Community MetaSteam | March 2023 - You know, Wo Leon, we really are the last of March

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yuraya

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May 4, 2019
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I swear the EGS is like a curse, every time you think it's dead they manage to reappear somehow.

EGS only reappears three times per year.

Once when they moneyhat something a lot of people want but wait for the Steam version.
Once when they moneyhat something nobody wants and everybody laughs at EGS.
And once when the year in review is released.

Its like an easy 3 phase boss fight.
 
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Mor

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
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EGS only reappears three times per year.

Once when they moneyhat something a lot of people want but wait for the Steam version.
Once when they moneyhat something nobody wants and everybody laughs at EGS.
And once when the year in review is released.

Its like an easy 3 phase boss fight.
Pretty much and you can see the strategy they are using with each one of those points, so yeah, best thing is to keep doing what we have been doing up to this moment.
 
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ezodagrom

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Wow, what a surprise, so releasing a ton of mid sized games for full price all close to each other (including 2 of them on the same day) during the busiest AAA time of the year results in them performing below expectations?

EDIT: Forspoken was updated, hearing reports that it can now run on GPUs with 8GB VRAM with proper looking textures instead of a blurry mess.

 
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Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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Wow, what a surprise, so releasing a ton of mid sized games for full price all close to each other (including 2 of them on the same day) during the busiest AAA time of the year results in them performing below expectations?
I generally like them doing mid-sized stuff, but their release schedule is whack and pricing seems delusional. Why is Forspoken 80 (EIGHTY) freaking euros?
Why are Harvestella, Diofield Chronicles, etc 60€?
If they're banking on brand power attracting ultra-fans, I'd say they are releasing games too close together and if they are looking at attracting new fans they are priced too highly for unproven new IPs at their budget level, because there are tons and tons of great games with equal or cheaper pricing.
 

MomoVideo

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Square Enix needs to stop pumping out mediocre games, with the same art style and $60 price tag. Various Daylife, DioField Chronicles, and Harvestella all look like they were made by the same people but they were released in a span of 3 months. Square Enix was a creative powerhouse 2 decades ago. Now they are anything but creative.
 
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Cacher

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Jun 3, 2020
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Square Enix needs to stop pumping out mediocre games, with the same art style and $60 price tag. Various Daylife, DioField Chronicles, and Harvestella all look like they were made by the same people but they were released in a span of 3 months. Square Enix was a creative powerhouse 2 decades ago. Now they are anything but creative.
Harvestella is creative, but they hid all of those elements from trailers and marketing. Definitely not a good move when it comes to a new low-budget IP.

At least the game has great WoM. It is still being sold near full price in stores here when games like DioField is selling at half of msrp.
 

Ascheroth

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Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean 6 and especilly Minstrel Song Remastered were all good games, though. I didn't regret buying all of these.
Yeah, I don't think the quality of their games is an issue at large. Sure, they have some stinkers since they release so much, but I don't think that's the norm.

Harvestella is creative, but they hid all of those elements from trailers and marketing. Definitely not a good move when it comes to a new low-budget IP.
Bad marketing is definitely a problem they're having accross the board.
Forspoken was also supposedly a case where they have somehow managed to cram all of the worst aspects of the game into their marketing and amplifiy those while the actual WoM is better.
 
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Ge0force

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The €80 pricetag makes it very unlikely that I'll ever buy Forspoken. What the hell was SE thinking? 🤔
 
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Mor

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
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Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean 6 and especially Minstrel Song Remastered were all good games, though. I didn't regret buying all of these.
The problem isn't quality, the problem is releasing them all together. no one can spend over 300€ in games in 2 months, that's fucking crazy.
 

MomoVideo

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Harvestella is creative, but they hid all of those elements from trailers and marketing. Definitely not a good move when it comes to a new low-budget IP.

At least the game has great WoM. It is still being sold near full price in stores here when games like DioField is selling at half of msrp.
I didn't play it, but from what I've read this game is actually very light on the harvesting aspect. Pretty strange for a game with a "Harvest" in its name and considering that trailers seemed to focus mainly on this part of the game.
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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SE should’ve spread these releases out more and released them at 50-60% of their launch price.

I look at SE’s lineup and even if the game appeals to me I don’t want to buy all that. I skipped Triangle Strategy because I didn’t have time for it.

That said, I hope Octopath Traveler II hasn’t fallen victim to this stupidity. I’m about 30 hours into and I’m loving this more than I loved the first, which I’d consider one of my all-time favourites.
 
