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Well, if someone were going to figure out the system exploit, it had to be good ol' Victor. Perhaps it's partially Kotaku guilty of hyperbolic framing here, but I kind of balk at this whole situation. For one - yeah, it's one screenshot, but it's all we've been given about this damn title besides a list of possible tchotchkes, and if you want the public to give you $500,000, you better put your best foot forward. You should ensure, for example, that your artist is capable of drawing more than one type of face. For another, from what little information we have available, we seem to be dealing with a bunch of white teenagers led by a white teenage boy who're in some sort of school or another - in other words, the same stuff from the same rut the genre's been stuck in since the '80's. The art's uninspired, I have no apparent reason to care about the characters, and there's no imagination on display. The developers & Kotaku are positing this Kickstarter's success as determining THE FATE OF THE GENRE, but I doubt THE FATE OF THE GENRE can rest on such scrawny shoulders.
On the second point, the whole "give us money for this one uninspiring project or we won't publish all these unspecified but most assuredly awesome games we have upcoming" premise - no. This isn't how rational actors behave in the marketplace. If your upcoming titles are so awesome, then you hold the kickstarter for them instead of the new Vay here. You don't hitch the fate of several supposedly promising projects to a single lackluster one, withholding the more marketable titles from paying customers if they don't drink their medicine and buy the lousy title first. The whole "give us an outpouring of desperate adulation or we won't release our next title" thing Atlus/Aksys/XSEED is a marketing gimmick - they make their decisions on whether or not to port a title on actual market data, like grown-up companies. This whole "give us money to say 'yay team RPG!'" is the height of cynicism.
We're not doing the genre any favors by supporting weak projects. JRPGs need to refocus on quality and innovation to experience a renaissance - it's not going to come through brain-dead boosterism and emotional blackmail.
On the second point, the whole "give us money for this one uninspiring project or we won't publish all these unspecified but most assuredly awesome games we have upcoming" premise - no. This isn't how rational actors behave in the marketplace. If your upcoming titles are so awesome, then you hold the kickstarter for them instead of the new Vay here. You don't hitch the fate of several supposedly promising projects to a single lackluster one, withholding the more marketable titles from paying customers if they don't drink their medicine and buy the lousy title first. The whole "give us an outpouring of desperate adulation or we won't release our next title" thing Atlus/Aksys/XSEED is a marketing gimmick - they make their decisions on whether or not to port a title on actual market data, like grown-up companies. This whole "give us money to say 'yay team RPG!'" is the height of cynicism.
We're not doing the genre any favors by supporting weak projects. JRPGs need to refocus on quality and innovation to experience a renaissance - it's not going to come through brain-dead boosterism and emotional blackmail.
