Cave + Xbox 360 OMG

[Shou]

Sorry, it took me awhile to come back on this.

Here are the latest Cave financial results. Obviously, this is all in Japanese.

Key slides are 14, 28, 33-35.

14 shows that over Q3-4 of 2010 that Social/Smartphone apps have brought in roughly 42% of revenue while arcade/console brought in 14.5%.

28 shows their staff resourcing in 2011. The top line shows that they only have consumer development at this point, no more arcade dev.

33 shows their focus on smartphones and what games they have in the pipeline for them. Note that there are 2 shooters, 1 facebook casual game aimed at gaijin and 1 MMO

34-35 shows how they will capitalize on the foreign market: Smartphone and social content.


So, there you go. Real. gaming. journalism.

[Tain]

Thanks.

that shit is depressing.

[GohanX]

That is pretty depressing. There are enough Cave shooters to last me for several years at this point, but they are going to run out sooner or later. iOS ports of the games are all well and good, but if if/when they run out of games to port, what are they going to do? Waste their talent making stupid Facebook games? Port their old arcade titles to whatever the newest game system is (again?) They are the current best game developer in the world at one very specific thing, and as much as I love them I'm not certain they can actually do anything that is particularly interesting other than shooters. I'm seeing shades of SNK here.

I'd expect to see talent abandoning ship and moving to different developers or starting up a new company any day now. It's irritating since personally I am just now really able to enjoy their games with older stuff showing up on PSN and newer stuff being ported to the 360 (and MAME, I suppose.)

[icarusfall]

Why can't they just keep making new games for iphone et all?

[GohanX]

Do yo really think they can make a game from scratch as good as Deathsmiles for iOS, keeping the quality just as high but the price low? It takes considerably more resources to create it from scratch than it does to port.

If we're lucky, they could shift focus to making good games for the consoles or pc, and then port it to the phones, keeping everyone happy and allowing the console game to eat the development costs. I don't see it happening, but it would be nice.

[MechDeus]

Do yo really think they can make a game from scratch as good as Deathsmiles for iOS, keeping the quality just as high but the price low?

Sure. If it takes more resources to create from scratch (which they were already doing) than it does to port (which they were also doing) and they're now doing less of both of those, then they only stand to make more money by continuing to make good games for iOS at the same prices they're already using. They're cutting out the creation of HD assets and skipping an entire step of development that was already happening, thus making their costs lower from every angle compared to where they were at.

Now, if they only do visual novels from here on out, then I don't really care if they stop business entirely.

[Tain]

Frankly, they don't need to spend half of their dev cycle balancing the difficulty curve anymore if they're veering toward Deathsmiles iOS Tiara mode being the focus of their iOS games. Which is the logical next step.

[icarusfall]

Do yo really think they can make a game from scratch as good as Deathsmiles for iOS, keeping the quality just as high but the price low?

Yes - and really DS imo is their weakest port so far.

Don't bemoan the days of $80 shooters with an inferior control scheme.

Welcome to the future.

[GohanX]

The future is scary and I don't like it! I may like it more if they would port something to Android, or I got an iphone.

[gameoverDude]

Fucking grim news. I can understand quitting arcades, which sucks enough in itself. Why not PC first then ports to smartphone?

The iPhone needs a joystick and HD-out. Hori iArcade Pro anyone? Start with the HRAP3 design, add a dock for your iPhone/iPod Touch, have a port for your iPhone power adapter, and component/HDMI and sound outputs.

It sure looks like Cave is about to end up like Irem did after Gun Force II. Hopefully some guys from Cave will pull a Nazca and come up with their own tribute to Ketsui (a spiritual successor to DDP can wait, we've got plenty of that one for now).