http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=444322
So, Starbreeze (the guys who made Chronicles of Riddick game and Enclave) are working on something called "Project RedLime". This Red Lime is nothing else than a new Syndicate game - cyberpunk first-person shooter looking pretty much like bleached Deus Ex Human Revolution, with four-person coop (I'd hit that) and, from what I read, some good ol' Persuadertron fun.

Holy shit, story written by Richard Morgan. Can't be all bad, then!

Whoa, cool!
how did they keep that under wraps?

I played through the first Syndicate. But if the new game has FPS elements it's fundamentally a different game, since Syndicate was basically RTS.

http://kotaku.com/5839190/first-screenshot...icate/gallery/1
Screenshots and jetbikes and floating cities, oh my!

Looks pretty nice so far.

You fine folks are being a lot more kind towards this than what I have seen elsewhere.

That said, I don't really like the FPS thing, we've been down that road before, we know where it leads...

Even though I understand why they do it, they do it to have their game mechanics function in a way consoles, their controllers, and their customers are more comfortable with. Me, I am more comfortable with mouse and keyboard - and while that doesn't rule out FPS, quite the opposite, it does handle RTS considerably better.

So, was the classic Syndicate more RTStrategy or FPShooter? The answer to that question should be pretty obvious.

This is reminding me of the latest X-Com game. Or do I need to drag up a more distant memory of a certain thing that has brought us together here being made into a FPS with a strong emphasis on the S.

It's because we're not a bunch of stuckup knobs who think they know EVERYTHING about video games. I mean, folks who remember the first Syndicate are most probably in nursing homes now! Also, the days of thirty-pixel-tall guys in trenchcoats wandering through 16-color cities are gone. Persuadertrons are still in, however. And we're not afraid to use them.

I'm a fan of the first two Syndicates games and I don't mind if it's a FPS, as long as it's a good FPS.

dude . . them's fighting words . .

But I can't fight you until this catheter is out.

Remember to pull your teeth out before the fight begins.

I follow your sentiment. I think the FPS makes it into another game. Which is fine I guess. It would be cool if they changed this to something more like alien swarm. Would be awesome to customize cyberware, gear and weapons. Heck add modding in there for magic, and we have shadowrun.

I love Syndicate, I love X-Com, and I love going back to play my favorite old-school games from yesteryear.

That said, the business decision not to make it "like the old Syndicate" makes perfect sense. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) FPSes sell about ten times more than strategy games. And I mean that literally. Halo 3: 9.2 million copies by January 2010. Halo Wars: about 1 million to date. A smaller but still impressive variance can be seen in Tom Clancy stuff - Tom Clancy's EndWar: 850,000. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Conviction: 2.3 million copies.
2) It's next to impossible to get good controls laid out for old-school syndicate, if you want to retain either the click-to-target type shooting or multiple agents. Trust me on this - I've tried something very similar, and it's impressively difficult. It would be possible, but it'd force the game to have a steep-ass learning curve, which again forces it into a more niche market than it already would be. The closest I think you could get while retaining the old-school style view and feel would be if you made a Syndicate game that played a lot more like Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which would be pretty cool, but is still a different beast.
3) When you work with a big name like Syndicate, the publisher generally wants to get as much return on their investment as they can, so they're gonna want to appeal to the most people they can. And it seems in this case they decided an FPS would be preferable to a Marvel Ultimate Alliance type experience, because they could (judging by screenshots) get a more Deus Ex type experience with regards to augmentations, etc.

At the end of the day, a game like Syndicate - the old Syndicate - has two options. Either it's an XBLA type title with a 10-20 dollar price point, which - if it's hot shit - will have a 2-5 million dollar budget, and sell between 350,000 to 500,000 copies. At the end of the day, you'd expect a profit of between 1.5 and 5 million dollars. Or you go nuts, get yourself a 50 million dollar budget, and you make it a cyberpunk FPS, and a 60 dollar price point. It's a riskier venture, but if you can perform moderately well - say, Splinter Cell Conviction level well - you'll sell 2 million copies at 60 bucks, and turn yourself a 70 million dollar profit.

