Sony Wasn't Interested in New JRPG from Ex-Wild Arms Devs

Kickstarter link for anyone interested:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublekickstarter/armed-fantasia-and-penny-blood

It does make sense, though. JRPGs really went from being a bigger genre in the SNES/PS1 days, to slowly becoming more niche from the PS2 onward. That was when games starts becoming a lot more involved with development. Despite absolutely loving JRPGs, they are a pretty niche genre now and there's only a few that really stand out.

Yeah this could have shut some naysayers up about Sony only doing single player narrative stories as of recent. Get back to their Japanese roots. Now Xbox will have this game to bolster their JRPG catalog. Hopefully this game does great.

Of couse, playstation isn't japanese company anymore.

I've been gaming since the days of the ZX Spectrum and I have zero interest in JRPGs, they're not for everyone.

Well it paid off for Sony in the end, they didn't have to help fund the game and they are still getting it 👍

It’s a big mistake Sony focusing only on Return on Investment and destroying their identity. An identity that attracted the majority of PS owners in the first place. I know it totally turns me off. In fact, if it wasn’t for VR I probably wouldn’t have a PS5 as they have nothing else to offer me I can’t get elsewhere and for cheaper.

Sony seems to be increasingly losing their identity. They moved away from the Japan side of things later in the PS4 era but now the identity they created in the PS4 era is under threat because of Microsoft's gigantic acquisition spree that's seemingly infinite.

@Grumblevolcano, Not quite no, Since Ps5 gen we have got Ghostwire Tokyo, Valkyrie Elysium, FF16, FF7 Rebirth, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin and Forspoken. All are exclusive/console exclusive to PS5. On top of that, this year 2 Japanese focussed state of plays were held . XDEV also has a new Japan/Asia division. They are certainly listening to fan feedback. Plus SIE also invested 14% in Fromsoftware. Things are certainly improving, but I think they really do need a few more Japanese Dev's/ publishers under their wing.

Understandable but still disappointing. I've been gaming since the PS1 era and majority of the games I've enjoyed are JRPG. Over the years, the genre has become niche and only a few people are invested. If it weren't for the Switch's sucess, JRPG may have died in today's era of gaming. Such a shame that Sony aren't as invested as they were back then (unless they came from bigger companies like Square Enix). At least Nintendo is still interested in it which is why the Switch has been a JRPG heaven.

It's too bad how niche JRPGs have become. Thankfully though that niche is pretty dedicated and unlike a lot of other genres, turn based JRPGs can appeal to older players much more than the general majority of games since you don't need on a dime reaction time to play them. Because of this I think the fanbases for these types of games can stay invested. So I believe they will still be around for years to come thankfully. It's just a smaller market is all.

Return to your roots, Sony. Do something, anything at this point. Konami celebrates its IPs by re-releasing them in great packages that get people talking. Castlevania, Contra, and TMNT are entries that we can go back to now and be excited about again. Suikoden is also coming up. Try doing more of that at the very least.

It is not the 90s...

Sony does not make Wild Arm jRPG just like Atlus does not make Miles Morales Open World action games.

In the end Sony is getting the game on PS5 anyway. You get to play them both.

Yes that goes for literally every company except Square Enix which is what he's trying to say. Nobody wants to let them make new JRPGs and it's true

I can't think of very many new JRPGs that have come out except Octopath, Triangle Strategy (and even then most of team asanos games coast off the fact that they all look like they belong in a series under the HD 2D gloss), 13 sentinels, maybe the card games by Yoko Taro if you want to count them as jrpgs, Harvestella again if you want to count it, and Nioh depending on what you consider a JRPG. Those are just some of the bigger more recent ones that come to mind

Everything is usually a sequel or a continuation of an already existing series. Was there even a new JRPG at TGS? Maybe that Samurai Maiden game? Otherwise I'm pretty sure the highlight for most JRPG fans was that Konamis porting old suikoden games lol. Everything at the recent ninty Direct? Literally all ports and sequels. There's a lot of people claiming we're in a sort of renaissance for JRPGS but that's just because a lot of devs have been porting their old classics not making new games

Unfair for anyone to really to criticise Sony here. Who knows what was pitched to them in that meeting. This statement from the dev is less about Sony losing its identity (which to an extent it is), but definitely has more to do with the wider landscape and appetite for niche JRPGs at the moment (sadly)

It’s obvious Sony more interesting with investing in big aaa Japanese games than smaller Japanese games.

