Above: Amy Jo Kim says listen to your super fans — not super haters.
Kim: Oh, yes. But it’s an interesting question as far as, what is the job of a game journalist? You look at it in the context of the YouTube and Twitch era — I think it goes back to, well, who is your audience? As a product designer, because that’s what I am in part, I always go back to that. If people want to attack me, I can say, “You know what, this isn’t for you.” If people want to spend their time attacking Dean for making a lighthearted video, you want to say, “Really? Why is that worth your time?” You could go online and find 50 YouTubers who could review it who are nerd experts.
What’s happened in journalism now is that there are so many channels. There are so many different reviews. There are reviews for kids, reviews for adults, professional journalists, YouTubers at home. The people who decide they’re going to attack somebody, as opposed to just finding something else that’s more interesting to them — my point is that there’s something going on with that person. It’s not just “ethics in journalism,” the thing they used to talk about. It’s about being an asshole and wanting to attack someone. You could just go look somewhere else. It’s not like there’s three channels and you have to pick one.
Question: Should there be higher expectations of journalists? When I go to someone’s YouTube channel, I just expect to see someone playing a game. I don’t assume that’s their job. A journalist is trained. Maybe you went to school to do that kind of job. Should there be more expected of someone like that?
Takahashi: We probably didn’t put enough context into our video on YouTube. We just had a couple of lines describing it: “This is shameful gameplay.” We embedded the video into a story that explained it more. But the story was also missing some of that context as well. That might have calmed everybody down. But most people came into the video through someone who tweeted about it and cut out two minutes of it, just focusing on those two minutes. That was their context for getting into this issue. Very few people actually came in through the story I’d written.
So yes, there is a responsibility. Yes, we should provide context. Yes, we should explain exactly what we’re doing. We were sort of naïve about posting this, not realizing that someone else with their own agenda could come in to try to draw attention to themselves by taking it out of context.
Kim: There’s a larger moral to the story, though, that’s relevant for all of you. If you find yourself with haters, you’re probably doing something interesting. They’re not going to bother unless they want a little bit of your juice.
Question: How do you respond to these kinds of haters? Do you post another video showing yourself finishing the game?
Takahashi: The very next stories that I wrote, I talked about finishing a couple of games, popular games. I finished Shadow of War. Cuphead is probably not a game I can finish. [Laughs] I think everyone has different tastes. There’s nothing — my reason for posting something like I did was that I think there’s nothing invalid about taking a fresh look at something. It exposes you to things that might be problems, things that people with jaded eyes wouldn’t see.
If you’re a jaded product designer who knows exactly who they’re designing for — these people are jaded consumers as well — you miss the opportunity to reach people outside of that realm. You miss the opportunity to get newcomers or people who had never had an idea that this product might be useful to them. Looking at something with a fresh eye is very instructive. That’s one thing we do regularly. Your fresh look with no prior knowledge — whether it’s a game that you have no idea how to play, and you analyze the onboarding — how good was that tutorial for Cuphead? I don’t think it was outstanding [laughs].
That’s the product design lesson. I’m not going to blame a product designer for problems I had, but they should be aware that it’s possible to make this mistake as you go into the product. The people who make that mistake might not stick with that product for very long.
Above: A man and his troll.
Question: I had a question about economics in the industry since you mentioned Shadow of War. I’ve seen a lot of reviews talking about how part of the single-player game involves putting more money in to get past this long slog in part of it. I’ve noticed a trend toward single-player games that get to a point where you have to put in more money over the $60 that you initially paid.
Takahashi: And that goes hand in hand with the news from yesterday that Electronic Arts closed down Visceral Games. They were making a Star Wars game by Amy Hennig, the creator of Uncharted. She was creating a single-player linear campaign game, and they felt like, in deciding to shut it down, that’s not where the market is right now.
They have, in the past, praised a lot of games with live operations, things like loot crates, things you can monetize over a long time. FIFA has its Ultimate Team mode. Battlefield has ongoing downloadable content. Those games are making billions of dollars for Electronic Arts. And then, they make this opportunity cost decision: Here’s a team working on a game that’s going to sell so many copies in a week and then never be played again. It just declines from there. The choice for them is do you want this team to continue doing that or not?
Shadow of War gets into this question of do they force people to buy loot crates by putting a key part of the ending of the story behind 20 missions that were really difficult and grindy? You could get through those missions more easily if you bought some things, but you could also just play all the way through. Shadow of War has a campaign that stretches across 60-something missions or so, but yes, 20 of them have nothing to do with the story.
It was also an artifact of the way Shadow of War was designed. Those 20 missions might be viewed as a grind, but they’re actually very dynamic and fluid missions. The orcs you capture and take control of, their personalities change over time. If you kill them once, they might come back as an undead orc, and they’ll say something like, “You killed me that first time, but now, I’m gonna get you.” As you replay these kinds of missions, you get a different result, a different story out of the orc captains you’re fighting against.
They felt like, for people who really love this gameplay system, what they call their nemesis system, it isn’t a grind. It’s a key part of what makes the game different and entertaining. So, it wasn’t, to them, a big deal to put an extra ending behind these nemesis missions. I don’t know. It’s an interesting choice that they made. But it did force players to, say, appreciate what you could get out of those 20 missions and that nemesis system.
Kim: This is touching on a larger question. The much larger-scale trend going on in games and in software is software as a service as opposed to packaged software, one-time sales. Not everyone does that. You can still buy one-shot packaged software. But more and more, what you’re seeing is experiments with a service-based model. Often, it involves some sort of community or multiplayer environment or not always. On a larger scale, that’s what people want because of recurring revenue versus one-time revenue. It’s a business decision.
When it’s done well, it benefits both the customer, the player, and the company. When it’s poorly done, people don’t buy into it, and it doesn’t succeed. When I look at the clients that come to me and the business models they’re developing all over the world, they’re all service based. That’s in part because it’s my specialty, multiplayer game design. But if you’re a developer, it’s something you should absolutely be looking at. I don’t see that trend stopping or slowing down in the games industry. I see it accelerating.
Above: Covet Fashion’s model lineup is multiracial. Amy Jo Kim worked on the game.
Takahashi: I am worried about something I would call management by analyzing opportunity costs. Hollywood, for a while, they realized that they were spending $90 million to make a movie and getting $100 million back. This isn’t a good business. They looked at games and thought, “Hey, we can make a game for $10 million and get that same $100 million. Let’s go make games.” All the Hollywood companies started making games.
Then, mobile games come along, and they see that some of these mobile games can make a billion [dollars]. Supercell is a good example, a company that’s made more than a billion dollars from games like Clash of Clans or Clash Royale. You can make something like that for all of $2 million. So, the Hollywood guys think, “Let’s quit making console games and go do mobile games.” You see this unending search for the next opportunity, not realizing that the most entertaining thing was what they were originally doing, making original intellectual properties for the movies. Mobile games aren’t necessarily going to be more fun than the movies they were making in the first place.
Kim: There’s another punch line, which is that it’s not very hard to make a game, but it’s really hard to make a good game.
