Summary
In this episode, the hosts discuss the trend of gaming franchises being revived and then quickly abandoned by developers. They specifically focus on EA's decision to put the Dead Space franchise back on ice after the successful remake. They explore possible reasons for this, including the inability to monetize the franchise through microtransactions and the impact of subscription services like Game Pass. They also discuss the larger issue of developers prioritizing long-term monetization over creating fully released games. The hosts express concern with this trend and its negative impact on the gaming community.
Chapters
00:00 The Revival and Abandonment of Gaming Franchises
07:56 Prioritizing Fully Released Games Over Monetization
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Projektitachi (00:21.788)
What is up, everybody? Welcome back to another week of the Jeezy Chop Shop podcast. I am your host, Project itachi, joined by my good friend and co -host, Warnurse. And this week we are going to cover gaming franchises that deserve their time back in the spotlight to get revived, but are constantly getting canned.
and it just hurts my soul as a gamer. But before we dive into that, if you guys are joining us on whatever listening platform you're listening to us on, make sure you hit that follow button, turn on notifications so you guys know when our podcast goes live, and swing over to our YouTube channel and hit that subscribe and like button. Join us for these adventures so you never miss out. All right, without further ado, one of your favorite developers, and I say so sarcastically, EA has done it again.
Do you know what EA has done?
Daniel (01:15.026)
I don't, I have no idea what's going on. What could they have possibly done this time?
Projektitachi (01:19.036)
So EA has now officially put. They have put Dead Space back on ice in favor of their next battlefield game. Yes, right after they made that critically acclaimed Dead Space remake. Pretty much open up the universe again after pretty much a decade long slumber after the you know, Dead Space 3, they revived it.
T -Motive pretty much gave us a remake. They gave us a phenomenal game. And now not even three years later, they're already saying, hey, we're putting it back on ice. There will not be a Dead Space 2 remake. It's it's canceled. It's not happening because the sales did not reach what we want. And.
Actually, there's an excerpt right here from the gamer dot com. It says the Dead Space 2 remake is officially not happening despite the original remake teasing an expanded universe set to be built upon. It seems sales of the reimagining weren't substantial enough to warrant a sequel. It sold millions, two million to be exact. But in the landscape of modern gaming, that just doesn't cut the mustard. So.
And two million is nothing to sneeze at that. That's a pretty decent turn for a remake. So what I want to kind of focus on a little bit is where do you think EA might have gone wrong? If they technically did anything wrong, what could have probably killed the Dead Space franchise? What keeps some of these developers from bringing back fan favorite franchises despite there being a huge outcry for them to revive certain ones?
Final Fantasy Tactics looking at you. And what could, you know, devs do in the future when they want to revive a series and to keep it revived because, you know, like Capcom's been crunching out the Resident Evil remakes and they've been doing phenomenal. And then, you know, Dead Space came out with their remake. And to us, well, at least to me, I thought it did phenomenal, but according to EA, it didn't do well enough. And my first reaction...
Projektitachi (03:32.988)
And don't take this as fact, this is just my opinion initially was that EA didn't see a way to milk it the way they can their other franchises like Battlefield with season passes, microtransactions, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, look at what they did to Battlefront 2 until the fans pushed back. And now Battlefront 2 at the end of its lifecycle is a phenomenal game. It's the game that should have been what we got at launch, but it took years to get to.
But by the time they finished it, it was the end of that game's life cycle. And now that's been canned. And so there's nothing else happening with Battlefront when if they had done everything they should have done upfront, we could have got the Mandalorian in there. We could have got the bad batch in there. We could have got an Ando crossover. We could have got so many crossovers with Battlefront if they weren't so money hungry with the franchise. Now Dead Space came out to single player game.
I was initially thinking maybe it was just because they couldn't think of a way to milk it because it's not a milkable game. That maybe they were saying, okay, well, if we can't season pass it to death, if we can't microtransaction it to death, no one's going to care about cosmetics in Dead Space, then it has to sell a ridiculous amount. And to be fair, it did underperform as compared to Dead Space 3 that when it launched, it sold 5 million copies as compared to Dead Space remake, selling 2 million.
