Gaming History: Publishers

Video game publishers play a large part in the release and marketing of games, and often the development stages also. Good video games publishers will allow the developers to make a game which fits the original vision of the creator whilst appealing to both a core audience and other gamers alike. Bad video games publishers allow budgets, time constraints and obstacles to consistently get in the way of the development and release of video games resulting in a sub-standard product at release which is lucky to make its money back.

For this edition of Gaming History, I'll be looking at 5 good and 5 bad video games publishers, their history and what they've done right and wrong. While I don't think that every game released by these publishers is good or bad, there's an overwhelming majority of titles in their output which swing my opinion eitherway. I'll be starting with the good publishers, so that I can reference things later on which worse publishers could have done.

For most people, Sega is instantly associated with Sonic The Hedgehog. As both their mascot and flagship franchise, the Sonic games of the Mega Drive era received much critical acclaim and are widely regarded by many fans to be the best in the series. Whether or not this is true, Sega published a whole host of other great titles for the system such as Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, Comix Zone, Ristar, Toejam and Earl, Super Fantasy Zone and Vectorman. This wide choice of quality titles for their own system lead to its success alongside the Super Nintendo.

The very first home console I owned was a Sega Dreamcast which helped to shape my views on what video games should be. Particular favourites of mine from this era are arcade titles which had been ported to the Dreamcast such as Crazy Taxi, House Of The Dead 2, Sega Rally Championship 2, 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker, Power Stone and Sega Bass Fishing. All of these titles retained an arcade feel with enough content and gameplay to justify a home release.

(Jet Set Radio for Sega Dreamcast - Published by Sega)

In addition to these arcade style games, the Dreamcast had a strong lineup of other titles such as Shenmue, Sonic Adventuer, Soul Calibur, Phantasy Star Online, Skies of Arcadia and Jet Set Radio, all published by Sega. While the Dreamcast didn't sell nearly as well as the Mega Drive, it seems that mistakes made in the 5th generation of consoles had more to do with this than any failings of the system itself.

In both of the eras I've discussed above, Sega had around 8 studios which produced games for them; the most famous of which being Sonic Team. Spreading their franchises out between teams which worked on every instalment of said franchise meant that games were made by people who already had experience of producing titles in that series, and were attempting to make quality titles to aid sales of Sega hardware.While their output seems to have gone downhill in recent years since they left the console market, I regard the Dreamcast Era and Mega Drive Era as proof that they were once one of the best video game publishers around.

I couldn't reasonably include Sega in a list of greatest video game publishers without talking about Nintendo also. While their approach to franchises and producing games has been markedly different historically, their output has been consistently full of quality and good games. Starting from the NES (released in 1985 in America) which reintroduced the public to quality video games as consumers began to flock back to the video game industry after the crash of 1983, titles such as Super Mario Bros 3, Metroid, Punch-Out!, and Legend Of Zelda gave gamers a taste of new, more detailed and exciting adventures.

The SNES era forced Nintendo into much greater competition with Sega, as the Mega Drive was released first and was quickly gaining a fanbase. Deciding to let their games do the talking for them, the SNES era produced new titles for most of their popular franchises as well as introducing titles such as Earthbound, Donkey Kong Country, Pilotwings, Pokemon, F-Zero, Starwing, and Kirby. These two eras saw the introduction of the majority of Nintendo's most well known franchises.

(Earthbound for SNES, Published by Nintendo)

The N64 era saw many third party publishers preferring Sony's disc based approach to gaming and leaving Nintendo to make games for their own console. Despite this the N64 managed to rack up 32 million sales worldwide on the strength of its gaming lineup. The top 20 best selling Nintendo 64 games were all published by Nintendo themselves, and are all highly rated and acclaimed video games. Without much 3rd party support, it would have been easy for the company to have given up hope of selling many systems, but instead they teamed up with Rare and their internal development teams to produce a stellar lineup for the system.

While gamers can criticise Nintendo all they like for sticking to the same franchises since the SNES era, both the Gamecube and the Wii had a lineup of quality titles which sold systems and held their value much better than many other releases. My respect for Nintendo comes from the fact that it would have been easy for them to release substandard games and resort to a slew of mediocre titles, selling on the weight of their franchise names, but they haven't. Pokemon, Mario and Zelda games of today are just as highly rated as their original counterparts.

