What happened in the PS1 era that gave birth to some many awesome

game devs and publishers actually gave a shit back then

Sony had to make a name for themselves as they were just starting out.

PCgaming happened.

This happened all the time before 2007

Gaming had gotten stale with the 4th gen and the market needed to be shaken up, also the jump to 3D made many 2D franchised impossible to convert so they needed new ones

>>386336556
This doesn't make sense. PC Games were great too.

>>386336649
This. After 2007, there was BIG BAZINGA THEORY and suddenly hipsters wanted to be game devs. STEM for women was pushed as well and there was a flood of shitty programmers being trained because they thought they would get rich/famous. Combine that with PC devs abandoning PC exclusives and making watered down games for consoles and everything became shit.

>>386336185
killed because of japs being an incompetent fuck destroying their old franchise and turn it into mobage.

>>386336185
They have franchises now to make money and don't need new ones.

>>386336185
The games were made by smaller development teams.

I'm convinced that during the period between the mid-70s and the mid-00s, Earth was passing through some kind of cloud of space radiation that made everyone really creative.

>>386336185
Everything is a clone of a clone now.

During 5th gen 3D was new, so there were no ground rules. Every developer taking unique approaches is what bred creativity.

Unfortunately /v/ contributes to the current climate of stagnation by whining about any game that doesn't use what we now would regard as a standard control scheme.

>>386337289
There was no standard control scheme for the PC.
Consolefags started ruining everything with their XBOX HUEG

>>386336879
While I can see your sentiments, I don't think this happened as late as 2007. Things had already gotten a bit stale by that point and this blooming of new franchises that the OP described had long since stopped as well.

>things were only good when I was young and everything was new and novel to me

You are now discovering why "old people" don't bother keeping up with pop culture.

>>386337520
t. gen z faggot

>>386337520
The OP described something that's objectively measurable; a state of affairs that led to many ultimately long-lasting and iconic franchises being created. It has nothing to do with nostalgia or otherwise tainted personal judgment.

>>386336185
innovation

>>386337520
That's the unfortunate fact of life that nobody tells you about. I wonder if there some evolutionary reason why people seem to hit that "been there, done that" point around the age when they typically start having kids.

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>>386336185
Affordable 3D machine
Affordable CD support (no more Nintendo Domination with their own catridges)
First dual analogic stick (Nintendo did only 1 analogic)
Ez hackable console

PS1 era was the revolution for consoles.

>>386337636
>objectively measurable
>how awesome a franchise is

no

>>386336185
Because people actually had (and made) money back then. I'm not just talking about video games, I mean in general.

>>386337861
>First dual analogic stick (Nintendo did only 1 analogic)
PS1 didn't even have an analogue stick for several years after launch. And the number of games which actually used both sticks (read: not just remap the D-Pad) could be counted on one hand.

>>386336185
AAA games are too expensive to take risks.

That said, niche games are alive again. A few years ago everything was rebooted as a bland shooter.

>>386336185
The jump from 2D to 3D forced devs to come up with creative uses for it, those that worked stuck.

>>386336286
>>386337086
These right here. Smaller teams meant less of a clusterfuck and far more focused development and a lot of teams genuinely gave a fuck about the game and had fun making it.

>>386337876
You can't read, try looking a bit closer

>>386336185
What happened is that you used to be with "it". But then they changed what "it" was. Now what you're with isn't "it", and what's "it" seems weird and scary to you. It happens to everyone.

>>386337876
Not him but you can objectively count the numbers of iconic franchises spawned between time periods. he has a point.

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I wish devs and ip holders would give old franchises a shot again.

>>386338376
Honestly, I just wish they'd try some new shit.

Lonely virgin nerds made games where they hate women and sexualize them to all ends, like in Tomb Raider, it's all just a power fantasy for the virgin nerds who made them because they were too pathetic in real life to get anyone to have sex with them

>>386336185
Playstation 1 search teenage public, PlayStation 2 is spirt teen

>>386336185
It was the first generation that make possible the game having fully 3d expericne with a lot of data thanks to CDs yet the industry did not get suffer less variety and monopolistic tendency in our age due to relatively small budget needed to make the games

it was basically golden age for video games as well as the late 80s

>>386338265
>>386338168

You can count how many "long lasting" franchises came about during that time once you set a standard for what qualifies as "long lasting". I don't know how you would do the same for "iconic".