Don't get me wrong I love JRPGs but the problem with a lot of JRPGs is that they are stuck in the past. They are still churning out the same tropes time and time again and refusing to take risks. P5 had massive success because it was willing to try something different.

I've been playing JRPGs since the late 80s, with Dragon Warrior and the original Final Fantasy. And I miss the days when the genre was at the cutting edge of game development and design. That really hasn't been the case since the end of the PS2 era, sadly.

Do you guys think that we'll ever get another fantasy setting party based RPG that has top end graphics, UI, smooth controls, ect? Or are the anime style ones just all that there will ever be? I just have a hard time getting interested in those. I want a game that looks and feels like Horizon or Ghost of Tsushima, but as a party based game.

@Korgon I think in 25 more years I'll still be able to Splatoon with the kiddies......I don't think I'll be able to read all the menu stats in most RPGs though

@Grumblevolcano What PS4 era identity? That's when they started losing their identity. PS4 launched with the identity of "it's not xbox or Wii", kinda gained an identity in years 2-4. Then just became "default console" after that. PS4 is when PS really lost its actual identity. PS5 is just a side effect.

@NEStalgia Not me. I've been playing slow paced games since I was in middle school, and that's what I want more of.

I'm not seeing anyone state the maybe most obvious reason: The developer wants to make a spiritual successor to an IP that Sony owns already.

Of course I wasn't present on their talks but I imagine Sony would have been a little more willing to listen, if he suggested a new Wild Arms game.

Nevertheless I am PUMPED for this game. Hopefully it turns out great!

That game looks amazing.glad its still coming to PlayStation.playstation still supports awsome jrpgs.word up son

sadly the popularity decline, because somehow in PS3/psvita era, not many japanese developer want localized the game to the rest of the world. even thought right now many japanese developer try to localized their game. it's just to late to get investment from big player like sony because JRPG is considered niche market.

I Sony were smart, they'd see the succes of companies like Falcom and acquire them and give them a good dev engine, training, some more money, and a translation team.
Imagine an YS X or XI game with Horizon graphics.

I was just thinking, what if Kojima started making a JRPG? That surely would be a AAA game. I think we need a competitor to Square Enix. They are taking too long with their Final Fantasies.
The other AAA RPG franchise is Tales of from Bandai, I think, and maybe Persona.

@Unlucky13 Oh I'm an RPG super fan in general. But I figure in a few decades all those tiny stats might be trouble. I don't play to many fast action games (No soulsborne for me!), but strangely I find I'm getting better rather than worse at them with age. I was bad when I was younger.....IDK why, but I'm getting faster reflexes, but less patient for in-game-maths with age, and I totally lost patience with Ocotpath's damage sponge boss battles that go on forever with huge AoE attacks that reverse your progress.

"I want a game that looks and feels like Horizon/Ghost but as a party based game"

JRPGs were never that. I can think of very few that even broached into being so ultra-real ultra-serious back in the SNES days. Even the "serious" ones always had a "cartoon" aesthetic to them. Maybe not "anime" as it is in HD, but I think that sort of abstraction of the real has always been a cornerstone of what makes a JRPG a JRPG. There's a fragile innocence to the characters and world that drives the themes harder than if it just works to imitate reality. I think that's a necessary part of the style. If I re-imagine any massively impactful moment of any JRPG, I think it would lose some of its impact if it were made more real. The abstraction in the design is part of what makes it more personal rather than being a casual observer. Some series like Fire Emblem did use to be more dry and serious. SMT used to be definitely less anime. But I can't say they were "realistic" in that sense either. When I think "realistic" I think of that as the domain of western RPGs. It's just that not many of them have parties anymore. Obsidian and inExile are kind of the last of the party-driven serious WRPG makers. IDK what Avowed will be. It seems single character though, even though it's Pillars of Eternity's world. "Super-realistic" just doesn't really fit Japanese design in general.

But mostly "ultra-real" costs a fortune to make, so any ultra-real game needs to reach the largest possible audience, which means it has to be simplified to be "for everybody" (and arguably be as much like "playing a movie" as possible to do so.) And that will never be a party based, turn-based RPG....

