First the Ouya, which turned out to be a total flop, and then the Wii U, which Nintendo marketed so badly many people thought it was an extension for their Wii. This company sure made some unlucky bets!
Throughout the article I kept coming back to how generic the name sounds. It conjured pictures if the digital slot machines that are free mobile games, with gameplay loops mostly consisting of waiting or paying money to skip wait timers. The name "Toto" being associated with gambling sure doesn't help either. I would've never clicked a link with that name no matter how good you make your game look.
A lot of genuine effort and care went into this but with an uninviting name and, by their own admission, a complicated control screen, no amount of art or advertising would've convinced me as a consumer to buy it.
This would've been a smash hit on a flash games site, and it would've probably sold well if Ouya had succeeded.
One thing I find interesting is that online multi-player wasn't added as a feature during development. I understand how overworked the lone dev must've been, but adding an easy way to play with friends would've surely boosted sales.
I also wonder if the game would've gotten more sales on a handheld. I think the 3DS might've made this a great little party game, especially if you follow the "stream a limited version of the game to your friends" model that made DS local multi-player so interesting. Now, with the Switch out, with its built-in local multi-player features, the game might've gotten a popularity boost as well.
It's sad to see a game made with so much love fail, but with problems in do many key areas I'm surprised it took them this long to admit defeat.
I agree. Anyone developer who has had to work on multi-player games will never say "just add multi-player". The whole way you approach the game changes massively.
It was a massive mistake in game like this tho, the mistake many other games like that died by.
Appeal of buying essentially party game where you need other people in same room to get the most of it (games like that are rarely good singleplayer) is very low, even worse in pandemic.
Not saying it would make game succeed, as that's still 90% marketing in oversaturated indie market, but it is a thing that would make me go "nope" if I saw what I like then read that it is local-only, hell, it did in many cases.
I think overcooked has a quite different audience, being cooperative rather than competitive. I won't buy a competitive local multiplayer game nowadays, whereas I've bought a lot of cooperative ones to play with my SO, and that's probably fairly common?
Of course online multi-player is difficult to pull off but with console sale numbers for the Wii U I think the time spent on porting the game to the Wii U could've been used to get online multi-player to work. They spent an estimated 50% of their two years development time on a console that was pretty much a failure at the time the game came out.
The PS4 was well ahead of any other console in sales long before the game was released onto the Wii U. I don't know their exact sales distribution, but I think a better game on PS4 and maybe Xbox One would've sold a lot more copies.
I'm a pretty big supporter of Xbox (had every console they've so far released, heavy into Game Pass) and my god they need to get naming right. They should have called it the "Xbox 4" or something to make it simple.
Though, Microsoft is never one for making names simple.
Xbox naming is terrible but at least their target audience seems to know how to keep them apart. I don't think that can be said about Nintendo's audience, which since the Wii has always seemed not as dedicated to console gaming as their competitors' audience is. I've never heard of a die-hard Wii fan, at least, though with the Switch they made up a lot of ground.
So instead they chose three numbers behind the PlayStation, and 359 numbers behind its predecessor? Not sure I follow that reasoning. Not to mention they could just jump to the same number as PlayStation used, just like MS also skipped Windows 9.
That said all the jokes at the time likely helped make it clear to everyone that the Xbox One was the new model. And Series S/X is just two letters, nobody seems too confused by that.
They chose a naming system that's not based on sequential numbers to both differentiate themselves from SONY and also to avoid being one number behind. Nintendo is doing the same.
It's a good deal for sure, but it didn't do the creative work that is the game any favors. It basically killed off the exclusivity deal that indie studios can often get for on-platform advertising.
Throughout the article I kept coming back to how generic the name sounds. It conjured pictures if the digital slot machines that are free mobile games, with gameplay loops mostly consisting of waiting or paying money to skip wait timers. The name "Toto" being associated with gambling sure doesn't help either. I would've never clicked a link with that name no matter how good you make your game look.
A lot of genuine effort and care went into this but with an uninviting name and, by their own admission, a complicated control screen, no amount of art or advertising would've convinced me as a consumer to buy it.
This would've been a smash hit on a flash games site, and it would've probably sold well if Ouya had succeeded.
One thing I find interesting is that online multi-player wasn't added as a feature during development. I understand how overworked the lone dev must've been, but adding an easy way to play with friends would've surely boosted sales.
I also wonder if the game would've gotten more sales on a handheld. I think the 3DS might've made this a great little party game, especially if you follow the "stream a limited version of the game to your friends" model that made DS local multi-player so interesting. Now, with the Switch out, with its built-in local multi-player features, the game might've gotten a popularity boost as well.
It's sad to see a game made with so much love fail, but with problems in do many key areas I'm surprised it took them this long to admit defeat.