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Recently Square Enix President, Yosuke Matsuda has been in the news after explaining his rule for judging new IP/franchises. In an interview with Weekly Famitsu the publisher head explained that he believes that a new franchise needs at least three games before its success can be judged reasonably.
“Looking retrospectively at the gaming industry, many games take off or get their big break at their third title”, it is certainly an interesting view-point and it holds up in some cases, more recently we saw the release of The Witcher 3, which went on to become more successful than the first two games in the series very quickly.
“But regardless, you need at least three games before you can tell whether an IP is going to be really successful or not. I call this my ‘Law of Third Titles. That’s why for the first and second games, you experiment to a degree where you can still be flexible, and if the series has grown enough to be able to expect a big hit for the third game, you expand the scale. If the third title is successful then all is well.”
In all, the interview, which was translated by Kotaku, gives us some interesting insight in to how Square Enix approach new series behind the scenes. Going by this rule, we can expect Square Enix to be paying close attention to Just Cause 3, which is in the works over at Avalanche Studios, in addition to Kingdom Hearts 3, which has been in development on and off for over ten years.
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KitGuru Says: It is always interesting to hear the view points of the veterans in the video game industry. Do you guys think that it can take three games for a new game series to really prove itself? Obviously there are always exceptions to things like this.
But let’s talk about thirds that killed their franchises! Terminator 3, Mass Effect 3, Alien 3, Dino Crisis 3, and the list can probably go on for a while. Is that also a law of thirds? As in, don’t make them when your franchise is already a great succes?
On the other hand, plenty of thirds were better than the crappy sequels, such as BioShock.
saying alien 3 and mass effect 3 killed the series goes way to far, but i agree with the others. closer to home would be ffxiii-3, which was a cluster**** of a series all together.
also, i thought bioshock 3 was generally considered the worst out of them all.
Infinite was a great game, but it wasn’t as intelligent as 2. This is exactly the sort of thing that he was talking about. With 1 and 2 they had experimentation: 2 pushed a really intelligent story that contained an advanced and abstracted socio-political story. Most people didn’t like it much. So with Infinite they went with the same formula as 1, with the successful points of 2, and expanded it.
Stop making garbage and the company will do better. Stop spending millions on graphics and marketing trying to convince people that Lightning is their lord and savior. Start localizing stuff that there’s demand for.
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