Square Enix tells us what to expect from now on.

[djzombie]

So you've settled for second best and now you're convinced it's the way to go?

Actually I needed a new phone and wanted a handheld gaming device as well so I got the best of both worlds.

External controllers don't do anything for you either, since the majority of developers are going to develop for the most common end user who do not expect to have to buy extra shit to play games on their phones.

Every emulator on android is setup to take advantage of external controllers. If you're buying this to play straight touchscreen android games you don't know what its for.

Any developer that makes a smartphone game that requires external controls is going to get laughed the fuck out of life. Which means for the most part smartphone games have to be designed for on-screen/touch controls which still makes them inferior to handheld consoles even with external controls.

can't wait til ouya gets released commercially and then you can eat your words.

You're still the worst person I know on BG.

You don't know me. Also, have you met test? lol

[djzombie]

double

[Deader2818]

oh god, ouya. that think is going to fail badly, lol.

[Shiyo]

can't wait til ouya gets released commercially and then you can eat your words.

Ouya is probably the worst thing ever created, did you seriously just talk about it like it's something good? WTF LOL

[Mizango]

Ouya is probably the worst thing ever created, did you seriously just talk about it like it's something good? WTF LOL

Is this guy serious? I was wondering who the Leroy of the gaming section was; it seems as if we have found him

[Knightmare]

Guess we'll know in June how this cell phone-gaming things turns out without the cell phone part.

[Link Removed]

[Tyrath]

Well doesnt the Android handheld kinda make the complains about phone gaming moot. It's no longer a phone, its a handheld. So yeah, handhelds > phone for gaming still.

[Shiyo]

Guess we'll know in June how this cell phone-gaming things turns out without the cell phone part.

[Link Removed]

This thing won't get a single japanese game, and no one is going to buy it.

Also $350, lmao.

[Viq]

Is this guy serious? I was wondering who the Leroy of the gaming section was; it seems as if we have found him

That guy is actually the reason I poke through every thread in the MMO subforum. Shit is a comedy goldmine.

[Deader2818]

who are we talking about?

[Pikarya]

Square Enix. He's such a little fucking cunt.

[Lucavi]

I'm all for differing opinions, but anyone trying to offer an opinion claiming smartphone superiority or even equality to a dedicated handheld in terms of gaming is well..

...a fucking idiot. For serious.

[Correction]

can't wait til ouya gets released commercially and then you can eat your words.

You don't know me. Also, have you met test? lol

http://media.tumblr.com/4eb114c5b4e2...Jp31qz4rgp.gif

[Jaybar]

The only superiority smartphones have over handhelds are its saturated markets.

[Kohan]

The only superiority smartphones have over handhelds are its saturated markets.

This is what it comes down to. This is all that matters.

It doesn't matter if anyone believes that current gen remakes of older FF titles will save the company. They won't. If you're still asking "Why?", let's go through the "No" list:

No, they won't be noticeably cheaper than developing a new title, as no assets will carry over—not even the original cinematics, nor the text, which would need to be newly-edited and modernized. Every resource that is necessitated by the development, marketing, publishing, and distribution of a new game would be required for all of them.

No, they wouldn't sell in the kinds of numbers necessary to yield a significant profit. Square Enix's operating funds, which were demonstrated in the slides, literally can't finance such an undertaking, so they can't spend money (that they don't have) and hope to make it up later.

No, they wouldn't attract enough new blood. Remember that the Final Fantasy brand isn't a guaranteed sell anymore, and then look at arguably any recent Japanese RPG IP that didn't have nostalgia on its side, and consider how its (terrible) sales were. That kind of title is not what the mass market wants, and the niche market is not nearly as important to Square Enix's sustainability.

No, console games—as we know them—aren't the future. They're not going away today, tomorrow, or even in a year from now, but smart devices are where the market is at, and with the ballooning costs of AAA PC and console development, it's where the profits are. It isn't a fad, either.

If Square Enix has learned from their mistakes, they'll cut out costly console development and will continue focusing on the mobile sector. It's obvious that FFXI will continue running, as that's a huge profit machine for them. (Again, despite the fact that their MMO incomes stayed at a constant level while console sales looked huge, keep in mind whether the latter was actually profitable or not, as that's what's important.) They're hoping FFXIV will be the same. It's a stupid hope, and hilariously, FFXIV always has been and always will be what threatens to destroy FFXI more than anything else, not to mention the entire company. It was meant to pick up where its predecessor left off, and ironically, it became the very thing that could destroy them both instead.

Even if you hate the smart device platform, that's where SE needs to concentrate their efforts (in addition to FFXI and possibly FFXIV) if they want to survive. Anything else is suicide.

[Jakson]

Pardon my ignorance, but I've heard that people have gotten Dolphin to do to Wii games was fairly impressive and made them a lot more attractive; With at least FFVII to X and XII and the support of a dedicated, yet small staff, could SE do for those games what the Dolphin team did for Wii games? And straight up ports of the older ones to a more modern and unified series: things like filters that emulators do to roms of the NES / SNES versions - do that to 1-6, put it all on one disc, and clearly establish on the packaging that players will be getting spit-shined nostalgia along with some games that are just like them and made at the same time, but just never made it stateside. All of this seems like it should be, relatively speaking, cheap to produce.

I don't know, I don't think I'm even selling myself on the feasibility of it; I do know that if it is feasible, and I could go to a get a physical copy of FF1-6 that I can put in my 360, for 50-60 bucks, I'd buy that np.

Edit: I guess now that I think about it more, the more I think that updating

Spoiler: show

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/...ield_model.jpg

requires more than just smoothing out edges; the difference between playable Cloud and CGI cutscene Cloud is one of the many goofy things I can see being a problem, if graphics really are that big of deal.

[Kohan]

As you later realized, simply throwing everything into an emulator won't do for the common modern day gamer. They'll take one look at that Cloud model—even if it's given newer textures and displayed at a higher resolution—and balk. Likewise, if the high resolution versions of the pre-rendered backgrounds don't exist anymore, they would need to make new ones—and even if they do still exist, they probably will not be high resolution enough, nor will the art look nearly as impressive.

This doesn't mean that SE can't do it. I forget what game/franchise it was about, but someone commented in another thread on BG that companies can't simply take their games, throw them into an emulator, and then re-release them. That's not true; they absolutely can do that. Numerous ones have, in fact, and there are companies that thrive by doing the emulation work for them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Eclipse).

Further, SE could do such a thing and make a reasonable amount of money. As mentioned, nostalgia sells, and they've been milking it for years. The point I was specifically countering was related to completely remaking the titles on modern day engines, which is not feasible.

[Celeras]

I have a ton of emulators/roms on my smartphone, but there are only two instances I can recall where I even remotely enjoyed playing them. The first was Mother 3/Earthbound 2, and it is an emulator only fan translation that gave me no choice (DIAF Nintendo). Great game. The other was FF6, because its FF6.

The thought of SE developing new IPs/games specifically for the mobile platform bums me the fuck out.

[Hyan]

I wish SE would develop new IP's indie style to Steam/PS3/Xbox marketplace.

Indie scene is just so good nowadays when anyone can make a visually pleasing game with solid gameplay relatively cheaply.

I'd take it any day over developing for the mobile platform (excluding Vita/3DS).

[AoE]

I love handhelds because I commute via public transportation nearly 3 hours both ways but I don't think anyone in this world could convince me to play games on my smart phone.