I... don't even know where to begin.
(1) Falcom released Brandish on PSP because FANS DEMANDED IT. Same thing with Vantage Master Portable, Zwei!! PSP, Zwei 2, and Sora no Kiseki PSP. Those were the games Falcom fans SPECIFICALLY ASKED FALCOM TO MAKE, and Falcom obliged. And to my knowledge, all of them (save for Zwei 2) sold ABOVE Falcom's expectations (especially Sora no Kiseki). Also, I personally believe Zwei 2 and Ys Seven to be among the best games Falcom has ever produced, so I HIGHLY disagree with your statement that they haven't released a blockbuster-worthy title in years.
(2) You are the VERY FIRST PERSON I HAVE EVER HEARD say that Clover Studios produces bad games. Okami is hailed by fans and critics alike as an absolute masterpiece! And you're also the very first person other than myself to say Sacnoth produces bad games (heh), since the Shadow Hearts titles are pretty well beloved by RPG fans EVERYWHERE (again, except for me!).
Also, since Cavia developed Nier, which is critically-acclaimed, I'd say your opinion is also the minority on that, as well. And finally, while YOU may dislike NIS and Atlus games, I seem to recall critic and fan reception for Persona 4, Persona PSP, and Devil Summoner 2 being EXTREMELY good... and NIS games *always* get a good reception. Also, EA's been hailed these past few years as turning a new leaf, and finally making GOOD games... yet they're doing worse now than when gamers and critics HATED their games!
(3) XSEED's profits are razor thin. Don't kid yourself and think that our Ys Seven collector's edition is "pure profit" for us. It's not. We're NOT making a lot of money, and we seriously do need every sale we can get. The amount of money it cost to produce that Ys Seven LE was pretty substantial, but worth it because (A) fans love it, and (B) it helps safeguard against piracy, since as I said before, you can't pirate a cloth map or an art book and have it be quite the same as holding the real thing in your hand. But ultimately, we are NOT rolling in dough as a result of that LE. I wish we were... but we're not!
(4) Although we ARE using fan-translations as a base, we did BUY those fan-translations, and they ARE still being edited (2 months were spent editing Oath in Felghana's translation, for example!), since we never release ANY game with an unchecked translation. That's all money being spent on localization right there, to ensure that the end result is a quality product. Would it have cost more if we'd translated it in-house? Well, sure! But does hiring a third-party freelance translator mean we're suddenly WAY BELOW BUDGET and have money to burn? ABSOLUTELY NOT. It just means the money went to him, instead of to one of us. It's really more a time-saving measure than a budget-saving measure, since XSEED *needs* to release a lot of games in order to survive. If we let ourselves go without a release for too long, WE WILL DIE. We're not like Working Designs that way. We can't stay afloat on our past titles forever.
I don't really know what else to say, except that we fundamentally disagree on every single point you just made.
-Tom
Let me apologize for responding to this a day later, but the life of a translator is a busy one, and I thought I should clarify a couple of points you brought up.
(1) SOME Falcom fans may have wanted a remake of Brandish BUT NOT THAT MANY. Sales for Brandish prove my point on this and that is a fact. I live in Japan. I am a fan of Falcom as are many of the other people around me, and yet I have never heard one single person say, gMan, letfs go buy Brandish! That game looks sweet!h NOT ONE PERSON SAID THAT NOR DID ANY OF THEM BUY IT. I certainly was not one of the Falcom fans who wanted a Brandish game and I am positive that anyone who did want one is by far in the minority. I picked up a copy at a used game store because I knew the game would start dropping in price the day it was released. A brand new copy will only run you around 1500 yen (about $17) right now. That right there says a lot about the quality of the game and there is no way Falcom or anyone could get me to pay full price for that.