Sony used to make a ton of lower and mid-budget games and that was the heart of what made their first party content great to me. Since they've gone down the path of mega-budgets-only, it means all their games also have to be "for everybody".... which leads to the "all Sony games are the same game in a different skin" criticism. It's an exaggeration, but there's truth in it.

@Sil_Am Imagine YS X or XI selling enough copies to pay for Horizon graphics..... I'd be down for a Kojima JRPG though! I don't even like Kojima and think he's massively overrated, but I'd definitely love to see his take on a JRPG.

Sony invests in what sells - that's what businesses that survive do. Business that invest in things that don't sell don't survive. That's true for video games, cars, pizza ingredients, overpriced screwdrivers, and everything else you can think of.

AAA games sell better than JRPGs right now. So Sony invests more in what sells better. This isn't rocket science. If you want more games like X, then buy more X and get everyone else to buy more X, and we'll all get more X. If you can't convince your friends to buy it, how do you expect to convince Sony to invest in it?

It's not like you need a huge budget to make something that gets a huge audience - see also: Minecraft.

@jimbouk ahh. Well that's good to hear. Hopefully they keep that up

@NEStalgia Their identity became the place to play big 1st party single player games like HFW and GoW (2018) alongside the big multiplatforn hits like CoD and FIFA.

Nowadays the big multiplatform hits are starting to disappear because of Microsoft's acquisition spree meanwhile the 1st party single player games are starting to disappear because Sony's all in on live service.

You know people would always say sony isn't the same and they lost their identity and all that (I was one of those people I admit) but at the end of the day these games just don't sell like that anymore. People don't buy em. They all want the same stuff. Its almost as if a dev has to get lucky for their new IP to sell well. And that's for any company really.

Fromsoft keeps doing souls games cuz that's all people want. Sega keeps doing yakuza cuz that's all people want. Capcom keeps doing the same RE's, Monhun, and Street fighters cuz that's all people buy. If they made a Rival school with as much love and budget that sf6 seems to have I bet it still wouldn't sell enough.

Platinum has mostly put out various unique bangers their whole career yet they're still struggling to this day.

Sony is still a business at the end of the day. They're just doing what brings in the money. It's very unfortunate especially for people like me who love Japanese games and variety but it's just how it is.

@Pepsiman_100 People keep defending rising game prices because games cost more to make, but it's a self fulfilling prophecy. The more expensive games are to buy, the less people are going to buy anything other than a sequel to a hit game they know they like, because it's too much money to gamble on something you aren't guaranteed to love. The higher the prices go, the more you'll see sales only to go to existing franchises. I think that's one of the big pushes behind subscription services of de-risking not taking the safe route for a game.

I just finally got around to watching the SoP and NinDirect yesterday. Sure it was mostly J-games, but....OMG so much content! I want almost all of it, can't afford all of it, and have time to play all of it even less. I think the release glut over the next year will start to show cracks in the pricing model. If all these game are top dollar, gamers will chose one out of several because nobody can spend the money or time for ALL of the things that interest them. Cheaper to make games that don't sell as much aren't a bad pool of content to have around.

The niche games aren't selling less than they used to, it's just that mainstream things are selling more than those things ever sold, and companies like sony are chasing only the biggest market at the cost of all other markets. Sony changed from the market they once served to a different market that's much bigger. The old market didn't die. It just got overshadowed by a newer even bigger market and some companies only want the one that's biggest.

@RobN That's an oversimplification though. Successful businesses identify markets and fulfill the demand in that market, turning a profit. Identifying only the largest market, and only fulfilling demand within that market, ignoring, or even withdrawing from success in other markets is a short-sighted action prioritizing only the largest possible immediate returns at the cost of market diversification. AAA sells better than JRPGs, though it also costs far more to produce than JRPGs, because it sells to a larger market. But the JRPG market, while not yielding as high a return (or as high an outlay) is sizable, stable, and loyal. Microsoft isn't throwing money around trying to buy into that niche market just because they can. It's a lucrative market they don't have a foothold in that they want a foothold in even if they have to deficit spend to get it. Sony had that market locked and is willfully giving it away to chase a bigger market. For the quarterlies, that's the best results. For the long term business flexibility, it isn't necessarily the smartest move.