I have other theories that might tie into why a game like, you know, Dead Space underperform, asking for a $70 price tag for a remake might've been a bit of a stretch, being that it's a game that already existed and asking for a $70 price tag may have been a bit much. But then again, you have Naughty Dog who did the exact same thing with The Last of Us Part One when they, and that game has been remastered, then they kind of re -
Re -remastered when they called it part one and made it available for ps5 and then they had a $70 price tag on it Because I think it's everything including the dlc wrapped in one so I guess that kind of justified it in their eyes because if you did the math From when the initial game came out and you bought the dlc. It was going to be around $70 even back then So asking for a flat $70 right now Technically didn't raise the price of the game. They pretty much are just charging you for
Projektitachi (05:59.964)
what you would have paid anyway already did pay if you look back at it. So maybe that's why they were able to get away with it because there is no DLC for Dead Space. It's not a DLC based game really. So maybe asking 70 bucks might have killed it as compared to $60. I also want to say, and this is not throwing shade because I know people will be like, oh my gosh, you're just hating. I'm like, no, this is not throwing shade. But I think this ties into what we were talking about in our last episode with things like Game Pass.
that offer games at launch, which is a very decent service to offer and has been going for years, that if you have Game Pass and those games are offered day one, technically free to you, why would you need to buy a game if you could get on Game Pass? So maybe it might have hurt on the...
you know, on that standpoint where the people who are like Game Pass users are like, is it on Game Pass day one? No. Then, you know, I'm going to wait till it's on sale. I'm going to wait until it is on Game Pass. And then they forget about it because it might have taken, you know, like a year to hit Game Pass. And even on the PlayStation front, we already know PlayStation doesn't follow that model that Game Pass follows. So the PlayStation front, people are like, oh, $70. Well, I'll wait till it's on a spring sale. And then they forget about it.
So only like diehard fans were buying it when it came out at its full retail price. So that may have hurt sales as this new subscription model for both PlayStation and Xbox may have also hurt them in the long run. That's why I say, I don't know if in this case the full blame falls on EA entirely, not that they're void of fault, but I think this is the one time that it's maybe not their fault. But I don't know, what do you think?
Daniel (07:56.248)
Um, it's starting to feel like it, especially studios like EA are canning games and not giving the community the kind of games that we have been asking for because they can't milk these games longterm.
Think of Dino Crisis, for instance, the fan base has been demanding that for over a decade now wanting to remake and the Resident Evil games have been so popular and they've sold really well. I think Dino Crisis would sell really well. The demand for it's really high. It's not. I would. Several years ago, I would have said Dino Crisis was a niche game, but that was before the outcry and the love of the franchise kind of came to light a little bit more.
over the past few years with the Resident Evil successes. But just like Resident Evil. I will actually I'd say unlike Resident Evil, Resident Evil has a much higher fan base than a game like Dino Crisis, but. They're not going to want to spend money on a franchise that they can't milk and that they aren't guaranteed to make the same type of sales. So what I think we're seeing in the gaming industry is a combination of.
Are there enough fans to make enough money on top of can we milk this with skins or DLCs or game passes or battle passes or whatever the case. So it's, it's becoming less about the fans and the community and more about how much money can we milk from people and get from people over time instead of dropping a game for a single price tag. And then that's it.
To say a game is a failure because you didn't have DLCs and you didn't have microtransactions and all these things that can gradually be milked over time. To me, that's just proof that that was the goal all along and going forward in the gaming industry is making as much money as possible from single player games.
Projektitachi (10:06.812)
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because in the same vein, I don't know if you heard Ubisoft, another studio that's famous for milking their franchises is already ticking off the fans with Star Wars Outlaws before it's even launched in August, already saying that it's going to have a season pass day one. It's already going to have, I believe, a $40 season pass.
Daniel (10:18.04)
Man.
Projektitachi (10:36.156)
pretty much to get everything day one, you're going to have to spend about $110 to have access to the job of the hunt missions. They say there's job missions in the game, but for these specific missions, they're paywalled by the season pass. And I was afraid of this happening. I said, you know, we got so used to EA having the Star Wars gaming license that we didn't, we thought any other developer messing with Star Wars would be better than EA, you know, EA, they milked it. And to, for the most part,
I did say years ago in just general conversation, I said, we've forgiven them so much that other developers, other big developers, when they get their hands on the franchise, they're going to say, well, EA did it and the fans forgave them because we did. Yes, we made an outcry. Yes, we made them fix the game. But at the same time, EA got what they wanted first before they fixed it. People cried, but people still spent that money. They spent that money as they cried.
