This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Love Social Security, Hate Social Security Tax!
- Giant Bomb is Independent (Fuck The Corpos, Stay Indie, Die Indie!)
- Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link Was Canceled (And Natalie Misses The Art of the B-Game Spin-Off Point, Just in General)
- Tribe Nine EOS Announced After 3 Months (The Mobile Games Industry is BRUTAL!)
- Persona 5: The Phantom X Announced For Global Release (The Mobile Games Industry is Nasty!)
- Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Bombed (Natalie Rambles About SNK History, Because Why Not?)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Love Social Security, Hate Social Security Tax!
As an American tax accountant, I need to think a fair bit about the tax system and routinely ask simple yet open-ended questions. What’s the most effective way for people to save money? How does it treat people of different income brackets? By thinking about this, by knowing what I know, it is easy to see a lot of things that are wrong with the US tax system. How it rewards investors over workers with long-term capital gains taxed at a lower rate. How it enables residential property renters to pay virtually no taxes while netting profits thanks to 27.5 year depreciation rates on homes, less for certain improvements. And how limited the Earned Income Tax, Health Insurance Premium, and Lifetime Learning credits are in this modern economy. Also, the 3,000 capital loss limitation is stupid, and everybody should want to see it indexed. It will help the 1% save during bad years, and help people who get screwed by a bad investment recognize their loss a lot faster.
However, there is one factor that is a somewhat murky target of criticism under the current tax system, and that’s self-employment taxes, or SE taxes, or social security and Medicare taxes. These are something far more difficult to directly criticize as, unlike income taxes, which go into a big bucket, Social Security (SocSec) and Medicare are supposed to go directly into the SocSec and Medicare money buckets. Medicare taxes goes to fund the program for everyone, and you get into Medicare by working ten years. The same is true for social security, but the more you put away for SocSec, the more you get back when you retire, based on your 35 highest earning years. Medicare is the only sensibly priced insurance plan in America, though it realistically should cost nothing, as a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. While SocSec is a government pension system.
The important thing to note about SocSec and Medicare are that these programs do nothing for the vast majority of people until they become of age. For Medicare, that’s 65, and SocSec is 62 to 70, whenever floats your boat. (These are the general rules, don’t @ me about the complexities.) This means that most Americans pay into these programs for 40+ years before reaping any benefits for them. And unlike with a retirement account or healthcare bank account, all the money you put into these programs is prone to disappearing upon death.
With social security, there are survivorship benefits offered to spouses, former spouses, and minor children. But if someone who is 55-years-old, has a 25-year-old kid they had with a spouse they married for 6 years, and then dies, the money they put into social security is just gone. Now, these funds are ultimately used to fund the benefits of other Americans, but to this hypothetical person’s 25-year-old kid, that can seem like an incredibly unfair deal. Their parent paid into social security all their life, paying tens of thousands of dollars, and it’s just gone now.
As for Medicare, you don’t get more, cheaper, or better Medicare if you make a lot of money. You just know that the money is going to fund medical expenses for others. This, combined with Medicare tax being a nuisance tax at worst, makes it far easier to just… brush aside. To explain why, I need to share a couple numbers for those not privy to the maths!
How much of their income does someone pay into social security and Medicare? Well, that depends on a lot of things, but generally it is 15.3% of their wages. 12.4% social security and 2.9% Medicare. If one is employed and has taxes withheld on their paycheck, the worker pays 7.65% and the employer pays the other 7.65%. But if someone is a self-employed contractor— and a lot of people in America are— they pay some mildly reduce amount— let’s just call it 14.1%. This is because the tax is reclassified as Self-Employment taxes. In practical terms, if someone makes $50,000, and are a W-2 employee, they pay $3,825 in social security and Medicare taxes. But if they are a 1099 contractor, they pay roughly $7,050 in social security and Medicare, a big difference.
Those figures are NOT INCOME TAX. Income tax is trickier to figure out, but at $50,000, and assuming they are single, a person would owe about $4,000 in income taxes if they are an employee, and $2,825 if they are self-employed. Meaning their total taxes paid would as follows: The W-2 employee would owe $7,825, or 15.65% of their total income. While the self-employed contractor would owe $9,875, or basically 20% of their total income. And that is JUST Federal taxes, not state taxes, which vary up and down and all around.
Now, the question: Is this fair? I would say no. The effective tax rate for all taxes owed— on top of the variable county/city-based taxes that change depending on where one is in America, and what they are buying— means the governments are collecting a hefty portion of a lower-end worker’s wages. …Actually, I think that I am being too optimistic in saying that. I’m not going to do the math on how much someone working $15 an hour full-time would make—
Akumako: “$50,000 assumes someone is making $25 an hour, working 2,000 hours a year, you class traitor makes-$80k-a-year on 1,200 hours asshole. That’s good money in most of the country!”
Don’t go telling people my salary, you BITCH!
Ugh… I could censor that, but no. Let the truth reign supreme!
Okay, okay, that is a better than average worker’s scenario. But how about another scenario. What if this hypothetical person was a trust fund kid who had a house gifted by their parents and who reaped $50,000 in long-term capital gains from Daddy’s Trust Fund? They would owe literally nothing. No, seriously. In 2025, they would need to recognize over $63,350 in long-term capital gains in 2025 before they would even need to pay a dollar in taxes.