Although I haven't played a lot of Capcom's recent titles or indeed a whole lot of Mega Man, their most well known franchise, they've still impressed me enough with other titles to warrant inclusion on this list. The first Capcom game I played was Power Stone for the Dreamcast, a 3D arena fighter where players compete to collect 3 power stones and transform into a far more powerful version of themselves in order to win the fight. There was an anime series based on the game which ran for 5 months after the game's release. What really impressed me about the game was the cast of original characters, exciting gameplay and overall mood of the game.

Before Power Stone even existed, Capcom were well known for their Street Fighter games, Street Fighter II particularly. With many improved versions and updates keeping the game fresh and relevant as a fighter, it enjoyed continued popularity and remains as arguably the most influential fighter of all time. Partially inspired by another Capcom Beat 'em up, Final Fight, Street Fighter II brought bonus stages, combos, special moves and increased arcade popularity to the fighting genre.

(Killer7 for PS2, published by Capcom)

Just after the short Dreamcast era, Capcom began to publish some surreal games which have gained much popularity since their release such as Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Killer7 and the Phoenix Wright series. While they had different roles in the production of all of these games, I'm confident that many of them would not have had as much character and charm without Capcom's involvement in the development and publishing process. In recent years they've continued this sort of ethic somewhat with the release of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for the Nintendo DS.

Today Capcom are best known for their Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter and Mega Man series. All of these have had plenty of installments across many consoles and continue to please fans on the whole, despite a few fans who never seem to be satisfied. Overall Capcom are to thank for inspiring many of the fighting games we see today, as well as releasing fighters such as the Capcom vs SNK series. While they could easily have sat back and focussed on fighters once Street Fighter II was sucessful, gamers were instead given an excellent selection of games spanning many genres.

As the third largest video game publisher in the world behind Activision and EA, Ubisoft have an advantage over a lot of the publishers I've mentioned, however I still regard them fairly highly as a company. Their most beloved game series, Rayman has had many instalments from its inital release in 1995 up to the present day. The most recent game in the series, Rayman Legends had a very good critical reception, as have most of the games in the main series. While the spin-offs from the series haven't faired quite as well, the Rayman series as a whole is enjoyable and innovative.

Ubisoft brought the JRPG Grandia to the PS1 in Europe two years after its release in Japan, which is something I'm particularly grateful to them for, as I've been enjoying it between games for a few months now. Later Ubisoft published quite a few games for the Xbox's target market; (though many of these were on other consoles also) releasing Morrowind in Europe, the Tom Clancy series, the Far Cry series, and XIII, a cel-shaded comic book style first person shooter.

(No More Heroes for Wii, published by Ubisoft)

Ubisoft were also responsible for publishing some enjoyable titles for Nintendo's 7th and 8th generation consoles; No More Heroes and its sequel were enjoyable and innovative titles which challenged the player with becoming the top ranking assassin in a surreal world, with many humourous elements. While Red Steel didn't get the most amazing critical reviews, it made good use of the Wii's motion controls and was a decent launch title for the console. Another launch title published by Ubisoft was ZombiU for the WiiU. Again, the critical consensus was mixed but it's a game that I personally enjoyed.

The best known modern series published by Ubisoft would have to be Assassin's Creed which recently received a highly acclaimed 4th instalment. With titles in the series based in different historical time periods and vast locations to explore, the series has become incredibly popular. Alongside publishing traditional videogames, Ubisoft also released Rocksmith, a guitar hero-esque game which uses real guitars and is able to teach users to play them.

One of the most controversial video game publishers in existence, Rockstar Games are renowned for their Grand Theft Auto series, which tops sales charts for both the PS2 and PS3 with San Andreas and V respectively. The many intriguing and violent instalments of the series have been popular since the release of the original GTA in 1997. Other Rockstar titles which have attracted a lot of controversy are the Manhunt series and Bully, set in a boarding school, though it was far less violent than the two aforementioned games, and had a somewhat misleading title.

Rockstar have also published their fair share of stylised, film-like videogames including Max Payne, Red Dead Revolver and L.A. Noire. Having recently researched and reviewed L.A. Noire, I was surprised to find out how much of the development fell to Rockstar for the game, as Team Bondi who were initially responsible for development made mistakes and bad decisions in addition to treating their staff poorly. While I wasn't truly amazed by the final product, I'm sure it would have been far worse without Rockstar's input.

