Censorship law removed?

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#21
quote:
Originally posted by Dark_Shiki:
Yes, but local "scarcities" like that hardly deserve the term, considering you can mail-order games from anywhere in the U.S. at same as or cheaper than the price you'd find if you went to an actual store (shipping cost and tax tend to cancel each other). In that case, the scarcity doesn't even really exist. For all you know, RPG gamers in St. Louis simply prefer to mail order their games instead of buying them at stores. Personally, I don't buy any games at stores anymore, because there's too much of a tendency to impulse buy.
Actually i've seen prices online...almost always even without S&H the prices tend to be higher for those HTF games.

And there are some that really are HTF, like PS1 Tactics Ogre. Sure you can see lots of them for sale on ebay. but at a cost beyond the price it originally sold for. And even then, compare that to say the number of Halo2 games...

[This message has been edited by Jinnai (edited 01-31-2005).]

#22
quote:
Originally posted by Ex-S Woo:
Yea, but its the same here as well.

Well, I think they're a bit different. A lot of the US companies that have been shutting down are the 2nd tier publishers publishing for mostly medicore titles in an expanding game market. Japan's gaming market is shrinking and Enix and Atlus are popular companies with multi-million unit sellers to boast about...yet they were still forced merge or scale back.

No what i think is happening in Japan is what happened several years back in the US company with all the computer game companies.

Squaresoft and Enix got in trouble because they tried to do stuff they weren't good at. Both companies were known for making excellent RPGs, but when they tried to make other type of games, almost all of them flopped. The only one that had any success was Bushido by Squaresoft, but its sequal wasn't nearly so popular.

On the other hand, almost every one of their rpgs, both enix and squaresoft made profits. Yes there were some bad ones, and yea not all of them are to everyone's taste, but Squarenix holds now the best known brand for rpg, Final Fantasy so they are pretty safe as long as they stick to what they're good at.

Atlus probably won't survive, but for some time it hadn't been making its games published enough. I only found Hoshigami on chance at a new/used place and Saiyuki while randomly searching around on ebay.

As for the US, there are very few video game companies left to begin with. EA is the only real player. The others just have a few major titles. I doubt Rockstar Games will be able to continue. GTA is popular enough for it, but in today's market you can't just keep producing sequals for 1 title and hope to make it for long and that's pretty much their only well know brand.

Blizzard also has had a lot off loss since WoW didn't do as well as they thought, so even here is the US its no different.

[This message has been edited by Jinnai (edited 01-31-2005).]

#23

I don’t have any problem finding the games I want to buy at the online gamestop store.

Anyway, there’s other Western companies that are doing well. Maxim, the makers of The Sims, must be raking in money hand-and-fist. Bioware has also made a name for itself over the past few years.

#24

The Japanese market recently got hit with a double whammy; both people are right - the one who said “gaming market has shrunk”, and the one who said “no, companies made bad decisions”. (Sorry, forget exactly who said what … big thread).

The Spirits Within, for instance, almost sank Square entirely. They were only able to recover because FFX was a smashing success. But they had to focus on being profitable – i.e. Final Fantasy – and honestly, FF has been in a bit of a slump. But! Even though Square was saved, they still wound up having to merge with Enix – I blame this on FF:TSW.

However it is ALSO true that the Japanese gaming market has shrunk by … I can’t remember the exact numbers but it’s as much as 30% in the past few years. That’s a LOT.

And at the same time, foreign (read: mostly US) game makers have started recovering from what I view as the fallout from the 80’s crash. It takes time to build up good quality development houses – when the Atari console market collapsed, console development here more or less died. Japan picked up the pieces, and so they had a head start on having good development teams. The US dev teams really started coming into their own on the Playstation, and now with the current generation we’re seeing far more US-developed games succeed.

Now I have to get to work.

#25

Yep, that and Square had the backing of Sony, and Sony would never let Square go backrupt. There is that, and from what I last checked, Sony owns a big percentage of stock in Square as well.

Spirits Within was a bit too ambitious. I think if I remember correctly, Square spent like $200 million making the movie, and the movie only brought in about $25-30 million. The dvd did a little better but not enough to save Square Pictures though. The only thing that Square got from Spirits Within was being able to make more life like CG cutscenes for the FF games in shorter amount of time.

[This message has been edited by Sousuke (edited 01-31-2005).]

#26

Pardon. But the yearly numbers recently released shows that the game market is growing. This continues a long trend. It also shows that in the PC market, RPGs are the third most popular sold game, at 10% of the market. Strategy games were #1, at 37% or so of the market, then FPS was #2 at 12% of the market, AIR.

I believe that it is the rising costs of producing a game that is driving the game company consolidation. That may be why people believe that the markets are shrinking, but not one recorded game industry has shrunk in years, in terms of revenue.