This is because long-term capital gains— and qualified dividends (thanks Dubya Bush)— are taxed as preferred rates. 0% for the first $48,350 (indexed figure, using 2025 number), then 15%, then 20%. Combined with the Standard Deduction of $15,000 (indexed figure, using 2025 number), this lets the wealthy pay nothing on the first $63,350 of income. When most people would need to pay 16% to 20% for that, as I just explained!
This represents a broader problem with long-term capital gains, but a significant amount of the tax these hypothetical workers are paying is just social security tax. The W-2 employee pays $3,100, while the 1099 contractor pays roughly $5,700. All for an IOU from the government that you won’t get anything for unless someone, and their spouse, live into their late 60s. I’m pretty sure there would be tens of millions of people who would consider that to be a shitty deal, though that does not mean much. Tens of millions of Americans are donkey-level stupid.
So, what am I proposing? Just phasing out social security tax, and phasing out the program in 40-ish years? Well, that would solve the tax problem that a lot of Americans are facing. It would increase the amount on each paycheck by the equivalent of a pay raise. It would make things far easier for contractors who will save thousands of dollars a year. It would also be a great benefit for any company with payroll, as it would eliminate a massive expense. (As someone who does a litle bit of payroll each month, payroll sucks, and I’d rather just make quarterly online payments instead.) But this would also result in a lot of old people dying on the street, becoming woefully impoverished, and mooching off of their children while offering no financial benefit.
The abolishment of social security would represent a seismic libertarian shift to how retirement works, and would lead to a boom in self-directed IRAs and 401(k)s. The associated retirement contribution limits would need to have their caps raised dramatically, and nearly every American citizen would need to manage a retirement account, as that would should be their main source of money once they reach seniority. It would remove a social safety net for people and lead to an influx of people trapped in poverty, unable to afford a spot at a retirement home. …And it would probably fuck up a bunch of tax treaties with other countries who have their own state retirement pension system.
This is all ignoring the rare carve outs where children are entitled to social security if their parents are of a certain age, or how disabled youngsters get social security too. Hell, I almost got social security for being disabled, but I was too good at working to be eligible. But if I LIED, I could have made $80k a year and gotten social security!
As should be painfully obvious, I think abolishing social security would be an absolutely terrible idea. It would result in millions dying in poverty once they become too old to work. It would expose tens of millions of people to an unwarranted level of financial risk as they are forced to play the market. It would empower companies like BlackRock and Vanguard even more than they already are. But I do think that things need to change in how social security is funded. There need to be changes in how people are taxed according to their income amount, regardless of its type. The tax system present here is, quite simply, cruel to those who work for a living.
Sure, people who are self-employed are able to deduct a load of things, and if you aren’t being greedy with deductions, you’re doing it wrong! Yet, that does not fix the problem. What is the solution to the problem? Not sure! Maybe rework Alternative Minimum Tax into something that triggers on more than a de minimis amount of tax returns. Have it be an ACTUAL minimum of 28% on the top earners.
Sure, that’s a cheap date for Mixter Moneybags racking in ten figures a year, but 28% is more than the effective tax rate for most people. Maybe add some criteria to using the long-term capital gains rate related to earned income. Maybe treat short-term capital gains and interest as earned income and investment income in some instances! That last one is fucking crazy, but the type of crazy that just might work!
Giant Bomb is Independent
(Fuck The Corpos, Stay Indie, Die Indie!)
Two weeks ago, I bemoaned the loss of Giant Bomb by their callous taskmasters over at Fandom. Espousing how corporate vultures like them wish to destroy and pillage all they can find, and leave behind nothing but clickbait. I pretty much wrote them off as dead, because most people were at the time, and I sometimes go with the flow when it comes to things I’m not well versed in. (I was a Destructoid Kid, not a Giant Bomb Girl.)
However, this past weekend, the people who made Giant Bomb what it is announced that they bought the company from Fandom. They have the name, the site, everything, and are reorganizing it into a fully independent venture. (They still link to GameSpot and a Fandom email at the bottom of their site, but it’s all a WIP, I’m sure.) I’d imagine this was a calculated panic-riddled reaction from Fandom who realized that things were not going as planned, and wanted to save face. As if they are not already universally derided. However, regardless of the reason, despite the despair and stress that followed, things worked out as they should in the end. Giant Bomb is back in business, the heart, soul, and prostate are all still there. Heck, people are probably more invested in them than they have been in quite some time, as they thought Giant Bomb was going to blow up in a blazing hot mess.
…And that’s all I have to say about that! The good thing happened, I love to see it, and I wish that most attempts at corporate consolidation and cleansing resulted in similar scenarios.
Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link Was Canceled
(And Natalie Misses The Art of the B-Game Spin-Off Point, Just in General)
In the past, I have presented the end of dedicated handheld gaming as a good thing, mostly for broader cultural reasons. While I love many games designed for handhelds, they were routinely seen as lesser games of lesser importance for lesser people. Just look at anybody waxing about the biggest games of a respective year, and chances are they will only/primarily fixate on the console games of the era. This is because they were assigned the most importance, generally received higher scores, and were the most technically impressive titles. However, they were more than sufficient platforms and devices to play games, and great ways to keep certain IP going between bigger entries. A way to give fans something leaner or more experimental, to chew on.
This lack of ‘B-games’ (used as a term of endearment) or smaller spin-offs represents a missing component in the modern console game landscape, and leads many bigger IP to go 5+ years without a new major entry. Or for spin-offs to be released in an underwhelming state, as it’s hard to make a B-game with oodles of cheaply produced content when needing to pump out AAA production values. Of course, this is not a ‘dead art’ but compare 2025 to 2010, and you’d see far less of this mid-range extensions of established IP.