For the pizza analogy, just because pepperoni sells 50x more than mushrooms, it's not necessarily a smart move to just ignore mushrooms, sausage, and olives and just focus on 10 varieties of pepperoni. Eventually the mushroom lovers might gravitate toward a competitor just as pepperoni wanes in popularity and you're forever remembered as the pepperoni store, looking kind of out of date and tied to a fad. (Because this is Push and everything needs to be food related.)

@RobN This. All of this. It's wild that I hardly ever see comments like this. Everyone blames the company but not the consumers

@Grumblevolcano That's the problem, though, that's not really much of an identity to have. The identity can't even be summarized well. Losing special arrangements on big multiplat online competitive games shouldn't be an identity killer, and a few mega-budget releases that may or may not really translate well to a long running series isn't really a platform identity either. Nintendo's identity is a concept more than an ip. Quirky games, family games, and weeb games. X360's identity was dudebro shooters and racing (for better or worse, and it tried to build a JRPG identity but failed.), PS1's identity was "big" games due to its unique storage. PS2's identity was weeb stuff, even bigger games, 3D gaming for the masses, etc, and realistically value was its identity above all. Even PS3 had an identity of extremely experimental games and "brown shooters". Xbone was TV TV TV (not a good identity, but it had one!) WiiU.... well...

Meanwhile PS4 was "the place to play big first party games like [insert a few specific examples which is really most of the list] plus the big online competitive games you can play on anything else" Which is the point. It really had no identity. Its identity was GoW and naughty dog. You can say HFW, but even that isn't really its identity, it's not really a linchpin game (even if it's one of my personal preferred Sony series.) GoW, TLOU (even though that's a PS3 game) Spiderman. That's basically PS4. The whole identity. Those games and the "default" place to play CoD and FIFA. Its real identity was simply that of being a default because the competitors sucked. Year one it didn't even have games. A launch PS4 wasn't about wanting what PS4 was, it was about not wanting what Xbox/WiiU was. It flirted with being a weeb paradise for a while, but that faded over the years and Nintendo stole that fast.

I mean I get it, market wise in its time frame that was a profitable identity. But it's not a real lasting platform identity that defines the brand, it's just a short-term identity for the market at that point in time for the current fads.

If PS5 were to have an identity, for now, it looks like "the place to play licensed Disney content" is its identity. Now that's a profitable identity...but.... for a gamer rather than a pop culture fan, it's not going to have a lasting impression.

XS' may seem to have a weak identity when looking at "exclusives" (for now), but when you say "Xbox" everyone thinks immediately "Game Pass". It has an identity. It has a whole mindset of engaging with the platform in a unique way. That's its identity more than a genre. (not everyone will love that identity but it has one.)

PS5 still feels like a placeholder to me. It's a bridge console Sony doesn't really know what to do with while they shop around and focus test to search for an identity. They won't know who they are until PS6, and if we're honest, they're too accustomed to defining who they are by defining themselves around being an alternative to their competitor's missteps. Sega overpriced. Nintendo had bad developer relationships and restrictive licensing. Nintendo had tiny media. Nintendo didn't have HD graphics. Xbox told their customers to go eff themselves. Nintendo failed to tell anyone their console was actually a new console.

The last time PS had their own forged identity was PS1 when Kutaragi basically wanted to be a better Nintendo than Nintendo. Since then they've always framed their identity around who their competitors weren't rather than who they were. Their competitors aren't misstepping right now so they can't figure out who they're supposed to be and they seem reactionary as a result. You can see the "identity" of PS4 start shedding right around when Switch came around and MS started showing they were serious about a comeback. Sony couldn't figure out what PS4 was supposed to be anymore, because it was built around "it's not Xbone/WiiU."

@NEStalgia To continue with the analogy...sure, your pizza company doesn't stop investing in mushrooms. But if pepperoni sells 50x more than mushrooms, no pizza company should invest equally in pepperoni and mushrooms - they're probably going to spend, I'm spitballing here, about 50x as much on their pepperoni supply as their mushroom supply, especially when they're selling them for the same price (but in Sony's case, they're probably not selling for the same price, which makes the disparity worse).

