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Post by RichterB on Jun 27, 2018 13:12:36 GMT -6
lovelydumpling [That's super disappointing to hear tbh. Ironically the Vita and the Wii U were the biggest platforms I wanted it on, the Wii U for its promised additional gamepad features and the Vita for the portability. Now the Wii U is canned, Vita looks like a super tall order, and I don't have the $300 to drop on a Switch.
In 2015, I was starved for Wii U and Vita titles and it sounded awesome. But in 2019... yeah, I guess it's hard to justify it anymore. As much as I really want it on my Vita. ]
Vita's one of my favorite consoles, actually. Bought in Japan on day one, have spent countless hours on it ever since.
If Bloodstained would have arrived earlier in the system's life-cycle (made from the ground up for the system), it would have been great for the system and maybe even profitable, too ( see:Dragon's Crown).
Right now, the Switch is probably the game's best chance to find an audience beyond backers, so I'm pretty sure they'll commit resources to that version in particular.
As for the Vita version... lemme stress that I want to be wrong, but ... I've never seen anyone pull off down-scaling a game to lower spec machine that's practically on it's way out. I've been hoping since the day they announced it that they would cancel the Vita version and offer a refund like they did with the Wii U, but... *sigh* ... doesn't look like it'll happen ... I just hope we don't end up with the "delay forever and then cancel once everyone's forgotten the game ever existed" pattern.
Anyone know how those 3DS and Vita versions of Mighty No. 9 are coming along, by the way? ... no hands?  lovelydumpling & dareka : I've chosen to be optimistic about everything, by and large. But I said a long time ago that, logic-wise, the Wii U cancellation only made sense because of the Wii U's market failure and the rise of the Switch providing better retail results. That was largely the logic that was given, too: that the Wii U was obsolete already and would be obsolete further by the time the game launched. By that same logic, though, I also posited something a lot of people sort of shrugged at, which is the Vita version probably shouldn't exist if we follow the same logic. Wii U had 13.56 million unit sold worldwide as of the end of September 2017, and last I saw anything reported, around late 2015, Vita was reported as somewhere between 10 and a little over 12 million units worldwide. Sony didn't release a successor and didn't fully pull it from the market, so of course it was going to have a gradual trickle of new users or "upgraders/collectors" since then. Even so, I doubt the numbers we stand at now are super far away from Wii U. As a Wii U backer, this sort of irked me, but I could understand it. At this point, I hope backers who wanted one do still get a Vita version, since I can relate.
But what I warned about at the time more so is something beyond that which could be important for Bloodstained relevancy. PS5 and XBOX One's follow-up are not as far away as some may think, and the further Bloodstained potentially moves its release date, the further the chance is that the PS4 and XBOX One will be ostensibly "obsolete" in the same way as the Vita and Wii U. Yes, there will be an install base, but a lot of people like to move on quickly these days, and we may be looking at pressure by a wider audience (not necessarily here, but in the wider context of a retail audience that will have the last word in sales) for Bloodstained to be ported up to PS5 and "XBOX 2" in the same way some people no longer even wanted a Wii U version once they knew about the Switch. I believe XombieMike stated he bought a PS4 for Bloodstained, but reports are suggesting PS5 will launch around 2020. This tightens Bloodstained's window a bit. Bloodstained could still happen at the end of 2018 or early to mid-2019, but much later than that and the market may cause a problem for its potential success. It will be launching for platforms that will be starting to get into a similar position to where the Wii U was in terms of market relevancy. "[May 2018]-- The PlayStation 4 is entering the final phase of its life cycle, according to Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO John Kodera." Now, that same article has a vague statement suggesting that 2021 is the date the PS5 would be emerging, but not all analysts agree with that assessment--some are really aggressive and suggest Q4 2019. (I personally would be shocked if PS5 isn't announced by the time E3 2020 closes, just based on the amount of rumblings out there surrounding dev-kits being shipped and such.) So take it all with a grain of salt, but I do wonder about the timing of the release of Bloodstained within the context of the console marketplace. I'm simply suggesting that there could come a point where PS4 and XBOX One owners are in a similar boat to where Wii U could have been if Bloodstained had launched a little earlier and Nintendo hadn't shortened the Wii U's life (or had kept it going alongside the Switch a bit longer like the 3DS, as initially seemed to be promised), looking for a game to lengthen the usage and life cycle of a console in its twilight. And as a Wii U backer, it would have been amazing if Bloodstained (and Yooka-Laylee) had stayed on the Wii U as an option--Wii U already had a fully functional Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with expansion content released as late as December 2017), but given all the technical and market circumstances, I understand why that didn't happen.