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>>386336286
Sometimes I wonder when square Enix, capcom and namco will revive their dead ips and games.

>>386336185
stable hardware platform

>>386338531
As it relates to games, an "iconic" franchise would be one that defines or pioneered a (sub-)genre, or simply a franchise that is held up as sort of a gold standard of its respective type of game. An example would be Silent Hill for horror games, or the 3D GTA titles for open world action.

>>386337739
Also when you get older you realise 99% of pop culture is disposable, mass produced, money making garbage and there's a reason every industry, from TV to movies and now video games, ends up being marketed at kids and retards.

>>386338531
With "long lasting". there's no way to tell what modern series will be long lasting because we're not 5 dimensional beings.

Iconic is more medium/genre changing. You think Cyberpunk you think Deus Ex/ GitS sorta thing. Popularity plays a role too I imagine but i'm not about to sort out those semantics.

>>386336185
People were hired on merit, they had passion for what they were creating, they were not a simple screw in a corporation machine hellbent of making money at any cost and before they started to work on their creation they did not have to at least double check a list of what is permitted by the political left.

>>386338729
>As it relates to games, an "iconic" franchise would be one that defines or pioneered a (sub-)genre, or simply a franchise that is held up as sort of a gold standard of its respective type of game.

This is deeply rooted in opinion unless we're talking about the pure introduction of game mechanics that did not exist prior.

> An example would be Silent Hill for horror games
Why SH and now Resident Evil even though it came our earlier?

>>386339051
>With "long lasting". there's no way to tell what modern series will be long lasting because we're not 5 dimensional beings.

Then don't measure any franchises that started during this generation?

You would measure franchise lengths from the NES/Master System Era up until last generation.

>>386338607
That game was insanely bad, it always comes to mind when I think about shit games I've endured to the end. Doesn't hold a candle to the PS1 original.

>>386336185
The jews didn't win yet

>>386336185
Nothing special, every console generation has its share of awesome new franchises, and I don't think the PS1 era was richer than the SNES/Genesis generation at all. Or the PS2 era, for the matter. It was still pretty good, though.

>>386337520
Yeah, that's why there are so many remakes that are successful? Games were definitely of higher quality back then. I mean for fucks sake, ps1/ps2 remakes are still being made and they still sell...

>>386339667
/thread

>>386338485
sup tumblr

Sony doesn't like companies taking risk or creating iconic games anymore. They want the quick cash ins or yearly rehashes that normies buy up.

>>386341513

You say that like there was never a Skyrim remake that also sold really well. You are also ignoring all the shitty games, of which most games released were, that never got a remake and have mostly been forgotten. You are cherry picking.

>>386342024
Isn't it the for video game companies in general though? Even Nintendo is like that nowadays.

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>>386336185
Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paperboy, evening TV?

>>386336185
It wasn't just 5th gen, all pre-7th gen periods saw lots of new successful IPs. 7th gen was death, nothing good came out of it. 7th gen killed everything and everyone who bought 7th gen consoles is responsible by proxy. Fuck 7th gen and everything after.

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>>386336185
Videogames were new and exciting, fairly cheap to make and the economy was on fire.

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>>386336286
This too. Literally every game in the 90s was a passion project.

Games were not movies

>>386337289
>Unfortunately /v/ contributes to the current climate of stagnation by whining about any game that doesn't use what we now would regard as a standard control scheme.
Standard control schemes are a matter of not fixing what isn't broken. A game that's otherwise identical to Call of Duty won't be any better if it just makes the controls different for no reason.

>>386339238
And making a modest but respectable profit was considered acceptable. Now you have to make a billion dollars or your studio gets dissolved.

>>386345897

Do you people really think capitalism didn't exist in the games industry until 2005 or something?