It's not that you can't invest in something that doesn't sell much, or even be willing to take a loss on something to draw in customers. But it sure can't be all you do, and you sure can't take huge losses on a lot of things - you have to be narrow and selective on what you're willing to take losses on, or you risk losing EVERYTHING.

But if customer demand shifts, if suddenly people want mushrooms and pepperoni in equal measure, than no pizza company would survive if they still spent 50x as much on pepperoni as on mushrooms. You're all acting like Sony is a gatekeeper, preventing games from being made - but we're all collectively the gatekeeper when we withhold success by not buying something. If you want more mushrooms, buy more mushrooms, and get the whole market to move with you in buying more mushrooms. It's really that simple...or impossible.

Now others have said "but there's so much to choose from, we can only afford one or two toppings." Well - if that's what drives a 50:1 disparity, then tell me where it makes sense to invest? Somehow it's Sony's fault they aren't giving you more mushrooms, AND it's their fault there's too many toppings to choose from? I can't keep up.

@NEStalgia I'd say PS5's identity at the moment is "experience what you can on PS4 but in higher quality". Later on in the PS5's lifespan however based on what Jim Ryan's been suggesting, PS5's identity will likely become "live service".

@RobN Sure, but, if pepperoni costs 50x more to make than mushrooms, even if you have equal numbers of pepperoni and mushroom menu options, you're only spending 1/50th on the mushrooms as the pepperoni. JRPGs pretty much never have a budget that even comes close to the blockbuster "$120M+" games. Even if every blockbuster game had an equal quantity of JRPGs made along side it, the cost would be a fraction.

But the "buy more mushrooms or get the whole market to buy more mushrooms" goes back to the oversimplification. The idea that two markets have to be of similar value to be worth filling demand for. It simplifies back out to "there's only room in the market for the biggest players/biggest market, and smaller markets simply have to conform to the wants of the bigger market" which of course runs contrary to the whole point of a market.... If Sony doesn't want that market, someone else will take it that wants it. Right now, MS is throwing money left and right to get a hold of that market, they clearly want it, which tells us they clearly know mushrooms are a valuable market even though it's not exactly pepperoni at a glance, and if Sony keeps casting it aside, we may find in 5 years XB becomes the official weeb console with all the ports of all the PC J-games that end up skipping PS, and all PS fans get is pepperoni and they'll be left wanting for mushrooms and olives because Sony only cares about pepperoni and what were we talking about?

@Grumblevolcano LOL.....yep....there's no counter to that. That's basically it. By PS6 though they'll have a new identity, because, let's be real, "Sony" and "live service" go together like peanut butter and spaghetti since the end of Everquest.

@NEStalgia I guess my feeling is that in the NES and SNES days, the tech simply didn't exist to offer better graphics, so the player was left to use their imagination. That's certainly how I did it back in the day when I was a teenager in that era.

But as tech got better, so did JRPGs for a while. FF 7-12 are all games that were at least in the conversation of better graphics and gameplay in their eras. Sometimes Square would look to push the envelope in a direction that didn't work well, but that's OK too.

But then once the PS3 era started, and other studios started to really crank out games that looked fantastic, the Japanese RPG studios all seemed to just not have an idea about how to keep up, and a lot of them, in my view, just gave up and went to the anime graphics at that point.

For younger gamers, 15-16 years might seem like forever, or thats the way that its always been. But I was 30 at that point, LOL. So my expections were set and haven't really changed.

@Unlucky13 I think there's a sort of natural bias among Western gamers to assume the NES and SNES games were a technologically limited attempt at creating realistic things because that's just our inclination to expect from media. Meanwhile in Japan I think there was an inclination to expect it was a limited approximation of anime. But of course in Japan, anime is "realistic" enough in a general media sense to be accepted as serious while that's less common in the west. FF7-12 really continued the anime-stylings (insert spikey-hair meme), I never really saw any real leanings from any japanese studios to go "realistic".Even when we look outside RPGs, we have MonHun that still retains a cartoon aesthetic, technically. There's ResE and Yakuza/LaD, Soulsborne that goes for more realistic now, sure. But then that means there ARE JRPGs that do go for realistic, they just aren't party based.

