Why no one’s funding it
I asked why no one would invest money on this idea, then I played it and my question was answered in short order.
Looking through Kickstarter, I see a refrain come around over and over, that it’s due to simple publisher/venture capitalist stupidity that a given project isn’t already being made. That every single project on there is an obvious moneymaker, especially the successful projects, and that there’s no possible reason other than sheer dogged stupidity that money isn’t being sunk into it.
That seems pretty immediately wrong, though, just on the face of it. I’m not going to say that rich people are smart by definition – I’ve met some staggeringly dumb people with tons of money, for example – but I will say that most successful venture capitalists and publishers don’t stay that way because they’re not good at picking what they fund. If they’re leaving money on the table, there has to be a reason for it.
Fortunately, several of these reasons are pretty obvious to me just at a glance, and I’m not even an investor. So why is it that no one is funding a given game outside of Kickstarter?
The myth of the killer app
I’m pretty sure this was meant to be a killer app at some point and I’m absolutely certain it didn’t kill much of anything.
Killer apps don’t exist.
Some terminology for the uninitiated – a “killer app” is a game for a specific platform that’s so good, you just have to have it. It’s one of the big things that console exclusives are made of, games that are really awesome but just can’t be bought unless you’re willing to shell out for a Wii or a PS4 or a Macintosh or whatever. And you’ve probably heard of several; games like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog often get brought up as examples of the first killer apps.
Only they don’t actually exist. The concept and terminology has been around for a long time, usually in concert with gaming platforms, and they just don’t exist in the way that writers and even companies want to pretend they do. Absolutely no one is going to buy a $300 piece of hardware for a game. Ever. It doesn’t exist and we have to stop pretending it does.
The paid mod debate we never had
Here we go with an important point of discussion we’ll never actually discuss.
According to pretty much anyone you ask, Valve recently made one boneheaded move and one reasonable and understandable move. The question is which one came first and which one came second, and that speaks to something interesting going on underneath.
Not oh-so-long ago, Steam opened up the option for paid mods via the Steam Workshop. There were two camps involved – one that was convinced this was utter brilliance and another that was certain it was the worst thing ever. It didn’t matter in the long run, of course, as not even a full week later Valve announced that it was pulling the test program, offering refunds to those who paid, and so forth.
By itself I find this all kind of uninteresting. I don’t have a horse in this race. What fascinates me is the fact that both sides in this particular tempest in a teapot have very firm ideas about which side of the debate is the side of the angels, and the very idea that there is an opposite side seems laughable to them.
We remember the worst examples
Everyone just talks about the time that killing unicorns served as a metaphor for man’s inability to recognize beauty, not all those times it was awesome.
Every time someone starts in on another rant about how terrible cutscenes are in video games, I think of two games. I think of Half-Life 2, and I think of Final Fantasy VI.
When I played Final Fantasy VI, it was early in my career of playing console RPGs, and I would be lying if I claimed it didn’t have a profound effect upon me as a person. Sure, the cutscenes contained therein were not the elaborate CGI sequences that would come in later games, but for the first time in my life I found myself feeling affection for the characters on the screen in ways I hadn’t thought possible. I remember feeling Celes’ pain in a musical sequence speaking of a love that she hadn’t ever experienced, Terra’s fear at being nothing more than a weapon, the slow pan into the town of Narshe for the first time.
I also remember Half-Life 2‘s complete lack of cutscenes, and how they made the game feel at once less interactive and less narratively linked. Sure, I could move Gordon around during the not-technically-cutscenes, but I couldn’t interact with anything. I couldn’t affect change. I was talked at, not to, and in response I was a mute. And it strikes me, not for the first time, that when we talk about these things we’re only really internalizing the worst parts, not the whole thing.
Hard Project: Metal Gear Solid
The outrage over a change in voice actors might not be entirely justified, but it did sort of speak to one of the few reliable islands in the franchise.
It’s kind of hard to cut through the web of what’s actually going on with Hideo Kojima and Konami at this point, because it’s filled with statements, counter-statements, and at one point I think a press conference was held that turned into an unskippable 40-minute cutscene that lost narrative coherency five minutes in. It seems likely that the man himself is no longer with the company, but maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t; who knows, and does it matter?
The answer to that one is both yes and not really at the same time, because we can be sure that new Metal Gear games will still be coming out and we can be sure that they will be a mixed bag at best. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, that was always going to be the case. Making a new game in that franchise is a hard project for a variety of reasons, and it’s only going to get harder.
Recent Work
- Brian Holinka is leaving World of Warcraft to join Greg Street at an unnamed studio
- Wisdom of Nym: Spoiler-free thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV patch 6.4’s content
- The Daily Grind: How much tolerance do you have for unfulfilled MMO promises?
- WRUP: Here are some true facts about Rome I guess what do you people want to see here edition
- Betawatch: Blue Protocol delays global launch to next year
- WoW Factor: Blizzard’s week of bad decisions
- Richard Garriott’s NFT-based MMO, Iron & Magic, appears to have vanished already
- Final Fantasy XI finishes the Voracious Resurgence with this week’s patch
- Vague Patch Notes: Why do people remember an MMO past that didn’t exist?
- The Daily Grind: What’s the idea challenge level for you for endgame content in an MMO?
Eliot Lefebvre 