All their games hurt my eyes and their quitting because not enough people recognize their genius left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Ha, they quit making arcade games to make a battle royale. Good luck, y’all.
Also they quit because they said sales weren’t high enough, which makes me wonder what they thought sales of arcade style games would be. Also apparently they released one called Matterfall that I hadn’t even heard of till I read their I Quit announcement just now.
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You got some zelda in my megaman
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I think Housemarque quitting was less pique and more spending $2m+ to make a game that sold <$100k
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yeah I took it to mean “we can’t do this anymore” which is hard to frame especially if you’re Scandinavian
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Housemarque is up to like 70-ish people now, which isn’t huge but apparently too big for arcade type games to support. I like their games but the audience just isn’t that big.
They had a niche but outgrew it.
Well yeah, that is kinda what I was getting at. Like did they not understand how sales of these games tend to go? Did they think they were going to get Geometry Wars 1 level sales, because even Geometry Wars doesn’t get those any more.
Like part of it is I think they made a decent amount on Super Stardust, and thought they would make that on all future games, while ignoring that SS filled a pretty not busy niche at the time on the PS3, one that is now occupied by a lot more stuff. It seems like, as busted was saying, they were spending a lot on games that were never likely to have the sales to justify it.
yeah, but if they can’t sell them, those games basically cease to exist at that level of budget, which is not a Market Inevitability that I think anyone here wants, so I can forgive them coming off as less than gracious or whatever when they complained about low sales
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Yeah apologies for being a jerk and a nihilist which is where I think Booji and myself were coming from.
Resogun is cool (but hurts my eyes.)
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I’ve been pecking away at random games in my Steam library and the only one that really grabbed me (Refunct) was over in like 40 minutes
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Oh no, I get that, but saying “Arcade Is Dead” (like literally the title of their announcement) and then complaining that despite your high metacritic scores, you just didn’t get the sales…well, it sure reads not great. I can get why it would leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth.
I even really like some of their games. Resogun is pretty fun. Nex Machina is enjoyable enough, even if I played it for two days and don’t really want to play much more.
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That’s kind of why I don’t have much love for Jeff Minter, I remember him crying Pearls-before-swine about Space Giraffe after it failed to sell very well.
Oh yeah, Minter definitely does it sometimes as well, though he seems pretty decent at scoping his projects based on how they do so that he keeps getting to make more, somehow. He at least doesn’t go declaring arcade games as a dead genre, just a more limited one that he would like.
I dunno, these companies aren’t like EA huge or something. The type of game you’re passionate about making being no longer monetarily viable is a hard pill to swallow, and it’s hard for me not to be sympathetic about it.
I don’t think they’re being insincere so I don’t understand what’s distasteful about it.
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I should probably state here that I say all this as someone whose favorite genre of games (STGs) has been circling this problem now for at least 10-15 years at this point, and it sucks a lot. I have a lot of sympathy for it. But at the same time, it sucks when one of the more well known studios for it just openly declares the entire thing unprofitable and dead.
I’ll stop now.
I think it might’ve been more illustrative for them to claim that it was dead other than for bedroom coders, which is why I’m still giving them the benefit of the doubt over being a medium-sized studio in a country with high salaries and so on – if they were to have said, “it’s no longer possible to pay people to do this,” which I don’t think is an excessively charitable interpretation of their statement, they probably would’ve garnered more sympathy.
Maybe it makes more sense to read it as, “dead at a commercial scale”; no one can pay people for their work (for the record $2m is about 7-10 people for 2.5 years, maybe double the scope of Super Stardust) and make arcade games right now, but there’s always the chance a hobbyist game might break out.
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oh hello there