#27

Assuming those figures reflect American sales figures, that would indeed make sense. I’ve been hearing more and more that gaming seems to be diverting people’s attention from other recreational activities such as TV. Keep in mind though that the Japanese developers probably make most of their sales in Japan (go figure). Thus a growing American market doesn’t equal a growing market overall for Japanese developers.

But wow…strategy games are 37% of the market? WTF?!

[This message has been edited by Dark_Shiki (edited 02-01-2005).]

#28
quote:
Keep in mind though that the Japanese developers probably make most of their sales in Japan (go figure). Thus a growing American market doesn't equal a growing market overall for Japanese developers.
It depends on the title. Yea there is a higher precentage, even with the fallout, that play video games in Japan, but of certain type an series. Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Metal Gear Solid, and a few others routinely sell more in BA than in Japan simply because they have a larger pool of people.
quote:
But wow...strategy games are 37% of the market? WTF?!
That doesn't surprise me. Of one of the few small gaming companies to well, and that i like, is Paradox, which produces historical strategy games. These games tend to do better in Europe, but also Koei has a buch of series that do well in Japan.

Its really only the US that lags behind in sales for strategy games, and even so its still one of the top sellers.

However i am wondering if they are also counting in this tactical level games, like Warcraft and C&C, which are totally different games.

[This message has been edited by Jinnai (edited 02-01-2005).]

#29

Strategy games have always been big on PCs thanks to the mouse, which made it the only platform to play it well on.

#30
quote:
Originally posted by Dark_Shiki:
Assuming those figures reflect American sales figures, that would indeed make sense. I've been hearing more and more that gaming seems to be diverting people's attention from other recreational activities such as TV.

[This message has been edited by Dark_Shiki (edited 02-01-2005).]

Indeed, video games are the first thing in a very long time to reduce the average number of hours spent watching TV. That's an impressive accomplishment.

#31
quote:
Originally posted by Nandemonai:
Indeed, video games are the first thing in a very long time to reduce the average number of hours spent watching TV. That's an impressive accomplishment.

And it will take an even greater accomplishment to reduce the average number of hours spent in front of a computer/video game. Except extreme stuff like blowing up powerplants and such.

Unless I'm suddenly struck with irreversible blindness, I don't see what could possibly make me abandon the PC as my main leisure time consumer.

#32

I’ve had a chance to go back and check. That was for North American sales.

Also, I had not remembered the breakdown correctly for PC games. Here it is direct from the report:
strategy games (26.9 percent), family and children’s entertainment games (20.3 percent) and shooter games (16.3 percent), followed by role-playing games (10 percent), adventure games (5.9 percent), sports games (5.4 percent), and action games (3.9 percent).

My apologies. My AIR was wrong.

While digging for that information, I came across worldwide reports of sales as of Sept 2004. It did increase year over year, but it was a minor 1% gain. The reason stated was the bite from the next generation consoles… the market is supposed to be “waiting” for the next generation of consoles.

#33

Those figures seem more reasonable. I had thought that sports games were more popular than that, though (especially on consoles). They’re all I see in used-game bins (though maybe that’s suggestive of something else).

#34
quote:
Originally posted by woodelf:
A live female !?? [img]http://princess.cybrmall.net/ubb/biggrin.gif[/img]

A what? Laiv Fee-mail? Never heard of it. [img]http://princess.cybrmall.net/ubb/tongue.gif[/img]

#35
quote:
Originally posted by Benoit:
Strategy games have always been big on PCs thanks to the mouse, which made it the only platform to play it well on.

Except for KOEI games which did have computer counterparts, some even in english, but never sold as well as their console counterparts.
#36
quote:
Originally posted by Dark_Shiki:
Those figures seem more reasonable. I had thought that sports games were more popular than that, though (especially on consoles). They're all I see in used-game bins (though maybe that's suggestive of something else). [img]http://princess.cybrmall.net/ubb/wink.gif[/img]
Yep of the fact people don't need 10 basketball games. Unlike strategy, rpgs, and even fps games...they're basically all the same, just hte bells and whistles are different.

Although i hear the Harry Potter Quiddich game has an extremely low turnover rate in the used market (i meantion that cuz it is considered a sport game...a fantasy sport game, but a sport game none-the-less).

[This message has been edited by Jinnai (edited 02-02-2005).]

#37

I could put up the break-down for console games in the US, if anyone wants to know. That market has a different split then the PC market.

#38

Sure why the hell not.

#39

Console break down for North America for the 12 month period ending in Sept 2004:

action (30.1 percent), sports (17.8 percent), and first- and third-person shooter titles (9.6 percent). Children and family entertainment titles represented 9.5 percent of sales, followed by racing titles (9.4 percent), role-playing games (9 percent), and fighting games (5.4 percent).

#40

Thanks for the statistics. It’s interesting to compare the two markets (PC and console).