I’m still not sure I understand your comment of “lacks professionalism.”
All I’m saying is that there is more to building and selling games than “just make the game and it will sell.” Limited resources within production, limited marketing budgets, limited interest from retailers, etc. Every once in a while, you get a game like Katamari Damacy that defies all convention and happens to find its perfect niche and does quite nicely, in spite of it all. However, those can hardly ever be planned for. Namco’s never had that happen before, and they haven’t been able to reproduce it since. Sony tried something similar with Loco Roco on PSP, and it came nowhere near the success of Katamari (which wasn’t huge anyway).
It’s like playing a craps table. If you bet all your chips on a bunch of random things, even if you end up winning on some of your bets, the losses you have from your other bets ends up negating anything you would have won otherwise. The trick is to know the odds, and play them well. And when you’ve got enough of a lead, start placing little bets on “hunches.”
Okay, so it’s not a perfect example, but it shows how you can’t simply make a game because you think it’s cool. Those are called vanity projects or “developing in a vacuum.” Even if there is some demand, what happens if, for example, retailers simply aren’t interested in selling the title? Or only buying small quantities? Or, what if the cost of building the game exceeds the projected revenue based on forecasts? What happens if first party simply doesn’t want a game like that on their console?
For example, if Walmart doesn’t want to sell the kind of game you are making, you won’t reach full distribution in the US (for example), so you are almost instantly relegated to sub-100k sales, simply because it will never reach critical mass.
Not saying that any or all of these things related to Shining Force, but just to give you an example of external forces that cause games to be what they are that you likely never give thought to.
It’s just that I find Geoffrey’s use of quotations around “precious profits” a bit, well, naive. Do you expect game companies to just sit around and lose money? Do you expect developers/publishers to be denied any raises or even get salary cuts because the games they are making aren’t making any money?
The comparisons between the fact that SF3 wasn’t released in the US and the war in Iraq were especially rich. It’s mind-boggling that that association can be freely made in someone’s mind.
Geoffrey says that he’d rather have the land of fairies that I describe, and that’s just, as I mention earlier, naive. I would personally take the real world . Learn how it works and try to fix it within realistic limits. Hoping for magic to happen in the world will get nothing done. Wishing and hoping does nothing. You want to see things like Shining Force 3 make stateside? Let Sega concentrate on becoming profitable and growing as a company, then once they have the revenue to be able to support things like that, start to make some noise. Demanding that Sega make games that will likely not satisfy anyone but yourself will get nobody anywhere.
(Just as a side note - I am vehemently anti-war, have been against the war since day one, and am regularly active in politics. Having friends who are overseas in Iraq, it is a bit offensive to think that having been denied parts of Shining Force 3 is equatable to the injustices that have occurred in Iraq is simply absurd. Perhaps you were being hyperbolic, but come on now.)