So EA was just like, yeah, you're crying, but you're giving us that money. And once we hit a certain threshold and we realize, okay, we can't push it, then we'll fix the game. And that's exactly what happened. And they finally fixed it to the point when they knew, well, we're going to can the game in like four years, five years anyway. So give them a little bit of what they want and then we'll just drop this, the franchise. And then they made their money. They let the license expire. They put it out to other developers. Other developers already scooped it up. Ubisoft being one of the first.
and they're repeating the process. And look at Ubisoft. They're literally gonna get away with what EA got away with. Yeah, cool, you're gonna get upset, but you're gonna pay us as you're upset. And then we're gonna nod our heads and we're gonna say, we hear you loud and clear. Once we hit a threshold and we realize, okay, we can't push it further, then we're gonna fix the game, quote unquote, fix the game, give you what you want at the end of its life when we don't care about it anymore.
and we're working on the next project. And that pretty much ties into like what a lot of these AAA studios are starting to lean into. This is what the whole we've dug ourselves in because for the most part, most of us have just been going, eh, you know, that's what it is. This is the times we kind of just got a roll with the punches, inflation. The games are actually cheaper this day as compared to other days. And we just take what a certain analyst says here, a certain...
Projektitachi (13:04.604)
content creator says there and we take it as you know, the spoken word and we're just like, oh, you know, it is what it is. It's not that it's not that big a deal, but it is because, you know, games are a mainstream media. They outperform sports. They outperform movies in terms of revenue retention, all of that. So they have an effect on us. You know, I feel like we should be able to determine what we're willing to spend our money on and what we should be like. No, that's BS.
You can't keep milking things like this. You already are planning to milk us and you're so bold now to say upfront, we're gonna milk you. That's ballsy. If you already know you're gonna charge for this, why can't you just?
Daniel (13:49.592)
Yeah, it goes back to what we've been saying and we even said in the last episode and I think it feels like a lot of the gaming community is starting to agree instead of instead of just nodding their head and accepting it when you spend $70 and a fucking triple a game. It should be a full game. It should never not be a full game. If you want to do expansions or DLCs, that's fine, but don't put paywalls on games and say, well, if you want X, Y, and Z in the game,
or if you want it early or if you want, you know, stuff that you wouldn't get otherwise, that doesn't come with the base game, spend extra money. Call of Duty is the worst about it. They've become the worst about it because they sell these skins and add -ons for almost the same price, sometimes the same price as the fucking game was to begin with.
Projektitachi (14:42.78)
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel (14:44.408)
And we've we've allowed this to happen and all the people that just shook their heads like it's not a big deal like this is going to become the not just the norm but the gold standard in gaming to not give you a fully released game and to expect you to spend extra money on that same game down the road more two or three times more than you even spent on the game alone for add -ons. I mean look at fortnight. What was it? The average fortnight player spends it was like seventy five or eighty dollars.
Projektitachi (15:06.012)
Yeah, because it all adds up. It all adds up.
Daniel (15:14.36)
the you know the panel source a dollar changed by a little bit but it's yeah it's like it's some crazy amount yeah
Projektitachi (15:15.644)
For the month it's like 800.
It's almost a grand. Yeah. It was like for a month that your diehard Fortnite player spends almost $800 a month on content in that game. And I was like, that's ridiculous. It's a free to play game, but you've spent.
Daniel (15:30.232)
Yeah, it's. Yep. And did I'm over here like I just want to fucking nightmare creatures remake. That's all I want. I just want a nightmares creature, a nightmare creatures remake, reboot that genre. It's a good genre. It deserves love. And we're not going to get that because you know what? Even if some company did revive that franchise, they'd find a way to pay wallet and make you pay for extra shit. They're making gaming less enjoyable.
They've turned into a one -sided lucrative business.
Projektitachi (16:04.828)
I think to talking about how these things get milked, another reason I think that EA shuttered Dead Space, like saying, hey, they couldn't milk it. And on the flip side of people will probably say, well, Resident Evil kept getting remade. But if you look at Capcom, Capcom has always been sliding in microtransactions in some way in all their games. They may not have slid 30 DLCs down your throat with the remakes, but there were microtransactions.
They were not necessary to the game, but they gave you the feeling of having a leg up. Like even with Resident Evil 4, the price tag for Resident Evil 4 was like $60, but the DLC was an extra 20 or 10, 10, 20 bucks, I think. I think it was like 10, between 10 and $20. So you wound up, if you bought all the cosmetics, all the little micro transactions, the extra money, the fancier guns to get yourself a little bit of leverage in the starting game, you wound up hitting that $70 price point.
you wound up hitting that $70 price point and they had a DLC attached to it. Even with the Resident Evil 2 remake, there's no actual DLC per se, if I remember correctly. It's been a few years since I've touched the game, but there were micro transactions, little things you could buy to increase how much they made off of that remake. And some way they found a way to make more money off of that gained initial sale at a lower price.
