Housemarque to stop making arcade-styled games

nigger

Their idea of an arcade game is closer to an Atari game or a very early 80s machine: games that were designed to be played for a few minutes at a time and then move on, with only a handful of dedicated autists putting serious time into them. They should make mobile games since that's where that kind of gaming is today (a decade ago it would have been flash games).
What else was in the arcades? Puzzle and action-puzzle games are everywhere, fighting games are not going away, new sidescrolling platformers and run and guns are made all the time. Even classic shmups are still alive and their average quality is much higher now compared to all the shitty cashgrabs that saturated the market in the 80s and 90s.

I think that Resogun's popularity went to their heads and gave them the wrong impression. I played Nex Machina and it is a good game, but it looks as generic as possible and in the end it's just another twin stick shooter in a market saturated with them. The only reason I gave it a try was because of a recommendation in the shmups forums. The fact that they were parading Jarvis' name around like a selling point only makes them look more out of touch with reality.

Reported for racism.

Bullets have the same color as the powerup pellets. Truly lots of thought went into this garbage game

Reported for reverse racism

look at these fucking neofags

Good. They need to try different things. Housemarque is a one-trick pony if I ever saw one.

All of their games are significantly different from the other if you'd ask me. How did you even come to that conclusion?

Are you shitting me? Resogun, Alienation and Materfall play the same. They even reuse the narrator. They're not even different lines. They're the exact same lines.
I guess Dead Nation was a bit different, but couch co-op only was a missed opportunity.
I'll play Nex Machina soon and I'm guessing it's going to be Alienation 2.0, ft. Eugene Jarvis.

Whaaaat? All three of them are entirely different genres. That alone should be a clear division. Resogun is a shmup in the vein of Defender, Alienation is a co-op isometric shooter with role-playing game elements and Diablo-ish loot, and Matterfall is a platformer about creating platforms and such. If anything Alienation is like a successor to Dead Nation, so I wouldn't know what makes Dead Nation 'a bit different' in that regard.

Nex Machina is a pure arcade-style twin-stick shooter in the vein of Robotron with a heavy emphasis on scoring and human chaining. No upgrades or anything like that. It even has a fucking second loop, it's a miracle why it's not on a PCB yet. It could actually attract some attention in Japanese arcades if it wasn't so hardware expensive and if the Japanese arcade scene hadn't moved on to pachinkos and rhythm games already.

They do use the same announcer for all games, who people call Ms. Housemarque. In Nex Machina she also voices the final boss, which I thought was neat.

I love it when hacks who've never made an actual arcade game in their lives pretend to know something about arcade games.

Nex Machina is as real as they come. Haven't you played it yet?

Get off my site nigger

This.
If you were good at an arcade game you would beat it in 20-30 minutes. Now what?
I'm not saying that was bad, in a world without internet and without 16-bit consoles you could make a living with a dozen arcade machines in a residential area. But today you can't compete against millions of free games that will steal your time for hours and days.

Also, genres are constantly being created and dying.

Are there any hope for guys who love arcade games?

I want to make my own arcade games in unity but this is demoralizing.

wew lad

Also worth note is that the last Arcade CRT manufacturer shut down earlier this year so if you were dreaming of a private arcade machine you better get used to that dream featuring LCD/LED.

I had to go and check who these guys were, because as it turns out, I've literally played none of their games, nor heard of most of them.

Crt is a meme

Your mother is a meme.

Maybe they shouldn't be charging $20 or 30 for $10 games.

They've also been jamming unnecessary mechanics into their games that you end up relying on too much like the Dash in Nex Machina.

They ALSO can't stop shitting particle effects all over the screen with excessive bloom and motion blur and every other pile of shit effect that makes it so you can't see what's actually happening in the game.

I think they can still do well though, Alienation was a blast. They do make high quality games but their obsession with unnecessary gimmicks and graphics flash is what got them here.

Their games that I played were pretty mediocre, especially their shmups.

wat

don't misread your potential audience and market intelligently
cuphead is an arcade-style game and it clearly has an audience. basically don't make a fucking robot-man twinstick for too much money and then complain no one noticed it

Cuphead and Nex Machina both cost the same
They are also both finishable in under 50 minutes if you discount dying from game time, but all of a sudden Nex Machina is the one which is too expensive here?

