The future of Cave

[Udderdude]

http://andriasang.com/comzmf/cave_forecasts/

Cave Lowers Earnings Forecasts
Publisher puts development of some content on hold and pours resources into social games.

[kid aphex]

Put. Your. Fucking. Games. On. Steam.

[Estebang]

Would that really accomplish anything? It's not like Jamestown and Satazius have been hugely profitable. And most Steam folks would just respond to Cave releases with "lol I can get those on MAME."

I guess this is really the end of an era. Look forward to Cave completely abandoning non-smartphone and social platforms in the next year or two.

[kid aphex]

I'd like to see them try Steam before allowing themselves to become the Japanese Zynga

[Estebang]

I guess we can organize a Facebook shouting campaign, then? That seems to be the only possible solution to problems these days.

It's not like this sort of thing isn't the norm everywhere. The pay-to-own games industry has its days numbered. Even the mighty Guitar Hero and Rock Band were dethroned. We might not see a PS4, and the Xbox 3 looks like it's going to be a tablet.

[Marc]

Would that really accomplish anything? It's not like Jamestown and Satazius have been hugely profitable. And most Steam folks would just respond to Cave releases with "lol I can get those on MAME."

I guess this is really the end of an era. Look forward to Cave completely abandoning non-smartphone and social platforms in the next year or two.

Sadly, I think you're right. The games industry is headed for the biggest crash since the '80's, except this time everyone involved kind of knows it, but seems to be crossing their fingers and hoping it will go away. It's phones and Facebook for any dev that wants to make a living without a budget of millions.

It seems a missed opportunity that those still makingmour sort of games can't adopt, say, the Rasberry Pi as some sort of standard, and see if they can't get their games in homes through the back door. Surely there's a viable model on such a standardised, cheap machine somewhere?

[kid aphex]

It seems a missed opportunity that those still makingmour sort of games can't adopt, say, the Rasberry Pi as some sort of standard, and see if they can't get their games in homes through the back door. Surely there's a viable model on such a standardised, cheap machine somewhere?

That's really funny, for a while I've been imagining a Raspberry Pi situation happening for gaming ... for the devs, by the devs, a network that's half diaspora/half XBL. It'll happen eventually

[Barrakketh]

Even the mighty Guitar Hero and Rock Band were dethroned.

That would be consumers being burnt out on them, and releasing shitloads of games and expansions on the franchise didn't really help. For example, 2009:

• Guitar Hero 5
• Guitar Hero: Metallica
• Guitar Hero: Van Halen
• Band Hero (a spinoff)
• Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (portable)
• Guitar Hero 5 Mobile (phones)

Or put another way:

[Estebang]

Part of the reason the popularity of shmups and fighting games sharply declined in the mid-nineties is because the public was tired of them. Endless revisions of Street Fighter and Raiden really burned people out, and supported the notion that the genres were old and outmoded. Of course, Final Fantasy VII and the other flashy 3D games arriving on the scene had the most to do with it.

Here's an idea: Kickstarter campaigns for new Cave arcade/console shmups. I personally know someone who made over $10K out of the site to finance his crappy band's album.

Kid Aphex misquoted me.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I think one of CAVES biggest problems lies in marketing. I mean a big reason why the US release of DS was such a success was that it was released in the summer at a time when the industry is very quiet, meaning the got lots of publicity including word of mouth from YT users. Compare that with PAL DS and DDP Resurrection which were released at more busier times, especially DDP which came out at during the Novembergeddon when even half of us guys were too busy playing Dark Souls etc to create a buzz around the game. Ive seen C grade indie games have more coverage on the net than what that game got.

It doesnt help when all the major gaming sites are US based and generally dont give a shit about PAL, even though there are many Euro & Oz readers.

I do think CAVE could copy from Jamestown though. Just keep the meat and potatoes of the game std arcade. But introduce real tutorials, mini challenge levels and morph the training mode into something more involving for noobs to play. Many ppl like hard games but hate inaccessible games. CAVE need to make learning shmups fun and in bite sized chunks like Meat boy / Jamestown.

What they are doing atm just doesnt cut it. First thing they should do is get rid of unlimited continues and do the same thing treasure or Crimson Clover does.