This is slightly countered by many indie games exceeding the production values, depth, and experimental nature of this arbitrary amalgam of DS, PSP, Vita, and 3DS games I’m gesturing toward. But in a world so dominated by IP, you just know that such and such game would do thrice as well if they just slapped some cast-by-the-wayside IP onto it. This should be cause for IP holders to be more liberal with their licensing of IP for smaller game ventures, but few companies are doing such things beyond DLC ventures, a la Vampire Survivors’ robust DLC. Even Sega is keeping most of their licensed offerings traditional.
…What was this supposed to lead into? Right. Kingdom Hearts from 2007 to 2012 was such a weird series to follow. It started strong with the initial 2002 entry for PS2, something of a 90s dream game for a certain type of person, and something of a JRPG gateway for any Disney enjoyer. Then it got a 2004 GBA spin-off with Chain of Memories, which was important to the storyline, but also not really. Why did it jump from the PS2 to GBA? Because the PSP just came out in Japan, and millions of children had super cheap GBAs. And the series flourished with 2005’s Kingdom Hearts II, returning to the PS2 with a far more refined experience, now gushing with newly established Kingdom Hearts-isms.
Akumako: “For the record, Natalie uses the first release date to determine when a game came out, and this was back when localization took 4 to 6 months, 8 to 12 for Europeans. So no, you’re not getting it twisted for thinking you bought Kingdom Hearts II in 2006 when it was brand new. You’re just a scrub for living in the wrong country.”
This then ushered in the spin-off era for the series, where games were being shot out constantly, appearing up, down, and all around the timeline, while Kingdom Hearts III wallowed in pre-production. In 2007, Re:Chain of Memories remade Chain of Memories as a late era PS2 game that featured radically different (mostly worse) gameplay and (lower) production values than the mainline games. Two 2008 phone-based games with Coded and Mobile. The clunky yet ambitious 2009 3D DS action and lite life sim, 358/2 Days, which is still one of the worst subtitles yet.
Then there was the 2010 PSP prequel Birth by Sleep, which I know some used to swear by for being the best game in the series back in the early 2010s. Mostly because it de-emphasized the Disney fluff, had a good variant of KH2’s battle system, and was mostly anime. Then Re:coded came out in 2010, remaking Coded for the DS and further baffling people who thought console exclusives should stay loyal to one brand, and not spread everywhere for market domination. And then Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance dropped for 3DS, marking the fourth consecutive spin-off, depending on how you count.
The confusion around this was compounded with the PS3 remasters, 1.5 Remix and 2.5 Remix. Along with the vital deep lore of Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] (2013) or Kingdom Hearts Christ, that released for browsers in Japan three years before being available in English. This deluge of re-releases and incremental doodads like the preposterously ill-titled Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue (2017) persisted until the release of Kingdom Hearts III (2019).
This was followed by the rhythm game spin-off of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory (2020) and some expansion guff for Kingdom Hearts Christ, but after 2021, the series has basically stopped. Rather than pursuing spin-offs for under-powered systems with cheaper development timelines, as those no longer exist, or re-releasing games that they already re-re-re-released, they went forward with Kingdom Hearts IV. A game that was announced in 2022, but has remained locked in shadows for a good three years. Well, aside from the new screenshots they gave us this past week.
To fill up this gap, Square Enix planned on pushing a mobile live service action game spin-off dubbed Missing-Link, announced in tandem with Kingdom Hearts IV, but they miraculously canceled that game. Why? Well, I can only assume that development was not going well, despite getting a closed beta and a few teaser trailers. I’d say this is sad for the developers, a waste of resources, and should have been salvaged as something. However, considering Square Enix’s penchant for exterminating live services around their first anniversary, it’s hard to mourn the loss of this game. I regularly dismiss live services as flakey, temporary things that come for the dough and leave after the supply expires, but that is true. And this is where I circle back to my original point. What, you thought the intro for this segment was an unrelated tangent? Well, it was, but I found a way to loop it back to the point.
Despite growing to the point where the latest high-powered iPhone is basically a portable PS4, mobile game development often targets far more modest specs, and still brings with it generally lower development costs. This is part of the reason so many investors are willing to throw cash at mobile projects, and why companies have spent the past decade transitioning away from handheld or downloadable spin-offs in favor of making phone games. Because they have, by in large, replaced the more casual-oriented mobile chic-real-lifer audience that handhelds once appealed to.
This is another reason to look at mobile-oriented live services with disrespect, if not disdain. Because they represent the loss and absence of other ventures to grow an IP that could result in permanently tangible products, rather than ethereal service-based ventures. Ones that will only widely exist for a few years, assuming they make it past the market viability tests enough to warrant any release at all.
I just feel bad for devout fans of series of big IP that used to get nearly annual entries back in the 2000s. When costs were cheap, testing was more limited, asset production took days instead of months, and iterations were not as necessary, games were shipped crazy fast. The average game enthusiast was younger, meaning they had more limited income, so keeping up with games was a financial challenge.
Yet now that the industry, and its players, have ‘matured,’ there are fewer of these smaller experiences to play, and fans of a given IP need to wait a bachelor’s degree worth of time between entries. While I suppose services can lessen the wait to an extent, that means playing the same game for years upon years. …That just sounds sad. Why would anybody want to play just one game forever when there are so many games out there? It’s like only listening to one album or reading one book or watching one TV show forever.
