Samus Aran said:
And Mario laughs at Halo and Uncharted. I love it how people try to spin this KS project as underwhelming. How much would people pay for spiritual successors of those games? Not much. ;) |
Alright, first off: Mario is pretty much the only platform character that is massively successful anymore, and he does that thanks to brand recognition and games that are completely different from Yooka-Laylee. Every single Mario platformer since Super Mario Galaxy has been a straight up running from one side of the stage to the other platformer. Yooka Laylee is a collectathon platformer in the vein of Mario 64 and Banjo, where the goal is to explore and COLLECT things. These two types of platformers play very differently, and this is the specific kind of platformer Playtonic has said its bringing back (and that this thread is asking about).
In addition to that, Mario is one of the only 3D platform characters who's even sells in the millions anymore. He's an exception, fighting against a tide of games in other, MUCH more popular genres, that see far more releases every year than the 3D platformer.
Secondly, I am in no way trying to spin this project's success as "underwhelming". I am merely putting it in perspective: this game has been fully funded, with all its stretch goals, on a budget that couldn't fund a fraction of a modern day, triple A title. The game was made $1.5 million? Most publishers will spend more than that on the MARKETING. According to Sony's Shuhei Yoshida, a top tier PS4 title would cost more than $20-$50 million to make. I mean, here, take a look at this article, which has a list of game budgets from a variety of publishers over the decades. Take a look at how much costs sky rocket in the last decade:
http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649
Now, you may ask "why would anyone spend $2.5 million on FACEBOOK MARKETING?" and the answer is simple: companies spend tens of millions on games now because they make tens of millions in profit. In order for Yooka-Laylee to prove that these games are viable enough for them to bother with, that is what Yooka-Laylee needs to do. At $1.5 million, all of which currently just covers the game's budget, that hasn't happened yet. The fact that Yooka-Laylee even needed Kickstarter in the first place ought to demonstrate that regardless of Mario's ongoing success, it isn't enough to convince them to pick this type of game up.
Publishers these days only want to bother with games that will make tens if not hundreds of millions in profit. Aside from the odd digital release (which, unfortunately, seems to be dominated by 2D games) most publishers just don't care about mid to low tier games anymore.
As a Kickstarter project, Yooka-Laylee is an amazing success story that demonstrates the power consumers now have, and the increasing irrelevance of the big publisher. Like I said before, we DON'T NEED them for these games anymore. They clearly don't care about these types of games, so why constantly come crawling to them to ask for it, when we can just do it ourselves, and let the developers see their vision through without interference from people who are more interested in maximizing their profit than they are in making a good product?
Finally, I cannot leave this unaddressed:
People don't need to pay for spiritual successors to those games, because those games are still around. Because, unlike Banjo-style 3D platformers, they have continued to sell consistently, amazingly well all the way until today. People also won't be paying much for a spiritual successor for Mario. ;)