(GTA V for PS3, published by Rockstar)

Other games of note from Rockstar include a video game adaptation of the 1979 film "The Warriors", the Midnight Club racing series, and strangely "Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis" which is far better than it might seem and has a great 'pick up and play' quality to it, especially on the Wii. There's a good choice of characters to choose from, an in depth tutorial and a good difficulty curve to the career mode.

Overall there's no set formula for being a good video games publisher. Consistently releasing quality titles, in a series or over a range of genres, innovating and pushing the boundaries of video gaming and allowing titles which might not normally be published to be released are just a few of the things which have made the companies on this list great. My own personal criteria for a good publisher seems to be when I begin to notice that a few of the games I like are by the same people.

If you're a regular reader of my review blog then you'll be aware of the Simple Series. If not, then imagine a set of over 200 games for PS1 and PS2, amongst other consoles, produced and developed as cheaply as possible and published by D3 Publisher. With titles such as "The Chess" and "The Pro Wrestling", most of these games were only released in Japan, but around 80 of them made their way to Europe. From what I've played of these games, there's little effort put into the programming, most game modes are basically the same and there's hardly any play value to them.

As the idea of the Simple Series is to sell games at a budget price, having published them cheaply. The early simple series games were based on generic themes such as tennis, chess, or mahjong but extended to slightly more complex themes. The most popular Simple Series game, Earth Defense Force has made its name for being pretty bad but almost playable, spawning an entire series out of the idea.

(MaXXed Out Racing for PS2, published by D3 Publisher)

Outside of the Simple Series, D3 Publisher seems to enjoy acquiring licenses for kids television shows and other popular franchises and publishing rather mediocre if not outright rubbish games based on them. Examples of this include the recent Adventure Time: Explore The Dungeon Because I Don't Know!, Ben 10: Alien Force and Ed, Edd n Eddy: Scam Of The Century. While kids games have never been the most highly rated titles, producing horrific budget titles could put young fans off video games for life.

The worst thing about the budget titles produced by D3 Publisher are that even for the price you pay, they're nowhere near worth it. While I've decided to collect the PS1 and PS2 titles in the series, I'd never pay over £1 for anything in the series and no-one should ever have to. If you're looking for good value games then the pre-owned section is a far better bet.

Next up on the list of my least favourite game publishers are Midas Interactive who have gone through a few name changes including simply "Midas" and "Midas Touch". Their first crime against video games is bringing the Simple Series to the UK, as they publish most of the titles from the series which arrive here. In addition to this Midas publish budget games in the UK much the same way that D3 Publisher do in Japan. Most Midas games are so budget that they don't have a metacritic rating of any sort, and the ones that do are mediocre if not bad.

Of the two games I've reviewed by Midas, (I'm not that keen on picking up any more, outside of the Simple Series) I'm not sure which was worse. The first is X-treme Express, a train racing game which while novel, felt incredibly budget, didn't have much choice of game modes and looked graphically poor. It turns out that racing on straight tracks is just as boring as it'd seem. Players are allowed to switch rails at certain points in the game, but the bad AI and controls make it almost unenjoyable.

(Xtreme Express for PS2, published by Midas Interactive)

The other game; Golden Age Of Racing was a classic style racer featuring cars from the 1960s. Unfortunately turning was impossible at any speed above 40mph, and even then it took considerable effort. In addition to failing at the basics of being a racing game, it suffers from a lot of the same problems as Xtreme Express. I don't hate Midas for being a budget games publisher, but the amount of effort they put into any of their titles seems minimal. None of their titles seem to have much depth or replayability to them either.

Midway began their life by distributing Space Invaders and Pac-Man in the USA. After this they published some arcade titles of their own, which in more recent years have made it onto "Midway Arcade Treasures" collections. Three of them. So, what sort of arcade classics warrant having 3 individual collections of games? There's Defender which technically wasn't even published by Midway, but Williams Electronics who merged with them 8 years after the release of the game. Or maybe Joust, another Williams game? Marble Madness? Paperboy? The only game that I can honestly say is worth playing on any of the Arcade Treasures collections is Smash TV, and once again it's by Williams.

Okay, so most of their claims to fame in the early arcade era were actually by Williams, but there's the Mortal Kombat series? Personally I think Mortal Kombat is a pretty mediocre fighter with poor AI and little appeal outside of the fatalities. Primal Rage is another game which is referred to lovingly by nostalgic fans every now and then, but really isn't much fun at all. In fact I can only think of two Midway games I even enjoyed; Showtime NBA on NBC and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing.