I can assure you, every game back then was developed the same way they are today; by people who want to make a good game within the budget, time and market confines as defined by the people actually paying for the production, the publisher.

I've got games magazines dating back to 1992 full of editorials and readers' letters complaining about how publishers are evil and just looking to make a buck, devs are lazy, games are always unfinished and buggy, etc., etc. Not much has actually changed, kid, except for production costs.

>>386346536
it was easier to take risks with new games because we didn't have 50 games getting released each month and didn't cost 100 millions dollars each.

Also we had demo discs.

>>386336185
3d brought innovation and a much needed wave of experimentation, which led to the creation of a ton of new standards and a lot of gems.

the mentality was still "quality directly and exclusively is proportional to sales", before the 21sth century marketing research ruined the world by actively offering worse products by investing more in lies and targeted misconceptions.

and "directors should be given all the choice for their game, rather than investors or publisher". which had certainly some downsides, but it allowed the creation of high tier masterpieces and dream games from a designer standpoint, the latter being what a consumer wants in an era filled with too many games to play anyway

The combination of these three. You are never going to see something like generation 5 ever again.

>>386346536
Ah yes the "its impossible to do anything for any reason besides money" argument. Sadly that is the situation today.

>>386346821

Yeah, but those developers who released games that didn't make money went out of business then the same as they do today. There was no free lunch back in the "good old days".

>>386346954
I'm pretty sure most devs in the good old days didn't even have an office and just worked in their basement until they hit gold.

>>386346954
Not the guy you are replying to but in the 'good ol days' you had a niche market where the world largely viewed the games genre as something exclusively for little kids. You had more room for error, smaller budgets, and no real juggernaut franchises to compete with. Genre's were fully rounded at that point as a lot of genres as we know them today were literally created in that period

So games the games industry of 2017 is not a perfect mirror to the early games industry of the golden age

>>386337520
Your argument would work if I hadn't played Lemmings for the first time recently and I wasn't blown away by how novel, fresh and genuinely fun it felt. The flow, the puzzle difficulty, the lack of dumb shit that pads out inflated productions.

As I read, this game defined a sub-genre yet there is nothing similar to it that's of high quality, decades later. And it still holds up for the most part, certainly does hold up more than, say, Uncharted or AC1, with their billion budget and formula that was repetitive already the day it was conceptualized.

I also played LoZ1 ~2008 and it was an incredible game. To this day I believe it's still the best Zelda game out there (Played them all on release starting with AlttP onwards)

La-Mulana comes to mind. The souls serie became a meme on the core philosophy of the essence of the older hack n slash titles of the 90's. Action games are so fucking bad that the semblance of some old mechanics made it become one of the most influential titles for both players and developers to the point where it's now being oversaturated with terminology and clones.

If that's not the prime example that modern games abandoning 100% of the design philosophies of two decades ago isn't a bad move, you may need to get that brain of yours checked.

Also, please argue that the hot innovation of our generation, the app store and mobile games, is qualitatively on par of any other generation, rather than being designed with paywalls in mind.

>b-b-but arcades
Yes, there were also arcades. But they made them difficult rather giving you an arbitrary currency with 100% random gameplay elements and a straightforward waiting timer. Still different, still the symbol of modern vs old even when it came to scam ploys. Modern gaming is still more cancerous by all accounts.

>>386337520
Resident Evil, Tekken and Crash Bandicoot were actually new and novel for everyone back then.

The problem is that Tekken 7 might be new for your underage ass--but really it isn't. It's the same old Tekken again and again.

>>386347137

No, most startups began with a capital injection.

We all like the idea of a handful of guys passionately working on their dream project in their basement on their own dime and then making it big, and while that might have been the case for a few like id, this is largely indie fantasy. The vast majority that tried this approach failed abysmally and went out of business. Far more devs vanished in the 90s than vanished in the 6th gen like we all like to believe.

>>386346954
The difference is that back then, "didn't make money" meant "didn't make money", not "made five million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars".

