metaphysician

My theory: the inevitable copyright takedowns are not a tragic outcome, they are part of the plan. Its an intended part of the theater, whether for the personal ego-boost of being "oppressed by the man" or else as a cynical marketing move that earns them far more headlines and eyeballs.

@JackGYarwood

Yeah, I'm more cynical. My own suspicion is that the "multiple projects" are more like a t-shirt line and a six week collab with a gacha game. Any actual substantial rerelease would be a nice surprise. . . provided, of course, the coin landed "heads" and it was actually a good rerelease.

@ItsAlwaysSunnyyy

The optimistic theory: They realized how abusive Roblox is and decided they didn't really want to get involved in something that was likely to draw bad PR and regulation eventually.

The cynical theory: They hate the idea of even theoretically having to share money with content creators, versus a GAAS where they get all the money themselves.

The most likely theory: The idea simply didn't occur to them, not at a relevant time. They just aren't that creative or insightful.

@MARl0

Depends. In terms of "ceasing to be major ongoing franchises", I'd say its mostly a matter of shifting trends + only wanting to invest in the biggest moneymakers. AAA publishers especially seem to have a bad habit of undervaluing diversity of library. Why spend money on Ridge Racer if racing games aren't doing so well, while fighting games are selling tons- just make Tekken and Soul Calibur. "Great" idea, until you've overinvested in one genre or series, needing ridiculously high sales to pay it back, and the tastes shift again.

In terms of keeping classic games in circulation? I think that's mostly a matter of organizational culture, along with "Are you bad at actually saving your work?" Bandai Namco does seem to be unusually bad about this. You'd think at the very least they'd do some cheap and easy Tekken and Soul Calibur collections for easy money off their marquis franchises, but its like they hate the idea of people buying their old games.

@Axelay71

Steam Deck and other handhelds. . . that cost considerably more than a Switch 2. To the degree that, aside from the Steam Deck, none of them are market relevant in the slightest ( remember, even the Steam Deck, by far the most successful handheld PC, has sold such few units that it does not even register in the console market ).

Or, no. No matter whether one random person on an internet comments thread might be willing to spend $600+ on a folding screen Switch 2, the audience in general for such isn't there.

Could it be a case of "We're testing the waters and so picked characters that seemed less likely to immediate trigger CADs from S-E"? Capcom being a much more known factor, in terms of what they will tolerate in fan projects.

I wonder how many people watched Fight Club, going into the theater expecting either an action movie or possibly a ( combat ) sports movie?

@Axelay71 @Axelay71

It should be very easy to see why Nintendo didn't go this route: cost. People already grumble about the price of the Switch 2. Nintendo wasn't going to add a cutting edge new screen tech that would have added another couple hundred to the retail price.

This does make me wonder: what is the most technically impressive "homebrew" game developed for each console? Which, admittedly, would first require what "counts" and is allowable. For instance, would the Roadblaster "port" to SNES be legal, or would it be disqualified due to using an "expansion chip" that never existed to run CD-ROM data that the SNES could never read?

I think the key that too many people overlook is that older simpler games. . . yes, they may be older and simpler. But that is exactly what makes them work better as learning tools for modern developers. Its not that single screen arcade games are "better". Its that single screen arcade games, or the like, have fewer components and thus bring greater clarity to the game design. You can more readily learn about dynamic difficulty, and how to generate difficulty from mechanics, via something like Space Invaders than from RE4, for example.

The problem with the "just release it and find out" plan is that you only need a certain lesser degree of certainty about ownership to get a giant ruinous lawsuit going. Its possible one of the maybe-owners wouldn't even need to prove that they owned it, simply to prove to a judge that the party releasing it knew that they didn't.

@Fallingshadow

"Better" is a very dicey word, is the thing. It wouldn't reference specific keystone titles, but whether that's actually a merit in real life is highly debatable. Especially since, while referencing games like Metroid and SOTN might not be "elegant", its also a lot less ambiguous. Whereas "Adventure-Platformer" uses one of the most broad and vague genre labels ( Adventure ), and manages to say absolutely nothing about the navigational focus of actual metroidvanias.

And, regardless of all the theoreticals? Any suggested alternative term has to overcome the fact that 'metroidvania' is jargon we already have and already use. It takes a lot more benefit to justify the greater effort of replacing an existing term, versus creating an entirely new term.

