Platitudes. And at this point nothing new from him in response to criticism, to be frank; just like vaguely talking about "car culture" is his go-to reason for why the next GT is going to be
so great. This is the
exact same thing he made just-barely-beyond-canned-response interactions about when backlash against a specific thing in, say, GT5 would reach a fever pitch after that game launched in a miserable state. He references the specific things people don't like, he subtly shifts the blame away from PD for implementing it and onto the people who take issue with it as if they don't understand why it was done, misrepresents the basis for the criticism being levied, then offers a completely empty gesture that something
may happen to assuage complaints about it even when obvious solutions are already present.
When PD added dozens of fake regional variations of cars to GT5 to pad out the car list, and people rightly took issue with the "1000 cars" in the game being made up of literally hundreds of cars where PD took multiple models and changed the text string in the car name and did nothing else (even in instances where doing so could have led to legitimately different models),
- Kaz specifically noted how people took issue with the practice.
- Then he framed the issue as just not understanding the reasoning behind them doing it rather than a deliberate decision PD took for a marketing checkbox:
- While also seemingly deliberately being obtuse about what the actual issue people had was:
- Before making an vague assertion that Kaz agrees with the problem and that there is a vague hanging implication that something will be done about it:
GT6 came out.
They did nothing to improve in this area, because they again needed the marketing checkbox to be higher than the marketing checkbox for the previous game so in fact made it even worse; even though all they needed to do to improve it was remove some cars that they made up and change some values on an internal spreadsheet for ones that they didn't correctly implement.
What about GT5's car sounds?
- Many here probably remember the infamous interview where he referenced people's complaints about that with GT5.
- He framed the issue people had with it as them not knowing enough to know they shouldn't be upset:
- Was deliberately obtuse about the reasoning people were taking issue with what PD had put together:
- Made vague notes about how it's something that the team will sort out:
In spite of the initial insistence that
seemingly everything in GT6's early appearances that people didn't like were merely placeholders (to the extent that it became a meme), nothing was ever done about it for an entire console generation even though very little effort (so little effort that people could fix the problems
themselves somewhat in that period of time where GT5 saves could be hacked) would have been needed to at least make it look like they cared at all.
For funsies, that last link has a double whammy because this:
Was in fact a bald-faced lie for that game, and functionally was a lie for the next decade of their output as well. But don't worry Sophie is definitely going to come to the game and fix everything.
But sidestepping that, let's compare those statements above to the statements in this post:
- Responding to a specific, loud criticism against the game:
- Reframing the issue as the people raising the criticism not actually understanding why PD are doing what they are doing rather than PD deliberately doing something that had a negative impact on the game quality
- Being deliberately obtuse about the actual basis that people are expressing the criticisms:
- Making meaningless statements that something may happen at some point (but please understand, they can't say what those might actually be) even though a quick solution is obvious and has already been widely discussed:
This one in particular is extra meaningless because it's basically the same thing that was
trotted out for GT6 on two separate occasions when the initial reactions to its announcement was open confusion for why none of the supposed features of the game couldn't be added to GT5 instead (since GT6 was going to be a PS3 game for no reason beyond maximizing profit). The problems with GT7 are also a direct repeat of the problems with the game structure (ie. not having enough events to actually progress through the game) of GT5; which was a mistake he also acknowledged then but at least PD sort of put a band-aid on to fix (at lest before shutting the game's servers off almost immediately after GT6 launched).
Also note that he didn't
actually say anything about the microtransactions. Not about their implementation into the game interface. Not about their prices being wildly higher than before. Not about how strongly they seem to correlate to the game's tortured structure and economy. Not that they were even implimented into the game at all when pay-to-win microtransactions in AAA games have been a constant,
extremely controversial sticking point in the game industry (to the extent of what happened with Forza 7) for the past decade.
Also note that he didn't
actually say anything about why they revised the event payments. Not about them being drastically reduced specifically as it pertains to the ones that were the fastest to gain money. Not about why they didn't simply raise the rest of the payments to try and "have users enjoy lots of cars." Not about why the solution that people
had already found to get around microtransactions was deemed an unacceptable solution to the problem he acknowledged (but actively worked to make worse).
At this point it's legitimately kind of hard to tell if Yamauchi is early career Peter Molyneux (shoots his mouth off about things he really shouldn't talk about at the point in time he's doing so, over promises things to himself and underdelivers constantly but always promises to try harder next time, notes challenges faced and how they will be overcome next time) or later career Peter Molyneux (uses his fame to stifle criticism of him, overpromises about things that will be in his next title because he knows that is enough to get the hype going, says things he knows people will want to hear because he knows that his fans will use his statements to beat down people criticizing him, blames his failings on outside actors that he failed to account for.)
And people complained about them in the context of this series alone
ten years ago as well. They complained about the mere
threat of them so much in GT's immediate rival series that they anything resembling them was stripped from the game and public statements were made about them not ever returning.
An awful lot of people in fact
specifically referenced the PSN hack and subsequent outage as why an always online single player game is a terrible idea (alongside all of the other infamous examples of the terrible idea causing problems) when it was confirmed (and later defended) for GT7. That PD ended up screwing the pooch
themselves and taking their own game down only a couple weeks after launch is merely evidence of how terrible of an idea it was to do in the first place for those who
don't remember Sony's past incompetence in this area. Or EA's. Or Blizzard's. Or Bethesda's.
www.gtplanet.net
