What happened to great game cover art?

what happened to great game cover art?

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Focus groups and customer perception studies.

The psychological marketing scientists took over.
Everything must be blue and orange.

The only research they do is looking at previous market winners and copy that style.

Dont forget covers that show the protagonist slowly walking or looking serious in a bland pose. And back covers that dont give you any reason to want to play a game.

Even if that's essentially what it boils down to most of the time, large publishers spend millions on this garbage.

What are talking about, user? Look just how creative these modern covers are.

*what are you

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Why don't we make our own then?
videogamena.me/

Jesus Christ, how lazy are these people?

Covers cost extra

Where's Nintendo one?

in the trash, where it belongs
sadly I don't have one

just found these, hope it works

Nice

Let's have a contest in making the most cancerous looking videogame cover based on existing material.

Artists can't do whatever they want anymore so they just do what the last game did.
True developer freedom is dead due to this market getting too big, back in the 90s and early 2000s dev teams were under 100 people and made fucking superb games, now there's teams from multiple branches from multiple countries with over 400 people on a single game, and they can't make anything fun aside from copying the last game.

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Sick

>videogamena.me/
That generator is pretty shit, but I would really like to see some of these games:
That would be something for a game-jam, roll five random titles and make a game out of one of them.

Someone with more artistic skills than I, please

"Battlefield: Forklift Saloon"

Mainstream cover art is built to serve a function, and look good second.
It's made to purposefully draw your eyes to certain parts of the box, those parts being the logos and titles.

My sides
This one sounds like one of those miniclip celebrity games, but instead you have to shoot islamic figures with lasers.

ARTIST HERE
What is a a Forklift saloon?,
I'm not very good at english

Just imagine a wild west bar with forklifts drinking, playing cards and girl forklifts dancing by lifting pallets in the air.

I did my best.

it's two words, a forklift and a saloon
I'm sure you can find both under images on google
the point of the name generator is that it slaps together random words to make "funny" names

fug

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Pls no

superb


there was an attempt

OK I will work then

A forklift is a little car that lifts cargo, you know something like this:
__|;\|
|o-o|__

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Or worse, black covers that just have the title and logo on it.

And so it begins….

These all sounds like shovelware Wii and PS2 titles. I'm getting flashbacks to the vidya aisles of movie rental stores where I'd see nothing but Burger King and Cheap Knock-off video games.

Take your pick
1/5

2/5

3/5

forgot pics

4/5

All I see is loss.

All done pick your poison
5/5

reminds me of the pic of inafune talking to an employee in a cubicle.

I would play that.

fug

A lot of the older artists quit.

There aren't enough games with sexy dragons, I vote sexy dragon.

Art schools don't teach anyone how to actually draw anymore, that's what happened.

The dumbdown of arts has come from a long way.

Someone pitch this to Nintendo.

Fuck Holla Forums tho :^)

cool

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hi-five, brah


This reminds me…

What is with modern art's obsession with garbage? Everything is a pile of literal trash, or a bucket of trash, or trash taped to someone's head.
Is it just that they're all lazy and take the easy route of "commentary on society's excessive consumption", or is there something else to it?

it's all a money laundering scheme while fueling retards' "creativity"
things like the MOMA should be torn down and people like Pollock hung by the balls
actual art is work which is their kryptonite

Thank god my government is planning to implement a guaranteed income to support non-traditional employment like artists.

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Because digging deep within and finding true inspiration to create something astounding, beautiful, or extravagant is difficult and time consuming. These people are told they are unique, special, and talented regardless of what they do. They don't live in the real world, like someone who works day in and day out to master something.

And by my generous calculations, the current plan would only cost 35% of the country's total tax revenue!

Sounds like there is some room for more immigrants :^)

S T O P

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The only reason why they don't train high arts in traditional mediums much anymore is because there simply isn't market for it. If there were demand, there would be people doing it. Most of the skilled artists are working with CG or other obscure niches.

As for the experimental crap you bitches are crying about is relatively really small for how much money they move. Also, the market isn't similar at all. People don't buy that crap for the same reason the olden folks bought those statues and ceiling paintings.


My generous estimation is that they pretty surely have calculated that it screws people out of more money than it gives to them. What country?

Hey Dink.

Blame the ESRB.

Exactly what they are saying, the entire thing is a money laundering scam.

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Canada.

The proposal calls for families to make at least $30,000 a year. There is 7% unemployment by official numbers, real unemployment is certainly more, and proponents of the system say 70% of those who would get money are already employed. That means 23% of the country could be eligible. Most families are either one or two people, and these families are also more likely fall within the program's income limits, so let's take the low estimate and say the number of payouts is about 10% of the total population. At 30k that comes to just over $100 billion. In a country with an annual revenue of well under $300 billion…

I doubt. Like someone already argued, they are high on shock value. It's contemporary stuff that invigorate the life of people who feel like they've achieved all that can be achieved, and are generally just fucking bored, such as super rich people and upper mid-class college students. They can feel like they are still breaking boundaries and act smug about it.

