Bananamatic wrote:
Xyga wrote:
Not that the alternative isn't possible but I have a hard time picturing a handful of emerging Shanghai Alices, each creating and carrying their own 'school' over the years with successful titles. One new heavyweight alone could do the magic and create a new alchemy, but damn I'd have to be a significantly more positive character to believe something like that will actually happen in the not-too-distant future (honestly for a little while I thought Yotsubane would be 'the one'...)
you're forgetting that ZUN can reuse a fuckton of his assets (engine, bullets, characters, sound effects, sprites, enemies outside of bosses and even bosses sometimes, etc.), the backgrounds are simple and repeating and the bosses are tiny sprites
plus they aren't well designed as shmups either, the stages suck and game balance is mostly an afterthought
you'd probably end up with a bunch of really similar games if anyone else did that and the visual design would probably suffer too since reusing enemy sprites across games is pretty damn lazy
I'm not forgetting how cheap Zun is, and this is certainly one of the reasons for the commercial success of a doujin maker, but I only took him as an example of surviving dev.
Cave knew well how to cut cost shoving tons of digitized sprites (honestly many looking like shit) and max out the pinku pyrotechnics, but they switched directors and designers from time to time which allowed for enough variety, the alt versions also didn't cost much and probably earned them very little only contributing to their image, but in the end their outrageaous formula worked, at least until enough arcades were still in business in Japan.
I don't see what kind of model independent STG devs could follow that would come even close to that, remain profitable and make the shmups market great again.
We've all seen the Steam attempt and some think it is the future for shmups, but I'm not convinced, the 'transition' didn't happen.
I think console platforms are the best territory, but looks like there remains only funds and devs for porting already existing games.
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