Also, of course gamers wanted some of these other Falcom games on the Playstation Portable because the PC games cost nearly $100 on release and whether their computer could play them or not, was ALWAYS a problem for many gamers. It seems to make a lot more sense to buy games for the Playstation Portable when they are HALF THE PRICE of the PC games and you NEVER have to worry about compatibility because the Playstation Portable plays ALL the games that are released for it. Falcom was just being stupid to continue to release games for the PC as long as it had been. There is a huge piracy problem there, too, and they set themselves up for that by hanging onto PC development. I would assume with all the fan translations and hacking of the games done by people on this site, you know more than a few people who have pirated their games, right? Anyway, Falcomfs games were always way overpriced on the PC and that is one thing that I believe has always held back their company.
I will disagree that Ys Seven is one of the best games Falcom ever produced either. Number one, almost everyone hated the new deformed character designs for Ys Seven in the beginning and so Falcom was forced back into redesigning them. I know we had that discussion on an RPGamer thread, and while you may have liked them, I will reiterate this again because this is the fact: deformed characters WILL NOT sell that well compared to normal human sized characters. Final Fantasy IX was another good example of a game that did not sell even close to as well as Final Fantasy VII or VIII. Ys Sevenfs character models are also terrible in comparison to any of the character models we have seen on the last 3 Ys games on the PC. Thatfs a huge step backwards. I feel like Falcom dropped the ball here, but I have to be brutally honest because as a customer who has often bought their games full price in the past, that is unnacceptable to ask for 8000 yen for something that looks or controls like that even if a drama CD is included. The story is longer and that is a plus, but it is not necessarily better than some of the older Ys games. More fleshed out? Yes. Better mechanics? I think that is debatable. Better graphics? That is a definite no.
Falcom has NOT released a blockbuster game in years and that is true. If you do not believe me, then please explain why ALL of Falcomfs games released on the PC and Playstation Portable have dropped so quickly in price? I purchased a brand-new copy of the Ys: Origin limited edition for like 1900 yen (about $20) not long after it released. Brandish dropped in price extremely quickly like I explained before, and so did Ys Seven, all the Sora no Kiseki games especially the 3rd, Ys I & II Chronicles, Zwei!!, Zwei 2, and Ys: Oath in Felghana, and now Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki. Falcomfs games are dropping in price so quickly it is crazy. Especially, the price of used games and there are not that many on the used store game shelves either. Usually the way it works in a used game store is that if there are a lot of copies, the price drops. Yet with the Falcom games, if there are only one or two copies, the price is still really low. Now let us compare this with Tales of Vesperia on the Playstation 3 which is like a year old and it is still being sold for about 5000 yen (about $55) give or take. NO Falcom game retains its value like that. NONE.
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(2) Okami was a great game, I agree with you there. However, God Hand was not. God Hand had flawed play control and all sorts of bugs and that game came out after Okami. This is one of the reasons Clover Studios closed. You need to do your homework on that one. Also, Viewtiful Joe had huge visible differences between the Gamecube and Playstation 2 versions which was a bad way to start off the company to begin with and probably one of the reasons why Okami did not sell that well because of the trust factor between gamers and and developer.
Sacnoth is no longer existent because of how the Shadow Hearts games played. As a person who played these games, let me tell you straight up.
The battle system was too slow and tedious. In a role-playing game where battles make up a majority of game time, this is unforgivable. The Shadow Hearts in almost every other aspect were good. They had great 3D models for the Playstation 2, story was decent, but the music was a hit and a miss, especially in the first game.
Nier has an aggregate score of 67 and 68 out of 100 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 respectively. That is NOT what someone calls gcritically acclaimed.h Are you sure you know what you are talking about here? Check out the link:
www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/nierShadow of the Colossus on the other hand has an aggregate score of 91 out of 100. That is what the phrase gcritically acclaimedh means. Check out the link:
www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/shadow-of-the-colossusAs far as the Persona remake on the Playstation Portable, Persona 4, and Devil Summoner 2 go, none of them could match the success of Persona 3. Persona Portable is about 1200 yen at used game stores today, Persona 4 on the Playstation 2 runs not much more that 1500 yen, and Devil Summoner 2 has long since been forgotten about. That does not sound so successful to me and their sales were not that stellar either. Persona 3, however, was a cultural success that translated over really well into English, and was even better on the Playstation Portable. A copy of Persona 3 FES on the Playstation 2 these days will run you about 5000 yen used and Persona 3 Portable is about that same price.
