Anyone else notice this trend?

What do
Star Wars Battlefront 2
Knack 2
Watchdogs 2
and Destiny 2
All have in common?

You, know, other than the fact they're all sequel...

?

They're all sequels to games that underperformed.

Why do you suppose companies are picking up this tread of forcing IPs that are flops?

 

I didn't think that either Destiny or Watchdogs were "flops"? I know both had people complaining about them, but how was their commercial performance? I thought they were alright.

Anyway, once the first game is out a whole bunch of technical work is complete that makes a sequel faster and cheaper to make. On top of that they've got everything they learned from the first game including, for instance, what people might not have liked about it. So it's faster and cheaper to make something that should be better, without even considering the possible marketing and branding benefits.

 

Watch Dogs had lies and slight performance problems at launch (graphics in any version didn't match the previews). Battlefront had many server issues and possibly some balance problems, but also improved. I'm sure they would never get sequels if they didn't make back more than they cost to make. Even Destiny improved a lot, although I think the game just had a built-in audience of blind fanbois.

Knack, on the other hand, I don't understand. That was a just plain crap game. Did they really sell well over costs by discounting it?

 

On what planet do you assume a title under performed if it's got a multi-million dollar sequel ? Honestly not sure about this thread. Nobody sane pumps money into flops.

 

AAA games need game titles that can generate more money than they cost to make. Even if a game under performed compared to some metric, as long as it made many millions it is worth a sequel.

For example, Destiny generated half a billion dollars in revenue the day it was released according to its Wiki page. Is that under performing? What revenue target should Destiny need to hit on launch day to justify a sequel?

I am not saying Destiny is perfect, but I am saying any game that generates a half a billion dollars in revenue on launch day is worth a sequel.

 

The suggestion that SW:Battlefront, Watchdogs, and Destiny are flops is so moronic that I'm fairly certain I can no longer take anything you say seriously.

 

While the latter half of this is a little ridiculous, it's true that these weren't flops by any standard.

What one might say is that "hardcore gamers"^TM had issues with these games. The fact that they got sequels might tell us that "hardcore gamers"^TM don't define the market.

 

I think you'll find most people, hardcore and otherwise enjoy it fine. It's called bitching. People love to bitch, especially about games they love. For example everyone apparently hates GTA V now, even though they continue to play it constantly.

The internet, I keep saying it, is a magnifying glass or amplifier. Everything said is dramatic and huge in text and hyped in youtube videos, but this is actually a generation that's full of S***.

The reality is that complaining is the new feedback. It's to be interpreted, not to be taken at face value. Look at all those people with 100+ hours on a game saying the game sucks.

Really? you play a game for 100 hours then decide suddenly it sucks?

 

Knack was poorly received but suggesting games with profits starting at 350 million and sustaining their players for years are flops is comically stupid.

 

Okay, geeze, "flop" is a strong word, but certainly underperformed.

And didn't Destiny break the record for most expensive development budget at nearly a billion?

It just seems like these studios could be picking better targets.

 

Did something happen to it?

 

If $350m is "underperforming" then what do you consider "success"?

@hippocoder nailed it. Just because people complain about something doesn't mean it's actually bad. And if you're looking at the Internet to tell whether people liked something or not, remember that people are more likely to complain than they are to compliment. And as @hippocoder also raised, behaviour is more indicative than words. If you play something for dozens of hours and then tell me it's crap I'm going to see right through the words to the fact that you played it for dozens of hours.

Mind you, I don't think less of people for stating such opinions. It took me a while to realise that I used to do the same thing with Bethesda games. I played dozens of hours of Oblivion before at some point stopping because I'd gotten over it, at which point I'd describe it as shallow, boring and repetitive. I wasn't wrong, but that description was accurate for how I felt about the game at the end of my experience of playing it. But at the start I found it interesting and entertaining enough to keep me playing it over other games for dozens of hours. Skyrim was the same. Fallout 3 and 4 were the same.

In each case, the last play session where I realise that I'm "over it" isn't at all indicative of the dozens of hours before that, it's just the easiest bit to talk about.

 

I'm not sure what you're asking, that list has solid sales... Certainly worthy of sequels based on the sales alone.

Star Wars Battlefront - Sold 13 million copies by 2016
Watchdogs - Has made more money than all UBI games sold at the time
Destiny - has sold 6.3 million copies in the first month alone, you can extrapolate where they are now.

 

People don't hate GTA, they hate that Rockstar said mods aren't allowed. When users retaliated by bringing GTA's reviews on Steam down to "Mixed," Rockstar backpedaled and said mods were okay. Additionally, there was a modding group or something who was going to recreate GTA IV in GTA V. After a backroom talk with Rockstar...they're no longer doing so.

 

Alright, I concede this was an ill conceived thread.

