It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
I mean, when games take a long time to come out and then still have serious flaws (looking at you starfield) can you blame anyone for not feeling too attached to a franchise? God I remember when veilguard was first announced after Inquisition… Announced, cancelled to be reworked into live service, cancelled again only to completely change everything that really made it a DA game.
Really short article but kind of an interesting point. To be quite fair, the games don’t just take very long to produce but their appeal keeps shifting towards more adult themes so younger players might not even play them. FFXIV was basically Game of Thrones and prior to that you had… whatever the fuck FFXV was what with a road trip royal theme? Hell, even DQ12 was announced to have adult themes.
DQ spinoffs have a better shot but they haven’t been particularly good and FF spinoffs are money grabs, so there’s that too. The article points to more popular franchises in Japan like Pokemon, although at my kids are literally watching Pokemon TV designed for toddlers, that’s kinda cheating with how everywhere that franchise is, lol.
Isn’t FFXIV an MMO? I don’t remember it being very Game of Thrones-y.
Typo, or likely auto correct for FFXVI. Yup, was autocorrect, as it just did it again just now lol. I’ll correct it.
I cant even tell you the last original FF that came out.
it came out so many times in the remakes lol. plus they keep adding new lore every time.
I mean…basically FFXIV’s Dawntrail expansion. But even then, a lot of their side dungeons and such have been referencing events/worlds from other Final Fantasy games via some multiverse theory.
I reckon it’s also because there are simply so many games available now, and countless devices to play them on. My generation had one console or computer max, and a handful of games. Now young gamers have half a dozen devices at home, and thousands of free or easily accessible titles on whatever platform is currently in reach. They don’t need to commit to a couple of titles, when an advert for the next one is a tap away.
I mentioned this before on another post, but I had 5 games on my PS1 as a kid. There are currently over 400 owned games available on the living room Xbox, there’s a Switch in the house, the kids have iPhones, iPads and laptops, there’s a Quest 2 gathering dust etc etc. That attachment we had to one or two of the few games we owned as kids has to be in part down to accessibility.
I agree this is a much more plausible reason. Not only was there less choice, there was less opportunity. Adjusting for inflation, I paid over $150 for Final Fantasy VI when it came out. Games were precious, and the good games were ones you replayed because–unless you were quite privileged–you didn’t have a big library to choose from.
That’s the kind of thing that endears players, and it takes truly exceptional products to get there now. There are also far more studios that have the game-making formulas to work with today, too. I don’t think that’s a bad thing in any way.
Steam library is at over 2000 games, yet it’s always Arc Raiders, Minecraft, and Peglin. Can’t get them to play a game with an actual story for the life of me.
SE’s obsession with making every mainline FF game a 100+ million dollar project with hours of cutscenes and a combat system ill suited to fight the skyscraper sized enemies is killing the series.
They’re obsessed with spectacle. Nobody really cares about spectacle anymore.
In fairness, spectacle has been a key part of the series’ identity ever since Summons were trying to show off as many particle effects as the SNES could handle. And then FF7 was designed around being a tech showcase for everything the Playstation could do, it looks quaint today but at the time that was cutting-edge eye candy and it’s how the game was marketed.
I still remember they put Deus Ex in the freezer, handed it over to Embracer, then they murdered it before the final chapter.
I mean, being the cutting edge turn based JRPG that’s on par with the most impressive AAA titles if not an industry leader itself was historically Final Fantasy’s place in the market, in contrast to Dragon Quest’s traditionalism.
Hell, I believe Expedition 33 is popular because it more or less filled the spot that Final Fantasy forfeited when it went action.
Kids will abandon most pre-existing shit to find something they can call their own.
Maybe don’t build your lives and identity around games?
What? What does that have to do with it? They’re not engaging with once massively popular stories, not bemoaning how they can’t be obsessed with them.
Why would you have an “attachment” to patterns of light on a screen?
… Because they tell a compelling story?
I can have a preferred color combination (turquoise and violet) without making that color combination my entire personality. You can do the same thing with video games.
☝️🤓 why do you have an emotional attachment to wavelengths of light?
I’m sorry, I’m not sure if you’re satirizing the initial poster or not :(
Oh, I absolutely am.
Because I love wavelengths but it doesn’t feel the same. It just goes through me. ☹️
A romantic attraction to something going through you? Lewd!
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What an odd thing to say with such a bold username.
It’s much easier to build momentum around a franchise when you release 7 games in 10 years than 2 games in 7 years.
Maybe because other games are more fun?
Did you read the article? The point here is that nowadays games in general, especially AAA games, takes very long to develop. In my opinion one reason for that is that games have became way too big, usually at the expense of gameplay. Of course there is some series like NBA 2K and CoD that keeps releasing a “new” game every year. However we all know that for many years they have repeated themselves a lot. New releases should be just patches that updates the roster or something like that.
Not sure why they’d think kids are the target audience for a remake of a 29 year old game.
Surely all the kids are playing the latest mobile slop pocket money sink?
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Being Japan, I suspect all the kids are sinking money into Gacha Impact or Honkai Gacha Rail or whatever else
I’m seriously seeing the difference between reddit and lemmy in this post. Last time I saw somebody mention how franchises were pretty frequent releases they got jumped on hard for not knowing anything about how games are made and that it does take 15 years to make a decent product.
I’m of the opinion that it really depends on the nature of the game.
For example, the children are super hyped for GTA VI, because even though GTA V came out before some of them had object permanence, they’ve been playing it for years. It’s remained in their consciousness this entire time.
Compare that to Skyrim, which came out only a year or so before GTA V, and we haven’t seen an Elder Scrolls game since… The young don’t give a toss. They weren’t playing it then, they aren’t playing it now, so there’s absolutely no attachment to Elder Scrolls as a series.
Games used to stay in the consumer’s consciousness before by having sequels made every few years, sometimes even every year! Now? It’s all live services, so it doesn’t feel like the game hasn’t had a new iteration for over a decade.
In other words: Kids aren’t attached to franchises anymore because the game industry is stagnating.
Same for elder scrolls or gta. Kids today get 1, maybe 2 games of their favorite series before they have to do adult things. The only teams releasing on a quick schedule are the shit mobile games.
i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.
elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.
HL3 problem is that they want it to be as groundbreaking as the previous titles. The problem with elder scrolls 6 is that even if it is released it’s probably going to be bad.
Kids play kid’s games like Roblox or Fortnite. Also i feel kids don’t play single player games all that much.
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Those games are what they can all play together across platforms for free, that is what matters as a kid when you get home and want to hop online with your buddies
My parents wouldnt buy me games as a kid but they bought me consoles, I wouldve loved some decent free stuff, fortnite became a thing when I could start buying games myself
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A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.
I didn’t play the second of the remake games because it was a PS5 exclusive. I usually buy into one platform (it was Xbox this gen) and hop on late in a console cycle for the other side to get cheap consoles and games, but for the first time consoles are getting more expensive over time, so I still don’t have a PS5. It’s on PC now, but building a PC costs as much as a modest house right now.