That kind of math is easy, as much as it upsets "true fans". And as I told my boss yesterday: I'd rather have some Syndicate than none, as much as I'd have loved a more Alien Swarm/Marvel Ultimate Alliance type game.

What about starcraft, starcraft2? how about a 3rd person like diablo II, freedom force, magicka or torchlight?



The old controls were simple, and you only had 4 characters. It isn't that hard, many games have done this before.



Personally I think publishers have no idea what the market is looking for, so they splatter the market with crap or spin rip off games based on previous IP. My guess is this game will turn out to be just like the shadowrun 360. Disappointing, not quite revolutionary to be new and unique, and just enough of the old to piss off purists.




At the end of the day, there are as many options as you will allow yourself. The problem seems to be that they are looking to the market trends for data instead of going to the consumer.



Some people would buy expensive dog poo, if you offered it to them. Doesn't mean that the mainstream will buy in.

Looking at market trends is going to the consumer. Or, rather, it's going to all the consumers at once. As much as die-hard Syndicate fans might not like it (or, heck, die-hard gaming fans at all), FPS games do rule the roost, as far as sales numbers tend to go.

Some of the charm of the old game will be lost, sure, but as far as I'm concerned if they get the general feel of the world right, I'll still be buying a copy. Because it's not the old game, and it shouldn't have to be in order to sell. I'd rather get a Syndicate FPS than no Syndicate at all, just like Adarael said.

You're talking PC only - none of those except Torchlight are on a console. And in Torchlight's case, the controls are radically different from the kinds of things you'd need in "old school" syndicate, what with that game's ability to control 4 characters at once or individually, with click-to-target. It is not a good user experience on a console, and players do not like it. That sucks, but that's the way it goes. Would you try to play Civ on a 360? Civ revolution, sure. But Civ 5? What a fucking nightmare. With Syndicate, you either have to change the game or admit playing it on a 360 would suck, control wise.

Developing for PC only is fine, if you don't mind missing out on approximately 68% of the "core gamer" demographic. With some games, that's just part of the way it happens - Shogun 2, Dawn of War 2, Civ 5, etc. But even traditional "PC only" titles are getting console-converted, like Witcher 2, Minecraft, etc. If you wanna maximize profit, you either have to have an ironclad sells-like-hotcakes model, or release multiplatform. Currently the only people truly capable of maximizing profit without going multiplatform are World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2, and TF2 doesn't even count because it's gone Free to Play and pulls in cash via Microtransactions.



Sadly, you're wrong. Publishers ABSOLUTELY know what the market is after. As Critias said, what "the market" is after may not be what we, on Dumpshock, are after. Companies invest millions of dollars in market research, and most of that consists of asking gamers what they want to buy. Mostly, what they want to buy is Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo. There's some Red Dead Redemption and Assassin's Creed in there, too.

Nobody likes to hear it, but what most people want is not what conneseurs want. This is the same story with movies. Cinema fans are all about art house movies, Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now... But the summer moviegoing public wants Titanic and Transformers 3. That's what pays the bills.


Again, as Critias said, market trends ARE evidence of what consumers want. There's this pernicious myth that somehow buying patterns are manufactured by corporations rather than being a reflection of what people want, but that's just not the whole story. There's some influence by publishers, yes, but that shit doesn't get created in a vacuum.

And "there are as many options as you will allow yourself" is true, IF you don't mind losing money. We're in this business because we love it, but this IS a business. And some things just don't sell like they used to. With niche styles of gameplay like that, you can't afford the kind of budget a AAA release needs to be competitive, because you will *never* sell the number of copies needed to recoup your investment.

Consoles: The worst thing to happen to gaming.
Consoles: The best thing to happen to game developers.


Both are overly generalized but basically PC gamers are becoming more and more a niche market and/or marginalized. Some tool on Google+ the other day told me mods are for 13 year olds, simply because they aren't around on his Xbox (or rather, are cheats on an xbox).

