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Video Game Industry Thread: September's thread is done, go to the new one
Posts
http://kotaku.com/5842126/the-toysrus-2011-holiday-hot-toy-list-has-a-video-game-ringer
Edit: Damn you, I had somehow managed to forget the whole Deleter thing.
I worked at Electronic Arts for a time. And their main lobbies are filled with things that advertise the newest games. They also have various displays around the campus showing bits from their past. Some are fairly sizable (For example, in building 209 they have a beat up Ducati motorcycle that was used in conjunction with Road Rash), but most are similar to the picture in the article of the glass showcase with all the old games. And some are hidden away from visitors eyes in locations most outsiders simply won't see. Employee break areas mainly, but you'll also see lots of stuff where the people work.
You know what I didn't see in that photo essay? Where the employees work. I saw what looked like areas that they would show public visitors that included mostly references to the recent (and upcoming) work with minimal displays for acknowledging past efforts. It could've been any games studio that ever existed for a decent length of time.
The fact of the matter is that you and people like you are just pissed off because Rare isn't doing the kinds of things you liked from them in the past. Maybe it's because they're associated with MS, maybe it isn't. But you don't like what they're doing now and you've decided to voice your disgust by accusing them of intentionally ignoring their past.
That fact of the matter is that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about right now. You weren't on the tour, you didn't take the photos, you didn't write the article, and I'd even go so far as to doubt that you've ever even been to the Rare studios
What you're commenting on is a photo essay that is presenting what must be a small selection of pictures taken on a press junket used to promote Rare and their work on the next game. And you're doing it very poorly. Of the twenty-one published pictures, seven have anything to do with Kinect and at least half of those are for the new game they're promoting. And five of them are either directly or inferred to contain things related to their pre-Microsoft days. Maybe six depending on what the BAFTA in the shoes picture is for (or maybe eight Kinect pics by the same token).
But hey, what the hell would I know about anything? Rare sucks and Microsoft sucks for making Rare suck.
You're muckin' with a G!
edit: Hey MS I'm sure are happy now, their transforming Rare has worked out well for their pocketbooks. I don't hate MS, I do however mourn what they did to Rare.
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We're not pissed, we're depressed.
So when EA invites the press to demo, say, Mirror's Edge 2, they hide all references to Madden, etc and throw Mirror's Edge stuff all over their office?
I have my own example - I toured Blizzard's headquarters. There was art, statues, and all kinds of shit from ALL of their games. There was an Orc statue all the way back from 1994's WarCraft: Orcs and Humans. They had trailers/cutscenes from all of their games (including old ones) on the TVs in their lobby. There was even a poster for that stupid flash game they made that you could play while you waited in line for Blizzcon tickets. Did they showcase their latest stuff? Sure. But they didn't hide all traces of past work from public (well, press) view.
Agreed.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
Valve has been hittin' dem AYE ARE GEES pretty hard these days.
Whoa, awesome dude, you never told me about this! How long ago was it?
What the hell kind of counter is this? None of you even did the math on the pictures and you all made it seem like the whole thing all but ignored their past. You comment but you have no seeming ability to analyse what you see. I can't fault you for not having any perspective on what a games company might actually look like, but I can take issue with the reaction to a photo essay fluff piece mainly intended to promote the new game.
What they are doing is putting on a public fact that rightly promotes their current projects. They're a game company, not a museum. Your expectation for them is exceedingly high and never had a chance to be met to your satisfaction.
You're muckin' with a G!
April last year
http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=102
Did Rare? Because I still count five pictures related to pre-Microsoft content.
You're muckin' with a G!
...the whole thing DOES all but ignore the past. They went out of their way to photo anything non-Kinect Sports related, and the fact that what little they found was small or trophy related is pretty telling. Compared to how large and up-front the Kinect Sports stuff is. That's what my brain came up with when analyzing that.
So how do you explain Blizzard going out of their way to reference the past? I don't have expectations like that. I would have liked to see some non-small acknowledgement of the past, but hey.
Like I said, I posted this merely to point out that Rare is now "Kinect Sports or GTFO." You can read a lot into a company's philosophy by how they decorate their public areas. And no, I'm not kidding.
Either he's gonna lose his job within six months, or Infinity Ward will be shut down by Activision. I really hate being the one to say that, I don't hope it happens, but... there's no way Kotick is gonna let that attitude fly.
That's some pretty excellent PR double speak right there, Kotick would be proud of that level of pure bullshit.
It's bland but if you think about it, what choice do they have other than to stick to their guns and buckle down for the upcoming competition? I mean, I guess they could say, "We're going to vamp up / stream line our physical distribution process." Maybe they should.
Honestly, I've seen Kotick stick to the, "We want to be the best, we want everyone playing, etc" kind of rhetoric. The "we wanna make the game we want to make and play!" message isn't one he runs with.
Here is an important quote in the article. (It should be noted that the text of the article acts more as captions of the picture above it, rather than the text of an article with appropriately selected pictures.)
They were there for Kinect Sports 2. It should never come as any surprise that most of the pictures were going to be about that.