 

It would be constructive to define which metrics those games underperformed on. The games you listed got sequels because they generated a lot of revenue.

As for Destiny, somebody originally said Destiny cost $500M to make, and then somebody else said it cost nowhere near that much. It definitely did not cost a billion dollars to develop. Either way, Destiny generated $500M on launch day, so that was a solid investment.

 

Yeah it's a pretty good example of interpreting negative feedback as constructive feedback. What we have here is a generation of gamers who are used to voting up or down. They don't know a middle ground, or care much.

Reading those people is important.

 

Battlefront was a huge success, sales outperformed estimates and its success drove up ea's stock. Critically, it had pretty good reviews. It was a bonafide hit by virtually every objective standard. I think some folks (myself included) were disappointed because it wasn't nearly as awesome the originals.

Thing is... the internets make people think that loud voices are the same as many voices. Like the Jim Sterling videos. A vocal minority. People love to bitch about things that are popular. I'm not a fan of the new battlefront games (so far), but an ass-load of people are. As a game developer, it is crucial to listen to all voices out there, not just the ones talking.

 

Its also worth pointing out that making a sequel is much cheaper then making new IP. And marketing a sequel is much simpler then marketing original IP.

Before I buy a game I normally I spend hours checking reviews, watching play throughs, and just generally making sure I'll actually like it. However I recently dropped $100 on a sequel to one of my favorite games without even reading the back of the box.

When you can command that sort of brand loyalty, you would be stupid not to make a sequel.

 

Yeah although Studio Ghibli doesn't deal with sequels but has utterly astonishing IP. It's one of the reasons I value them so much.

The time is drawing near where I return to making games. I don't expect to make amazing games, but I'm not getting younger. I don't know if I want that flame that remains to be burned on sequels.

 

Ah. Right. Mods again.

Spoiler

I bought GTA 5 last year, beaten singleplayer and overall disliked it. So hippos comment made me wonder if something happened that GTA crowd suddenly changed their minds.

Your response made me recall some GTA-5 modding tools statement I saw somewhere few days ago. Basically, rockstar disabled that modding tool because people used it to harass other players in online part of the game. And because Rockstar was strongly pushing the online component last time I played the game, it makes sense for them to shut it down.

 

Well, to be honest steam reviews do not offer "middle ground" votes. I wish they had those. I played couple of titles that were just okay but neither good or bad. There is no way to communicate this kind of opinion on steam reviews.

 

I've thought about this. Netflix very recently changed their 5 star rating system to a thumbs up or nothing. So it's even simpler now.

Here's my observations:

A lot of review publications online have similarly switched away from a score grading to either recommended or not. And I think this practise in general gives us different data to work with.

It's built around the observation that people can't articulate what is good or bad. Most people suck at it. It was good originally, when you had tech-savvy people online. 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, the average person online was pretty smart, or competent enough to get online and to afford to do so.

So you could trust this crowd to give you some pretty decent 5 star ratings. Over time, the internet has opened up to anyone from a child to an elderly person, plus a lot of different nationalities.


And of course the people who are super stupid, as in being brutally retarded. This sort of person is actually the most common. These are cattle that businesses milk for all they're worth.

So these days, everything and everyone is online. That's a huge difference made far more pronounced by the introduction of internet capable smartphones.

Therefore 5 stars is broken. Because there are now billions, not hundreds of thousands, of people online, and most of them can't think constructively beyond what is in front of them, and most of them do not care. They are a herd. Like any good herd, some will try to lead it in a different direction, and it might or might not gain traction there, but ultimately people are doing things like this on Unity's own asset store: I read comments where people rate something as one star but say "this is great, recommended".

What everyone in tech observed happening was that people aren't any good at anything. We're not machines. So it went from 5 star to 3 star. And when 3 star was just as random it went to thumbs up or thumbs down. But that got trolled. A generation of haters and millennials decided that thumbs down was a good way to exercise power over something.

So we're left with just the thumbs up.

Eventually it's boiled down to mining user patterns (sales and cookies, user behaviour) and registering a thumbs up for confirmation. So that's the best data mining we can get that's closest to the truth for now.

Because it's not an ideal or reliable world.

 

Makes sense, but I think it would be a good idea to have a middle ground option anyway. "Liked/Disliked/Indifferent".

"stars" and "x out of 10" systems indeed produce skewed values, for example, let's say in movies, when somebody just discovers some genre, they're very prone to give very high ratings to anything they saw. Meanwhile someone who watched huge number of movies will have different perspective and will be less likely to give high ratings. This causes popular products to get higher ratings than they actually deserve.