FPS games that are multi-console is simply where the money is, outside of some franchise games like Madden. Hopefully as a PC gamer, those ports are done well and we are getting features for the PC that are only available on the PC. Some games do this well, some don't even try.

Just be glad any PC only games are hopefully coming from proven developers and publishers cause all the hack studios are getting into the console port market full time.

I dunno, it's a hard thing to look at. On one hand, I feel you - I still buy most of my games on the PC, despite having worked on the Xbox, and making games for consoles. "Worst thing to happen to gaming" depends on your perspective. Millions more people play games now - is that bad in and of itself? Is it damaging to gaming BECAUSE there are more people? Or is it merely damaging to the self-identification of some gamers, due to their perception of exclusivity? Does it encourage "dumber" games, or games where interaction doesn't require complex rules, so gamers can focus on playing rather than learning to play?

These are all much bigger questions than this thread is capable of answering, I think. And I'm not endorsing any of these views unless I am specifically asked what I think.

Oh sure, that comment was strictly from a pro-PC perspective. There are good and bad things on either side in reality.

Personally the main thing that keeps me from buying console games beyond Madden, is controls. I do not want to play a FPS (or as has been said, a RTS or any click-heavy types of games) with a control pad.

It can be made to work (hell, for FFXI Online I bought something to plug my playstation controller into my PC), but alot of times the conversion of a game from control pad to PC is the very worst part of the port.

Ironically consoles mean there are now more games than ever I don't want to play.

Perhaps the ultimate culprit is Spongebob.

Playing Call of Duty is a bit like attending a cardio kickboxing class. You invest the time, energy, and money but at the last moment you sabatoge the content so that in spite of your investment you learn nothing of value, whereas if the content had just been a little more low key, challenging, and true to life, you could have instead maybe learned something.

Yeah, and it's a first person shooter because "everybody is doing FPS these days". That'S the worst reason to make it a shooter. Betehsda did it because it's what they always do (adnd where they more or less know their shit). That game though seems really like it's just trying to ride on Deus Ex 3's success, nothing else. Pity they ruin the Syndicate franchise with this, loved these games back in the day.


They let toddlers type on computers now?

And the original Syndicate hat amazing vector graphics and stunning 3D visuals in full 256 colours! Also, it was quite fun to play. Not sure if a game that imitates Deus Ex without the kilotons of flair the game throws at you to make you forgive it's flaws will work. Well, let's give them the benefit of the doubt; but I'm rather sceptical here. Might well end up where the Shadowrun FPS went.

I am choosing to ignore Serious Mike, that is why haven't posted in this topic for a bit, it is plain that Adarael especially and pretty much everyone else is where the engaging conversation is.



Thank you for delving into this topic, it appears to be one that you are close to due to your line of work.

The valid points you bring up are pretty much why I end up buying so many games on Steam (usually on sale) and Desura that are Indy Dev games. They don't go over board on graphics, they don't have AAA title millions of publisher bank and strings attached, and they engage very willingly with their audience. I have been having a way more satisfying experience buying games like AaA: A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Delve Deeper, Dungeons of Dredmor, Dwarfs?!, E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, Frozen Synapse, Hinterland, Magicka, Minecraft, Mount&Blade: Warband, Space Pirates And Zombies, Survivors of Ragnarok, Project Zomboid ... just to name a few. And that is before I even get into mods.

To me, console games are just a gilded cage and while they purport a certain install base, I have found some of those numbers to be inflated for PR reasons, where IIRC numbers of sold X-boxs or what have you are the numbers of units that that been sold to the retail chains, not necessarily the actual number of possible customers or even if those customers will bother buying much beyond what comes with the system, like I have heard happened with the Wii and Wii Sports, a passing fad. I was going over some other numbers recently when I was listening to a Indy Dev podcast, they reported that they had sold more than double on Steam than what they sold on Xbox, so much so that they figured it wasn't worth their time to bother with Xbox in the future. And other sources have been surprising where recently Valve said Left 4 Dead 2 was a surprise hit for them on Xbox but then Portal 2 did better on the PC (presumably on Steam).