That's why they could keep crunching out remakes because the micro transactions added up and they were so small. They were so tiny, you know, people don't realize pennies make dollars. So you see something for 99 cents. Of course in your head, you're like that's less than a dollar. That's easy day. You multiply that by every gamer who bought the game that every gamer does that Capcom was making bank. Therefore hitting the number, the dollar number that they want.
to justify doing it. And once they saw that people were gonna be willing to, because I promise you, if people were not buying Intel's microtransactions, I don't think we would have got a Resident Evil 3 remake. I don't think we would have got a Resident Evil 4 remake. And the funny thing about it is, Resident Evil 4 remake was already in development for a while. Long, I think long before two and three were even talked about, they were talking about a Resident Evil 4 remake.
Projektitachi (18:25.148)
Did it not strike anyone as funny that not long after two, three was right behind it, ready to go? They had already built up the game. I promise you if two did not make the money they wanted it to, three and four would have been shuttered. But they had three at the ready to capitalize off that hype and off the money gamers were willing to spend. So as soon as two...
started making that money, they dropped three immediately. They were like, oh, we got three right behind it. And then we had to wait for four.
Daniel (18:55.576)
Yeah, they dropped they they dropped the remake of a base game like it was a DLC for the other game.
Projektitachi (19:02.492)
Yep. And we were just we were so hype on like Capcom making their return Capcom returning the form that we didn't see. We didn't realize what they were doing. And I felt for it too, because I was like, yo, to remake phenomenal. Don't get me wrong. Love it. It's a great game. It's a great remake. I love it to death. So I was on that hype train to when three came rolling out. And it wasn't until after I had three already downloaded paid. And I was like, wait a minute.
They got me. Three came out way too fast. They got me. They got me right when I was on my high. Yeah. I was like, man, you guys got me. And then we had a gap in time before four drop. I was like, ah, see what's happening here. Well played Capcom. Well played. But yeah, unfortunately for the Dead Space fans, we got pretty much we got teased.
Daniel (19:34.872)
Didn't I just play this other game eight months ago?
Projektitachi (19:58.268)
We were hoping that it was coming back and now EA is dropping it in favor because the team has pretty much moved on. They're working on the next battlefield. So there's no one even work on a dead space to remake EA is saying that from their standpoint, it's not canceled. It's just indefinitely paused, but they never actually confirmed that it was going to be in the works in the first place. So of course they won't say that it was canceled because they never even got started on it. So, you know, that's their.
Segway of oh, no, we didn't cancel it. Yeah, because you never started on it in the first place which tells me they I don't think they really had a plan to work on it. Um They saw an opportunity to make a lot of money really fast off of a certain niche fan base They delivered a quality product to guarantee that it's sold, but I don't think they truly had a plan to see it through because
We're in the era where everything is, it's either FPS or sports right now for a lot of gamers. Online competitive is the focus for a lot of these companies right now. And that's where they wanna put their money, that's where they wanna put their effort. Even though there's a huge outcry for more single player games, a lot of them, they just wanna drive the competitive online aspect.
Which for me, it's actually turned me off from competitive online. I used to be for it when it was a smaller batch. Because it just, then it, I don't know, it felt, I don't want to say more intimate, but it, like the high was better because you only had a few games to go through. Like, you know, it was like, you know, you had, you had call of duty and you had like Madden and stuff. And it wasn't that many. So, you know, when you got online, you were like, yeah, but now there's a plethora of them. And it's like,
Is there any single player game where I can just sit down and zone out into my own little world for like hours upon hours and I don't have to be online with other people and get annoyed like so I don't know. I don't think EA actually had a plan to work on it, which really, really, really sucks. So, yeah, that space is pretty much can and Ubisoft is already putting the nail in the coffin for Star Wars Outlaws, which I had high hopes for.
Projektitachi (22:23.131)
And now I'm side eyeing it.
Daniel (22:25.08)
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the excuse when a game has micro transactions and pay walls and stuff. And I see the same argument all the time. Like, oh, well, you don't have to buy them. They're just there if you want them for your convenience. It's all in the game. And again, just like the last episode we mentioned, you're part of the problem. You're part of the problem.
of the, of the part of the community that's allowing this shit to happen. And then you'll probably turn around and then get upset when you're the one behind a pay wall of a game you really like. And then you feel passionate about said game and it's this stuff's only going to get worse down the, down the, down the line, man. It's, it's gotten really like way out of hand.
Projektitachi (23:15.118)
Yeah, absolutely. But what do you guys think? Are you upset that Dead Space isn't happening? Did you already know Dead Space wasn't going to happen? What are your thoughts on Star Wars Outlaws? Do you think we were better off just being stuck with EA? Or do you think other developers, now that they can get their hands on the Star Wars license, might revive the series and not put everything behind paywalls like EA and now Ubisoft is planning to do?
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