Just food for thought, because there are some out there--doing pure speculation, mind you--saying that all the fine-tuning for Bloodstained could push it beyond early 2019 and closer to 2020. (I don't know whether or not I believe that, but it does seem to me that IGA's team has been forced to do more trial and error with development due to their size and the nature of this product/project seemingly being a first-time thing for the company in terms of the actual implementation. (I say "seemingly" because I don't know if the daily coders/modelers/etc. have worked with IGA on some other Castlevania project before; though, even if they have, doing it under the Kickstarter/Stretch Goal circumstances makes it a little bit of different ballgame, too.) To all this, I also wonder that if things get hairy, will ArtPlay's parent company in China pressure Bloodstained to be released in whatever form it is at some given date. In the end, I just want a good game and I want it to succeed, but I do consider some of the larger, less-considered factors it might face, and the perhaps the potentially sad irony of the Wii U version being cancelled.
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Post by lovelydumpling on Jun 27, 2018 14:58:42 GMT -6
The PS4 wasn't a failure like the Wii U or Vita, and the Xbox One isn't doing that badly either.
Home Console generations always have a transitional period in which both the older and newer system is supported until the install base for the new system catches up. The Wii U was a special exception, particularly because the Wii U had very few users to transition in the first place, and the Switch outsold the Wii U within a year. Due to the Wii U's failure, this was an easy hurdle for Nintendo, but it won't be for successful systems like PS4. So just like with previous generations, there'll be a time where the PS5 is out but the PS4 is still being supported while the PS5 adoption rate catches up with the PS4s. It won't get so many big name releases of course, but it's not like its going to be dropped like a hot rock.
And I definitely know no one is going to ask Bloodstained be delayed until the PS5 comes out. And if the PS5 isn't backwards compatible, you can bet a port of Bloodstained will come to it at some point if the game is successful, regardless of the release window.
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Post by RichterB on Jun 27, 2018 16:38:39 GMT -6
The PS4 wasn't a failure like the Wii U or Vita, and the Xbox One isn't doing that badly either. Home Console generations always have a transitional period in which both the older and newer system is supported until the install base for the new system catches up. The Wii U was a special exception, particularly because the Wii U had very few users to transition in the first place, and the Switch outsold the Wii U within a year. Due to the Wii U's failure, this was an easy hurdle for Nintendo, but it won't be for successful systems like PS4. So just like with previous generations, there'll be a time where the PS5 is out but the PS4 is still being supported while the PS5 adoption rate catches up with the PS4s. It won't get so many big name releases of course, but it's not like its going to be dropped like a hot rock. And I definitely know no one is going to ask Bloodstained be delayed until the PS5 comes out. And if the PS5 isn't backwards compatible, you can bet a port of Bloodstained will come to it at some point if the game is successful, regardless of the release window. You've made some great points, and this is all hypothetical, mind you. But I never said people will ask for Bloodstained's development to be delayed till PS5, and they certainly won't here on these boards. (I'm definitely not!) Rather, I'm just wondering if it, for whatever reason, does end up arriving more on the bubble of the console cycle, will the people who are not backers and/or not on this forum say, "You know what, I'm going to wait until it's ported to play on my brand-new PS5, because surely it will be ported. Why would I play a big Metroidvania on a last-gen console, when it could be one of my first neat, shiny experiences on my new console?" i.e. When Breath of the Wild came out, there were people who were confused about which system to get it for, even those who had a Wii U, when the game was originally made for the Wii U and ported to Switch. ("Lifetime sales of the title on Switch are 8.48 million units and 1.5 million units on Wii U.") Same kind of thing with Metal Gear Solid V, which people could buy one or the other: "But at least from these Metal Gear numbers, even with 160+ million consoles sold between them, the older systems [PS3/Xbox 360] only account for 5% of sales." And then there was Zelda: Twilight Princess, another port situation, where Gamecube sold 1.59m global while Wii sold 7.18m total.
There are many factors in these cases to consider, yes, but they express my wondering about where trends are going. In the case of Bloodstained, a PS5/Next-Gen version would A.) Be general user speculation that it's even happening and B.) Might cost additional money for ArtPlay/505 Games to make it happen--not sure about the finances and programming difficulty of this transition. I would need more of a sense of what Bloodstained's market is beyond these forums to know if the broader audience would be interested in holding onto an older system to play this, or more interested in getting it if it could hypothetically show up on the newest thing at the time (assuming the worst-case scenario). Semantically, even if not technologically, Switch is the first of the next-gen systems, and because it's the newest and hottest thing with its features, I'm hearing some people say that they don't even want to get a game for PS4/XBox One if they know it's going to have a competent port on Switch, because that's what they're investing their gaming time and money on now. Whatever anyone thinks of the Wii U, Zelda: Breath of the Wild works just fine on it, but people apparently weren't willing to hold onto a Wii U and its legacy support; they were ready to move on to something new, even when the game made for that something new was a Wii U game. Wii U even had a portable mode that mirrors the Switch's for living spaces so long as you set the system in a place where its signal can travel freely (though, not outside the home, mind you--but I have yet to personally see a Switch played outside yet; I know it happens, but I'm not sure how widespread the feature is used compared to playing in portable mode around a living space). Plus, even when a lot of Switch titles have been ports of last-gen titles or Wii U games with their DLC added in, people went for the Switch and its versions. ("Yes, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze made its Nintendo Switch debut and stormed through the charts with a solid 88,421 units sold. In comparison, the original Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on the Wii U debuted with just 35,717 units sold."--install base aside, people are essentially paying $60 for four-year-old game that you can buy for $20 on Wii U.)