I wonder how many of those Capcom actually still has in their possession, or whether they lost/discarded them, too.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has some of the best music to be found in the entire medium.

As someone whose heard of retrobrighting, but never actually investigated how its one: so it involves using hydrogen peroxide? Well then, I'm not shocked you get damage. Hydrogen peroxide bleaches things by oxidizing them. You know what causes a big chunk of damage to plastic? Oxidation. While plastic chemistry can be complicated, this feels kind of like trying to repair burn damage to an object by "cleaning" away charring with a blowtorch.

This is not exclusive to the video game industry, sadly. One notable example from the tabletop gaming business: the company "Dyskami Publishing" basically exists the distance new products like the current edition of BESM from "Mark MacKinnon", their creator. Why? Because his name is still at least moderately toxic, even a couple decades later, for basically grabbing the cash box and running across the border when the RPG industry started contracting after the peak d20 OGL days.

@MontyMole

The one game I've seen anything about that seems to be trying to use AI for something actually interesting:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/

Basically, not using AI as a tool to create a game, but using AI as part of the game, with an LLM serving as a "virtual GM" to manage to ( more traditionally designed ) procedural content. Its ridiculously ambitious and I only give it maybe 20% odds of working out well. . .but even if it fails it'll at least be the right kind of failure.

@Sketcz

Being "fair", I am skeptical that this is an actual sincere belief on their part. Rather, its a pretense to cover their actual belief: that they don't want people buying older games, because the current execs make bigger bonuses and gain more clout from new games.

@FeRDNYC

I'd bet that's an artifact from the days when IBM sold you both the product and the upkeep. They likely were originally writing those manuals, not for the end user, but for their own maintenance personnel. And even when this shifted, the design culture stuck.

@PKDuckman

And had most of the contents of the AD&D 2e players handbook, hence the size. Though even completely original 90s WRPGs often had similar sized manuals, hence why IMO they were the peak for physical manuals.

I would say the key is not precisely that games these days have "too much" stuff, but that they have too much extraneous stuff. Things added, not because its part of the Core Vision of the game or contributes to such; but because that individual item is perceived as popular and thus hopefully leads to more people trying and buying the game. Which definitely emerges from the "trying to be everything for everybody" concept. Big AAA studios generally hate greenlighting anything that isn't at least potentially aiming to be The Next Big Thing That Earns All The Money And Dominates The Industry.

I wouldn't rule out "thieves stole loot without a plan for what to do with it". Its shockingly common that even seemingly-talented thieves able to pull of quite clean heists, have no actual idea of the challenges of turning the stolen items into usable cash. Which could lead to the items showing up on Craigs List, or it could lead to the mouldering in some storage unit for years.

@Santar

LLM/Stable Diffusion tech is the same tech, whether its called "generative AI" or something. Its just a question of what you are training that tech to do. Hence why a chatbot and an art AI can both be made from the same underlying technology.

@NatiaAdamo

Its not that shocking in retrospect: Nintendo is by far the oldest company in the industry. More than any other, they probably came in with a corporate culture of long term thinking. "Ooops we lost important info" is probably a mistake Nintendo made, and learned from, decades before most of the people in the industry were even born.

@Sn0w

There's at least one game in development that is more or less aiming for this.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1685310/The_Wayward_Realms/

Basically, a modern Daggerfall using GenAI tech as a "virtual GM" managing the procedural content.

It is ridiculously ambitious, and I'd personally only give it a 25% chance of living up to its aspirations at best. However, its the right kind of ambition to be interesting ( maybe even if it fails ), and an example of how to use GenAI tech in video games as something other than a questionable excuse to reduce labor costs.

@breach187

I think the key here would not using GenAI as part of developing the game, but using GenAI as part of the game engine itself. Which is to say, procedural games already effectively involve "training" the procedural engine to produce the desired array of results in game. Now you could do the exact same thing, only with the much more powerful GenAI tech as the underlying procedural "engine".

Of course, the "problem" with this is that it would require just as much work producing appropriate bespoke art for the training, and labor in doing the training, as it takes with current procedural games. Except that's only a problem if your goal with using GenAI is to produce a magic free "infinite art forever" button. For everyone else, it would just be a tool to do procedural design, only better than before.