Maybe they should hire someone to do marketing, because I've never heard of them or their games despite being on Holla Forums every single day. Do they just expect Steam to make it work somehow?

I was going to pick up Nex Machina on sale recently but it seems like there are a lot of complaints about technical issues with the PC version. Has anyone experienced that or is it overblown?

It won't launch on some PCs and no real patch has been released to fix it, so you might as well try and pirate it if you're unsure

They're at least a two-trick pony judging from this game.

I'm sure this will end well for this company whose games I dont think I've even heard of.

I want another Supreme Snowboarding. Shit is still cash.

Supreme Snowboarding, Transworld Snowboarding, Super Stardust, Dead Nation, Alienation, Resogun etc. But I want them to go back to snowboarding/skiing/snow games.

I guess since nobody really cares about the topic at hand anymore to even shitpost I figure I might as well be done with it and post this wall of text to leave behind my thoughts on this

The arcade mentality is too dead in both the West and East for developers to be able to expect reasonable profits for high-production value arcade-style game releases. You simply need to make some concessions to make arcade-style games palatable to the home gaming audience in order to not be swamped with complaints about the game being too short or too easy because they're able to creditfeed their way through, complaints which actually hold no weight at all but will impact the imago of your game simply because of the nature of the audience you're presenting your game for. There's too many people out there who will look at you with disdain if you expect them to finish a fifty-minute game with no continues and charge them more than ten bucks for it. The game isn't inherently better or worse for being so quick to finish and being expensive, the road towards 1cc'ing an arcade game can take over fifty hours, but that much effort being expected is what gets most people to start posting their favourite autism-related reaction images.

For example, had Cuphead expected you to beat all bosses in one single run, that would simply be too much for the modern gaming audience, even for the ones who tried their damndest to finish Dark Souls for gamer cred. To beat all bosses in Cuphead in one single go takes around 30-40 minutes. The average completion time of Cuphead is around 6 to 8 hours because of how difficult those bosses are to defeat. The average time to obtain an 1cc for most arcade games would be even higher, but whereas Cuphead lets you retry at the start of each boss which only has you lose about under two minutes of time, for most arcade games you need to replay the entire 30-50 minute stretch depending on how far you got, which might annoy a lot of people. That's why home ports of arcade games usually have a practice mode so you can practice individual stages without having to replay everything before which you can beat with ease, but again the act of having to practice a game and having to work for their fun is what gets most people to start posting their favourite autism-related reaction images.

Another difference to note here is that in Cuphead you work towards completion, whereas in Nex Machina you work towards an 1cc, which is an entirely self-imposed challenge. I hate self-imposed challenges as much as anyone else (should), but that's simply the kind of playstyle arcade games are built around and by what Nex Machina is built around. It makes the consequences of creditfeeding rather obvious by resetting your score and depriving you of your power-ups which causes you to die more often to the point where it's easier to win if you restart the game, but not a lot of people actually get that. Though if there's one thing that goes over the heads over a lot of developers on these kinds of games, is that people don't want to play for high score rankings and scoreplay off the bat. They just want to survive the game and win despite having a shitty score, like how first-time players in Bayonetta will get Stone Awards all around. One method to encourage scoreplay is to interweave survival with scoring, where it's simply easier to survive if you play for score, like getting HP bonuses for every few million points. Or the Platinum method of having Normal mode be more of a tutorial mode with higher difficulties expecting much more out of you, but that will fall apart if the player doesn't feel like replaying the game on a higher difficulty to begin with.