Not to be a cunt but... 3D gaming was new and fresh. A lot of things were being done for the first time and people were experimenting with what worked. It made things feel fresh and bold. A lot of it was awful but some of it felt amazing because at the time it had never been done. Now things are settled in and it just much harder to recreate that same wow factor.

>>386347783

Making 1c for every $10 invested has never been considered a good return.

You people seem to forget a game doesn't just have to cover it's own cost, it also has to finance the production of the next game. $5 million dollars is not going to do that, $60 million will.

>>386348191
The fact that current game budgets have to be so high in the first place is part of the problem.

>>386348306

Blame the market, they are the ones that put all the expensive shit like graphics above almost all else. This place is certainly no different.

What you are seeing today is not the collapse but the stabilization of the video game industry. There was far too much over investment throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. The smart ones are still around and going strong, the rest are dead or dying.

>>386348590
AA games and niche games are still doing just fine selling the same numbers they did in the 90s and I'm still playing those games, it's great.
It's just the casuals that keep buying crap that created a new market for boring games with pretty picture.

>>386346827
>You are never going to see something like generation 5 ever again.

I disagree.

Its not going to come from the current industry though, but by individual people who'll disrupt the current industry's economy.

>>386348884

Industry absorbs success. There will be no outsiders tearing down the establishment and saving us from evil corporations, they'll join them or fade into obscurity. And it would be wise to join them, they have the resources.

The PS1 was a great system.

CD format allowed much larger games and PlayStation was the first console with decent real time 3D

>>386337520
I just don't bother with people that post shit like this, they're so far up their ass they don't listen

>>386349054
>It's just the casuals that keep buying crap that created a new market for boring games with pretty picture.

Those casuals are the vast, vat majority of the market.

And here's the other problem, you guys will play casual games but casuals will never play your niche stuff. Don't bother telling me that you individually don't play modern AAA crap, I'm talking on a grand scale. And you are probably lying anyway. This is the meaning of the term "lowest common denominator", it's real and it's very effective.

>>386336185

The budgets weren't so huge to be prohibitively expensive to make new IPs. Capcom after the Capcom Five fiasco and Clover studios, they learned that they should only make sequels. So they've been coasting on a few IPs forever since then.

The budgets for a PS1 game on average are 3-5 million. PS2 is around 8-10 million. Ps3 onwards and they get so expensive you have to ensure the game is a hit.

There weren't that many completely new games, just reimagining old games in 3D, even Resident Evil is just Sweet Home in 3D and Metal Gear Solid is just Metal Gear in 3D

>>386349678
>even Resident Evil is just Sweet Home in 3D

It's actually more Sweet Home + Alone in the Dark. The project started as Sweet Home IN THREE DEE, but morphed tremendously during production until Mikami found Alone in the Dark and that set the groundwork for how the game would look.

>>386336185
The few western-developed games had to be good during this gen. All the shit devs (which happened to be western) all died on the rise of Gen 5.

>>386349678
>Resident Evil is just Sweet Home in 3D

No it absolutely isn't. Have you ever played Sweet Home? It's a fucking party based RPG that just happens to have a horror element. Literally the only thing RE and Sweet Home have in common is that both are set in mansions.

There's a difference between "inspired by" and "copied".

>>386349635
Casual lives in their own bubble filled with bloom & blur FPS and sports game.
Niche players lives in their own bubble filled with shoot em up and JRPG.
It doesn't matter how big the casual bubble is, niche games will always be there.

>>386349953
>Literally the only thing RE and Sweet Home have in common is that both are set in mansions.

There's still some Sweet Home in RE. The idea that each character has a set of unique skills which helps them navigate the mansion. Jill has a lockpick, and can play piano, while Chris doesn't and has to rely on Rebecca.

>>386336649
>>386336879
It's kinda funny how basically every board pretty much unanimously agrees that 2007 was the year shit hit the fan and hasn't recovered sense. It's fascinating.

>>386350107

That was hardly a gameplay mechanic unique to Sweet Home. You wouldn't even call it an uncommon gameplay mechanic.

