/vr/ - Retro Games

Too much market division maybe? US and Japan were two large, strong economies that were essentially monolingual, and you consistently had one really obvious platform winner in the market (ie. NES, SNES). Europe was more divided in language and platforms, as I understand it, and maybe had less money to throw around at games, and so the market didn't manage to grow from funding being chucked at it.

I admit to not knowing a lot about the EU games market in the day though, so my info might not be accurate, but I feel like it's a reasonable explanation.

Several reasons, the most obvious was that it's a fragmented continent with 20+ languages and a lot of different HDI development levels and cultural differences. Also half of Europe was still under the communist boot until 1990. It helped a good deal that Japan and the US are a single country/language/market.

>>5165884
because the good guys lost WW2

When you started getting into the VGA PC era in the 90s, the quality of European games improved a lot but for the 8 and 16-bit eras things were pretty dire.

>>5165894
>Also half of Europe was still under the communist boot until 1990

I know it's not retro, but I'm glad one of my favorite developers, CD Projekt Red, was able to rise out of the former Iron Curtain.

>>5165894
>Also half of Europe was still under the communist boot until 1990
This reminds me of a video I saw a while back looking at game devs in east Germany, then looking at it in a united Germany. How to this day the majority of new game development studios all appear in west Germany.

because we all speak different languages american troglodyte

>>5166046
Then sell the games to americans :^)

I assume it just has to do with global trade in general. The economies of the US, Canada, Japan, England, Germany, and France have always been compatible — I would assume if you were keeping score, those were probably the top 6 countries for game development in the retro era. The European side of that partnership is just smaller, in point of fact.

Because you can't rule the roost in any business when you take 20 weeks vacation a year.

>>5166046
So nations with the top economies in the world and populations over 30 million can't scrap together a few studios?

Japan is a tiny island nation and they did it.

>>5166406
Japan has been a top 3 economy in the world for a long time.

>>5165884
50hz is shit, no one wants to play or make games with that

>This is getting serious replies at all
Daily reminder you are all helping OP make /vr/ worse

>>5167004
Says the anime fag.

>>5167276

>>5167004
>>5167362
Thanks for your quality contributions to the board.

>>5165884
Britain's vidya output was mega, and while France put in some work occasionally too, the rest of Johnny Foreigner was too poor, ignorant, or lazy to contribute.

>>5166416
Was.

>>5165884
>powerhouse of game development like the United States
wat

White Europeans have never been capable of creating worthwhile cultural artifacts, so it shouldn't surprise you much.

>>5167552

>>5166002
how can a developer be your favourite when theyve only made one series lol

the language reaon is valid. what is also valid is that most markets only catered to themselves because of cultural reasons. sim games were huge in germany, and some of the bigger and best ones came from germany too. settlers, anno, patrician,...

>>5167539
western games do very well with westerners. Isn’t GTA5 the best selling entertainment media of all time beating any movie or music album? Also red dead 2 had best opening weekend of any entertainment media ever. I’d say that’s pretty successful.

>>5167574
GTA5 is british, anon...

>>5165884
Because they failed to grasp the basics of game design and they failed to notice and incorporate innovations that were happening in other parts of the world.
The C64 had some games with incredible ideas and really unique concepts that never took off and that's a giant shame, but after that in the 16bit era you just had people like manfred trenz pumping out utter trash.

>>5165884
*blocks path*

>>5167764

>>5165884

The americans only produced laughable shit during that era.

>>5167780
Ubisoft has always been shit though

>>5167852
Some things never change.

>>5165884
It depends. Yeah, from inside the US bubble it might have looked like what you described. But I made different and quite opposite experiences.

Most of the stuff I played during the 90s (not the 80s since I couldn't access a C64 or Amiga from behind the iron curtain and only played on the only east german home computer KC85 or the Polyplay Arcade machine) was almost exclusively european stuff. Either british, french or german games and there where hardly any US-made games among them. I started with the usual games on tapes on the C64 (at first using an old east german B/W TV-Set with a dying phophor layer) until I got a floppy drive. Later followed an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 1200 that I unironicaly used until 2008.

I hardly felt the need to buy a console, since the european marked was booming like crazy with a high output of titles (yes, there were also some stinkers among them) on oh so many platforms (not just Nintendo, Sega and PC). But of course I only used the aforementioned systems. My first console was the Sega GameGear but I only bought very few games for it and wasn't impressed at all, since console gaming was just so fucking expensive, while the home computer games were just much cheaper and most of the time much more complex.

So I pretty much held onto my home computers and furthermore ignored all consoles until the PS1 came out (but even the PS1 I bought pretty late in it's lifespan). Yeah, the console games from japan and the USA looked nice in magazines, but were just too expensive and quite frankly shallow compared to the games I was used to play IMO.

Same goes for computer gaming. I only played and productively used the C64 and the Amigas during the 90's... well my A1200 I used well into the 2010's and never owned a Windows PC. In 2008 I switched from an unaccelerated A1200 (expanded only with CD-ROM, HDD and extra RAM) to a Mac Book, despite also being very critical about Apple stuff.

>>5165884
Europe was a mess in 80's and 90's. And also bullshit censor and copyright laws.

>>5165884
To be fair, Rare did come out of Britain.

>>5168775
This anon actually likes games. And he's right, console games have always been watered down set the baby in front of the tv software.

A big part of it had to do with PC gaming being a lot more mainstream in Europe in the 80s than it was in the west, so that's what most European developers were focusing on. That meant the vast majority of them never developed any real overseas popularity and most of them died out. The reason Rareware ended up so prominent is because they were smart and muscled their way into making console games early on.