It will likely never come to any of this, but it's something I want to watch out for if we get near the bubble on a later-than-expected release date. How will the market outside of the Kickstarter backers react? One too many times I have personally heard contempt for wanting to play something new on a last-gen console when it might get a port or already has a port. But a curiosity connected to this that may make everything irrelevant is how over half of Curse of the Moon's sales came from Switch, which Nintendo will not be transitioning out of for at least, I would guess, 5 or 6 years. If RotN does big enough numbers there, future ports would probably just be gravy in terms of sales.
PS: Interesting hypothetical related to all the above...If Breath of the Wild was a Wii U exclusive (as originally planned), would people have flocked to Wii U to play it at the end of its cycle or waited out a potential port? And would Switch have launched with as much sales without Breath of the Wild?
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Post by lovelydumpling on Jun 27, 2018 20:32:58 GMT -6
None of the games you mentioned were ported over from existing games.
Breath of the Wild released for Wii U and Nintendo Switch on the same day. Metal Gear Solid V released for old and new consoles on the same day. Twilight Princess sold on Gamecube one month after it sold on Wii. Of course when you have a modern version and last gen version releasing at the same time, people will want the modern version.
It's a completely different story releasing a port at the same time or before its last gen version, much less when the last gen version came out before the next-gen consoles were even out. It's more appropriate to compare it to games that came out during the tail end of the last generation, like The Last of Us or Grand Theft Auto V, which by no means had poor sales on PS3.
Bloodstained will come out before the PS5 and anyone who wants to play it will buy it for whatever consoles they own at the time it's released. Especially since it's not a flashy AAA title that will see any real benefit from a next-gen port other than simply compatibility.
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Post by RichterB on Jun 27, 2018 21:31:37 GMT -6
None of the games you mentioned were ported over from existing games. Breath of the Wild released for Wii U and Nintendo Switch on the same day. Metal Gear Solid V released for old and new consoles on the same day. Twilight Princess sold on Gamecube one month after it sold on Wii. Of course when you have a modern version and last gen version releasing at the same time, people will want the modern version. It's a completely different story releasing a port at the same time or before its last gen version, much less when the last gen version came out before the next-gen consoles were even out. It's more appropriate to compare it to games that came out during the tail end of the last generation, like The Last of Us or Grand Theft Auto V, which by no means had poor sales on PS3. Bloodstained will come out before the PS5 and anyone who wants to play it will buy it for whatever consoles they own at the time it's released. Especially since it's not a flashy AAA title that will see any real benefit from a next-gen port other than simply compatibility. I'm going to let this settle here, as a new demo is coming out very soon and it was just something to consider in terms of marketplace optics. It's an unlikely scenario to begin with, since I personally feel Bloodstained will come out in early 2019, but I was curious how such a thing might play out if that weren't the case. You gave some good examples. Though, for the record, I was a Twilight Princess Gamecube (yes, there was indeed a goofy market-driven wait) and Breath of the Wild Wii U person. Those games were both developed for those given platforms and reworked late in development to help artificially bolster a new console, regardless of what their releases say. I bought a Wii U because Breath of the Wild was supposed to be an exclusive, but then it got delayed, and then after that it wasn't an exclusive anymore. I wasn't going to reinvest big in new hardware right away...yet tons of people did. So, I could totally relate to what you were saying earlier in the conversation about Wii U and Vita. |
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Post by ghaleon on Jun 29, 2018 1:49:39 GMT -6
I kinda expect the ps5 to be backwards compatible.. the ps2 was with the 1. But 3 was not with 2.. well it was originally. But it caused problems (Since it had to be done by basically cramming a miniturized version of the ps2's guts inside the ps3), which as someone who has developed software on the ps2, I can believe, and the ps3 hardware is even MORE wonky than the ps2.. But they specifically designed the ps4 to make development and pc compatibility more simple, and as such, I expect it to be much easier to be made backwards compatible with for future console generations.
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