Sadly, the fast development timelines of yore just do not work with modern technology, or rather modern expectations. If you try doing things the old way, you get things like Pokémon in Switch Era. A series of games that were made quickly and all have big problems. Oversimplifications, overambition, bad performance, murky visuals that do not conform to the ideals of tastemakers who led outrage campaigns. Well, this applies to all of them except for Legends Arceus, if you don’t like that one, that’s a skill issue, mate. You gotta work that ass and learn to love.
Akumako: “Is this another one of those ‘gaming peaked when I was a teen-ager sort of thing?’
…God, seeing teenager written like that is one of the only things in this world that I would call cursed.
I do not like to look back at the past reductively, idealizing the time of which I was never alive and thinking that everything was better when I was a 12-year-old who thought you made babies by buttfucking. The past had problems, edges that are smoothed over by the hazy glow of nostalgia, hindsight, and simplifying narratives. However… sometimes things were just better back in the day, dude.
Fascism is on the rise. The richest people want to become kings of the world because they abandoned their decency long ago. People are forgetting how to read. The kids are cheating their way to getting passing grades, complaining when they can’t cheat, and emboldened by the notion that everybody is doing it. And video games have just been capitalism’d so much that it’s harder to have fun with them, easier to view everything as a transaction. Also, negative comments and rage are pushed cyclically by algorithms, all with the goal of keeping people angry yet pacified.
…Maybe there just never were any good times in human history. Just bad times and less bad times? Anybody who glorifies Ancient Rome is forgetting that they would probably be a miserable soldier, farmer, servant or peasant just trying to stay fed before dying in some horrific manner. And how is that any different from being a Black woman in the Great Depression?
Akumako: “Oh dear, she’s fallen into her political tangents again. Someone get the stretcher and the parasites!”
NO! No parasites! Not after last time… I’ll go back to talking about Squeggles. As a studio, they have been struggling over the past few years, and it is easy to point at examples of non-starters. Games that received basically no push or fanfare, games that disappointed, or games that came out at bizarre arbitrary times. I have no idea who decided when their H2 2024 line-up should have been released, but it was just odd. Visions of Mana was the first fully new console Mana game nearly two decades, and it came out at August 29. Then September had the PC releases of Final Fantasy XVI and Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. Right before the holiday season.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven, a mid-budget remake a niche (in the west) but beloved RPG came out on October 24, six months after the series got a new entry with SaGa: Emerald Beyond. Then Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, a rare game that sold over a million units in Japan, came out on November 14th, being THE RPG of the season. Fantasian: Neo Dimension, the latest Mistwalker banger, then came out on December 5, where it was easy to ignore after the RPG gauntlet that Square Enix released. Because it was an old game that released after a holiday rush.
This is all before getting into the surprise underperformance of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which was hindered by the muddled brand identity of modern Final Fantasy for reasons I mused about previously. (Apparently the Zoomies like Persona, and not the Final Fantasy, which is a series for olds, who are always mad about it. I’d argue against that, but Final Fantasy from 2009 to 2024 has just been inconsistent.) The complete non-starter of Foamstars. The deluge of games they dumped on Game Pass. Or anything on the level of The Diofield Chronicle (2022).
I would argue that this is not a recent phenomenon, and Square Enix, as a company, has been facing myriad issues since… Square Enix became a thing. The dev teams and tech were established around the time SquareSoft and Enix merged on April 1, 2003, but when Sony ushered in the PS3, they could not adapt. They desperately wanted to be a big shot, to invest in technology and create a super-powerful in-house engine they could use to power their games going forward. However, with the old guard gone and leadership shuffled, it was hard for them to deliver games that achieved the four C’s. Commercial, critical, and cultural acclaim with console games.
They thrived with handheld and smaller projects, but their console releases during this time were sparse and had… problems. The Last Remanent, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope, Front Mission Evolved, The Disappointingly Un-Sexy MindJack, Dungeon Siege III, and Nier all failed to set the world on fire, and they did not develop a console game until they developed Final Fantasy XIII. (I still argue that Tri-Ace developed the sequels, based primarily off of vibes.) Then their entire brand identity collapsed when they started putting out Eidos games in 2010, starting with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days!
Akumako: “Hold up, what about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light?”
Beat it by a literal day. Suck it, bitch!
Tenshiko: “You’re both wrong, it was Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009).”
The fuck are you talking about? The merger wasn’t completed until November 2009!
Akumako: “Yeah! Get rekt ya dickless cunt!”
Tenshiko: “…This type of reaction is precisely why I stay in the box.”
Get out of there, or you’ll be living out the last minutes of your life in a boxfort. Ya fascistic bitch.”
Tenshiko: “I’m an angel.”
Angels, fascists, same difference! You both pray to The God of Caucasoids. Dæmons are the only real ones, on the real.
…What point was I making? Right, the Eidos acquisition and subsequent sale, combined with the tanking reputation of Final Fantasy really epitomize the failures of Square Enix as a company. It’s why I’m actually gung-ho about them being bought up by someone, as despite whatever they say or aspire, they aren’t going to fix things.
Akumako: “Yo! Nat!”
We are in the same room, you don’t need to greet me like that, Sis.
Akumako: “In the Psycho Shatter universe, you should have Sony buy up SquareSoft in 2003 instead of having them get bought out by Enix. Just like how you plan on having that Microsoft Sega acquisition in 2001, instead of having Isao Okawa die and save Sega through the power of stonks and debt forgiveness.”
…I should do that.