[moh]

If you think about it...Cave has practically mastered making one specific type of game. They can only release so many before it gets kinda dull, and people lose interest..

so what do you guys want? Do you want Cave to keep releasing more and more shmups year after year? even us hardcore fans would get bored eventually..

now dont get me wrong, im a HUGE cave fan, but I just dont think there is much more they can do that they haven't done before. To me, a lot of their games like DOJ, espgaluda, and deathsmiles are absolute perfection. I'd rather appreciate them as jems, rather then have cave release a ton of clones annually.

imagine the beatles kept on writing music until now....even the hardcore beatles junkies would hate them.

personally, i knew it had to happen. Letting cave die off will just make me appreciate their masterpieces even more.

[BulletMagnet]

I mean a big reason why the US release of DS was such a success was that it was released in the summer at a time when the industry is very quiet, meaning the got lots of publicity including word of mouth from YT users.

Was it all that successful, though, sales-wise? It certainly didn't impress Aksys very much in that regard...

[TrevHead (TVR)]

IIRC I always imagined it sold reasonable numbers for a niche game. Maybe Arksys were hoping they had a SFIV hit on their hands and were disappointed with the sales. It was a better seller than RSGs DS who said they made money off it, and thats with the higher costs of localising in the disparate PAL region. There is a high number of YT vids of NA DS aswell. PAL only has a few at most.

Isnt there more sales of NA DS than of the JPN original? That Videogame sales figure site suggests so. Even though its not very accurate,

Edit, thinking about PC, I think CAVE could find some success on it, Atleast in marketing terms considering Steam will give indies alot of promotion on the main page if they feel the game is good enough. Quite the opposite to MS in the way they promote a tiny number of niche / xbla games. It seems that MS only really promote the XBLA game they themselves are publishing (Treasure / Limbo / FEZ) Or atleast this is what I see n the UK

[ebarrett]

shmups are deader than dead, stop pretending otherwise everyone

[hail good sir]

or

[Cuilan]

Cave's top 5 best-selling shmups of this generation in order are :

Deathsmiles (well over 30k in Japan if Platinum version is included, and then there's about another 30k from US sales, and who knows how many more from EU)
Deathsmiles 2X (well over 30k in Japan if Platinum version is included, and then there's the sales from the NA GoD release)
Mushihime-sama Futari 1.5 (definitely above 20k in Japan, more if Platinum release is included)
Espgaluda 2 Black Label (definitely above 20k in Japan, more if Platinum release is included)
Dodonpachi DFK 1.5 (close to 20k in Japan, well above 20k if Black Label retail release is included, and who knows how many more from EU)

The two Deathsmiles games are in the top tier of sales, followed by Futari 1.5 and Espgaluda 2 in the 2nd tier (with DFK joining them depending on how you look at it). After that, sales show a sharp decline with the MMP+PS double-pack and Akai Katana Shin (decline is even steeper if you include Instant Brain, which was a total bomb). There's also the two Cave games released under 5pb, which would sit somewhere just below DFK1.5 and well above MMP+PS and Akai Katana.

What Cave needs to do is focus their attention on the shmups that have brought them the most success, figure out what it was that made those games so successful, and then try to improve upon that. If Cave's arcade division wants to prove to the higher-ups that the genre is still viable, they'll have to pool all of their resources into creating Deathsmiles 3 or Mushihime-sama 3/Espgaluda 3, and making sure they're an over-all improvement over the previous installments. If they can do that, I am very confident that they'd be rewarded with similar or even greater sales than their current best-selling games.

What's clear to me : people want smooth learning curves, people want as much choice as possible, people want character-focused games, people want moe characters, people want colorful fantasy settings.

Isnt there more sales of NA DS than of the JPN original?

No, they sold about the same. Aksys was "satisfied" with the sales it got, but the game failed to sell out of its first shipment (this has more to do with the minimum number of copies that MS will allow for a first shipment in the US). The stricter policies that MS has in the US combined with other factors (some issues with a recent member of Cave's staff iirc) are what led to Aksys not localizing any more Cave games. Of course it would help if shmups weren't such a niche genre, but that seems like the most difficult thing to change.

[Estebang]

People only care about versus competition anymore: fighters, FPSes, RTSes. The appeal of a "can you beat this score?!" challenge has long faded: it just requires too much solitary investment in a game, while in the other genres you've got dudes to bounce off of. Same reason why soccer is more popular than the 100M dash.

I was hoping that Guitar Hero and the movie King of Kong might have encouraged a popular rediscovery of score-based competition, but I guess not. No one cares much about the time trial modes in racing games, either.

An Arcade/Vita Deathsmiles 3 might be enough to preserve Cave.

