LisaK
[14] Master
she ended Kitana and Taki so bad
Soul Calibur VI: General discussion
- Thread starter SSfox
- Start date
Rusted Blade
[14] Master
Ehhh, the reality is a little more complicated than that and the truth is probably somewhere in between these two perspectives. First off, there's some really important context to Namco's PR branch trumpeting passing the "2 million" mark there. Because Namco, unlike some other major publishers, notably does not typically reveal firm sales figures. That annoucement came out less than a week before an annual share holder's meeting that was undoubtedly reporting very weak sales figures generally, coming at the end of their fiscal year as we were headed into year two of the pandemic, with the entire industry in virtual freefall, especially in Japan, as you might recall. I suspect that the decision to announce that two million copies had been sold was very much part of a "polish that turd" strategy in Namco's marketing and executive departments at the time. I think they were desperate to highlight anything that kinda-sorta looked like a success in the circumstances.
And even then, I suspect they juked the stats a bit by including season pass sales in that figure. Because while Namco typically does not reveal sales figures themselves, you can kinda-sorta extrapolate projections if you follow the sales on particular platforms that do report licenses sold. And if the two million figure was to be believed at that time as being based just on the core game, then you'd have to believe that the game had a major uptick in sales in its second year, and that pretty much almost never happens. So I'm pretty confident at least part of that two million "copies" sold included DLC season pass sales.
Second, two million might sound like a lot of sales, but it's really not that great a figure, even if it was all copies of the base game. It's a marginal success at best, and certainly not what a company like Namco needs to see from a double-A funded game in order to see it as a real success. SCIV sold about 2.25x as many copies as SCVI, ten years earlier when a) the market was much smaller, b) production costs were much, much smaller, and c) games usually sold for close to their original asking price for much longer, unlike today's open and heavily saturated platforms where, unless you are at the very top of the competition in your genre, you often have to slash your sales price a year (or even just a few months) in, if you want to stay competitive. In other words, for a variety of reasons relating to how the industry as evolved over the last decade and a half in particular, their profit margin is much narrower, and two million sales (which wouldn't even have been eye-watering in the 2000's really) can be, depending on the game, not so far away from a "did we break even on this one?" situation, after you factor in development, marketing, and localization costs, and profit sharing on the license sale.
And for a company like Namco, who have one of the deepest IP libraries in the industry, they are constantly having to choose between which projects to fund, so success is relative in that respect as well. And when you're holding up SC against their other more successful fighters attached to more popular IP, that's probably not a flattering light for SC these days. So at the end of the day, we'll never really have a particularly clear idea of whether this game met Namco's expectations or its hopes--because they are a company that like it that way, as do many Japanese publishers. But I think we know enough to say with confidence that no one was doing cartwheels around the executive offices over it. At best, I think it was a modest but surprisingly decent return during a difficult time.
I want to correct one other little side point here as well. Project Soul didn't dissolve after SCV because the game performed badly: it dissolved because it always does once they wrap production on a title: Project Soul is not a standing internal dev studio: it is an ad-hoc team that is reconstituted every time a new game in the series is greenlit, usually by pulling staff primarily off of the previous Tekken game once production for that game is winding down, but sometimes from other teams too. This works well because 1) Namco understandably prefer not to have their two 3D fighters competing for the same slice of the market with releases at the same time, and 2) because the Tekken team brings with it a lot of knowledge about how to optimize a similar type of game for the current generation of platforms/architectures/engines, which is very valuable for getting the smaller-budgeted SC games out on the intended timeline and within budget. Namco devs have been talking about this Tekken->Soulcalibur cycle in interviews for ages: it's been the default approach since at least SCIII, when they first started using the Project Soul moniker.
Honestly, I think the bigger myth here is not that SCVI did only so-so; I think that's a pretty accurate assessment no matter how you slice it and what presumptions you make on the unknowns. Rather, the bigger myth is that SCV did so poorly it almost "killed" the franchise. That was never going to happen. Namco is a massive enough company that it can absorb a few hits in the form of bad returns on projects developed internally. They're not going to sell the IP, and they rarely outsource development of entire games using their own IP to other devs. Rather the sales just impact how quickly the series floats back up as a priority. The effect of poor (or mediocre) sales rather is to simply make a quick return to that particular IP less likely. Which, along with longer development periods and the Tekken and Soulcalibur teams relying on some of the same staff, explains why Soulcalibur games have larger and larger gaps between them as time goes on.