>>386336185
The height of Japanese economy.
The bubble burst not long afterwards, leading to massive layoffs, budget cuts and what-not.

>>386337520
Wow anon its like you figured it all out.
I bet youre the first

>>386349309

I still think a collective effort will be made given the amount of easily accessible open source tools for virtually no fee.

You got start-ups like Uber and AirBnB coming out of nowhere causing a shift in how people pay for products and services.

At some point 100 man+ studios will not be a required endeavor.

>>386336185
a massive shift in technology and massive push to reach a new audience of older gamers, there was no longer a need to make games for children anymore

>>386350354

There's a bit of a difference between automating a repetitive and mechanical process and automating a creative process. I think it's a safe bet we are very, very far way from automated game development, if it ever even happens.

Also, Uber is a poor example of innovation. It's just another "on the internet" business. It certainly didn't invent a new business model, on the contrary it actually dug up an old one we did away with long ago for a variety of reasons and managed to slip through via legal loopholes that most places are actually trying to close at the moment.

>>386350326
That explains why American video games went to shit around 2008. The financial crisis.

>>386350863
>>386350354

>Studios are now just IPs
>Future /v/ posts screenshots of their favorite AI dev's twitter feeds

>>386351373

No, it doesn't. The entertainment industry was largely unaffected by the GFC. People would rather not pay their bills on time than miss watching the latest capeshit film.

>>386350863
>>386351691

I'm not speaking about automated development, but the reliance on a 100 man strong workforce to develop games will be reduced to significantly less people, possibly working in their spare-time, using efficient and effective tools that can produce similar products for on lesser budgets.

You may say Uber is a poor example, but it did cause an unforseen disruption in how people ordered transportation without relying on larger companies to cater that service.

Another example could be Youtube, slowly taking over television broadcast entertainment. There's been a dramatic shift in which medias have more clout nowadays, than compared to prior to the early 00's. Most are transitioning online. Snapchat and youtube, e.g., will continue to gain more traction, especially among the younger generations and demographics.

>>386352176
>but the reliance on a 100 man strong workforce to develop games will be reduced to significantly less people, possibly working in their spare-time, using efficient and effective tools that can produce similar products for on lesser budgets.
No, because what will actually happen is you'll just get more content at a higher detail. The only thing that will stagnant the industry is hardware and the hardware manufacturers want to make money as much as anyone else so they won't do that. The tools have already been seeing huge improvements for decades now and the team sizes have increased, not shrunk, as a result.

>but it did cause an unforseen disruption in how people ordered transportation without relying on larger companies to cater that service
Again, this model is not new. Those companies were introduced, not there from the beginning, and they were introduced because it was deemed regulating the industry would be best for all. Uber is one of those companies anyway. What they do different is try to dodge a lot of the regulation that the "official" taxi companies have to deal with. It's not working and Uber is constantly fighting against the closure of the loopholes they are exploiting.

>Another example could be Youtube, slowly taking over television broadcast entertainment.
The only reason youtube is slowly taking over television broadcast entertainment is because the networks just wouldn't accept that people want their media "on demand" because that would fuck up the way they charge for advertising. If they hadn't been so goddamn stubborn and just adjusted their model ever so slightly they wouldn't be in this position. Youtube is actually trying to shift to be more like the networks as much as the networks are finally started to accept the reality on the internet.

>There's been a dramatic shift in which medias have more clout nowadays
Not really. We still live in a world of "cult of personality".

>>386353241

I still disagree, I guess we see things differently.

Modernity is an unstoppable freight train. The Individual person is getting more and more accessible tools available.

>>386350326
Actually the height of the Japanese economic growth was the 70's and 80's, the bubble burst in the early 90's

Not every game needed to be the next AAA movie game. They were content with smaller budgets and more modest sales.
This reduced risk and allowed more diversity in projects.

>>386337520
The 80's and 90's WERE the golden era considering all the video game, movie (and music, by association) reboots coming out with people wanting to relive those moments in history when creativity wasn't stifled. 70-90's music is STILL the staple in the radio and television industry. Seinfeld is STILL being aired.