adding more and more costs and unnecessary excess until it became completely unsustainable.
No way FFXV had a budget to 80 to 100 million...that was probably it's marketing budget. FFXV has 3 versions. Versus 13, Nomura directed XV and after taking nomura off the project the rushed and downdraded final version of XV.
Those numbers come from a random message board.
https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...
Here's a message board speculating it had a budget of 600 million based on financial statements if this is the kind of accuracy were going for.
https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...
It's the implosion I keep talking about. Expectations and reality in the industry are no longer aligned. This will continue until some sort of market equilibrium is reached.
Agreed, this cannot continue and something has got to give. I miss the old days where development costs and time were managable and SquareSoft released hit after hit. Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7 to 9 released ONE year apart and all of them were critically acclaimed.
The facts are the time and money needed to make games has gone through the roof and we as gamers just aren't buying enough. These games are costing 100 of millions to make and even games rated highly are doing good to get 3 or 4 million in sales. Something has to give.
Raising prices has failed. Seeing games go from $89 CAD to $94 in some cases. I’m just not buying those games.
We all can see the days of square enix being 3rd party are coming to an end which is really sad because they have so many valuable IP’s only if they manage them properly.
Like I said before, it's not just Microsoft laying people off. It's happening throughout the industry.
Ms has come under fire because they have recently dropped so much money on studios and publishers. That's people's issue. That and the highest rated game they've released in years seeing its studio closed. That's why there's a difference.
Are we sure, and I mean super sure, fanboyism aside and the like that maybe Final Fantasy XVI and especially VII Rebirths sales weren’t at least a tad disappointing for them?
We keep fighting about it but if freaking VII, Square Enix’s Golden boy and it’s hype of us begging for a remake for almost 15-20 years didn’t set the world on fire like Square Enix wanted then what else can they give us product wise at this point high expectations and all.
I’m not saying it would have stopped this and everything would have fixed its self if they launched on more platforms since the industry seems like it’s imploding within itself at the minute but it could have given them a little leg room.
Maybe it’s time to admit, regarding your feelings on the games, and this has NO impact on the quality of the games, that XVI could have felt more FF like being more that a simplistic hack and slash game and VII’s remake should have just been a single, less ambitious game just telling the original story over reimagining it?
Even Kingdom Hearts III felt shallow, look at how convoluted it’s become and they are still doing that with all the Missing Link / Union X shit before Kingdom Hearts IV even comes out.
What’s new? The whole industry is in an upheaval and this isn’t the end of it. I really think the pandemic poisoned the industry as a whole. Big profits, everyone playing games during the pandemic. Now it’s back to normal and they’re trying to regain those pandemic numbers numbers. Our hobby hijacked by a bunch suits.
Fking word. It's fk up how they just raised the middle finger to ps4 players. I'm still peeved about this
This is not limited to any one company, the industry is in a major change, for better or worse. Game budget and time for development have skyrocketed, and the industry is trying to find it's balance again, it will level out, it's just a matter of when.
Restructuring come with layoff 90% of the time.