I would also like to point out that there was a RTS Shooter that did relatively well on a console a few years back now, Battalion Wars (Gamecube), so I know the mechanics and easy interface are possible.

I am bringing these things up because I know that there are other possibilities than FPS treatments of older IPs, which where largely held in high regard because of their game mechanics, which were decidedly not FPS. Hell, they could call games like Shadowrun, XCOM, and Syndicate by completely different names, that is all they would have to do, and we would never even know the difference. They are just trying to abuse the nostalgia of gamers to sell more copies, all flash, no substance, IMHO. In these instances, their marketing is wrong - I know why they do it, but it still doesn't make the end product a better experience that can't just be replaced with a better quality product, in this case Deus Ex 3 not turning out like Deus Ex 2 and E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy.

Oh and PC gaming dying is a straight up myth, pure BS, one that Devs like Valve, Activision Blizzard, and a multitude of Indy Devs thrive on because they don't have to go up against as much competition as Devs on consoles have to face, especially with their product still having to be tied to retail space. The install base for a lower system requirements in PC gaming is damn near astronomical to boot. PC Gaming has been happily "dying" for a decade or more now.

TL:DR - Syndicate reboot didn't have to do us like this and could have still turned a sizable profit.

Bottom line is, most companies are going to go with the sure bet when there's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on the llne.

FPSes are a "sure bet", from a maximal sales perspective. RTSes are, not so much.



-k

I disagree. Some FPSes are sure, but not all. There are plenty of FPSes that fail as well. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Painkiller: Resurrection, or Revolution for instance.

So much for sure bets.

That's one way to put it.


Frozen Synapse and Magicka are some of the most awesome things I've bought in quite a while. I wanted to like EYE more, but it's got a few too many problems for me to be truly happy with it. Magicka has bugs too, but at least they're only cosmetic.



Ehh. I worked on Battalion Wars 2, and I'd like to point out that while Battalion Wars is an "rts", it's an RTS in the same sense Chess is - you could order your units from point a to point b on the map, but that's all you could do. There was no skill activation, no weapon selection, no patrol routing, just... go here, do this. And the AI would take over whenever orders weren't issued.

Not sure what BW1 sold, but BW2 sold around 350,000 copies, if my memory serves me.



You say abuse, they say revive. I mean, No Mutants Allowed raged for 2 YEARS when Fallout 3 came out, because it wasn't an isometric perspective game. But it wasn't the end of the world. It was different, but it wasn't a bad game, as much as I personally would have preferred something more like Dragon Age 1.

Of course there are other treatments than making an FPS. All I've been pointing out in this thread is that making it an FPS over a different style of game is almost 100% certain to make it sell more, when combined with a halfway decent budget and a brand name people recognize. Their marketing isn't "wrong", since attaching that name does boost sales. I think the term you're looking for is that it sucks. But it definitely works.



I would never claim otherwise. After all, like I said, I buy most of my games on the PC. I think the most major contributor to "PC gaming is dying" is the fact that console sales have exploded so much that PCs are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of core gamers. But that's due to market expansion, not PC shrinkage.


Sure. But EA doesn't want sizable, any more than you want an "okay" game. They want the biggest profit possible.

There's room in the gaming industry for risking, lower-profit games. But the design director needs to be a *very* convincing person when talking to shareholders & execs, if he wants to take a risk like that with a property that they regard as a "sure thing." The more experimental your game, and further off the beaten path it is, the more likely they'll want you to invent a new IP for it, so that if it fails it doesn't taint the well.



Mathematically they are a sure bet. Individual FPSes fail, yes, but their rate of failure to recoup investment is much less than other genres.

Also, as an additional clarification: I have not worked on any "rebooted" francises like Syndicate, X-Com, or Deus Ex. But I think about this kind of thing a lot, because there is a distinct possibility that one day I will, and I do work on a lot of games tied to highly-beloved IP, because WB Games owns the rights to (for example) Batman, Lord of the Rings, and Mortal Kombat.