 

Personally I use a thumb-based system. I happen to have two hands, so that neatly translates to a 1-4 rating:
2 thumbs up - heartily recommended (Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher 3, Rise of Nations)
1 thumb up - I like it, not very original, but good fun anyway (RTSes that aren't Rise of Nations, decent open worlders)
1 thumb down - has major bugs, server issues and/or too little content for the money, but there's a sliver of hope it'll be fixed (lots of shooters and MMOs which aren't Guild Wars 2 get this rating and never improve)
2 thumbs down - Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, Colonial Marines

This is a system I subject about five people to regularly. I don't expect it to be that popular

 

What if you lied though :O

 

Couldn't get through a day if I didn't!

 

Star Wars Battlefront revenue $840 million.

Watch Dogs revenue $600 million.

Destiny revenue $500 million.

Knack: I do not know as they have not released much on revenue.

Those numbers are based solely on what the companies released too the public in statements and assuming the price tag of $60 dollars per unit sold or downloaded.

Based on those numbers I have too agree with the others; those games did not under perform, nor were they flops.


HOWEVER!

I have seen and played some games that did perform poorly in sales...but STILL got a sequel (some times years later).

 

Other consideration for rating systems, is what is the rating intended to represent. Should i rate a game poorly because i personally didn't like it even if i can clearly tell it is a well made game, just not a game for me? Or should my ratings be purely opinion based.

In the case of Netflix and Steam ratings it seems it should be opinion based, since the system should know if i dislike a lot of games in 1 theme or genre that it should stop recommending them to me.

That being the case the way to figure out the quality of a game based on its ratings, would be how highly does it rate compared to other games in the same niche by the same users as others games who like that niche.

 

That's my big problem with reviews. You don't put somebody who only plays single-player games to completion once, ever, to review near-lifestyle games like Blizzard's current roster. Never ever touched Adventure Mode in D3 and still writing a review? Why the shazbot are you even assigned this job?

 

Only assign people who will give the game 10/10 to write the review?

 

No, don't assign somebody who hates car games to review car games, and don't assign somebody who doesn't even try all modes of a game to review a single+multiplayer game etc.

 

Why not??

 

Next thread will be criticizing release of the new Doom because the original was a flop.....

 

Is this the five minute argument or the full half-hour?

Tell me why you should have someone ill-disposed towards a type of game to review a game of that type.

 

Because it's utterly stupid beyond belief and encourages developers to make games that are mind-numbingly bland. Car games wouldn't exist. You'd need flying, fps, 3rd person and strategy bits to ever hope of reaching 10/10 and you never would.

DUH.

That would never happen. The exact opposite would as someone who has played a lot of a given genre knows what makes it suck.

 

On the other hand, there aren't enough games where the cars have cannons and rocket launchers. Just sayin'.

 

Carmageddon, GTA 5, Mariokart series..... maybe I play driving games with violence
Comes from living in a country where one drives on the correct and left side of the road.

 

http://www.worldstandards.eu/cars/driving-on-the-left/
Ye'll not touch me scabbard.

 

I have never though about why before. Just one of those things that passed me by. Thanks for that. Im not sure if I could get used to shifting left handed though. I assume the clutch is still on the left of the brake and throttle on right?

 

That's right. I imagine I'd probably go with an automatic for the first time ever if I had to switch because I'd forever be grabbing the door handle.

 

Wind screen wipers were the main culprit for me. We also drive on the correct side of the road here. When driving on the wrong side of the road, most stuff is surprisingly intuitive. You still naturally position yourself in the center of the road, and the pedals are the same.

But the windscreen wipers and the indicator are swapped over. So for the entire three weeks I was in the states, I would flick on the wipers to indicate I was trying to turn. I apologize to anyone I cut off doing this.

 

Well considering that nearly everyone in the UK indicates when they're actually turning and not before, I don't really rely on them. I indicate in good time because that's indicating.

Shame people are annoyingly annoying.

 

@hippocoder
Wow yeah I would have a hard time. I never put much thought toward the mecanics of it. I of course have known most of my life you drive on the "wrong side" but thats as far as it went. I'm guessing brittish race cars all have the shifter on the left. That would be fun to try, keep you paying good attention the whole ride.

 

I guess so, except formula 1 which has central seating and wheel-based gear shifting.

 

Those cars scare me. Im not sure if I want to drive one.

 

Of course you do. The best part is they don't brake properly unless you heat up the brakes by going as fast as possible.

 

Oh maybe a little. Ur right. They still scare me though. Moving too slow makes the car not handle appropriately. Its all or nothing with a narrow margin for error. Downforce contributes so much to traction that if your 40 mph too slow into a turn you will slide out when you could have actually gone much faster if you had skill. Scares me. Maybe if I warmed up in formula 500 for a year or so. Rally is more my kind of racing, grand touring is nice too. America has crap for racing in comparison, nascar is about as exiting as birdwatching. We do have monster trucks though so that counts for something.

 

You'd be surprised how quickly people adjust. Especially after the first time they fall out of the car!