What happened to Cave?

[shmuppyLove]

STG's of the highest calibre forged through thousands of hours of blood, sweat and man-tears

Have you even PLAYED Bejeweled?

Shit's pretty tough.

[Skykid]

^ I was talking about the production process, not game difficulty.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The difficulty levels in the bejeweled clones like Candy Crush is a steaming pile of casino excrement. If the game doesn't want to to pass a level and wants you to lose your lives then it gives you a hand that is unbeatable for a while in the hopes that you will do an in-game purchase. After a while it gives you a better hand and you can pass. People who are never going to pay never do and just throw away time on the impossible hands.

[Thjodbjorn]

^thats why I stopped playing Candy Crush. Bullcrap “difficulty” that couldn't be beaten without paying.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

It's a shame because they could be really good games otherwise. If they would have just done a free version model that has the first few levels then pay for the full game which doesn't have in-game purchases it could have been sweet (pun intended).

As it stands it often makes me want to bomb their home office buildings.

[alpachinko]

Seems to be a trend these days with the whole Free-to-Play and Pay-to-Win model. I could see this coming with the event of the iOS ports though. One of them, Deathsmiles I think had pay for extra credit and what not.

[cools]

Everything apart from the original Bejeweled has been flawed.

[cave hermit]

iOS "gaming" is basically the cancer of the industry. It ruined people's grasp of the concept of value ("Why doesn't this port of a Playstation game cost 99 cents like Angry Birds? $5 is such a ripoff!"), and it introduced the concept of bribing your way to victory with micro-transactions to the mainstream ("I'm too lazy to collect coins despite that being the only thing you can do in the game besides run forward, so I'm just going to pay $5 for a bunch of coins to unlock this wallpaper! I'm such a smart shopper!")

[cave hermit]

And like cancer, the concepts used by iOS games are metastasizing to actual portable and console gaming.

[alpachinko]

And like cancer, the concepts used by iOS games are metastasizing to actual portable and console gaming.

Yeah true that. Sure Battlefield 3 on PC had an option to buy better guns after only a few month of the game being released. There is other PC games basically centred around it too ie Planetside 2.

The other failing to this model is that these games are going to be worthless with in a year or two. Who will go back and play Cave's Hello Kitty game in best part twenty years time like some of us do with a game like DonPachi. The servers and hardware will long be gone by then.

I believe Sony are embracing the micro transaction funded model with some of their next gen games. The outlook is bleak..

[R79]

Strikes me they were pretty much a zombie softco as soon as the PCBs of stuff like DoDonpachi, ESP RaDe and Progear were hacked and distributed all over the net, what, 10+ years ago now?
Piracy pretty much killed good music, it's killing the cinema, and now, yeah, it's pretty much killed Cave.
Reap what you sow. It's not like we're talking Electronic Arts or Interplay here...

[cave hermit]

Another thing I can't stand is how everything is going digital, and you no longer actually own games you buy. Sure you can just buy games on disc for consoles, but it seems like the big three are in a stage of transition; I mean PC gaming has already crossed completely over to purchasing licenses to play rather than actually buying games. By the time I graduate from college, there's a pretty good chance it'll be outright impossible to own modern games physically, which means that it'll be impossible to take those games into the distant future...

[cave hermit]

Strikes me they were pretty much a zombie softco as soon as the PCBs of stuff like DoDonpachi, ESP RaDe and Progear were hacked and distributed all over the net, what, 10+ years ago now?
Piracy pretty much killed good music, it's killing the cinema, and now, yeah, it's pretty much killed Cave.
Reap what you sow. It's not like we're talking Electronic Arts or Interplay here...

It's really a vicious cycle with this; people pirate stuff, companies make their copy protection/DRM more and more obnoxious to paying customers, who become disgruntled and turn to piracy, which results in worse DRM, resulting in more piracy, etc. etc.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Not 1% of people here outside of Japan ever tried out their games before emulation. I found them in mame and then bought 95% of them, just like all their fans here did. Even with today's digital distro they've never gone so far as to give trials except on ios ports with wack controls (or at least I've never heard of them doing it or that being the way anyone ever discovered them). And they can sell all the ports they want. If they made a port of Donpachi for Xbox all their fans here with the system would buy it. So this argument doesn't make sense in Cave's case.

[R79]

This forum pretty much goes back to when the internet took off, circa 2000. People here then were buying Cave hardware, and those on smaller budgets like myself would go after the ports on the 32bit machines, and then when ARIKA's port of DDP DOJ appeared, grab a JP PS2. Sure, they could've released so much to the West, but then they are a tiny niche Japanese softco. It was great to see some of their modern games finally get PAL releases on the 360, but really, we can look back now and see the (financial) rot set in years ago.
How many people "here" skipped over the quite reasonably priced and nicely implemented Guwange DLC on XBLA, because they already had a .zip file sitting on their PC?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

People here would not have bought the pcbs back then if they hadn't played them in mame first. Or where exactly would they have played them to know they were worth spending hundreds of dollars on? I guess a small handful of people outside of Japan heard about the ports and imported them but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the fanbase that was built from playing mame.