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sytus
[14] Master
@Rusted Blade
It was a pain in the arse to find this stuff but you can read for yourself where I get my conclusions from.
www.bandainamcostudios.com
www.playstationlifestyle.net
www.dualshockers.com
Quotes from Okubo:
And then just to remind people that Bandai Namco published this:
All in all this idea that SC6 didn't meet expectations or that it failed is bollocks. It was a sales success for Bandai Namco. Sure, the publisher would love to have sold way more, but that's literally the story of every publisher. Not every game has to be a AAA sales success, a lot of IP's simply have a small but core consumer base and there's nothing wrong with it. This idea that Soul Calibur is going to be standing side by side with the sales giants of Tekken/Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat is delusional. It is a mentality that the Calibur community cannot break away from.
There's more to this than what I'm letting on, but there's no point me mentioning the details as it boils down to a "trust my source bro" and a Twitter post so far down the eather by the director Yoshinori Takahashi publicly saying that he wishes to continue working on future Calibur entries. I haven't been on Twitter for years so I have no idea if here's still working there, but I haven't seen anyone here chirp about his departure from Project Soul.
It was a pain in the arse to find this stuff but you can read for yourself where I get my conclusions from.
The Making of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’ (Part 1) | Bandai Namco Studios Inc.
We will share behind-the-scene stories on the development of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’, the weapon-based fighting game for Playstation®4 (*1) / Xbox One (*2) / STEAM® (*3). In this article, we will share passionate stories from our Developers regarding the making of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’, which was developed...
www.bandainamcostudios.com
Soulcalibur 5 and Its DLC Will Be Delisted Soon - PlayStation LifeStyle
It's the end of the road for Soulcalibur 5 and its DLC as Bandai Namco has announced that it's pulling both from online storefronts.
www.playstationlifestyle.net
SoulCalibur VI Could Be the Last SoulCalibur if the Game Isn't Successful
SoulCalibur VI's Producer explains that the SoulCalibur franchise risked disappearing, and the success of the upcoming game might be critical to its survival.
www.dualshockers.com
And then just to remind people that Bandai Namco published this:
All in all this idea that SC6 didn't meet expectations or that it failed is bollocks. It was a sales success for Bandai Namco. Sure, the publisher would love to have sold way more, but that's literally the story of every publisher. Not every game has to be a AAA sales success, a lot of IP's simply have a small but core consumer base and there's nothing wrong with it. This idea that Soul Calibur is going to be standing side by side with the sales giants of Tekken/Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat is delusional. It is a mentality that the Calibur community cannot break away from.
There's more to this than what I'm letting on, but there's no point me mentioning the details as it boils down to a "trust my source bro" and a Twitter post so far down the eather by the director Yoshinori Takahashi publicly saying that he wishes to continue working on future Calibur entries. I haven't been on Twitter for years so I have no idea if here's still working there, but I haven't seen anyone here chirp about his departure from Project Soul.
Rusted Blade
[14] Master
@Rusted Blade
It was a pain in the arse to find this stuff but you can read for yourself where I get my conclusions from.
The Making of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’ (Part 1) | Bandai Namco Studios Inc.
We will share behind-the-scene stories on the development of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’, the weapon-based fighting game for Playstation®4 (*1) / Xbox One (*2) / STEAM® (*3). In this article, we will share passionate stories from our Developers regarding the making of ‘SOULCALIBUR VI’, which was developed...
View attachment 97393
Soulcalibur 5 and Its DLC Will Be Delisted Soon - PlayStation LifeStyle
It's the end of the road for Soulcalibur 5 and its DLC as Bandai Namco has announced that it's pulling both from online storefronts.
View attachment 97394
Quotes from Okubo:SoulCalibur VI Could Be the Last SoulCalibur if the Game Isn't Successful
SoulCalibur VI's Producer explains that the SoulCalibur franchise risked disappearing, and the success of the upcoming game might be critical to its survival.
View attachment 97395
And then just to remind people that Bandai Namco published this:
View attachment 97396
All in all this idea that SC6 didn't meet expectations or that it failed is bollocks. It was a sales success for Bandai Namco. Sure, the publisher would love to have sold way more, but that's literally the story of every publisher. Not every game has to be a AAA sales success, a lot of IP's simply have a small but core consumer base and there's nothing wrong with it. This idea that Soul Calibur is going to be standing side by side with the sales giants of Tekken/Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat is delusional. It is a mentality that the Calibur community cannot break away from.