[RNGmaster]

shmups are deader than dead, stop pretending otherwise everyone

if you hate shmups so much go back to a mainstream forum

[ebarrett]

shmups are deader than dead, stop pretending otherwise everyone

if you hate shmups so much go back to a mainstream forum

I've implied many times that you aren't very bright but you never cease to surprise me with your ability to completely miss the point.

[BulletMagnet]

I'm getting rather tired of this of late - back on topic, PDQ.

[hail good sir]

mine

[Kollision]

If Cave releases a brand new arcade or console game (360) this year (and I'm being optimistic) I would be more than satisfied.
With the recent news, however, I'm afraid the chances are getting thinner and thinner.

iPad and mobile users rejoice, your time has come.

[Remembrance]

I've been showing shmups to people ever since I picked them up. Most of the time, it's still the difficulty or perceived difficulty that stops them before they will even try them. The thing is, though, those are the people who actually do care enough to say why they won't try them. People who appreciate the idea that you can try to improve your own performance in games.

From some of those people, though, I've gotten good feedback about Jamestown. The most thoughtful feedback among this has called it the most accessible introduction to shmups they've seen. (A shame, then, that the highest difficulty in Jamestown is so intolerable even by bullet hell standards. Not that it matters in my example - they weren't able to unlock it.)

So I really thought that there was going to be this Renaissance of shmups, for a while, thanks to the phone and Steam platforms. And now this... makes me wonder if even being able to reach that group will be enough.

Because there are a lot of games competing for people's time, and they're cheaper and more accessible than ever, especially on phones and on Steam.

[captpain]

If you think about it...Cave has practically mastered making one specific type of game. They can only release so many before it gets kinda dull, and people lose interest..

hahahahahahhahahahahahah

YOU ARE ON SHMUPS FORUM

[Gus]

If you think about it...Cave has practically mastered making one specific type of game. They can only release so many before it gets kinda dull, and people lose interest..

This is pretty idiotic. Compared to most other devs, Cave has done an incredible job of making their games feel unique.

[Siren2011]

Agreed. To say that Mushi feels like Ibara, or that Ketsui feels like Espgaluda 2 is retarded beyond belief. All of these games have something unique to offer and play completely differently from one another.

[AntiFritz]

What Cave needs to do is focus their attention on the shmups that have brought them the most success, figure out what it was that made those games so successful, and then try to improve upon that.

Agreed I think Deathsmiles was great in that you chose your own difficulty, straight 1 for beginners and the gorge/castle after all 3s, or MBL 999, was still balls to the wall. The other key was that they didn't call it novice mode, I'm sure that people who "should" be playing Futari original novice can be subtly insulted thinking they're playing a mode called novice, and especially so if it's explained that it's a tacked on mode for the port and not even the real game. Most people who I'd see posting on other forums who were excited about the game, liked the style and characters more than anything.

And like with DDP:R, there's over 800 on the 1.5 leaderboards, but only 500 on the 1.5 novice, even though novice in this one is really well done, and a lot of fun to learn the joys of learning a scoring mechanic and really pushing it, whereas regular 1.5 is about the most unforgiving score system I've ever seen.

Exactly, I just recently bought the pal version of dfk and have almost solely been playing 1.5 novice to learn the mechanics and bee locations. I was surprised novice was so much fun.

[NTSC-J]

Agreed. To say that Mushi feels like Ibara, or that Ketsui feels like Espgaluda 2 is retarded beyond belief. All of these games have something unique to offer and play completely differently from one another.

I think each game has its own charm and things that set it apart, but to say that it's "retarded beyond belief" that they don't share many similarities is a bit of a reach. Like a band or author, you can see their evolution over a vast body of work, but naturally they're still going to have many things in common.

If another Cave game comes out, I imagine it will be relatively easy to beat on a credit, hard to get a top score in, 5 or 6 stages with a last stage that's fairly long, and chaining or some sort of meter or counter that brings points.

A lot of people don't like their style or are tired of it, and that's fine and understandable. I like their games and wouldn't mind a few more, but if this is the end of the line, god bless em for doing what they did with this genre that has been long since forgotten by most people who play video games.

[spadgy]

At least Akai Katana PAL is safe.

RSG just confirmed that was so to my colleague Ben (author of the above).

[AntiFritz]

Apart from cave who even makes arcade shmups at all these days? Darius Burst is the only one i can think of...