Steven wrote: ↑Sat Aug 02, 2025 1:10 pm
I'll keep it brief, but yeah, you've reached what I was ultimately hinting at, so might as well go for it without any subtlety now!
Oh well, I spent hours ruminating on topics that were floating in my head for a while, so it was not useless to ruminate on it after. My signature might explain why I find this result a good one
lol that's why it's a comparatively neutral perspective! There are games that I just outright hate, like most bullet hell, but I still think they are good games. Example? Daioujou: everything that is wrong with bullet hell maximized and shoved into one game.[...]
I do not hate any videogames in general, but
DOJ was a logical step in a direction that Cave had an interest in taking due to the fans' requests ("more bullets, more complex chains, etc."). I actually believe that
DOJ was relatively successful in the arcades but
Ketsui was a minor failure, possibly because it was off-putting to anyone expect the ultra-loyalists of the style. I do not remember if there any old interviews with Ikeda-san discussing this matter and how it might have led to subsequent Cave games being more approachable (or, at least, with multiple modes).
Toaplan made some complete shit games, though, with Tatsujin Ou being the best example. [...]
I grew up with Toaplan and adored their games unapologetically, but as I am approaching my 45th birthday I believe that they started with some great, foundational titles (...you know which ones) and slowly petered out with attempts at changing style without having clearly set goals.
Tatsujin Ou strikes me as a perfect example: beautiful and with a glorious OST, but it is "more of the same" of a style that I stopped liking when I was 14 or something, i.e. in the mid-1990s. There is a review of
Batsugun on this website by the 2003 version of myself, by the way: my 2025 self still loves the game dearly, but probably would not defend the claims made in the review. Oh well, I will return on the topic at a later time.
Yeah. I don't like using Cygni as a punching bag, like I said earlier, but it's the easiest one to remember along with Sine Mora. I guess the Sine Mora devs came here too, or something like that. Similar situation there, of course.
Yes, and I believe that at some point they tried to even explain the genre to people who interacted with them, or something like that. You may find the topics in the archive parts of the forum, perhaps?
There it is! That's the thing that I was hinting at earlier. I see this thread, and people wondering why STGs are niche, and my two immediate thoughts are "Who cares?" and "Good".
There is more. It is not uncommon to create a duality between "mainstream=popular, financially healthy, good, whatever" and "niche=obscure, financially risky, bad, whatever". I would chalk it up to PR departments trying to sell whatever "mainstream" products they sell, but you make a point about "mainstream productions" below that is telling, in my view. I suspect that the creator of OP also opened the thread because not only he espoused this view, but also because he wanted shmups to be loved by the masses ("me likes shmups! All world likes shmups, so all world is like me and me is happy! Happy and normal!"), or some such nonsense. Re-reading the OP, I have this impression.
anyway:
[...]Obviously, people who sell STGs as their job care because their jobs/salaries/well-being/etc.[...]
Yes, I believe that companies still making STGs in 2025 would like to make a living from their endeavours. But again, if STGs are "niche" in the standard sense of the word, this should be a natural result: being "niche" means "knowing your market well and
succeeding in selling your product".
If anything, larger publishers like EA and Activision are probably rather risk-averse anyway, [...]
I think that a brief glance at Hollywood or popular tv shows or manga or comics or mainstream music suggests that "mainstream=risk averse". I have no idea on how people can claim otherwise, because daily evidence in real life seems to confirm this simple equation. Whence my mention of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the Walter Mitty fantasies.
Some posts and posters in this thread seem to understand the current mechanics of first world entertainment
backwards, as if these posters are getting paid by a PR office from OCP to regurgitate mass propaganda or something. Maybe they are just really, really ignorant and naive (and not too bright?). They live, we sleep, and so on.
[...]Like I said previously, I think I'd actually be okay if the genre died right now and no further new games were made, as although that would suck, I think what's here is enough for a few lifetimes already. Do we REALLY need more, especially if it isn't necessarily up to the standards of older games a lot of the time anyway? Not really, but I don't mind it either.
Nobody needs more of a luxury, at least from I can understand of "real life", but if programmers want to make a living by producing more shmups, it may be convenient for them to know how to succeed in their endeavours. People on this forum need to play less mainstream games, I believe, and more shmups, so they may actually have a grasp of what has made the genre reach the venerable age of (roughly) five decades in relative health. The local users voicing certain concerns may need less Koijima and dungeon crawling and more shmups 1-CC's.
On a concluding note: technically speaking, Heavy Metal is "niche", and billboard-oriented technobabble is "mainstream". Sales might tell a different story, but cultural perceptions veer in that direction, I believe.
Nevertheless,
Lady Gaga discovered very early on in her career that Iron Maiden had an impeccable and everlasting bond with their fanbase (i.e. their "niche"), which also doubled as an excellent business model (too lazy to find the original interview). This is particularly interesting, because Iron Maiden reached a massive fanbase by having no radio time, no MTV slots when MTV was a thing, and by singing songs touching upon historical themes, war, SF and whatever else that was not mainstream, while having a zombie cyborg (Eddie) as a mascot. Or, by being "hardcore niche" in some curious sense of the word.
In the happy domain of videogames, we might actually have a similar situation.
Ikaruga might have not sold as much as
Street Fighter VI (128k vs. 6 millions copies? SFVI sales can be found online), but
had a staff of 13 people, whereas Street Fighter VI
had a staff of 1849 people.
On a similar note,
Fifa 21 had a staff of 4990 people, though it sold 38 million copies in the first year (also online).
Or, in borderline pointless numbers, one programmer on
Ikaruga sold a copy to roughly 9840 players, whereas one programmer on
Street Fighter VI sold a copy to roughly 3174 players, and one
Fifa 21 programmer sold a copy to roughly 7615 players. I suspect that if we start looking closely at how many people make a shmup and how many players they can, in a sense, reach out with their work, we may suddenly have a genre that has considerable reach that modern massive productions may only dream of, unless they are all-time best sellers.
Of course, I have no idea on what the target sales on each game were, to break even, but I suspect that a game with 13 programmers might require a slightly smaller budget than a game with 4990 programmers and might turn a profit at a relatively lower threshold. Besides, resources are not free. A game like
Ikaruga can be created in a big apartment;
SF VI and
Fifa 21 require a medium-size village (my uni campus hosts 12k people, but I am in
China: building complexes can host 5k people, here).
For those who fear the notion of "shmups being so niche", anyway, there is always
GTA V to soothe their souls.
Most importantly, though, I am willing to bet with anyone that I will turn all these ruminations in some publishable article in one of those pesky journals on videogames, like
these dodgy lads here, and feel zero shame about it (maybe some Catholic guilt, though I am an atheist). Bets will be in zenny coins, of course, and I am willing to take long-term deadlines (e.g. by 2030 or so)
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
