Comment by johnnyanmac
4 days ago
Dark souls exists because Demons Soul existed. But if you ask Sony or even FromSoft, they'd never say Demons Soul was a success. It just didn't bomb so dosasteroisly as to prematurely cancel an entire sub-genre.
You can have disappointments and even failures while Also admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was all I was saying.
It seems you’re conflating financial success with all types of success. There can be engineering successes and artistic successes in this context.
Indeed. I can name quite a few of both kinds of success and the end result was unfortunately a shattering of a studio who did get a chance to iterate on the potential.
As a business, it's clear what kind of success valve prioritizes.
Valve has put out some artistic and engineering masterpieces consistently over the years. They currently print money with steam. However, they aren’t putting out a Half-Life 3 to rake in more money. They don’t believe they have anything worthy from a storytelling or tech perspective. But they put out Half-Life Alyx, which was an incredible VR game.
Further, I wouldn’t call the Steam Deck itself a financial priority. Hardware is famously risky. Obviously, they want to continue their financial success, but they don’t seem to pursue that at all costs like other companies that run their IP into the ground to make more money. Having their financial success allows them to keep their integrity and continue pursuing artistic and engineering successes to diversify their income stream and build goodwill. Their work on Proton is a crowning achievement for their pursuit of engineering successes.
I don't agree that Fromsoft and Valve were operating from the same definition of success in those respective cases.
I also don't think it makes sense to suggest that the Fromsoft timeline starts at Dark Souls. My understanding is their first game was Kings Field, which had modest commercial aspirations compared to the Dark Souls franchise.
This is a semantic debate about what "success" is. You're both making different points at each other.