Make a Mortal Kombat with Lord of the Rings and Batman-Characters!
Watch every Nerd explode into rage.

I want a fighting game: Mortal Kombat vs. Lord of the Rings!

And that worked so well for many franchises, like Shadowrun, like Fallout (before Bethesda made it *something* worthwhile again), like Duke Nukem, like JA:BIA will, or like Master of Orion. It also works really well in Hollywood, where it originates. If you make everything a streamlined, easily marketable product, odds are a lot of these will fail because they bore people. Lots of wells were tainted by this kind of risk-averse business strategy.


Statistically, yes. But a low statistic possibility does not mean you're safe. It's no guarantee no bad thing will happen if you are careless, or just unlucky. Lots of Japanese had to find out the hard way that a highly imporbable freak Tsunami can actually happen to them. They felt safe behind lower-cost statistically plausible height tsunami walls. Statistically they were extremly safe. IRL there're now tens of thousands dead and a nuclear meltdown catastrophe. So playing it safe and cheap may look well statistically but is no excuse for sloppyness, nor a guarantee all will be well.

There are many high-profile IP FPS that fail.

So Freddie Krueger vs Jason Voorhees in the new MK is not enough for you?
I gotta say, being owned by a large movie corporation has its perks.

I think you are missing the point.

Individual games can fail, yes, regardless of format.

But OVERALL, FPS games are MORE LIKELY to turn a significant profit than RTSes. They pose LESS RISK than RTSes. Therefore they are more likely to get green-lit by management.

Even a highly successful RTS is likely to generate significantly less revenue than a "moderately" successful FPS game. It's simple math.

This has nothing to do with "what would serve the game subject better". It's all about what will get a guy in a suit sitting in a corporate boardroom to sign on the dotted line.




-k

Always comes down to executive meddling... It's no longer a bunch of folks in a garage doing what's right, it's people in a boardroom doing what's most profitable for shareholders. Look how well that worked for Team Bondi, the company that made LA Noire. Hand-over-fist money, but placed into administration now.

"Well, there's a party going on outside
All my friends got ya terrified
Don't call no cops or the state police
Don't break up this blown out symphony
You think I'm wasting all my precious time
You say my music outta be a crime

Well, give the radio back
Give the radio back
Yeah, give the radio back to the maniacs
To the maniacs" - Give The Radio Back, Alice Cooper

You don't think you're being a little melodramatic there, Ray? It's a business, producing a product. Of course it's going to try and make a popular one.

Tell that to artistic filmmakers, songwriters, and so on.

Really, really well, actually. Team Bondi was overbudget on LA Noire by tens of millions of dollars, and was released three years late. For most game studios, that means you close down and everybody is now riding the Unemployment Train. Rockstar invested in LA Noire because they thought LA Noire had promise. Without that, everybody would have been out of a job WITHOUT releasing the game.

I know it's tempting to assume the people making the yes/no decisions on what games to fund are heartless assholes, but let's not be ridiculous here. The people making games are making them because they love them. They just want to make the games they love AND not go bankrupt in the process. It's like Ford: for every Ford GT they make, they have to make 5 different versions of a sedan/SUV, because that's the shit the market wants.

So the bottom line is that commercialism ruins everything?

Mainstream taekwondo is to hardcore 70s full contact karate as contemporary FPS titles are to Sid Meier games from the late 80s?

I honestly didn't know they had that. It sounds perfect for MK actually.

Yeah, the Freddy DLC came out, and I cried. BlockBuster is closed, and there's no places to rent games here any more. I can't justify buying it, however.

Already beat the storyline... I've also figured out that Sonya Blade shops at Victoria's Secret Ops store.

I really don't think it is melodramatic.

We don't need the big outfits, the publishers for good games. If trip A games think they require millions of dollars to make games and are bloated as a result, that really is their problem, not ours as the customer. A lot of the popularity of games these days has little to do with game mechanics IMHO and a whole lot more to do with advertising dollars spent in a way that resonates with people with discretionary funds and desire some entertainment.