They had to go 'out of their way' to take pictures of everything else because if they don't, then people would demand to know why a visit to Rare didn't have anything to do with their past. And again, nearly a third of the pictures deal with this. The rest of the pictures, the largest group, is about what the buildings look like, a break area, and the surrounding countryside.
How do I explain Blizzard? They make WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. What the fuck else are you going to see? Blizzard has apparently decided to make their public areas contain lots of stuff from all the things people really like about them. So what? Does that mean Rare should make the lobby all about R.C. Pro-Am?
I can read just as much into the same thing you are. The public areas are about the present and future of the company. And this distresses you and others. The fact that you leapt to the conclusion of 'GTFO' is why you are bad at this kind of commentary. You are actively trying to say that Rare is doing poorly because they aren't devoted to focusing on the things they did more than a decade ago.
Your whole concept here is that you're upset because a press tour for a new game didn't devote massive space to the history of a company when you probably liked them better. This is not as reasonable a position as you might think.
You're muckin' with a G!
HEY, if Microsoft can turn the XBox division around to start making a profit, they can do the same with Bing!. Also, don't bring up the Zune. <.<
Yet they didn't just go to the rooms featuring Kinect Sports. They spent a lot of time in the public areas, like the cafeteria and lobby. And it was crammed with wall-to-wall Kinect Sports 2. They said this in the article.
Besides, saying that they had to "go out of their way" to take pictures of stuff that ISN'T Kinect Sports stuff heavily implies that Rare is, as we're asserting, all about Kinect Sports.
And even though a third of the pictures had non-Kinect Sports stuff, they were all tiny and insubstantial. You told me to analyze, so I did.
As far as Blizzard goes... yes, they have a bunch of different games. That's because they've decided to make their public face all about their rich history of games. Rare has chosen to make their public face nothing but Kinect Sports 2. Even though, as you said about Blizzard, Rare has made a lot more stuff that people like about them.
Besides... when did I say they were doing "poorly?" I said it depresses me, because it shows that the company isn't the same as it once was and isn't even giving small thought at their past. I didn't say anything about Kinect Sports 2 going badly.
I guess the bigger question is: why does this assertion upset you so much? It apparently does, since you're making such strongly negative and knee-jerk comments about my mental capacity. What does "I'm bad at this type of commentary" even mean?
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
I assumed they were dead.
Right, and Rare made Battletoads, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Conker, Banjo Kazooie, etc etc. That is the kind of stuff I would expect to see at their own company headquarters. Something cool like a life-size statue of Pimple from Battletoads, his fist in the shape of an anvil, punching Fulgore from Killer Instinct. A bust of Joanna Dark back to back with James Bond. Pictures of squirrels and other past mascots, some doing humorous and inappropriate things. Nothing like that was there though aside from a Conker poster they snuck a picture of, some bananas hinting at Donkey Kong, and a few small other details here and there.
The lack of all of this can be attributed to the opening of their headquarters for a press event for Kinect Sports 2, but it seems unlikely that they would scrape nearly everything else relating to anything else just for that. I think the really telling thing is that Microsoft has since bought them out and probably insisted that things relating to their past at Nintendo be kept to a bare minimum. Even then, its still odd that Viva Pinata and Perfect Dark aren't seen. But Microsoft didn't seem too pleased with their performances and is all about the Kinect and its games now, and so their headquarters was made to reflect that. So really I think that all of this can go back to when you summed things up by saying: Rare sucks and Microsoft sucks for making Rare suck.
tldr - I wouldn't bother trying to "read between the lines" regarding Rare's offices. For all you know, it was just something a random admin thought of, and no one else at Rare thought it was important enough to disagree with or fight over, since there's far more important things to be concerned about.
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You find something related to gaming and then post it. Sometimes in whole, sometimes only excerpted, and sometimes with what you feel is a key paragraph related to a point of snark that you wish to make.
And yet it never seems to deal with what is actually going on. The whole thing reads like the website was invited (along with lots of other people) to preview the newest game the company made. And they decided at some point that rather than focus on the game, they'll talk about the campus instead. Which they do.
They talk about what it looks like when you enter the building. It's devoted to Kinect Sports. Their recent game and related to what they were invited for in the first place. But while they were there, they checked the place out and showed some items related to their 'beloved' past.
And your whole reaction was that Rare is fully avoiding their past, possibly at the behest of Microsoft, and that this means that Rare has succumbed to one of many memes related to the horrible decision to leave Nintendo and be bought out by Microsoft.
Your only attempt at actual analysis is to say that the lobby means a lot about a company and how their willingness to promote their latest games means that they lost their way or something. Instead of it being a company who is actually proud of their latest games and want people to see them.
The article does not actually say exactly where they went. Clearly the lobby, one caption mentions the cafeteria (hard to believe that maybe they fed the gather press...), and they saw a patio, farmland, and the exterior of the worker bee hive. And in the end, twenty-one photos were selected to be used in a piece that speaks mainly about the campus.
And according to you, this must mean that Rare is no longer as glorious as they once were. Rehab then says:
And a specious comparison between a fluff piece about the campus and how a single link, to the side, mixed with a bunch of 'related' links (related in that they're about Microsoft, the 360, Kinect, and Rare) is indicitive of the poor state of a company that gets trashed for 'not having any franchises worth developing for'.