Part of Cuphead's success is just that, having a checkpoint system so players can alleviate their frustrations by being able to restart quickly, and a high enough difficulty so most players will spend enough time on what is essentially a rather short game to the point where they feel they got their money's worth with just one playthrough. On top of being a good game and a good-looking and a good-sounding game. And for the more experienced players you have Expert mode where you can S+-rank everything to your heart's content. You can only get S-ranks on Expert, so completionists will be driven to play it again on Expert. And I think having a grading system of some sorts is just a good design habit because you can clearly divide good players from even better players through encouraging speedkills and no damage runs, which in turns amps the competition and acts as a guideline for players to know how they can become better.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here. Home gamers (be it on PC or consoles) expect at least 6-to-8 hours of gameplay for about twenty bucks, and you can't expect all of them to spend that time on their own volition to get better at the game, because everyone's time is precious. You want them to at the very least have a good time with what little you have and have them react with positive reviews after finishing it, which in turn spreads through word of mouth to other people who might try your game and do invest more time into it. For short amounts of content you should rely on high difficulty and replay value through scoring systems or just fun gameplay to 'pad' out the game's length while still being able to offer an arcade-like experience for the purists who in turn make superplay videos highlighting how your game is played at a very high level. Personally I would offer a STANDARD difficulty setting which includes about 80-90% of the game and lets you quicksave a limited amount of times/has a checkpoint system for people who just want to complete the game, and then an ARCADE mode for people who want to play the game the way it's meant to be played, maybe an ARCADE LIGHT and an ARCADE MAX setting to ease out the difficulty curve.

Nex Machina OTOH takes the more pure approach, with no tutorials to speak of and allowing you to creditfeed. I still don't know why you're even allowed to creditfeed in these games as otherwise players would be forced to restart and play the game like it's meant to, otherwise they're just going to complain it's too easy and too short anyways. It works very well for the niche it appealed to, but outside that niche it just didn't stick with people. Platinum games at least have the cinematic experience to create a proper experience, but Nex Machina doesn't have that either. While the visuals do look very dynamic, Housemarque's particle fetish alienated a lot of people with toasters which in turn generated less sales, which I guess is an oversight after having predominantly worked on consoles. My rig is decent and yet I still had to lower the settings to get a decent framerate. People say the visuals are cluttered, even though I think that's only the case when you're looking at gameplay footage, the visuals are surprisingly clear when you actually play the game and focus on what's important.

I think these arcade-style games should at least manage to have dynamic graphics, not necessarily technically good-looking graphics. People fondly remember Einhänder and G-Darius because they remember the cool giant robot fishes and robots and backgrounds with tons of animation and life to them with unique artstyles, kind of like with Cuphead, even if the former have jittery PS1 graphics. People will overlook outdated-looking models and textures if the game moves at a fast pace and has some life to its animations, and if it has a consistent artstyle which doesn't look cheap. Nex Machina kind of blundered here with its seemingly generic sci-fi artstyle. Perhaps they could have profited a bit more if they went with an artstyle that wasn't so expensive to develop and to get running on your PC while being more attractive.

I still think Nex Machina is the best game from Housemarque and a genuine GOTY contender which I'd rate above even Cuphead, but it is unfortunately more of an acquired taste. If you really want your arcade-style game to be successful, then I think this can be done without sacrificing the integrity of your gameplay through presentation and difficulty settings, and making your game more presentable as both a home system game and an arcade game. You might not receive the same amount of success as Cuphead without yuge amounts of marketing, but if word gets around and the game's good it should be good enough.

I believe Housemarque should downsize and focus more on accessibility without sacrifice rather than abandoning their niche, but I guess that boat sailed after the middling sales of their magnum opus. Hopefully they don't jump on the latest indie trends like roguelike multiplayer procedurally generated online card games and the like. The sole reason I bought Nex Machina on a whim is because I heard the levels were handcrafted. Too many 'arcade' games on the market I've seen are compromised with unnecessary upgrade systems and narrative cancer, especially when looking at new releases. Indie games of this level of confident minimalism, replayability, and production value are a dime a fucking dozen, and I hate to see Housemarque go out like this.

literally who?

When they say things like
I hope what they mean is just the potential for Co-op because I also think that a game with an arcade philosophy can still work if there's something that draws people in. Like you mentioned since it is a pertinent example I don't think it is a secret that Cuphead drew some people in because of its artstyle along with the gameplay. If they end up annoucing some 5v5 multiplayer exclusive game or a card game with lootboxes then it will be obvious that they are basically lost.

Its okay to cry lads.

Cuphead's development was unusually expensive and time consuming due to its graphics style, and it would have been a disaster had it not become the meme game of the month. A 3D twin stick shooter like Nex Machina should have been a safe bet for the studio, especially with their previous experience. If they can't turn a profit from that then they clearly need to rethink what they're doing.