Tenshiko: “You are being incredibly unprofessional and aimless in discussing this topic. How can you call yourself a reporter or commentator if you cannot differentiate between a novel and a topical news segment?”
THAT TEARS IT! You’re going in a boxfort, you Nazi-humping race traitor! Akumako! Get my gun!
Akumako: “Can’t. Our mom wouldn’t let us buy one!”
Then get the box cutter! Same difference!
Tribe Nine EOS Announced After 3 Months
(The Mobile Games Industry is BRUTAL!)
Welp, that happened faster than expected. The Too Kyo Games cyberpunk action RPG with baseball elements, Tribe Nine, has announced its end of service, with a shutdown slated for November 27, 2025. The game only released earlier this year, on February 20, 2025, meaning that it took less than three months before the EOS announcement, and the game will only be available for a total of nine months. I would call this a stunningly short lifespan, but after Concord last year, no shut down and length duration is unprecedented.
This is upsetting to me, as while I did not have much fun with the demo held last year, I recognized a large amount of promise in Tribe Nine. If not for its status, limitations, and nature as an online only, daily retention experience, I think it has the makings of a slightly convoluted yet highly effortful RPG with endearing characters and gushing personality. Also, I like the creative team at Too Kyo Games, and want them to not only succeed financially, but produce a work that they can be proud of.
Sadly, the game simply did not see the returns the publisher expected, and all development is being ceased, effective immediately. Promised content will not be delivered, the fourth chapter of the story will not be added, and various fixes and improvements will not be implemented. The game is simply being abandoned, with the shop shuttered, but you will be able to play it for another six months. This comes as a surprise to me, as the game did attract a good amount of buzz around release, including surpassing 10 million downloads in less than a month. However, it was unable to retain players, or get the average player to spend even a quarter on the game.
Per Sensor Tower data, as reported by Gacha Revenue, Tribe Nine allegedly brought in $800,000 in February, then $600,000 in March, before dropping to a mere $100,000 in April. These numbers tell a story of a game doing decently well at first, before collapsing past the top 100 in the market. Combined with the EOS announcement, I think it is reasonable to say that the lifetime revenue of the game was a mere $1.5 million. A downright gallingly small amount for a game with such high production values. For reference, if this were a $50 budget release, revenue per unit would be $35 (Thanks Steve Jobs!), and it would reach $1.5 million after selling 43,000 units at full price.
Based on the sheer drop in revenue month over month, I do not blame the publisher and main developer, Akatsuki Games, for recognizing their losses and just shutting the game down. They are a business in this capitalist world, and it does not make sense to keep supporting a venture like this. Especially as a live service.
I’ve said this before, but the live service subset of the games industry is a cutthroat one where success is fleeting and only the top dogs survive. Newcomers come frequently, but they consistently struggle, and have been dying off faster than ever as the industry has matured and publishers become more eager to cut their losses. The top earners are seen as representing the industry, but there are games that come out and flop, hard, every month. Technically, this is true for games of all levels on all platforms, as it is very easy for people to just gloss over them, only paying attention go the biggest and best-selling games. But with live services, the problem is exasperated.
The death of Tribe Nine is bad news for the developers who have spent years working on this game, and bad news for Too Kyo Games, who will be carrying this failure, burdened by a story they never got to see through to its end. Considering how light many of this game’s online elements were, mostly being limited to a Dark Souls esque player bloodstain system, I would like to have some hope that the game could be revived as an offline single-player RPG with an actually complete story.
Though, considering how the game was just getting started from a development and narrative perspective, and Too Kyo Games’ financial troubles, I highly doubt that would or could ever happen. This is mainly an Akatsuki Games venture, and the studio only works in live services, so any offline version would be unprecedented.
I just hope people are able to preserve what they can of this game, as an incredible amount of work went into it. (I’d help, but I’m too busy.) And I hope that those who enjoy it are able to continue having fun with it for the next six months. Because, after that, the game will be little more than a memory.
I hate that things like this happen, but this is the live service model working as intended. For as much as I want to espouse how the packaged games industry is so much better, it is also a brutal, oversaturated, place where trash and blasé bullshit can rake in millions while smaller titles struggle to make back their production costs. The economics around games are dismal and distressing when remembering the 30% storefront cut and the fact that you need to sell 100,000s of units to make millions. A game with a fairly modest AA budget of $10 million at a budget price of $50 would need to sell 286,000 units at full price to make back its production costs.
But the thing about packaged games, about fixed offline experiences, is that once they are done, they are done. They will survive so long as there is hardware and software to run them, and can continue to make a couple coins a month for whoever owns them. If Tribe Nine was an offline game, it would always be there. But by being an online game, it is only allowed to exist for a scant nine months.
So, why even care about it if it will just disappear? Because it’s art. It’s a game. It has just as much effort, passion, and skill put into it as any other game. I want (nearly) all games to be kept on a shelf in the public library of art, for anybody with enough curiosity or desire to check out whenever they see fit. There are legal hurdles that prevent that in the current system, but it is possible, and people kinda do this every minute of every day. (Thank you emulation.) However, with online games, that just does not work. These games will eventually die, and only a scant few will be revived. Not due to an artistic desire to make something finite, but because business wills it. Because capitalism wills it.
