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[Poetic.Injustice]

When Hideki Kamiya took to Twitter earlier this week to praise and thank NieR: Automata director Taro Yoko for the positive effect the game's success has had on PlatinumGames as a company, he implicitly confirmed something many fans of the company had feared - that despite its string of much-loved, critically acclaimed titles, Platinum had been on the ropes and potentially facing disaster.

"It's a pathetic thing to say, but it's no exaggeration to say that Platinum has been saved by Yoko-san," Kamiya tweeted.

PlatinumGames is a pretty impressive development studio. Firmly establishing itself as a creator of beautifully polished cult classic games with the likes of Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising and Vanquish, it's also done great, offbeat work with the likes of The Wonderful 101 and has done high-profile work for hire for some of the industry's biggest publishers. The quality bar hasn't always been held up - games like Anarchy Reigns and Star Fox Zero failed to hit the mark we'd come to expect from Platinum - but in the eight years since the company launched its first games, there have been far more hits than misses, and the hits have been spectacular.

Yet here's Kamiya, one of the founders, talking about the studio needing to be "saved" by the success of NieR: Automata - which, although a brilliant and beautiful game, has really only been a moderate commercial success. Though far outperforming the original NieR, the well-regarded sequel has sold about 1.5 million units - great, but not "sports cars for the whole studio" great, by any stretch of the imagination.

Why PlatinumGames was in trouble, right at that moment in time, isn't hard to fathom; the studio had just seen Scalebound, an ambitious multiplayer RPG being developed as an Xbox One exclusive, being cancelled by publisher Microsoft. In this era of crowdfunding and early access and many other business models and ways of funding development, we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that this is still a living reality of the games business; that a big publisher or platform holder can roll over and crush a small developer, no matter how acclaimed or beloved that studio may be. The history of game development is littered with those dead studios; destroyed not by their own incompetence or lack of creativity, but by a publisher that changes focus, or loses interest, or makes some other decision at an executive level that ends up destroying a third-party developer halfway across the world.

That doesn't just impact Platinum; it's a problem for a whole sector of the industry, studios and creators who have done a great job over the years of building games that build cult status with a small but thriving audience of fans. If that's not something that a studio can build a business around any more, that's an enormous shame - and a huge creative loss to the industry as a whole. These are the kind of games that often drive the industry forward, innovating and pushing boundaries on a whole range of different fronts; they may not always hit their mark and they rarely sell millions, but when they get something right, you can be certain it'll start to appear in some form in the sorts of games that do sell millions. Moreover, the audience these games appeal to are important in their own right; it's the fans of creative, cult games who are the industry's most devoted "superfans", and its from their ranks that many of those motivated to work in the industry or in the media surrounding it are drawn.

Given how many other sectors of the industry are booming, what's gone wrong for PlatinumGames and studios of its ilk? Why is a studio so popular and so acclaimed left in a situation where it lives from project to project, and a single cancellation can threaten its existence? Here, I'd like to draw attention to something else that happened this week; the comments from Steam Spy's Sergey Galyonkin, who used in-depth data about Steam pricing to argue for indie developers to value their games more highly and stop undercutting their own businesses.

Galyonkin pointed out that even though average sales for indie titles are only at around 21,000 titles, the average selling price has fallen to $8.72 - which drops by almost half, to $4.63, during Steam's periodic sales, which have become famous for consumers stuffing their catalogues with cheap games that they may or may not ever get around to playing.

This relates back to the experience of niche, celebrated games from bigger studios precisely because very often, what those games are competing with for attention is exactly indie titles. The core audience for creative indie games overlaps significantly with the core audience for games like those Platinum makes... And that, it seems, is a core audience that's started to get used to paying five bucks, rather than fifty, for a game. Of course, what Platinum offers is more polished, more complete and more professional, in most cases, than what you'll get from a plucky indie creator; but it's on the same spectrum in terms of experience. At one end of the market, you have AAA games getting more and more expensive; at the other, indie games getting cheaper and cheaper; and it's increasingly hard to see how a studio like Platinum fits into that world.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-18-falling-indie-prices-undercut-the-market

 

[Deeke[VRZ]]

This is entirely based on PC indies that are cheap for a reason. I feel this argument is ridiculous as I consistently see overpriced indies on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.

This site has good content sometimes but this one doesn't make sense to me.