I’m still hung-up on the article’s use of “overlooked”. That’s wrong and misleading. MMS has over 100 reviews on Metacritic, about the same as Dead Space and 3/4 of God of War: Ragnarok, which released about the same time and is highly acclaimed in the media. The game had a marketing budget. It’s not the case consumers failed to notice the game existed. Instead, fewer chose to buy than Take-Two predicted.
Thinking of the audience for MMS only as the overlap of XCOM fans and Marvel fans seems wrong. Those should be the sure-fire purchasers, and squad-based strategy and Marvel fan bases bring the two largest sets of other people potentially interested in the game.
In my country the Midnight Suns are completely unknown. Combined with an upcoming general super hero - and especially Marvel - fatigue the value of the Marvel + MMS brands could actually be negative if you are trying to push a new gaming IP into the market.
I’m a casual Marvel fan, based in the US, and I’d never heard of the Midnight Suns (then again, I’d never heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy, either).
I love XCOM, am a casual Marvel fan, and hate card mechanics with the fury of a thousand midnight suns. I’ll probably pick it up at some point, but frankly am so sick of card mechanics that it wasn’t a difficult decision to not buy this at release.
I loved Firaxsis’s Xcom games. But, I generally don’t care for card games and I have a huge backlog. That’s why I didn’t buy Midnight Suns at release. But I’ll get it at some point and will probably enjoy it.
I bought it on Steam but then got a refund due to how poorly it ran on my aging, middle-of-the-road PC. I was not impressed by the playthroughs I watched, where about half of the game seemed to be exploring an abbey and playing Marvel friendzone simulator.
I’m very much the target audience for this game, being a big turn-based strategy fan who read superhero comics through my high school years, and so I was surprised that I wasn’t drawn in to a greater extent.
However, what I’ve seen for reviews, the game is a bit of a mix of different games, the fights and deckbuilding appears to be good to great, reviewers all seem to agree, but the part where the characters have dialogue and relationships outside the fights, that’s much more divisive.
So, it’s a sort of Fire Emblem, where the Tactical part is well done, because Firaxis knows what they’re doing with that part, the rest, probably depends how much of a fan of Marvel you are, of the characters, and what you expect from game writing.
They were probably also expecting that the Marvel name would lead to bigger sales numbers.
Sounds like a toxic CEO to put that kind of pressure on his employees. And awful management to boot. With that kind of attitude it’s easy to justify crunch and other things that -
oh right.
Hey CEO, maybe focus on improving your culture and behavior so you don’t squander a good thing with a major publisher that prevents you from signing deals to give your studio more security?
PGA is better but it isn’t like they have super glowing high scores either
I think they just wanted to sell as much as their last tactical game, Xcom2. Of course, companies want even more than the last time if possible, but I guess they wanted to sell at least as much as their last game, as a bare minimum.
I don’t think it has been the case.
(and take in account that Steam is now bigger than when Xcom2 launched)
You say ‘despite the license’, I don’t even think the Marvel setting has served to sell more. I think the issue is that the intersection between people who like tactical squad games like Xcom2, people who like card based games like StS, and people who like Marvel (enough as to want several hours of dialogue in the social part) is niche. It’s the typical venn diagram with 3 circles where the middle part to touches the three is very small.
In the wake of Hi-Fi Rush’s success, Shinji Mikami’s leaving Tango after 12 years. No word on whether he’s retiring or planning on moving to another studio.
hah when I made that argument I got immediately corrected that there are at least several people on QT3 who love both these types of games and marvel :)
Or maybe people care about the game rather than the theme, and the game, while good, is:
Nothing like xcom
Has far more “story” time than most people are going to want in their game. It has a very JRPG feel and that is very niche. I actually think the writing is pretty engaging with respect to the ongoing story, but the relationship builder portion is just not interesting. It is very Fire Emblem, rather than Persona.
Also yeah, a game with Wolverine, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and Spiderman in and it’s called “Midnight Suns”. Kind of burying the lede.
This forum is composed of a 100% people who likes tactical squad games, so that’s already one of the three circles down. We are not a representative sample :P
Yeah that’s what I was talking about. It’s game that people who wants a nice concise tactical game will dislike (too much Marvel visual novel!) and people who like adventure games will dislike (too many battles!).
This. Card mechanics are inherently niche and are more likely to limit the appeal of a game to me than be a selling point. Even Slay the Spire left me cold.
Wow. That’s big news! I would be just fine with him showing up at Platinum Games again. The world needs more God Hand, Vanquish, or something new that fits in those categories. :)