I'm not sure why anyone in their right mind would have passed up Guwange if they already owned an Xbox and knew it had the blue version and 360 mode.

Maybe because it wasn't a physical release. When you were born with carts, it was bad enough going to disc. Digital feels like bullshit only suitable for phones.

[R79]

Arcades dude, magazines, burgeoning webpages etc. The spark was lit 20 years ago with Batsugun on Saturn, which specialist import shops here in the UK would stock and let you try out in some cases. Staff who had been to Japan many times in the 90s. I remember seeing Ikaruga in a small independent shop the week it came out on Dreamcast, played it standing up at the counter for 20 minutes, then handed over my 60 quid, end of.

It's all gone now man. Even once massive companies like SEGA or SNK seem to have virtually no control over their past IP to repackage and sell properly, let alone afford the staff and development costs to deliver new arcade innovation. It's a freakish anomaly that Cave struggled on for as long as they did, when similar companies like Irem, Psikyo or Raizing went under long ago.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

I've been going to arcades since I was 4. I've never seen a Cave game in one ever. I've never met anyone online or in person outside of Japan who discovered Cave any way but mame. Arcades started dying before mame was a twinkle in Nicola's eye. So I'll have to agree to disagree. Emulation helped Cave.

[Squire Grooktook]

What my parents reaction would be if I told them I wanted to buy a PCB:

"ha ha ha ha ha, NO."

[ZacharyB]

I think it's both. Lots of people now know about niche genres and companies like CAVE thanks to emulation... and lots of people, feeling thrifty, avoided the ports because they didn't want to then pay for them on such a discovery. It's still debatable whether or not each MAME play is a lost sale (it's my personal belief that the experience is what is being paid for, not the product, so it at least degrades the possibility of a sale).

However, in my opinion, the real killers of companies like this is simply that their products are too niche. The biggest seller for me was the community surrounding a game. When I'd attend shmupmeets, it would make me more interested in the games I was playing. Youtube videos which show something has credence and might be relevant to a modern audience. (You almost never TALK with other people about these games, though...) These are the kind of things which speak to human value, which in turn stokes the desire to own. And with shmups... there just aren't that many people.

Take a look at the Nintendo franchises... they are doing much better, because they have the power to reach charismatic people who have tons of friends, who in turn become interested. Even the Call of Duty-type franchises, which speak to a totally different kind of person, but that connection to tons of people is still there. Normal people look at a shoot'em up and just get turned off. It's our job, here and elsewhere, to turn them onto them again. It doesn't help that most of us are weird nerds. But we can at least explain what is going on, and show what the excitement is all about.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

There has been no significant time period where there was an overlap in what you could get "for free" that would hurt Cave's sales of new product. The first emulation was after their arcade titles were years old along with their ports. Even a few months in arcade game terms is a long time considering the kits produced were all sold out. So the 90's games were emulated in the early 00's and lots of people heard about Cave. Then TONS more people bought their pcbs and ports over the next 10 years that were made. By the time the next resurgence of Cave emulation hit it was PGM games that had already been ported and bought in high number due to their reputation from playing their 90's games in mame. Then you have emulation of the earlier sh3 games. It's not happening until ~5 years after the game releases and even after that time, the emulation is not at all accurate and is currently making people buy the ports if they haven't already. You have a buggy inferior test out version that will likely drive you nuts, or you could just buy the port. By the time it's accurate Cave will be on their next hardware.

I'd go as far as to say no arcade game company has ever benefited from emulation as much as Cave has.

[KAI]

http://www.cave-world.com/jp/games/donpaccin.html
Translation?

[Pretas]

I'm not sure why anyone in their right mind would have passed up Guwange if they already owned an Xbox and knew it had the blue version and 360 mode.

For the record, the Guwange Blue Arrange rom was quickly ripped from the XBLA port and added to MAME.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Define quickly.

[brentsg]

What my parents reaction would be if I told them I wanted to buy a PCB:

"ha ha ha ha ha, NO."

Someday you will not have this problem.

[Oniros]

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/26/do ... itty-game/

Yeah, Hello Kitty Candy Crush clone is about as low as it gets.

Well they're trying to make some money, and everyone knows disposable shit makes money. No-one wants to buy STG's of the highest calibre forged through thousands of hours of blood, sweat and man-tears - they want to play Bejeweled Hello Kitty clones. That's where Ikeda and friends might take home a pay packet.

Fuck videogames btw.

Hahahaha flawless post. Don't worry y'all, with the money from these smartphone games they'll fund the Ibara + Ibara Kuro port for the 360. Anytime now...

[alpachinko]

Hahahaha flawless post. Don't worry y'all, with the money from these smartphone games they'll fund the Ibara + Ibara Kuro port for the 360. Anytime now...

That would be awesome though probably will never happen.

[WeirdRain]

Hahahaha flawless post. Don't worry y'all, with the money from these smartphone games they'll fund the Ibara + Ibara Kuro port for the 360. Anytime now...

[Cagar]

Just wait for that ketsui 2 announcement..

[WeirdRain]

Just wait for that ketsui 2 announcement..

We will get it after IbaraXMushihimesama...