Article: SE: we would like to turn Eidos' games into "persistent online experiences"

[Linnaete]

[23/08] SE: we would like to turn Eidos' games into "persistent online experiences"

First, some good news for fans of the reboot Tomb Raider game that came out this year:

The 2013 Tomb Raider reboot was received amazingly well. The team at Crystal and the broader team at Square Enix worked tirelessly to deliver on the promise of a modern reinvention of the franchise. We now sit in a great position where the decisions we made and the willingness to embrace a new direction resulted in the fastest selling game in the history of the franchise and the most critically acclaimed title ever produced from the studio.

Tomb Raider remains one of the biggest selling releases of 2013 in many major territories with more than 4 million units sold worldwide so far.

4 million sold worldwide is an astonishing figure, and any medium-sized developer and publisher would kill to see their game reach to these lofty heights. Unfortunately, this is still 2 million short of the 6 million figure that the publisher was hoping to shift. Though it's fair to congratulate them for 4 million sales, this affirms yet again the haplessness of the management and the ability to read and understand the current market.


Gamasutra blog

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In other, perhaps worse, news, Square-Enix have clearly stated their commitment to a new strategy that has recently been popping up in recent days in the industry.

The Eidos side of Square-Enix list their franchises as:

-Hitman
-Tomb Raider
-Deus Ex
-Sleeping Dogs
-Just Cause

While they state that not every Eidos intellectual property will turn into what they term a "persistent online experience", Sleeping Dogs and Just Cause have been cited specifically by name for their potential in extracting longer-term player engagement.

the neon lit Hong Kong of Sleeping Dogs and the tropical playground of Panau in Just Cause 2 - all worlds that tens of millions have enjoyed spending countless hours exploring. Oh, and there is also the depth and beauty in the worlds created by our colleagues in Japan!

Oh, here's the good part:

And for me, this is where the future starts. We see the opportunity for some of our games continuing beyond a traditional beginning, middle, and end. We can have them become extendable and more persistent - with an opportunity to build and grow across games. To design in a way to keep our games alive for years instead of weeks. I’m not talking about an MMORPG – although the concept is similar - I’m talking about creating persistent online experiences built on the foundations of the games we are well known for. Now, this doesn’t apply to every game, there is no one solution that works in every case, but as a wider goal it’s certainly something which some of our franchises are incredibly well suited to and something I want to explore further.

A persistent online experience where players can expect longer-term involvement in a game that is not conventionally structured with a simple beginning, middle and end. Yet something that is not quite an MMORPG. So basically, something like Bungie's Destiny, and TitanFall.

I hope people enjoy having to be perpetually online, ala Diablo 3 and SimCity style!

Gamasutra blog

 

[Cardinal Copia]

Heh and in the future when the servers no longer support them games, what will they be? Worthless because you can't use the disk without being online. That's one of the many reasons why Diablo 3 fails and is such a fuckpocalypse of a game. No single player offline mode? Always online? I realize that it's 2013 but not everybody has internet. And not everybody wants to play online all the time.
Online gaming is overrated IMO.

 

[Linnaete]

At Square Enix we care deeply about how our games are received, as creators they are the strongest statement we can make. Every day hundreds of talented individuals across our studios come into work with a single question in mind: How do I make the best game possible?

Look at the admission into our prestigious company of all these promising, potential new individuals who aspire to create some of the best games of the future! What do we do to help cultivate such budding new talent within our ranks? Why, we force them to accept our vision of just blindly chasing what appears to be working in the current market with little regard as to whether this approach will even work and what it may do to us and to our intellectual properties in the longer run!

You want a new Legacy of Kain game? You mean that charming story-driven franchise that saw plenty of action in the PS1 days before mysteriously vanishing off from the face of the planet? Oh, don't worry. We've brought it back. No, not as a new revitalised entry that fans have clamoured for. We had to cancel that. Oh no, we've made an even better effort this time. We're making a spinoff multiplayer game, probably because League of Legends and DOTA are totally IN at the moment, and we want to totally capitalise on that by holding on to the bandwagon as tightly as we can by our fingernails!

This sort of strategy has worked for a select few companies and games. As it stands now, major publishers are scrambling to jump into this exclusive jacuzzi as well, aiming to open it up for everyone. The problem is, there will only be a finite number of players who can totally invest in these online-only experiences, and as publishers grow increasingly more convinced that this may be the future of gaming, more of these "persistent online experiences" will show up, potentially saturating the place. Through time, your game may considerably lose its finite population and member activity, and it ceases to be a profitable venture. Games left and right will begin to see their servers shut off. Good luck trying to revisit these games years into the future, and/or continue with a relatively niche persistent online game.

This sort of paradigm certainly has its place, so long as they don't change their mind and decide, yeah! Tomb Raider needs to be a persistent online experience as well. That will totally be rad! I can see Just Cause having a decent go at this, and this does have a place, but at the same time, I don't want to see this pervasive practice seep nearly everywhere that conventional single-player experiences are seen to be unsustainable by big publishers. Oh, well, actually. I don't really care anymore to be honest. Let the indie and mid-sized developer revolution begin and some of the more hapless big publishers die off if they mistime and miscalculate this as an ideal future model of gaming.

 

[Cardinal Copia]

I hate to keep beating and beating a dead horse but I can't help it. Companies are trying to mimic the Call of Duty franchise because that's the biggest money maker. And what are them games known for? It certainly isn't their fucking story. Not anymore anyways. Story?(Lol wut?) Everybody buys it for the online and gamers flock to that shit.
So hey lets try and duplicate what they do and put more focus into the online experience, thats a good idea right? No. It's fucking not. It's actually lame as shit.