Well, Steam was doing some sort of crackdown on games out of the blue without clarifying exactly why, despite of all them following guidelines set by Valve before, for no new apparent reason and without proper instructions to devs on how to comply with the new “normal”, and aiming all that exclusively at Japanese-looking or Japanese inspired VNs and games, when there are western games that have arguably much more “offensive” material on both sex and violence.
By the way, Steam has since backstepped and claimed it was an “error”.
So yeah, there’s a reason for the backlash that goes beyond “save our titties”. That said, the #waifuholocaust tag (and motivation) is absurdly stupid and counterproducent.
Polygon has a terrific long-form feature detailing the messy fallout between Bandai Namco and Bottlerocket during their attempt to revive the Splatterhouse IP back in 2010. Project was in absolute shambles for years!
“It was just a normal workday,” says Holty. “Everyone goes to work and there’s a bunch of moving trucks in front of the company. Everyone’s like, ‘What’s going on?’”
Former Namco Bandai associate producer Dan Tovar, who had been with the project from its earliest point, recalls that day: “What followed was one of the most unpleasant experiences I have had to date in my professional career.” Tovar continues, “There were grown men crying. […] ‘Hellish’ doesn’t quite summarize it.”
“The only way we could ship was if we created days without cutting features,” says Robinson. “How do you create days? Well, we had close to 90 street days of bugs, but only 62 days of bug days to cure. We were going to blast through this schedule in two, three months. What we’ll do is, I’ll stay up all night, every night. I’ll change the whole team schedules so that testing happens while everyone is asleep.
“Everyone on the team drew a straw,” Robinson continues. “That straw meant you had to fix any bug in the game, and you had to be on call. It was close to 20 of us. I would show up at 4, 5 o’clock, and I would produce my other games until 6 or 7. Everyone would submit their last overnight build and I would play until the morning. As soon as I hit a bug, I’d call up whoever was in charge that day, they would run in, fix it, and I would start the play cycle again. We gained 22 days back.”
Same. It was the perfect expression of the genre. Well, no, the Warcraft 3 map The Great Strategy was, but very very few people played that in lieu of the much shittier and less strategic DotA :-(
This is just about the most circular and passive-aggressive gaming article I’ve read in ages… oh it’s another Forbes blogger.
Xbox’s Weak Console Exclusives May Be A Good Thing For Video Game Lovers
Many bemoan the fact that the list of Xbox console exclusives pales in comparison to what PlayStation has to offer. Xbox has some very good games, but in volume and overall quality, PlayStation is clearly superior. This is bad news for Xbox, but it’s good news for PlayStation and even better news for players. If the situation were reversed and Xbox owned the PlayStation exclusives, there would be little reason to buy a PS4. If that happened, it would be very bad news for people who love video games.
Think about what would happen if Xbox and PlayStation swapped exclusives. Xbox would have the state-of-the-art console and the best games. The only people buying PS4 games would be diehard PlayStation fans who care more about brand allegiance than game quality, people stuck with a PS4 because they couldn’t afford a One X, and owners of both consoles who really wanted to play one of the PS4’s weak lineup of exclusives. That would be a terrible situation for both PlayStation and game players.
The difference between the two consoles becomes even more pronounced when you take upcoming titles into consideration. PlayStation has God of War, Marvel’s Spider Man, The Last of Us: Part II, Detroit: Become Human, Ghost of Tsushima and Death Stranding. Xbox counters with Crackdown 3, State of Decay 2, The Last Night, Deep Rock Galactic and Ashen. Enough said.
Xbox’s weak line of console exclusives is a good thing in the current context because it helps maintain balance by offsetting the technical superiority of the One X.