Minecraft is pretty bloody popular, it makes Notch and Mojang bank (we only know this because he is very open with his bookkeeping), and its not even out of Beta yet - but can pretty much guarantee that no corporate suit would have signed the dotted line on that game. And there are many, many other Indy titles these days that are in the same situation and all the better for it IMHO.

Hell, seeing what can be done with web browser games these days, IMHO, Syndicate and other IPs revived would be better of as that than a console attempt at a blockbuster. This game will suffer for its departure from mechanics that were essential to the kinds of stories gamers had with it, just like other IPs we have known, enjoyed, and then gnashed our teeth at their sequels.

There is more than one way to make bank and not all of them have to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Well, not exactly. They will, as Jason DLC was announced recently, and Freddy DLC is already available.

My point is that "less risk" does not equal "no risk", especially if you count on pre-existing IPs to turn a quick buck. It might even work once, but it will not work again.


Tade deficits are made that way. Nobody wants to buy crap product, and it won't repeatedly happen; this means an erosion of customers and, ultimatly, collapse. This has happened to the video games industry once already, and it will happen again, given these business politics.


And that's one of the problems here: There's more than one market in the world. America's not even the most profitable market anymore. You can't dump oversized, overpriced and hideously uneconomic cars like the Ranger (or whatever that thing is called) on China. Nobody there wants such a car. It couldn't even operate in most Chinese or European cities for simple space reasons. It's how GM managed to go belly-up, though. Focusing on sales projections and market optimisation is only going to get you so far, especially if your market research is biased, and it almost always is (Volkswagen is doing absolutly crappily in the US, too, for the same reasons).

Seems so.

Not necessarily. The idea of maximizing profits at the expense of everything else (Including morals) ruins everything. Somewhere along the way Execs forgot that there are people down there, and think the only "Persons" that matter is the Corporation (Which is a legal entity) and themselves, and maybe their fellow Execs.

Maybe that's me being cynical. Maybe they never had that idea to begin with. I don't know. I should just shut up now.

How's the game coming along?

Actually, what they care about is themselves and the shareholders, not the corporation. Corporations are happily ruined for the sake of shareholder short-term profit any day of the week.

Ah right. At least those are people.

Small note:
People respond well to gameplay. People also respond well to good looks, sound, animation, et cetera. Weren't we lamenting in another threat that "good AI is dead"? All that costs money. A small team with a low budget can make Minecraft, or Limbo, or Braid. No small team with a low budget can make Grand Theft Auto IV, Assassin's Creed, or Battlefield 3.

There's room in this world for low-budget and high-budget games, and I've worked on both. But make no mistake, small "out of the garage" teams cannot make huge games, because they just don't have a big enough budget.



Just to clarify: are we saying "most profitable market in the world" in general, for cars, or for video games?
In general: True.
For cars: Not really. Higher volume, but lower revune. China sold about 30% more cars than the US did in 2010, but on average cars sold in the US are worth 2 or more times what those sold in China are, ergo, more revenue in the US. Western automakers have expanded into the Chinese market, but the ultra low-cost cars made by Geely, Dongfeng, Chery and SAIC dominate the market.
For games: Hard to say. Potentially yes, but in order for that to first happen you have to navigate both the bureaucracy of the PRC's censors, AND figure out how to not have your game pirated left right and center, due to a total lack of laws protecting against piracy. It works for World of Warcraft, but it doesn't work for Nintendo, for instance.



No, that's not the case.

GM went belly up due to bad fiscal management, UAW post-retirement costs maturing, and failure to change their business model based on market research. In a nutshell: they failed because they DIDN'T listen to their fiscal projections, market research, and due dilligence. The market research said time and time again: "American consumers want smaller, more efficient cars, and don't see "made in Detroit" as something to be proud of. Make hybrids & efficient commuter cars and you'll cash in." And they didn't.

It's not that market research was wrong. It's not that the research was biased - that's why everyone pays independent firms to do this kind of research. It's that they saw the results and did not listen. Ford listened to the same reports and same companies, and that's why Ford's market share grew while GM's shrank, and also why Ford was able to weather the automotive crisis relatively unscathed. It's not that Ford was lucky, but that it listened. This is also why Ford does a brisk business in European countries - because they produce cars the European market wants, because they've listened to the research.