There's more to this than what I'm letting on, but there's no point me mentioning the details as it boils down to a "trust my source bro" and a Twitter post so far down the eather by the director Yoshinori Takahashi publicly saying that he wishes to continue working on future Calibur entries. I haven't been on Twitter for years so I have no idea if here's still working there, but I haven't seen anyone here chirp about his departure from Project Soul.
Yeah, I do agree that SC fans do need to have more realistic expectations based on where it sits in the current industry. In fact, if you go back a thousand pages or more in this thread, you're going to find page after page of me trying to patiently explain to excited fanboys that no, just because there was some positive buzz for SCVI in its first year of release, that doesn't mean we will be seeing SCVII in 2022, and that it would be closer to 2026-2027, if we were lucky.
On the other hand, we do have reason to be grateful for a certain kind of stability that helps keep the series' longterm prospects good: Namco isn't some kind of rink-i-dink developer that's vulnerable to folding because it over-extended on a couple of titles that didn't work out. It's a juggernaut that doesn't need to hit the ball out of the park for every game in every series. As I was saying above, and as is highlighted in one of the interviews you linked there, the real issue is always going to be selling the next entry to the executives when they are sitting on a pile of IPs, many of which will have advocates in the company. And another interesting thing in that interview, and which other recent comments by Harada have signaled as well, is that the company culture of Namco creates a default career track where successful devs eventually move into executive positions, which has significant impacts on those decisions.
But not withstanding Okubo's hard sell (to both the board and the consumer), I think we have every reason to believe Soulcalibur is going to be rubber-banding back into the market for a long time: the main impact that sales for this or that entry will have is not on whether it will return, but when. On the other hand, the impact of development complexity and overhead on cost and timeline is a much more linear one, so waits between titles will continue to grow for a while, until there are some big changes in the industry. Of course that industry is in something of a crisis right now, so changes, they could be a-coming.
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AriesWarlock
[12] Conqueror
Project Bokuho
[14] Master
Out of nowhere. Nice!
Jeromeice
[10] Knight
Old arts , from a french article .
https://www.gamekult.com/actualite/...-personnages-et-idees-oublies-3050862090.html
https://www.gamekult.com/actualite/...-personnages-et-idees-oublies-3050862090.html
Rusted Blade
[14] Master
It's interesting: one gets pretty comfortable thinking of Soulcalibur's character designs as dipping into some pretty wild territory. But if this concept art and the related summary are to be believed (and bear in mind, we are talking about multiple translations and idiosyncratic summaries of a purported decade's old interview, so who knows how much has been lost or altered in translation/summarization), then the truth is it was almost even much weirder amd silly than the current substantial levels!
SSfox
[14] Master
People are so crazy about this girl it's insane, but I can see the appeal tho.
AriesWarlock
[12] Conqueror
LisaK
[14] Master
The only appeals I'd like to see are Cody's, but I don't see him coming back for now. TT
Returning to the topic, if you look at the DLC of the other games, Mai seems more interesting to me than Conan or Clive and not because of her attributes.
LisaK
[14] Master
LisaK
[14] Master
AriesWarlock
[12] Conqueror
SSfox
[14] Master
AriesWarlock
[12] Conqueror
Rusted Blade
[14] Master
Wow, a limited vinyl release for the Soulcalibur soundtracks; that is an an intersection for a very specific type of hyper nerd! :D
As to the licensing initiative, despite the most of the Redditors thinking that this is somehow likely to result in licensed games, I think it's pretty clear from the wording of the notice* that they are really talking about merchandising, cross-promotion and other sorts of ancillary brand utilization. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this is good news for those who are keen to see more knicknacks and models for Namco properties**, Soulcalibur included, but I don't think we'll see much beyond that.
*And Namco's typical policies and market position, and the way IP licensing works for games typically works.
**Which is the type of geeky, slightly tacky kind of consumerist/fan service merchandise that is not for me and which I would call a waste of material, but to each their own)
As to the licensing initiative, despite the most of the Redditors thinking that this is somehow likely to result in licensed games, I think it's pretty clear from the wording of the notice* that they are really talking about merchandising, cross-promotion and other sorts of ancillary brand utilization. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this is good news for those who are keen to see more knicknacks and models for Namco properties**, Soulcalibur included, but I don't think we'll see much beyond that.
*And Namco's typical policies and market position, and the way IP licensing works for games typically works.
**Which is the type of geeky, slightly tacky kind of consumerist/fan service merchandise that is not for me and which I would call a waste of material, but to each their own)
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