But it's important to remember that in the West we see "anime" as a niche, and thus the games are all trapped inside a niche and there's a desire to see it break away and become "normal" - but for Japan, including the devs, anime is just mainstream media, normal, and serious, there's no "niche" to break away from, it's already perfectly mainstream.

Edit: Realism has always been kind of a Western fetish with media. Especially in the UK where LotR was deemed to be "children's books" because such a fantastical thing was simply not adult fare (in the US it was accepted as adult fare at the time, though, and Tokein himself intended it as adult.) And in computer entertainment realism has been a Western fetish just to see how real a synthetic reality we can technologically create. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it's definitely a long lived fetish. Japan more often than not seems more interested in creating the surreal than the real. They show more interest in creating things that could not exist in reality. The West seems obsessed with just perfectly recreating 1:1 simulations of reality.

@NEStalgia Thank you for the very well thought out and well stated reply. That makes sense. I guess my own age and perspective had me look at it in a different way.

Either way, I guess its fair to say that I won't be getting my own personal niche from JRPGs again. I have to keep my fingers crossed for Bioware, who seems to be the only developer intent on making more of the specific thing that I'm after.

Now I want Dark Cloud i had a blast with these games. And why does Kickstarter still not accept PayPal.... ☹️

@NEStalgia You keep arguing "it's not that simple," but then you use examples that really repeat what I was saying already. I think we agree more than we disagree.

Of course I'm simplifying - this is a forum post, not a doctorate dissertation - but I think it's fair and honest simplification. There's some question of which comes first, sure, but businesses fund what they think will sell, and it truly IS that simple. You don't convince Sony to spend more on JRPGs by telling them they're losing their identity - you convince them by showing them they're losing profit.

This article is about one game Sony didn't fund. Sony may have had 100 different reasons not to fund it (competes with IP they own, didn't believe in the developers, whatever) that might even have had nothing to do with the genre. But just as someone said there were so many games coming out they were reserving their money for the sure-fire proven franchise titles, Sony and other game developers (and movie developers, too) do the same thing - BECAUSE they know many of us choose to spend our money on the established franchises. They're making what they know (well, think) will sell. That's rational.

And yes, a game that costs a fraction of a AAA title only needs a fraction of the revenue to turn a profit. But if you're going to invest $X, and the one title estimates a 100% return while the other estimates a 5% return, it may not matter that $X is a lot smaller for the 5% return. Or maybe it does. Companies evaluate and manage their risk/reward, and make decisions as best they can. The worse they do, the sooner they perish.

Why is he bothering Sony? Just go to NIS, Atlus, XSeed, Square Enix, or Nintendo and had them secured publishing it. It's clear Sony had a different mindset this gen and securing more JRPGs aren't part of it unless your game is from a popular IP.

@NEStalgia @MasterVGuides So far Nintendo and steam are making bank with it. The two bigger players of the game market lost touch with gaming once they went head to head. Its all live service games, microtransactions, shooters and free for alls they want. Jim Ryan, Phil Spencer are out of touch with gaming really. If nobody has noticed they keep pumping out the same ip's over and over now, filling the big gap with cheap indies, and remakes and remasters. Most of the studios new devs are dry as bone on coming up with new and original work, and if they do come up with something that sticks, they then use it as a political soapbox to the point it ruins the story.

@Unlucky13 @Serpenterror I don't think thats true, I have a huge library of JRPG'S and RPG'S not of the western diablo template, or shooter like rpg. Its just with western management they pushed anything turn based away saying it was boring and not engaging. And sooner than later the kids of the 2000's only choice was live service games, and most are shooters. They are pretty much programmed that way now. But I have a younger cousin that was 2001, huge halo and destiny fan, he didn't like much more than something like that, then fell in with COD.One day he downloaded Final Fantasy remake, must have fell in love with the stories. So he gave the original a chance, something he would say looks crappy and sucky. That dude talked my head off about Final Fantasy and now has borrowed just about every old game and system I have. Now he talks about cronocross an wild arms and Legend of dragoon, legend of legaia and many more like hes an 80's or 90's kid. So I really think its just what gets put in front of you. I think theres tons of great new games but they pretty much all follow a cookie cutter design now. Because listening to my cousin talk, he becomes more attached to each character, and goes on and on about hidden secrets in all those games and how they don't take up no space, but feel so much bigger than Assasins Creed odessy and Horizon.

