"Travel is
fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need
it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and
things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all
one's lifetime" - Mark Twain
Whenever I look
that quote above, I see the word travel more like opening up your mind and
experiencing other things outside what you normally do.
Have you ever
milked a cow before? I never did. Would be an interesting experiencing doing
so. How about something less exotic like organising a fighting game tournament?
I mean it is just pulling some people together at a place and play some
fighting games right? Right?
I mean if you
could run an event you could even run a business! After all isn't business just
selling a service or product? Just buy it cheap and sell it at a higher price
right? Easy pzy.
Sigh.
I was at a PSO2
event on Sunday to least give the small event some live. This is what I could
do at least in terms for the game, Asiasoft and well PSO2 I guess. I definitely
felt out of place when I am the few guys in their 30s to be there.
There was a few
announcements made to us who were invited to the event. Like reviewing of when
the next update is coming and what is install for the next few months. We had a
feedback session and a Q&A session in regards.
I highlighted
some concerns I see regarding the game to the guys in Asiasoft. From what I
feel, those guys are genuinely trying to get people more excited about the game
and working to grow the server population. I mean think about, why would they
sabotage themselves? This is their job. Their live hood. It do them no good if
the game fails.
Imagine PSO2
failing, they would need to write a whole bunch of reports to their management
to explain why they think it failed. Second a whole bunch of folks might lose
their jobs because there isn't a need to have so many people working on this
game anymore since it is no longer there.
Even Sega
wouldn't want their partners to fail. It shines a negative light on their games
and company as a whole. Remember when whole Ragnarok 2 closing down within a
year. Most people are pretty burnt by the game and people no longer see Gravity
as a company who can make good games or keep to their promises.
No one who is
working on this want this to fail in any way.
The whole point I
want to come to is. Running an online game or even developing a game is not
anything easy. I see the ignorance of a lot of folks playing games going on
forums, twitter, Facebook etc. to say things that are really narrow-minded and
ignorant.
This struck me as
really the responses tell me they do not have any understanding of how a game
company works or even how a business work.
Here lets an
example straight of PSO2. In PSO2 there is collaborations with third party
stuff like Anime. Those could include stuff like Madoka or even the Fate
series.
For Sega JP PSO2,
they would just negotiate with the respective rights holders. Topics would
include range of stuff they intend to license, like usage of characters and
which characters. Kind of things they are doing in game like are those
costumes? How about voices?
If you are going
to use voices, here is another can of worms. First you need to tell them you
are interested in this particular character's voice, second you need to get the
Voice Actor to on board with this. The rates for that might be different and on
different terms. You might even need to discuss which lines you are going to
use.
Some rights
holders do not like their characters portray in certain ways which is one of
the reason why you don't see certain characters appearing. The game developers
will also need to send their final costumes / products sent back to the right
holders to be vetted before they are even allowed to use them.
Lastly, which I
forgot even before doing all that. Sega has to make sure they can make enough
or more money from this collaboration. Since it costs additional to license
this stuff. Sega will need to find somewhere to make this all worthwhile.
Unless you are in the business of losing money. (If you are in the business of
losing or throwing money away, please call me. I am immediately available from
whatever thing I am doing now)
That is of course
on Sega's end when they first start this. How about Asiasoft? They are not
doing all that work. Surely it be less complicated right?
The answer is Yes
and No. Yes if Asiasoft does the easy way of just using only what Sega produced
for PSO2. From there, Asiasoft will talk to the rights holder with Sega
assisting them telling them exactly what Asiasoft would be using the thing for.
To note if it is done this, Asiasoft might have limited rights to do
advertising. What I mean that is, during the launch of this collaboration. They
will not be allowed to make actual merchandise related to the collaboration be
it postcards, key chains basically small gifts to give out and stuff. They are
only allowed the stuff inside PSo2 itself.
This is of course
just some aspects of licensing itself. Then comes the cost of licensing.
Licensing famous / popular titles is never cheap. Asiasoft would need to find
some way to make this back. I wouldn't want to go into actual costs of
licensing stuff but the figure in your head should be around 6 digits.(if you
have difficulty figuring what 6 digits mean it looks like this ~100,000).
Here's the
complicated part, would Asiasoft want to spend more on getting a license which
allows them more freedom to do other things so it can grow the player base or
do they want pay the minimum so they can maximise the money they can get out of
this?
Going the first
way can lead to happier player base and growing the player base. There is also
the risk of the player base not growing.
Doing the second
ensures they can survive but ultimately makes the player base disappointed and
lose players over time.
Fine line of a
balancing act between making money so they can keep going or lose money and
ultimately close down. There are so many pitfalls in running a business.
Well that is for
my wall of text. I really needed to get this off my head after reading some
stuff online.
I could just
easily brush this off and retort in my all Singaporean way of saying:
"Sin ginah.
Bo dau bo shue"