I understand the point you are trying to make.. But this kind of research is done by professionals who do ALL kinds of sociological research, and have been doing it for decades. They are correct and unbiased vastly more often than they are biased and incorrect. Failures on the corporate end are almost always because of two things:
1) They failed to listen to their own research;
2) They couldn't bring themselves to take ANY risks, because they adhered to the research too closely. (I.E. "Let's make a brown shooter set in the middle east!" or "Giant SUVs have always worked for us, and we have enough cash to just wait it out until people want them again!")

The bias is in the purchaser of the research, not the research itself.

Well! More often than not, banks or hedge funds.


Certainly, but you also have to take into account currency rates then - for a euro-based company, for instance, any dollar they earn is vastly devaluated (and for a Chinese company, it is even more valuable). Also, the American market is carved up and not expanding, where there is promise of growth in developing countries (Brazil's suppsoedly pretty hot for cars, as is india). Volkswagen, for instance, has not much to gain in the US save for prestige. I'm not sure if it still applies but in the recent past their US branches were bleeding money a lot, and they were looking to cut them loose.


Yes, absolutly (and for the record, the US market also has rather stringent media censorship laws for games, they're just different). For video games, the US market is at least balanced against the huge Asian markets (Japan, South Korea, China ...) and Europe, both markets that have decidedly different demands for games - from the Asian fascination with competitive online gaming to the fact that publishing an FPS in Germany is basically asking for the game to be banned from sale unless you really, really make sure it does not contain anything even remotely close to violence (the Fedeal Youth Protection Office (BPJS) goes so far as to try and scan foreign shipped packages from Amazon and other online vendors and confiscating any game that does not conform to this country's ridiculous moral standards for games). Pretty sure there're similar tripwires in other large Euro countries.


Point taken. Though they've been doing this since the 1920s, and unlike GM, to whom non-American branches always were red-headed stepchildren, they made an effort to think locally. However, GM, chose to listen to old market projections, ignoring the Hybrid trend. Of course, that also happened to Chrysler, who were mostly foreign-owned through the 90s and 2000s.


Such research always depends on the parameters applied. Think of climate research - loads of highly intelligent and fnded people who produce absolute crap, for a Lobby that needs this crap. Their climate models ignore the existence of gravity, clouds, sunspots and air currents for the most part, and hence are hardly worth reading through, but they'Re considered to be adequate enough to base huge socioeconomic restructuring programs on. Same applies to market research. You'll get different results depending on what you ask, how you ask it, who you ask ... sociology is almost as much science as weather froecasts are, and almost as reliable.

And the second is precisely the problem I see with most video game products, and it's also what Hollywood is suffering from at the moment. Game design, like moviemaking, always has to blend economics and artistic impulses. If you only rely on the latter you get German arthaus movies that are as enjoyable to watch as drilling holes in your foot; if you only rely on the former you getv streamlined, boring, nth repetition of the same shit over again product that in the medium run is just as enjoyable as those arthaus movies.

Have you read the screenplay for the Hitman movie? It's floating somewhere on the Internet. When you read it (I think it's a final or near-final version), you'll be surprised how stupid execs messed up a pretty decent movie. The script has less plot holes than the final product, contains no reference to 47's childhood or footage from the "Dark Angel" TV series used to quickly shove it into the film and actually could be filmed with only minor increase in budget (because shooting a scene with commandos descending from a helicopter to a moving train would be a bit costly, but not exactly prohibitive). So sometimes, everything hinges on the execs' sanity, intelligence and imagination, and usually they lack all three, being patronizing morons with expensive suits and microscopic peckers.

Speaking of Syndicate, it looks like Paradox Interactive (publishers of Magicka and Sengoku, both of which are fine, fine games) will be making their own thematic successor to the game. It's called Cartel.

Paradox’s Cartel: The True Syndicate Sequel?