They were aping arcade games that were developed by one to a handful of people back in the day - Robotron 2084 which they mentioned so often was made by two people in six months, and most of that time was no doubt spent on the technical side of things. High production values don't enter the equation when it comes to these games.

High production values did come to the arcades, but never in the way of flashier Robotron or Gauntlet inspired games. Companies invested in more powerful hardware capable of showing bigger and more numerous sprites in higher resolutions, custom cabinets with expensive gimmicks and eventually cutting edge polygonal graphics. To pretend that you can just throw more money at certain genres to keep them popular, when the history of the arcades already disproves it, is simply a waste of time. These games can and will keep being made, but by very small, even single person, studios or as passion projects, of that I have no doubt.

Then there's all this masturbatory nonsense about "gamers these days". Like people in the 90s loved short and frustrating games rather than playing them because that's what they had, due to the business model of arcade machines and the limitations of home consoles and computers until the 16 bit generation. With the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo came games increasingly easier and longer than before, with passwords and batteries to save your progress. My first gaming system was an Amstrad CPC, so I know a thing or two about frustrating shitty games that made the NES library pale in comparison, and I don't miss those dark times. The reason why I still play old games on MAME is because I can savestate and credit feed. Thanks to that I could play games like Metal Slug X until I could actually 1cc them without getting fed up. If I had to play them the old way they could go fuck themselves, and the same goes for any game that tried to be like Cuphead without the checkpoints and infinite lives.

I thought Cuphead was funded by Microkike, I guess I'm wrong? Still don't really care about flavor of the month beyond animated films being less shit compared to the Commiefornian garbage of today. Definitely wasn't any chromatic fucking aberration back then.

It's not that they're not making money with their games. They're just not making enough money to assuage their inner kikes, when they could be chasing the microtransaction train.

Arcade shooters have been niche for the last 20 years. Sony didn't even want them on the PS3, and used to reject the PS license to people who tried to make them, which lead to an underground shooter scene on the 360 - which was the only reason why the 360 wasn't posting sales in the dozens of units in Japan like their hardware usually does.

They're as "dead" as adventure games… meaning they still sell to their niche, and all it'll take is a single breakout hit to put the genre back on the map for a few years before sinking into obscurity again. You can still easily make a profit selling them, especially since they're so cheap to produce.

You're just not going to get big doing it. Which is why, IIRC, their next game is going to be a generic hero shooter/Overwatch clone with lootboxes. I hope it crashes and burns like Cliffy B's turd.

It's not like a game from the same exact genre with the same exact goals hit the same exact problem a couple years earlier.
Oh wait that actually happened
Assault Android Cactus before you ask

Nigger they've been around for 22 years.

Forum thread if you want to talk to the devs about it: forum.housemarque.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&p=11400

Nah. It's more like they suck at marketing and branding their games. When I looked at the last few Housemarque games I couldn't tell they were arcade games just from looking at 'em. They looked like random generic playstation games to me. I think they were depending on discerning consumers as well as gaming journalism and accolades to earn them sales, but gaming media's influence on consumers is pretty dead these days and most consumers judge a book by its cover.

The overall result is that these games are buried and don't get the sales they needed. You need market outreach to make a good game sell.

Essentially it allows them to place in excessive fire that you don't need to skill around, you have to dash through. Full screen width lasers and such, all with excessive bloom.

With that kind of set up you basically end up with bullet hell style "there's only one right answer" use of it, which is kinda boring, or things are just a clusterfuck and generally not fun.

But that's just my opinion. My biggest issue is still "huge piles of shit and bloom obscuring the gameplay". That's pretty much as antithetical as you can get to good arcade action. Fancy, sure, but you need to see what's going on. Also, charging too much.

Never heard of them. Did they even make anything worthwhile?

