Two Kinds of Older Gaming Brands

Coming up with this thumbnail was harder than you would thought.

One of the subjects related to gaming industry that kind of bothered me recently is the matter of developers, publishers and their "legitimacy". What do I mean by that? Well, often you can see various arguments about this that studio "X" isn't the same anymore or "Y" is just a pretended to the name they're carrying. In the meantime, there're cases where a new company uses an older brand and some people believing that "old guard is back".

Sometimes it gets as confusing as a usage of terms like "remaster" in gaming media and general conversations. Similarly to re-releases, not everyone seems to really bother with terminology all that much. Although I think that getting it right can be as (if not even more) important than doing the same for aforementioned newer version of older games. That is the topic I decided to explore this time around.

Brand Importance.

Why is it even important in this case? It's about marketing, brand recognition and its legacy, really. The age of certain company and their actions in the industry shape the way how gamers (or consumer) view and engage with them in various ways, most obvious of which is buying their old & new titles. In other words, most people are more likely to purchase a game from already established company with familiar name and certain reputation as a safest option.

To be fair, its not as straightforward nowadays due to grow of "indie scene" in the industry, but I think you get what I mean. I think its fair to assume that modern person who just got into video games is more likely to purchase Minecraft since it's a popular game owned by Microsoft instead of some indie and/or niche titles. More proper and easier example would likely to be mentioning the likes of Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft. Many people nowadays just boycott those companies out of principle after being disappointed and disgusted by either their business practices and recent scandals involving misconduct.

Although you can definitely argue how much affect it actually has on overall sales of their recent products since most casuals players of Call of Duty or FIFA have no idea about negative reputation that companies like Electronic Arts carry nowadays since their communication with the gaming world is limited to just playing games on weekends. All they know is that "this is a long-time developer/publisher with an established series".

What about those "in the know" though? We need to go back to my "remaster" analogy: its inconsistent and all over the place. People can moan about Raven Software being trapped in "Call of Duty mines" while saying that id Software or Blizzard Entertainment aren't the same companies because "all OG members left ages ago". In some cases, statements like that are wrong because people just don't really remember all the people who work there and I'm guilty of that myself. Mostly because modern developer and publisher team are just massive and I would argue that it's not even required for average person to keep in their head every name there is. You can properly pay respects to them in other ways.

Legacy Verification.

However, my perspective on the matter can actually be as confusing due to its seeming complexity and I'll try my best to explain my view in most transparent matter. Because the truth is, there're two rights answers that might contradict with each other. I believe that its best to acknowledge both the people who were involved with specific projects or company at the time while also treating the company itself as its own timeless entity based on "legal factor", by which I mean when said company was founded and how long it lived.

This principle somewhat works best when we talk about Blizzard, id Software and Looking Glass Studios, even though the latter sadly no longer exists. While people admire the contributions of John Carmack, Chris Metzen and Warren Spector, they also credit the company as a whole. Max Payne and Duke Nukem might be owned by Rockstar and Gearbox respectively, but people still associate those series with Remedy and 3D Realms. Why? Because these companies are still around since at least 90s and they can often outlive individuals, which is just a sad truth of our world.

Nostalgia factor also plays an important role for specific companies, not just games. Most recent example that comes to my mind is Apogee Entertainment, which is a new company that existed as far back as 2008 when Terry Nagy bought Apogee brand from since company used the name 3D Realms for many years. Now they portray themselves as "the Apogee" since Scott Miller is now involved with them and carried over several classic titles from original company. As I noted in one of my "lame posts", this is just a marketing stunt. Does it keep raising my eyebrows? Sure, they still give off some odd vibes to me. However, as I've mentioned before, I don't think there's much reason to suspect anything. Not yet, at least. Although I'm not really keeping up with them, so... Who really knows.

An undoubtably awful example of "imposter company" would, of course, by current Atari. Nobody really likes Infogrames that adopted classic label, especially after them focusing on blockchain stuff after their restructure... their intent to buy MobyGames actually kind of worries me since I'm getting NintendoAge situation I learned about in Karl Jobst's investigation of video game collection bubble. Anyway, some of you also can bring up Konami, but its still the same company from all those years ago: it just fallen from grace.

Conclusion.

You know, this is definitely too confusing and I didn't make it any better. At the end of a day, I suppose it is a double-edged sword. While it can be technically misleading when a new company uses an already established brand and intellectual properties to gain artificial credibility and popularity in gaming industry, there's nothing illegal in here. Ownership of classic titles, name and/or presence of known figures in your company doesn't automatically transform it into said legacy developer and/or published. That's just not how that works. You have to earn such status, which (I would argue) becomes more difficult after inheriting a household name since you must do it justice.

While I encourage to acknowledge company as separate entity from those who once were part of them, I think that its more right and fair to acknowledge all the developers on game-by-game basis. It doesn't seem fair to credit just one person for success of a classic title or publisher who distributed them, no matter how important their role was, when in fact it involved multiple people to reach end results. Unless one person solely handled both full developement and publishing duties, which is pretty damn impressive on itself. Otherwise, it's always a team effort and we should always remember that. Praise designers, artists, compossers, programmers and even testers. All of them, for all the good work.