(And a skim of the article seems to be about how some mucky-muck with the company is talking about how awesome the company still is. What a scandal!
Though it spends most of it's time talking about how they were better before Microsoft. Almost like they're proving Henson's point.)
You are terrible at commentary because you drop tidbits that mostly conform to a narrative you wish to present and then expect everybody to somehow buy into it without needing to do their own thinking? How many times has somebody posted a link to a small write up that has no real context and than tried to use it to prove whatever pet theory they're trying to push.
Not long ago, somebody posted a link to an article which was a summation to an interview held elsewhere about how stupid Factor 5 (or whoever it was) was. And then people here immediately seized on this blurb as proof that it was true. So I did the thing I feel has to be done: I pointed out that the linked article contained no real information and was a summation of content that couldn't be easily seen by everybody.
You want to bitch about poor games journalism? Don't engage in the same shitty practices these other terrible places do.
This specific article is about the Rare headquarters. They were there for Kinect Sports 2 and while they were there, grabbed some shots for the folks who are more interested in the pre-MS days. This article does not prove that MS is too rigorous. This article does not prove that Rare is abandoning their past. It is twenty-one pictures, fourteen of which are about the company property, and five of those are about the things you wanted in the first place.
It should not be a surprise that they didn't devote much time or effort into the past of the company. And yet you and others are trying to argue that this matches the common sentiment that Rare is a fallen company. Why should an article that was not intended to be about Rare's history spend much time talking about Rare's history?
And what did that related article which proves how bad things are for Rare have inside of it:
Rare, Ltd. Rest in peace, we hardly knew ye.
Proper analysis of the industry means trying to put things into a larger context. Dumping a link, selectively quoting, and encouraging people to conclude the worst isn't analysis. It's games 'journalism'.
You're muckin' with a G!
Also, is it any news to anyone that the Rare of today has pretty much nothing to do with the Rare of yesteryear? I wouldn't be surprised if there's nobody there who has been there for longer than 5 years.
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And failing to even acknowledge my thought-out counter analysis to your assertions and instead continuing to make inflated accusations about my intentions as well as knee-jerk assumptions about my mental ability isn't analysis either. It's bullying that isn't worth taking seriously.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6335842/nhl-12-sets-franchise-sales-record?tag=newstop;title;3
Based on a detailed, four-hour analysis of this article, consultation with the last decade's worth of serious video game theory, the font the article was printed in, its use of the word "also" and the author's astrological sign (The Clump of Random Boring Stars), I have concluded that Charlie Sheen is a chupacabra.
So Activision has three CoD studios?
Sledgehammer
Treyarch
IW
???
As for the article itself, it even mentions that a tour through Rare's headquarters would have been much more exciting in the late '90s and how going through and looking at their current project (even though they said its good enough) that you get a sense that the magic is gone. Obviously Rare is still performing well. Hell, I'm sure they are making money hand over fist with all the crap people can buy for their avatars, for instance. The feature about getting a look inside Rare even brings up the 3 million units Kinect Sports sold. That related article about Rare falling off the map has more to do with how they have fallen out of place with long time fans and losing relevancy with the (ugh, I always hate using this term) hardcore gamer, not with how well their company is doing. Just above Aegeri admits that he just assumed that Rare was dead and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people thought that. Not everyone goes into the "inside baseball" part of the industry to see they're doing a lot of things internally for Microsoft and most wouldn't associate their identity with something like Kinect Sports at all. For them, they identify with Rare from the glory days of before.
If you don't care about all that or the quality of Kinect Sports (and are only looking at the performance) then of course there is no reason to see any of what was shown in within that feature as disconcerting. I'm guessing that is the case if you bring up R.C. Pro AM out of all the things relating to Rare's past. But if you find yourself agreeing with this when you would rather see more of this or this from Rare, then yeah, it is a little depressing.
Five if you count Demonware and Beachhead. Beachhead, the house running Elite is technically a studio, and Demonware does the franchise's netcode.
Infinity Ward and Treyarch alternate on yearly CoD. Sledgehammer was making a CoD action-adventure game, rumored to be space marine-ish, but that was cancelled in the prototype stage so they could help with MW3.
EDIT: Six. I forgot Raven Software does DLC duties.
I write news there. It is fun.
I think Sledgehammer just gets work offloaded to them and assists the other two companies with their games in addition to working on the new model for multiplayer. It does seem kind of absurd but Call of Duty is all the rage right now, so its kind of understandable.
Well . . . damn!
But I recognize that it isn't that studio anymore.
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Rare made that? RARE?!
*Head Explodes dancing to Lvl 1 music*
For as hated as Battletoads is as a game, it's a technological marvel. They were able to do a lot of things no other games did, including finding enough CPU time to load a new sprite for the main character every frame, allowing them to have a lot of detailed and varied animations. Not to mention how complicated it is to get parallax working on the NES, and they do it both vertically and horizontally (levels 2 and 3).
Heck, Snake Rattle & Roll stylistically reminds me of early N64 games, with a locked diagonal camera.
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