>>5166406
>tiny island nation
>126 million
American education, everyone.
Also, workforce costs much more in Europe, as it did back in the day.

>>5168842
O B S E S S E D

>>5165884
they churned out "Speccy" games by the thousands. But not even 1/100th of those hold up today

>>5165893
This and an iron curtain.

>>5165884
over reliance on pharmaceutical drugs for psychological illness

>>5168837
>sticking with consoles
>"smart"

>>5169507
The majority of those small European studios were the 1980s equivalent of modern indie developers. They'd program some shit in their garage, send it to a publisher, and the publisher would publish it for a quick buck. Some got big enough to form something resembling a legitimate studio. The issue they faced going into the 90s was that technology was advancing to the point where that model was getting harder and harder to sustain, until the vast majority of them were either crushed or absorbed into bigger companies. The same thing happened here in the states, but it was far more noticeable in Europe.

>>5165884
>what is grand theft auto
>what is sensible world of soccer
>what is elite
>what is ultimate play the game / rare
three of the most influential games ever made plus one of the most influential developers ever. all Amerifats have got is Doom

>>5169897
Based and redpilled

>>5169897
>all Amerifats have got is Doom
Ad Sierra and LucasArts and Microprose and countless other major devs who pioneered PC gaming.

>>5169867
It happened earlier in the US, mostly by the mid to late 80s. Computer gaming was getting higher budget and less "bedroom coder" by the time PCs were becoming dominant. Probably because games were moving towards bigger multiload disk stuff.

>>5170149
Yeah, they were still selling Commodore 64s in Europe for years after they were discontinued in the states. It and the ZX Spectrum lingered until the mid-90s, because the PC gaming scene was so much bigger over there.

>>5170156
>Yeah, they were still selling Commodore 64s in Europe for years after they were discontinued in the states
I'm pretty sure they sold new ones in the US up to at least 91-92. That was only 2-3 years before Commodore folded.

>>5170158
Wiki has a pretty good summary of the thing's last few years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#1988%E2%80%931994

You'd be shocked at just how long a lot of 8-bit systems lasted.

>Apple II--discontinued 1993
>C64--discontinued 1994 (only Commodore's bankruptcy that spring finally put it to rest)
>ZX Spectrum--discontinued 1992
>Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit computers--discontinued 1992
>Intellivision--discontinued 1992

In a lot of cases we're talking machines released in the 70s and still going until Clinton was president.

>>5169897
Reminder Tomb Raider was a thing and it's British.

>>5170142
>And Sierra and LucasArts and Microprose
... who folded pretty much the moment /vr/ era ended. Well, LucasArt stayed, but was making Star Wars and nothing else.

>>5165893
Language barrier was real. CD Projekt literally started as a translation company, because two pirates realised there are two selling points for games in Poland: if they are on CD, you can have a single disc with dozens of games AND if they are in Polish, everyone is going to buy them, regardless of what they are, simply because there is close to no language competency (it was early 90s and speaking B1 English was considered a feat worth hiring you for manager of a company). They quickly turned their business into legit one and started just making translations.
Effect? All the games they've released in the initial stages of their company are all-time classics in Poland, because they made sure to give them quality translations and using high-profile actors for voice-acting. Thus Polish /vr/ boils down to "garage games" made by tiny-ass studios, predominately for Amiga, and everything that CDP published up until '03 or so (being former commie nation, our /vr/ lasted a bit longer, due to simple lag of releases and catch-up period). All the game-dev companies simply folded, because it was either bunch of hobbists and/or enthusiasts OR a garage business of some dude who invested into computers in early 90s and then simply went out of it once there was no more room for Amiga and it was impossible to ask kids from the next street to write you a new game.

>>5170351
And just from top of my head:
One of the most successful Polish games of the 90s, Polanie (essentially a Warcraft 2 clone, but about unification of Polish tribes in 9th century), was made by bunch of IT students as a party joke that suddenly got serious when they sit down and started to code it. And it sold "whooping" amount of copies, too: slightly above 5 thousands.
Kupiec, an (in)famous trading game, started out as a C64 game made for fun and to test randomised outcomes, but was picked up by the "big" company (a literal garage business) that got then constantly re-released on different platforms. Final turn-out of sales for C64, Amiga and PC was somewhere around 20 thousands and it was MASSIVE and considered sensational. The game looks like pic related.
And so on and forth. But the main obstacles were three-fold. On one hand, it was all "indie dev" and pretty much made for shit and giggles by people who were toying with their coding skills, which meant there was pretty low technological "glass ceiling" for those games. On the other hand, there was the obvious issue of piracy, that meant the game might sold 5k copies, but half of the country played it anyway. It was simply pointless to invest any sort of money into developing "serious" games, because they were going to get pirated anyway. And finally, the "peak" of computerisation in Poland happend around '97-'98. That was about the period where computers stopped being this expensive gadget only the rich could afford and hobbists knew how to use, but actual average family could (and did) buy one. So by that time, developing games in indie dev model was pretty much impossible anyway, because they would have to compete with mid and big-sized studios with their trash games, the only advantage being lack of language barrier. Which by the late 90s was less and less of an issue anyway.

>>5165893
>>5170351
>>5170368

Thanks for the insight, friends. I am too young to remember the USSR being an active country, and so sometimes I also forget about the Wall. Yeah, this all makes a lot of sense.

From 5th gen onwards they dropped that additude and surpassed most American devs.