It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
Also, and I’m just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it’s the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?
Like, aren’t we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.
We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it’s over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren’t given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.
If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.
I’m in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It’s the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn’t speak to their experiences.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
On the nostalgia front I just want to say I’ve never been into metroidvanias and never played any kind of metroid game before, I tried metroid zero mission an hour ago and I’m already hooked. These games are just genuinely good. Not dunking on newer games I play those a lot too, just saying not everything new is better and I’d love to see some kind of happy middle ground.
You aren’t wrong but I also think people tend to forget just how much of what we grew up on were remakes and rehashes of stuff even from the radio era. Especially the cartoons that we watched as kids, so much of that was just recycled jokes and such with some jokes for the adults of the day thrown in too. Even Star Wars was an homage to the serials of the 30s-50s like Flash Gordon, which itself got an 80s remake (with an excellent soundtrack by Queen). The remakes aren’t new they are just more obvious.
I mean, all you have to do is look at box office numbers to know you’re wrong about Marvel and Star wars.
Maybe the movies are garbage to hardcore fans, but the franchises still make a fuck ton of money.
Yeah and they largely all fucking suck ass for about the last 5 years.
There’s a difference between slop that appeals to an imagined ‘median consumer’ that will make a boatload of money, and ideas that are actually unique and new and captivating.
Regardless of what you or I think of quality, the median consumer is consuming them. Star Wars is still making a hell of a lot of money, it has not faded from cultural relevance in the slightest.
And yet the Disney effect is a very real thing. If your franchise hasn’t been milked to death, it’s only a matter of time.
I want to agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but this is very much not true. Regardless of whether you or I like the new stuff, those franchises are still making tons of money, and that does include younger generations.
The article mentions asking kids which is more popular, Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and all the kids answered Pokemon. That’s a franchise that’s slightly younger than FF and DQ, but not by much, it’s still much older than all those kids playing it. So the real question that needs to be unpacked here is: why are some franchises able to continue appealing to new audiences, while others get reduced to nostalgiabait for those that grew up on them?
Far easier to rehash a known moneymaker than to take a risk come up with something original. Some people might point at the multiple tens of thousands of games on Steam as evidence there are people making new games that are original, but if you compare the relaitive few that take off vs the popular franchises’ success it’s pretty obvious that rehashing works. Plenty of new games languish and never really get anywhere.
My parents once taught me how to use a payphone when I was a kid. I’m 40.
Your post is exactly correct.
Wtf is a payphone
There were many decades between the proliferation of home phones and cell phones. During that time many people may be away from home and need to contact someone over the phone. Payphones were installed in public places that anyone could use to meet that need. They took change in exchange for minutes using the phone.
So just telephone cells? Okay
If only children had the perspective to know alternative choices exist and they should hold out for something better. This assumes young people can control the media they are fed. It’s more likely that the generation making content for them confuses nostalgia for childhood and the audience doesn’t like the iterative/derivative product.