…I thought that this may spell trouble for the future of Too Kyo Games, as Tribe Nine Months of Service sure does not look good on a resume. However, the literal day after this story broke, DMM and Too Kyo Games announced a new project called Shuten Kyodan, or Main Point Giant Bullet. I think this might be the Limit x Despair concept that they teased aaaalllll the way back in 2018, but it really could be ANYTHING. …Wait, it’s coming to Switch and PC? Not smartphones? Even though DMM is a mobile game company? And Spike Chunsoft tweeted about it, as they are the international publisher? Okay, so this is going to be a real game! Hell yeah! I thought that I was good with Hundred Line— and I am, as that game is 200 hours long— but I’ll take something else in a year or two.
Akumako: “Actually, this is apparently launching September 5th and is a visual novel involving five different routes with different gameplay and genres. They accidentally published details on the official website, and some people sniped them.”
Oh. Heck yeah. I should not be too busy with taxes then, so I will try to make time for it, assuming it looks good. I’d trust Media.Vision with a newborn, so I pre-ordered Hundred Line out of respect. I thought DMM was just a mobile game platform owner, co-publisher for Utawarerumono, and multimedia venture thingies. So I would not trust them with a sack of potatoes. They’d probably get them infested with weevils…
Persona 5: The Phantom X Announced For Global Release
(The Mobile Games Industry is Nasty!)
Damn you it Atlus! I hate the fact that you made this, and even more that you made this look GOOD!
I’ve previously talked about Persona 5: The Phantom X, the Atlus X Perfect World gacha sequel/gaiden/thing to Persona 5, and how it was coming to the Japanese market. This naturally raised questions about a western release, and after Steam database entries were found for the game, a PC release was all but confirmed.
This past week, Atlus eschewed all suspicions and announced that the game is getting a simultaneous Japanese and western launch for mobile and PC on June 26. Meaning a bunch of the Persona loving Zoomies will get to spend their summer breaks farming out their way through a mostly new Persona game, experiencing something that will inevitably be canned in the next few years, possibly in a deliberate ploy to drum up attention for Persona 6.
Akumako: “Wasn’t that Tokyo Mirage Session?”
I thought it was, but I’m not sure. You’d need to ask one of the 50,000 people who have actually played it. I know it possibly broke a million units, buy buying a game does not mean playing it. I mean, I bought it. …For $38.20, because I figured that was the cheapest it would ever be. And it basically was.
Anyway, I just highlighted how even if a game looks good and has good production values, it can still perish in the world of live services, which begs the question of why is Atlus even bothering with this venture? Well, in part, because they are not really handling the workhorse development of this title, nor are they paying for it outright.
Instead, this is ultimately a licensed product, and licensed products in the world of live services, specifically the gacha grundle, tend to have good margins starting off. Additionally, the Persona fandom, while not huge in the world of video games, is one that is routinely growing, and one that is particularly ripe for exploitation. They’re typically youthsome, phone-based, and receptive to the allure of paying for power in exchange for seeing more of a story driven character-rich RPG.
From a capitalist perspective, a Persona live service like this makes as much sense as meat on bread. But I also feel that this will be a wonderful example to use to illustrate how the overcomplication of gacha mechanics make games worse. Because much of Persona 5: The Phantom X is cleanly derived from Persona 5, but with live service systems grafted onto it. This is something I have already learned by playing a decent amount of gacha games over the years. Covering titles like Mega Man X DiVE Offline. And writing a massive game design document that aimed to rebalance a gacha game as an offline title. But I want more people to recognize this problem, smell the hot beans, and realize that live service design decisions just make games worse.
Also, since this is a Perfect World joint, this will also be an online only venture, with little to no chance of ever coming in the form of a real packaged game. …Meaning if you don’t play it now and get in on the hype, you will forever miss out. So go pre-register and skip out on meals so you can afford a guaranteed five-star.
…What else am I supposed to say here? Live service games are risky. If they take off, you can make a billion bucks on something that would struggle to make a tenth of that the kosher way. I hate that it has to be this way, but the whole system of commerce is fucked up. I talked about how difficult it is to make a profitable game, and did a part two on that. The economics of paying people, the deep digital discounts, the 30% platform fee. Just doing basic math makes it hard to understand how any game that sells for under $40 or under 250,000 makes enough money to pay for anything! Despite being an accountant, I just do not get how you can fund a business like that.
When a game is completed and the costs have been all recuperated, I understand how it serves as a nice little bundle of passive income. (Not from a tax perspective, as royalties are earned income.) I just do not get how a game that doesn’t sell millions from the outset makes money. And that frustrates me, as this only goes to support the narrative that games need to go big in order to make any money, or be one person passion projects that sell well by virtue of dirt cheap costs. I just need to know. I need to see your budget breakdowns so I can understand the economics. So I need the balance sheet and income statements for the past three years.
HIRE ME INDIE GAME DEVS! I will do your taxes for peanuts, if not for free! Just let me see how the sausage is made and how the factory stays open! I need to know!
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Bombed
(Natalie Rambles About SNK History, Because Why Not?)
So, this is an odd situation where background is necessary. …Actually, it probably isn’t, but this is my site, and here we do things my way! So deal with it!
SNK is a developer who was on the verge of falling into darkness, becoming a defunct company, a few times now. Throughout the early 1990s, they were a powerhouse developer whose iterative arcade boards and innovations in the world of fighting games made them a staple name in the industry. NeoGeo was their brand, and it was one of the most unique pieces of hardware of the era, as it was an amalgam of an arcade cabinet and a home console. Hardware with removable game cartridges the size of a damn PlayStation that came in two flavors. A home system for the ultra-wealthy and spoiled little brats, and economic arcade cabinets where switching out games took only a few switch flicks and upgrading to a new game only cost a few hundred dollars.