Kermit's STD Gone Wild

Covers used to be the way games were advertised, so a lot of effort was put into them. 3D graphics were too expensive to use until the mid 90s. Now companies were advertising their games with 3D graphics because that's more impressive than 2D. 2D covers were forgotten as 3D became more and more common, and now that more effective ways of marketing exist, there's no financial reason in investing in them. Now, they just get some fag to render a shit 3D cover and photoshop it a bit. It's fucking silly because more often than not, a lot of modern games have great concept art even if they are ultimately shit, but because is right, we end up with boring covers like .

this

I've never understood that last one, DOOM's doomguy armor doesn't look like Halo armor at all

Say what you will about the gameplay being slow and floaty but good visual design for it's armor and tech has always been one of halo's strong suites

Many rating boards such as the ESRB have a lot of guidelines as to what is acceptable to put on covers and what isn't. If you show juuuust a little cleavage there, then you gotta cover it up! We don't want the kids who pass by Sports Illustrated and Call of Duty to have a gander! Is there blood? Remove it or change the color! Are they wearing a swimsuit? Put another suit on them!

I will always hate 343 for shitting up the Halo armor/tech design

UNSC armor was always blocky and clunky and form-follows-function (though still managing to look badass)

Then 343 happened and now they look fucking stupid

It doesn't need to be violent or sexy for the cover to be good. In fact, all of those covers look awfully boring.

I see some potential

What covers you like?

one ruined by too much text

Let's dew it

Really, aside from a few retarded helmets, it's really just an issue of aeshetic then specific designs.

I feel like most 343 designs, if done in the old UNSC aehseitc, would look fine.

This.

That may be true, but even if you weren't going for the violent or sexy approach, you would still need to make changes if they for whatever reason find it objectionable. This one isn't violent or sexy, yet Nami had to be covered.

Same thing that happened to book covers and movie posters. Photoshop happened.

I enjoy 2D art much more, but can appreciate some 3D covers as well.


Especially in the US, where you don't have that cultural homogeneity like in Japan, companies like to play it safe especially with touchy subjects like tits and ass lol because many people consider it suggestive even with a modicum of exposure. Japan is just as bad as the US when it comes to violence, and they still censor depictions of penises, vaginas, and anuses.

Also, the girl in blue has her tits censored too.

Weren't a lot of NES era covers ripped out of movie posters or old art? I recall the Castlevania games having covers ripped off of paintings as well.

yes

I wouldn't be surprised.

I thought we were making these

yeah the point was to make them on your own, I guess that kinda fell flat

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What are your favorite covers, Holla Forums?

Classic Boris Vallejo. It's so damn nice, now that's what a cover is all about. Games that use in-engine renders are fucking lazy.
Too bad Sega never used the GAIII boxart they commissioned, replacing it with JP art before release. Interestingly, you can get the original painting from Boris' site for $8000! That'd be an interesting piece to hang around.

I would buy it if i had the money.

The background to Simon's Quest is a strait up trace or redraw of Ravenloft 1st ed.

fucking hell m8

Portal 2 is allright though.

Oh you mean this game?

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OH BOY! RANDOM COVERS TIME!

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why the fuck was my name field sage

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last one

Those were some balling threads
we need more OC on Holla Forums

I find this hilarious for some reason

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The same thing that happened to games in general.

The bare minimum of effort with everything truly impressive and secret extra not expected to be discovered, but obtained through microtransactions. People have to change this.

Over 9000 hours in KidPix.

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Looking back as older games, those at least had a decent description to pull you in. Meanwhile with modern back covers, half the fucking thing is filled up with credits (the sort of things that ought to be left ingame, with just the developer and publisher warranting front or back cover space), and of what's left, the fact that it has to be in two or more languages on the back means there's not much room for a real decent description.

[NOPE TOO GROSS, SORRY]

honestly game covers that try and convey something that will actually be happening in the game are usually the ones I like the most

Motherfuckers. I'm on permanent disability and stuck with 10k a year, meanwhile useless, nation wrecking marxists who are doing jack shit but take drugs and fuck whores or purpose are gonna get 30k a year? Hang them all!

This one's better

Somehow this sounds like a title fitting for a katamari clone.

Holy fuck, Badminton Jihad looks like a real game cover. I'd play the shit out of that.

Might add more to this later, but it was annoying enough just trying to make a decent transparency of Guile for it.

I thought things like movie trailers, screenshots and demos(years ago) took precedence over an attention-getting box cover.

They didn't have the Internet or many massive marketing campaigns as far as I can remember, so they relied on eye-catching box covers to advertise what could be in the box.

I will never not be annoyed that this reversible cover wasn't NuDoom's default, because it sure as fuck gets the game's appeal across better than GENERIC DOOMGUY WITH SHOTGUN AND TITLE PASTED OVER HIS CHEST.

Who thought that keeping this as a reversible cover instead of putting it upfront was a good idea?

The same thing that happened to movie posters; marketers, focus testing, and sterilization.

Oh baby

It's really telling who the game is primarily appealing to with how they decided which cover to show everyone and which one they kept tucked away.

The choice is almost always up to the marketing department

reminds me of this

/argentina/ here; the BCRA (Central Bank of República Argentina) gave 50000 $ (almost 3.138 U$S) as first prize to this piece of rag called art

Whatever happened to Valalpa? I use to check out his blog in 2003 but haven't seen anything since.

Does anyone have that capped post explaining how this modern art scheme works?

Literally just a copy of the original with some minor changes.

That pic. Just look at that hand and the absolutely insane amount of skill.

This is exactly how the scam works. Over inflate the value of shit stains on the floor. That's free money.
This thread though. Pic related.

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/doom2016

This thing?


Reminds me of that screencap from some user that said he spent days carving some tree into a pretty neat (from what the photo showed) dragon for his school's art show, only for it to be set up right next to some other student's shitty sculpture of a man sucking his own cock.

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Damn…

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kek

While I like the art style of this one, the composition is shit. Could have been partially fixed with a different framing though.