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(3) XSEED does not release its numbers, but the entire gaming community knows you guys have banked on Lunar and Ys Seven. Both of those games have generated millions in revenue and I know that, the analysts know that, and your company knows that because the fan base for both of those games are substantial. I think XSEED uses the excuse that they are the little guys in order to get gamers to feel sorry for them so that people will buy their games. ALL game companies should be transparent about their numbers.
I will also say it again, those limited editions your company produces are like pure profit. All of those goodies you pack in cannot cost more than 2~3 dollars to produce (including the box) and then you ratchet the price up $20. That is like 700~900% profit. Sorry, but I have done enough work in the industry to know how much a lot of that stuff costs to produce and Victor Ireland, who is the pioneer in that field in the U.S. has been extremely vocal about that as well. If you want to say it is so different then be transparent because I am being perfectly transparent about the cost of these things. A music CD with an insert costs like 10 cents to make (and even less if you print tons of copies), and that is a fact. Today a lot of the limited edition books, boxes, and figures in Japan are outsourced and made in China, even further driving down the price of what it costs to make something like that.
Your company may not be necessarily "rolling in the dough" like Square-Enix, but I will attribute that to your companyfs poor choice in games that they brought over. To name a few: Samurai Showdown, Sky Crawlers, Ju-on, The Wizard of Oz, and Valhalla Knights are ones that will not sell extremely well in this market. Therefore, you cannot blame your companies poor title choices on the gamer and expect us only to buy new and not used.
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(4) As far as fan translations go, it is a fact that a company will never pay a fan-translator what their translation is worth. There have been numerous examples of corporate executives taking advantage of these people recently like with Higurashi, etc. How about your company? What are you actually paying your fan translators? Ten bucks says your company is banking on these peoplefs work, too, and that means more profit for XSEED. There is just no way in the world your company would pay fan translators what it would cost to do it yourself because companies always regard fan translators as gunprofessional.h That is the stereotype that companies have. This is why fan translators should NEVER sell their translations to a company unless it is paid for on a word by word basis like any translation house would do (and yes, believe it or not, even professional translation companies make mistakes). Using editing as an excuse has nothing to do with the price of rice since it is an inevitable step involved regardless of whether or not someone translates in house or is freelance.
I think the idea that your company will die is a false myth because XSEED is not a single company. XSEED is buoyed up by a parent company which has a lot of money and parent companies realize that they must take risks to be successful sometimes and if that means not being profitable for a year or two, they continue to stay the course because they understand that the future will be different and the gaming industry is only continuing to expand.
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In closing, I am going to agree with Skeletor. If you want people to buy your game, make or release a good game. PERIOD. If you cannot do that, you should not be working in the gaming industry. Game advertisements, videos, etc. are usually very DECEPTIVE and do not necessarily portray accurately what you will get in a game. Therefore, you cannot fault a gamer for buying used. THAT IS CALLED BEING SMART because I am sure most gamers in the past have bought at least a lemon or two--I certainly have.
Buying used games is PERFECTLY OK, PERFECTLY LEGAL, and if you have a doubt whether or not you will get your moneyfs worth BUY USED. That goes for Square-Enix, Capcom, Falcom, Electronic Arts, Bioware, XSEED, Atlus, NIS, or anybody else.
I bought Tales of Vesperia new for the Playstation 3, because I did my research, and because I knew it was good. I got my moneyfs worth out of that game and today it still retains its value. However, most games lose their value very quickly and are not worth the asking price. As a Falcom fan it pains me to say this, but most Falcom games shed half their value in the first month or two.
Also, the game industry will NEVER cease to exist. That is a myth drummed up by company shills who want to sell more of their games. DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE WHO SAYS THAT. There will always be people who will make games and what forms those take, we should look forward to those new and interesting ideas that may suprisingly come about outside of the corporate realm. That I can promise you.