This made them popular with arcade operators, particularly in Japan, where every arcade had oodles of SNK cabinets, loaded up with the latest games each year. But SNK’s real claim to fame was in Latin America, where home consoles were prohibitively expensive, and not really a common thing outside of Brazil’s Master System, and the Gensis, kinda. But SNK arcade cabinets were a routine staple part of any convenience store, loaded up with beautiful (possibly pirated) games that kids could play for pocket change. Series like King of Fighters, with longer matches and extensive cast of characters, made them a great value proposition and an opportunity to make friends.
The absolute mastery of sprite art at SNK allowed them to remain decently competitive throughout the mid-90s, but as 3D became the norm and arcades became places for hardware gimmicks, they began struggling. So, they tried innovating, launching a CD-based console and a 64 bit 3D arcade system. The CD system did decently, while the 3D system was a flop, only being home to 7 games. …That’s better than the SuperGrafx! This was not good for the company, so they tried to diversify. For example, after the initial Japanese Pokémon boom and before release of the WonderSwan, they made a handheld game system in the form of 1998’s Neo Geo Pocket… because why not. They began a crossover campaign with Capcom, developing a scattering of games that… mostly went to benefit Capcom over SNK.
As troubles brewed, the the company declared bankruptcy in 2000, becoming SNK Playmore after a year of reshuffling and licensing products. SNK Playmore wrapped up and discontinued the NeoGeo line of systems and began shifting toward developing games for PS2 and Xbox. Mostly a bunch of re-releases and revisions of existing games, as most of the development staff having left for other companies. New games were developed, but ask any fighting game fan about The King of Fighters Neowave or KOF: Maximum Impact and they’ll probably groan. Meanwhile, games like Metal Slug 6 and The King of Fighters XI were effectively souped up mods of games released a decade ago, released in an era where 2D sprite-based games like this were derided in favor of 3D. They were not retro yet, making SNK seem like a poor company hocking the same old crap.
…Though, some people, like my friend and occasional guest writer, Cassie Wright, consider games like Metal Slug to be a core part of the PS2 library. Why? Because she played it on PS2 with her brothers, so it’s a PS2 game, damn it!
Now I’m wondering how many LatAM folks primarily played KOF on PS2, as the PS2 was huge in LatAM, and most of the KOF games launched on it. That, or the PS1.
SNK eventually began doubling down on quality and core fighting game competencies with The King of Fighters XII (2009) and The King of Fighters XIII (2010). A pair of lushly gorgeous 2D fighters that benefitted from the online era and genre revitalization thanks to Street Fighter IV (2009). Though, SNK was still largely getting by thanks to their back catalog and a glutton of re-releases. …And then they made a pivot to pachislot after they were bought out by Leyou, a Chinese food and technology company that was later acquired by Tencent in 2020.
This could have represented the end of SNK, becoming a husk that gets by on rehashes of old IP and legalized gambling. However, Leyou allowed SNK to build up their development force, make the bold shift into 3D (for real this time), and begin the modern incarnation of SNK. This started with the successful The King of Fighters XIV (2016), and continued with other generally well received titles like Samurai Shodown (2019) and SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy (2018). SNK was back! They were open to the idea of continuing any number of older fighting game IPs, while also loaning out the IPs to basically anyone with money. Which is also how we got the excellent SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (2018) and Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection (2020) by Digital Eclipse.
However, the company underwent yet another change in management in 2020. And the new owner was none other than the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman! By February 2022, his company effectively owned the entirety of SNK, and this unsettled more politically conscious people, as Salman is a brutal authoritarian monarch who kills those who disagree with him or wish to publicize the real truth.
Despite this, SNK fans were still glad that the company was back, expanding, and producing games that appealed to their core audience, such as the one-two punch of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. A revival of the long dormant Fatal Fury series and its beloved spin-off, Garou: Mark of the Wolves (1999). This had the potential to be the best 3D SNK fighting game, a game that took everything the modern KOF team had learned from the past decade. Something that experiment with new ideas, revisited old ideas left by the wayside, and an expanded cast of new and familiar faces. It was all looking great at first, there was some palpable buzz, but then they added a rapist to the game!
I don’t know diddly about football, but even I recognize the name Cristiano “Rapisto” Ronaldo, and he has been the target of controversy for… being a rapist! Also known as not the kind of person you want to be part of anything that’s targeting a niche audience, as niche-likers tend to not like rapists. …Well, sometimes. Other times they elect them as presidents and view them as Jesus Christ III. People are stupid like that.
This soured a vocal portion of people on Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, but SNK continued to market it heavily at both a highly publicized boxing match and… WrestleMania 41. Normally, I would expect this to work, to get people to buy the game and give it a whirl. And from what I have heard, the game is good. Not the best there ever was, but a quality experience on all fronts.
…Despite this, the game was a commercial bomb. With less than 10,000 physical sales in Japan, and a peak Steam concurrent player count of under 5,000 people. And right after it debuted, SNK said that their current CEO would step down. Which could normally just be a standard transition of power, but it’s pretty clearly a punishment for leading the company as they shipped a high cost flop.
It’s kind of amazing that despite featuring international celebrities as playable characters, going to the trouble of licensing their likeness and make full unique move sets for them, that the game managed to do so poorly. However, I think part of this could also be explained by glancing at SteamDB again. SNK is a LatAM staple, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves expensive as hell in LatAM countries, particularly in comparison to the likes of Samurai Shodown (2019).