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That said, I hope Octopath Traveler II hasn’t fallen victim to this stupidity. I’m about 30 hours into and I’m loving this more than I loved the first, which I’d consider one of my all-time favourites.
While there are other metrics to consider, the game had a pretty strong launch for a SE game on steam, which I find kind of funny.
 
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Cacher

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I didn't play it, but from what I've read this game is actually very light on the harvesting aspect. Pretty strange for a game with a "Harvest" in its name and considering that trailers seemed to focus mainly on this part of the game.
Yeah it is more a JRPG with farming elements. Most of the gameplay is mediocre but the story is very, very good. Full of surprises.
 

Mivey

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Sep 20, 2018
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speaking of square , Forspoken got big update
We’ve also made some changes to lighting and ambient occlusion, which you can see in these screenshots.

They "changed" ambient occlusion, in the sense that it went from "not existing in this game" to "having been implemented".

 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean 6 and especially Minstrel Song Remastered were all good games, though. I didn't regret buying all of these.
I think a lot of these games weren't bad. Hell, I even thought that the Diofield Chronicles demo I tried had some good aspects, and that's one of the lowest-rated of the bunch.
I'm also still interested in trying Star Ocean 6 at some point.

As others have said (and as I and others have said before all of these were released, just knowing their release windows), the insane part is the management, marketing and release strategy.
Sure, all of these games are slightly different, but there is still a massive overlap in their potential target audience. And these are long (S/J)RPGs, so when you release half a dozen of them in 2 months then what you are asking people to do is spend 400 hours just playing your games. Which for the vast majority of people -- even hardcore fans of the genre -- is not going to happen. And at the same time, when you price most of these mid-tier games as AAA, then almost no one is going to just spontaneously buy them to check them out either.

All of this seemed blindingly obvious to me (and many others!) months before it manifested.
S-E apparently not realizing or not caring illustrates that they either entirely lack a unified publishing strategy for the company, or that the people in charge of that are terrible at their jobs.
 
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Kal1m3r0

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Jan 9, 2021
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RE4 Demo.

What I like:
No stuttering
Everything
I repeat, no stuttering
Option to disable your screen becoming red when low on health
Again, no stuttering

What I don't like:
No DLSS
Have to wait 2 weeks for the full game
Reminder to keep an eye on this mod, I think it'll be implemented with RE4 as well
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
3,281
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Square Enix needs to stop pumping out mediocre games, with the same art style and $60 price tag. Various Daylife, DioField Chronicles, and Harvestella all look like they were made by the same people but they were released in a span of 3 months. Square Enix was a creative powerhouse 2 decades ago. Now they are anything but creative.
I'm not even that bothered by samey art style if it cuts down on development time.
The biggest issue is availability (exclusive fuckery and release uncertainty) and pricing.

I'm all for whacky new ideas and sometimes insane stories, for the one gem that I like. Otherwise, we get bland Sony first-party cinematic experiences that are focus-tested to hell and back to get the mass market.
 

didamangi

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.
Nov 16, 2018
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Reminder to keep an eye on this mod, I think it'll be implemented with RE4 as well
Yeah, tested that with re2 and dmc5. The image sometimes jitter with dlss and I'm not patient and knowledgeable enough to mess with the settings. DLAA seems fine though. I'm sure they'll make it work for RE4 later but it would be nice if capcom added dlss from the get go.
 

Derrick01

MetaMember
Oct 6, 2018
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Wow, what a surprise, so releasing a ton of mid sized games for full price all close to each other (including 2 of them on the same day) during the busiest AAA time of the year results in them performing below expectations?
It's not just bad release timing it's also marketing, or lack of that is. And it's a weird catch 22 because they're trying to keep the budget on games like harvestella low, and marketing is EXTREMELY expensive, but if you don't market anything you're not going to sell anything either unless you get lucky and get some viral tiktok meme to blow up like high on life did. I mean the trend of lackluster sales seems to be continuing this year with theatrythm and octopath 2 despite a calmer release window (except for hogwarts). The latter is a sequel to a game that sold over 3m but it also had nintendo's marketing support whereas this one doesn't, and they've done barely any marketing themselves and so far the sales have been lower than 1.
 