Dashing blindly through everything won't really work considering there is a short delay between dashes, unless you have Triple Dash where the cooldown initiates after three consecutive dashes. There's a lot more to it than dashing through bullets. The majority of enemies you will face are still mooks which will rush straight at you and deal damage on contact which you can't really dash through. Later on you will also have to face a different type of laser you can't dash through at all. There's also the Dash Explosion power-up which lets you deal damage to enemies you are dashing through, often killing most mooks instantly. You could also combine this with Smartbomb to dash into a group of enemies and Smartbomb which will kill all affected enemies instantly, even the heavier ones with more HP. So there's also an aggressive use for it. You also see this in the high-level replays for some boss fights where instead of staying at the bottom of the arena shooting at the boss while dodging the occasional attack they aggressively use Dash Explosion to kill the boss faster so they can get a higher time bonus.

I've never had much of a problem with the visibility, but then again I play on the lowest settings, so maybe post-processing doesn't really come into effect if everything's on Low.

I skipped over Nex Machina because it had garbage mouse controls, that's inexcusable for a twin stick shooter. Did they ever fix that?

Pretty much same reason I skipped it, game's good but I'm not playing that shit on a pad.
No, official stance is "MAYBE SOON™"

buy a controller already

If you can't even be assed to properly support the primary input device of the system you released your game on then you're a lazy ass hack and not getting my money.

PS4?

I already have several, controller just sucks shit for twinstick, at best you gain slightly better movement at the price of your aim precision and reaction speed.

GTFO neoFAG, we have some other boards for the likes of you;
>>>/gaschamber/
>>>/oven/
>>>/treblinka/
>>>/bog/
but the most recommended is:
>>>/suicide/

same as

Why the fuck are you seriously responding to bait? Why did you bump my thread with this shit?

Because i am pretty sure that was not bait but neoFAG refugees and their faggotry.

Do you really think neogaffers would choose fucking Holla Forums to settle down in?

are you really this fucking stupid

At what
How does this ev
USE SOME FUCKING LOGIC, APPLY COMMON SENSE, SHIFT YOUR BRAIN INTO 120% OVERDRIVE

WHAT KIND OF FUCKING ELECTRICAL REACTION HAD TO HAPPEN INSIDE YOUR BLACK HOLE OF A BRAIN TO COME TO THE NON-CONCLUSION THAT A SUPERSPEHUL LITTLE NEOGAF SNOWFLAKE WOULD WILLINGLY IMMIGRATE TO THE HARSH COCKMOUNTAINS OF Holla Forums
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU WASTING PRECIOUS PICOHITLERS OF MY LIFESPAWN BY PRETENDING TO BE THE GATEKEEPER OF THIS PLACE'S LACK OF STANDARDS AND POINTING AT THINGS WE CAN ALREADY SEE WITH OUR OWN TWO EYES

EXCEPT IN THIS CASE THERE'S FUCKING NOTHING TO POINT AT, THERE'S ONLY YOU DOING THE LITTLE FUCKING JIGGABOO BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANTED TO TRY YOUR HAND AT THE UNORIGINAL REDIRECT TO BOARD MEME MEME AND FEEL LIKE YOU ACCOMPLISHED SOMETHING WORTHWHILE WHILE EARNING SMUG POINTS, EVEN THOUGH ALL YOU'RE DOING IS PERPETUATING THE CANCEROUS BOOGEYMAN OF THE WEEK MEME, THE CURRENT TARGET OF WHICH CAN ONLY BE LOGICALLY CONSIDERED AS VIABLE THROUGH COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF DOUBLETHINK OR NO THINK AT ALL

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT, CLOWN

It was funded by Kickstarter so no Microsoft never stuck it's dick in there.

I can't find anything on the Cuphead Wikipedia page that Cuphead was Kickstarter funded.

Let me give you a golden piece of advice: Make fucking demos and spread it far and wide, like back in the 90s.

These days companies don't make demos because they heard demos negatively impact sales, but that only applies to hypercasualized mass market AAA fare where the game is sold not on the strength of its gameplay but the strength of its marketing, so letting players experience the actual game would only hurt sales. But when you're indie and making niche games that you need to sell, it's important to produce a demo and spread it far and wide because gameplay is your selling point and free demos are how you get people to experience enough of that gameplay to buy it if they like it. Otherwise you have to hope they somehow felt enough interest to buy this random game they barely know jack shit about.

just look at this autistic faggot, stay triggered nigger.