Category: 2023

I was perusing some video game news when I saw the headline “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Dev Daedalic Ends Internal Development to Focus on Publishing“. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, thinking that it made sense given the issues surrounding that game, but then I suddenly came to a realisation and made an audible “Noooooo!” As you can imagine, the closure of Daedalic Entertainment’s development division breaks my heart and so I thought I might explain how this came to happen and why it breaks my heart.

For those of you who might not be aware of who Daedalic Entertainment are, I’d direct you to an article I wrote about them sometime ago. To quickly summarise though, Daedalic Entertainment is a German video game publisher and, now, former developer who began making point and click games such as Edna & Harvey, The Whispered World and Deponia to name a few. It was announced in 2019 that they would be developing and releasing a new Lord of the Rings game which featured Gollum as the main character. The game finally released this year and received a critical thrashing and, while no sales figures were provided, we can assume that it sold poorly enough that Daedalic Entertainment decided to stop making games and to just publish instead.

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I’ve spoken about difficulty in video games a few times on this blog but, to quickly summarise, I enjoy difficult video games when I believe them to be fair and enjoyable and find them aggravating if otherwise. Recently, I’ve seen a rise in the discussion of accessibility in video games and I view this as ultimately good as I believe that it’s another crucial component to growing the gaming market. However, something that has begun to frustrate me is the viewpoint that the difficulty of a game and the accessibility of a game are intrinsically linked, something that I completely disagree with. Therefore, I thought that I’d explain why I consider accessibility and difficulty to be separate in video games.

Let’s start with a brief overview of what accessibility means when it comes to video games. Basically, accessibility in video games refers to the ability for people who have disabilities to be able to play a game with little to no difficulty caused by their condition. To give an example, many games use colour as a way to communicate information quickly and efficiently to the player but people who suffer from colour blindness will struggle to interpret these colours correctly and will find playing the game more challenging than it needs to be. The implementation of a good colour-blind mode can remove this barrier and allow the person to play the game as it was intended.

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There’s an interesting website called SteamDB, which I’ve referenced once before, that contains an enormous wealth of information on video games released on Steam such as their price history, which games have seen a surge of players, a rating system that builds off of and is more accurate than on Steam itself etc. However, one of the most interesting pieces of information is a history of the concurrent player numbers for any particular game. Often games, particularly single-player ones, will see their greatest concurrent player count at the time of its release with slight bumps around the times when it goes on sale. However, I’ve noticed a few single-player video games that have seen their concurrent player count grow beyond what a simple sale could hope to achieve. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at these examples.

1. Celeste

I recently mentioned how I was playing Celeste so it only makes sense that I begin with the game that gave me this topic in the first place. Celeste, an indie precision platformer, is a superb but very challenging game whose bonus levels such as the C-sides and Chapter 9 push your platforming skills to the absolute limit. Having found it a profound experience, both from a storytelling perspective and how brutal but well-designed its gameplay was, I was curious to see how it was performing. Imagine my surprise when I saw something that proved to be highly unusual, an example of a single-player video game that had seen its concurrent player count grow, something rare in the games industry. I would consider this accomplishment a clear sign of the quality of the game.

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I was perusing the Famitsu video game sales data the other day and saw something that genuinely shocked me. The Xbox Series release of a game had managed to chart in Japan’s top 10 video game sales of the week! To someone who might not be familiar with the state of Xbox in Japan, this might not seem surprising at all but, for those that are aware, it’s genuinely surprising! Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to discuss Xbox’s struggle in Japan and why I actually want to see them succeed there.

Let’s start with an overview of Xbox in Japan. The first Xbox console was released in Japan in February 2002 and it proved to be a perfect example of Microsoft’s ineptitude when it comes to the Japanese market. Besides poor marketing, the design of the console proved to be unpopular with Japanese consumers and, alongside a lack of games aimed at the Japanese market, the Xbox proved to be a poor seller, moving only about 450,000 units. It was clear that Microsoft recognised their failure as they made a concerted effort, by far and away the most they ever have, to break into the market with the Xbox 360. Along with a more aggressive marketing strategy, they also acquired exclusives that appealed to Japanese consumers such as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey from Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, Tales of Vesperia and Star Ocean: The Last Hope amongst others. This translated into the best sales that a Xbox console has ever had in Japan with lifetime sales of about 1.6 million units.

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