This dissuades people in countries with lower buying power from playing the game, and without them, you are not going to have people keeping the online community alive. Fighting games live and die based on the ability for poor folks to play them and keep the servers lively. And if you don’t let them into the base game, there won’t be anybody to buy the DLC when it drops.
Now, there are probably more reasons, but I just find this whole turn of events to be so strange. SNK has been around through thick and thin, finally released a game people have been wanting for decades, and nobody is really happy about it.
…Also, the fighting game market is simply oversaturated. Only a small portion of people are willing to learn a fighter, and companies want them to play a fighter for, like, five years nowadays.
Also also, are fighting games effectively live services with a built-in offline mode? ‘Cos I think they are.
Progress Report 2025-05-18
I love it when people put an incredible amount of effort into a fan work, even when they know it is a weird, niche novelty that would only appeal to freaks. I have, of course, watched the original 1986 anime Mario movie, after Kineko Video did their excellent 4K remaster, and the movie is not great on its own. Though, it is a fascinating artifact that tries to make a story out of Mario with only… two games, if you even want to count regular Mario Bros. (1983). It’s a great thing, I love preservation efforts like this, and the folks in charge did a great job.
But what I was not expecting anybody to ever do was to do an 80s style dub of the movie, complete with a new score and reworked, overly Americanized script, to keep with the spirit of vintage Japanimations dubs. The group behind this production offer something that feels like a mixture between a long-lost late 80s budget dub including whoever they could get to voice the characters for a thousand bucks (in 80s money) and a mid 2010s abridged series. Back in the era where people could get good mics for cheap, the art of internet dubs had been well-established, jank was less acceptable, and the jokes were generally funnier, coming from a more experience palate.
It’s an oddball concept, but one that succeeds because of the clear and obvious effort put into this. I can tell this took hundreds of hours to script, voice, mix, score, and edit. There are no signs of cynicism, there’s no snark, and at no point in this film does it seem like the creators weren’t having a blast.
…So, yeah. The Super Mario Bros Super Dub was definitely a fun thing to watch while I was exercising for two nights in a row. Would recommend watching with friends. If you don’t have friends who you could join on a weekly watchathon… start a blog where you talk about niche freak interests, or become chummy with someone who runs a niche blog for freaks! That’s how I got my friends! So that must be how everybody gets friends who they can watch movies with on Discord!
Grief, I am going to be upset if Discord enshittifies. I would genuinely rather have it become a premium social network that costs $5 a month for basic user fee than have its service quality decline. If I ran a country— like Germany— I would nationalize Discord. Though, I’d just nationalize everything! A planned economy is a good economy!
2025-05-11: 5,000 words on the Hundred Line review, because the game is too big for me to NOT draft parts of the review now. Played like three hours or something. I forget.
2025-05-12: Wrote 1,500 words for preamble ramble and 250 words for Giant Bomb bit. 4,600 words for the Hundred Line review, because this is gonna be a 20k word review, easily. I did the general bit first, and then started gushing about the routes I’ve played this far. Also, I spent 3 hours shopping for a laptop, as I’ll need it for a trip later this year. I had one ready to go, but before I could place order, the laptop went out of stock, so I had to buy another one for $200 more. Big frustrations. Should have just gotten one for cheaper back in November, but nooooo! I had to wait for things to get worse. Orz. When will I learn that I regret NOT doing things more than I’ll ever regret DOING them? I spent $15,000 on Colombian pussy, and I don’t regret that. But I do regret not buying a Bitcoin for under $4,000. I would have sold it for $50k, but still, that’d be $46k in raw profit, and I wouldn’t have needed to pay any real tax on it. FUCK!
2025-05-13: I did NOTHING for Natalie.TF stuff today, as I was busy working a full work day and spending my evening slaving over a hot laptop. The Lenovo Legion seems fine, but this girl gets HOT and thankfully it all blows out her ass, away from my hands. Also, good lord is basic-ass Windows a ram hog. I thought I just had some funky settings with my desktop and the RAM usage was inefficient, but this 32 GB machine runs at half capacity with Firefox, MusicBee, and Discord running! I did not prepare for this, so I was not organized in my approach, and my password manager did not like this computer, for some reason. Orz.
2025-05-14: Wrote 2,500 word bit on Kingdom Hearts and B-games. Started TSF Showcase 2025-06, then got bored and went back to Hundred Line.
2025-05-15: Wrote 3,100 words for the Tribe Nine, Persona 5, and Fatal Fury bits. Then went back to Hundred Line because it was late and I was almost done with a route. Then I played for over an hour as I discovered a MINDFUCK!
2025-05-16: Edited this Rundown, realized the state, and decided I needed to focus on TSF Showcase 2025-06. I got another 1,000 words into it, went to shower, and after I was done, I was simply not in the mood. So I went through some of the TSF comics I downloaded over the past few weeks and let clog up my bandwidth. Also sputtered out 1,000 words for next week’s Rundown that may or may not get used. No Hundred Line until I finish drafting TSF Showcase 2025-06.
2025-05-17: FINALLY got a good thing going with TSF Showcase 2025-06, entering THE ZONE. Got 4,200 words written today, almost finishing the first half of the series, but I suspect the ultimate showcase will be just over 10k words, as the second half is, well, worse. I would have written more, but I wanted to take care of things for a client, and the work took me three hours of prime productivity time. So I did not start working on the showcase until after dinner. For those not in the know, Saturdays are my household chore days!