@Rafie I could never understand why they cast aside so many games that made the platform unique up until ps3 now Playstation trying to make up for that with an oddly designed flashy console VR a subscription and heavily monetize ftp games when they need to go back to the PS2 blueprint.

Sony is scared it won't have commercial success as there are no zombies involved.

This is why I’m not feeling Sony these days because they’re all about their interactive movie trope games. Thank goodness for the Switch.

@Paultall Sadly, it's not so much that Jim and Phil are out of touch with gaming, and more that we're out of touch with what the majority of people that buy consoles spend the majority of their money and time on. When you look at the revenues pulled in by mtx and digital currency, heck, GTAV still topping charts 3 gens later, CoD, FIFA, etc. Fortnite is one of the highest grossing games of all time and it's "free". Even for Nintendo, it's MK8 a 10 year old WiiU game that's their top seller and not by a small amount. If we compare it all to even a big JPRG, it's fairly obvious where the real money is and why these companies are obsessed with people who buy Generic Shooterball 18. Most of the people that buy the consoles buy it just to play Generic Shooterball 18. Business-wise that's their market, not us, so that's where they focus. But, at the same time it doesn't mean our market, despite being way smaller by number and total revenue, isn't also very profitable. It's a loyal bunch that buys much more than average number of titles, and the titles are almost always cheaper to produce than the big live service counterparts. Sony, in particular, is making a big mistake taking a small but valuable market that's been loyal for granted, while their competitors are, in Nintendo's case the home team, and in MS's case financially committing to making a play for that market.

The single player Western industry (+ FF) is also now stuck in the Hollywood sinkhole. The productions cost so much to make, with so much debt on the line to pay for it, that no risks can be taken and everything must be an absolute runaway success. And the only way to ensure that, same as with Hollywood, is just keep making the same things that are generic enough that most people will buy them without much risk. Sequels, reboots, and cloned tropes are things people are guaranteed to buy in enough numbers to generate a profit. And the higher the cost of games, the more people will only spend $70 on something they already know they'll like. More of the same guarantees that. It's a viscous cycle.

I still feel that voice chat changed gaming primarily. Or rather it changed who plays games , though with a significant amount of "gamers" who are less interested in the actual game and more interested in just having an interactive virtual social media environment to hang out on the phone with their friends and goof around. I think a large number of modern console buyers, and thus where the money comes from, comes largely from people really just using the "big" games a a digital hangout space. Second Life with guns/footballs.

@wiiware Thank you for saying what I've been thinking for a while.

Unfortunately, these days, Playstation are about as Japanese as Mom's apple pie or er...Microsoft...?

People keep saying JRPGs have become niche without expanding on why though...
Many of them, especially during the PS3 era, were low budget, low effort, and low fun.

FF7 had a huge part in catapulting JRPGs to success in the West.
How? It had great production value, and a huge marketing campaign showing how it was the coolest game in recent memory.

Even when Sony did put out good Japanese content, too often did they squander it or hide it. Gravity Rush 2 is a great example of an incredible, open world, action game. Anyone that liked the new Spider Man games would probably enjoy Gravity Rush.

But whereas Western games get big ad campaigns, Gravity Rush 2 was kept hidden, and the online features were axed incredibly soon.

Point being, it isn't enough to make good content. You have to support it, and believe in it, and perhaps most important, you have to be proud of it. The last point is what I feel went first.
Sony doesn't want to show their Japanese roots. They don't want to be the "weebstation".

Absolutely dreadful. Extremely disappointed in Sony for thinking that all we want are open world or action games. Even worse, they think we want more GaaS games.
They have Wild Arms and Legend of dragoon just lying there. Ape escape as well.

Oh i'm sure we are missing more gaas and open world games...

Btw many don't seem to realise it, because he can't say it directly. He meant he pitched Wild Arms 6 several times and Sony didn't care. So, now we got this kickstarter game, which btw even if this was Wild arms 6, it would've lit a fire on a Sony presentation and been properly funded.

@Paultall Actually Odyssey and Horizon are two of my favorite games of all time. What I would DREAM about is a party based RPG like those two.