Stone Ocean

Proud Degenerate
Apr 17, 2019
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Sure, all of these games are slightly different, but there is still a massive overlap in their potential target audience. And these are long (S/J)RPGs, so when you release half a dozen of them in 2 months then what you are asking people to do is spend 400 hours just playing your games. Which for the vast majority of people -- even hardcore fans of the genre -- is not going to happen. And at the same time, when you price most of these mid-tier games as AAA, then almost no one is going to just spontaneously buy them to check them out either.
It also didn't help that Q4 last year was packed to shit so not only was Square cannibalizing their own titles, they were also fighting for attention with a billion other games - which were often cheaper to boot.
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
3,281
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It's not just bad release timing it's also marketing, or lack of that is. And it's a weird catch 22 because they're trying to keep the budget on games like harvestella low, and marketing is EXTREMELY expensive, but if you don't market anything you're not going to sell anything either unless you get lucky and get some viral tiktok meme to blow up like high on life did. I mean the trend of lackluster sales seems to be continuing this year with theatrythm and octopath 2 despite a calmer release window (except for hogwarts). The latter is a sequel to a game that sold over 3m but it also had nintendo's marketing support whereas this one doesn't, and they've done barely any marketing themselves and so far the sales have been lower than 1.
The problem is, that they are a AAA publisher that wants to not spend much marketing on A and AA titles like other AA or A Publishers who are successful with such a strategy,

The thing is: SQE behaves like a AAA publisher when it comes to catering to their niche audience and their influencers, as in: barely to non-existing.
Publishers like Paradox, for example, have contact with tiny Youtubers and Twitch streamers in several languages.
How likely is SQE to sponsor a German or Spanish Youtuber that has barely 3000 subs or someone who has at most 100 viewers on Twitch? While Paradox has a working relationship with such an Influencer.
 
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ezodagrom

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Square Enix sucks
And doesn't seem like they're gonna get better any time soon...

From the same report where they said that the fall releases were below expectations:
Q: While I think it is fair to expect growth in FY2024/3 in part because you plan to release multiple major titles, I also fear that
will create a YoY hurdle you will be unable to surmount in FY2025/3. What kind of initiatives do you have in mind to ensure
sustainable growth?
A: Major title launches will not be concentrated solely in FY2024/3. We have organized our pipeline so that we will have a good
spread of new releases in FY2025/3 and beyond as well. We also hope that you will look forward to the blockchain games we
plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter.
 

yuraya

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May 4, 2019
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Square should get in bed with MS and put out all these titles on Gamepass when they launch. Get a nice paycheck from Xbox and let all the other storefronts sell them too so you can actually break even + make profit. There is always some weird exclusivity deals with them. They seem to never be able to put out games on all platforms at once. If they don't have the resources then take your sweet time and properly port everything. What is the rush to just dumping so many games in such a small window? These type of games need better word of mouth. They aren't Final Fantasy they won't carry the brand name to sell several million units with ease. Square is just too incompetent and always doing things that make no sense.
 

Derrick01

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Oct 6, 2018
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The problem is, that they are a AAA publisher that wants to not spend much marketing on A and AA titles like other AA or A Publishers who are successful with such a strategy,

The thing is: SQE behaves like a AAA publisher when it comes to catering to their niche audience and their influencers, as in: barely to non-existing.
Publishers like Paradox, for example, have contact with tiny Youtubers and Twitch streamers in several languages.
How likely is SQE to sponsor a German or Spanish Youtuber that has barely 3000 subs or someone who has at most 100 viewers on Twitch? While Paradox has a working relationship with such an Influencer.
SE does that too it's just not really known about. Remember around forspoken's launch there was that one twitch streamer who tried to raise a stink about not getting a lot of money for streaming it? Everyone's takeaway from that story was shock that SE would even bother with someone who had like a thousand subs at most. But with smaller games this comes back to marketing as many of these streamers want to be paid to play games and thus it circles back to the overall marketing debate and how much is it worth giving games like harvestella or star ocean a push while avoiding going over budget.

This is really why AA games died out in general. Budgets kept going up and sales weren't so most companies just stopped doing them. I know SE isn't helping matters by dumping 10 games out at once but my point was it really doesn't matter on the amount or schedule, people ultimately don't really want these games. Octopath 2 is set to sell quite a bit less than the last did and the only way to maybe avoid that is pump more money into expensive marketing campaigns, which likely erases any gains the extra sales would get anyway as ultimately the game is still a SNES inspired turn based jrpg and the amount of people who want that is limited. The answer isn't as simple as "make good games get good sales" or "space things out better" because it often doesn't matter even if you do those things.
 
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