(San Francisco Rush on N64, published by Midway)

The rest of Midway's output seems to be about making updated versions of their arcade "classics". Examples of this are L.A. Rush, an attempt to update the San Francisco Rush series, which included a licensed West Coast Customs and horrible gameplay, Rampage: Total Destruction for the Wii which made some of the worst use of the motion controls that I've seen, and the various updates to the Crus'n series which haven't got any better since the first game.

Overall Midway were the type of publisher that relied on their previous games and franchises to keep their business alive. Unfortunately most of these were aquired when the company merged with Williams, and most of the games that weren't aren't worth playing. Midway went into liquidation in 2009 as they ran out of franchises to produce a new version of. Probably.

Before Activision, third party developers didn't exist. While being the first was quite an achievement at the time, it was bound to happen at some point, and doesn't shield them from criticism, particularly in their present day dealings. It's not until around 1999 that Activision began to do anything of particular note, but around this time they began to acquire developers whose games they were publishing such as Neversoft and the Tony Hawk's Series, Treyarch and Infinity Ward with the Call Of Duty series and Luxoflux and the Vigilante 8 series.

Instead of developing and publishing games themselves, Activision acquired developers and published their games, with much more creative control over the process as they owned the developers. Some of the developers acquired by Activision were only able to produce a few games before going out of business, such as Bizarre Creations (makers of Metropolis Street Racer and Project Gotham Racing), and Luxoflux (who made the True Crime series whilst owned by Activision).

(True Crime New York City for PS2, published by Activison)

Activision's best known game series to date, Call of Duty is also the 8th best selling franchise ever. While its widespread popularity is well documented, so are concerns of unoriginality between instalments of the series and short single player modes which give way to focus on the multiplayer aspects of the series. While the gameplay seems to have kept a consistent quality of sorts, there's not been much progression for a series on it's 10th instalment.

Overall Activision seems to rely on bringing out two new Call Of Duty games a years, buying developers who seem like they might have a good franchise and then letting them go out of business if they don't. While I don't deny that there have been some good Activision published titles over the years, it doesn't make up for or excuse their behaviour in general.

My final publisher on the list of bad ones is possibly the worst. EA Games received the Worst Company in America award for 2012 and 2013, for poor treatment of their staff and customers. Over the years they've produced some enjoyable games, but in a lot of cases they've acquired developers who were already making good games in the same way as Activision and passed the product off as their own.

Some fine examples of this sort of activity are their purchase of Criterion Games, makers of Burnout (one of Need For Speed's biggest rivals), Maxis, makers of the Sims (now EA Maxis, so that EA can get extra credit), BioWare (makers of Mass Effect), and Bullfrog Productions (makers of Populous, who are now defunct, following the EA takeover).

(Dungeon Keeper for Mobile Devices, published by EA)

More recently, EA released a mobile version of the Bullfrog Productions game "Dungeon Keeper", except that the gameplay had been changed to fit a free-to-play model which eventually demands cash out of the player if they wish to make any decent progress. Add this to the fact that EA had fixed the rating system for the app so that users could only give 5 stars and you have something that can hardly be called a game, so much as a pay-to-win experience being released by EA.

Some of EA's biggest moneymakers are their sports games; FIFA, NBA, NHL, and Madden games are all pretty popular and bought by gamers regardless of their similarity to last season's game. In a lot of ways this is worse than my frustrations with Activision for releasing similar Call of Duty games. Personally I'd like to see a definitive version of each sports game released and then have EA wait until there's a large enough technological advance to actually warrant a new game. It's not as if rosters couldn't be updated with simple downloads anyway.

With more and more examples of EA's greed and lack of respect for their consumers being documented in the media in the past few years, gamers have started wonder just how long the company will be able to completely ignore what they want before a complete boycott of their games ensues. The release of Simcity caused some discussion of this, and I'm sure it won't be long until there's more.

A few companies that were close to making these lists were Atlus and Konami, on the good side and Microsoft Studios (purely for ruining Rare) on the bad, but I didn't feel that I had compelling enough reasons to put these companies on here.

All in all there's no recipe for how to be a good publisher, but perhaps there is for being a bad one. Trying to make games as cheaply as possible to sell at a budget price hardly ever produces satisfying results, if at all. Attempting to cash in on past successes that we're particularly good to start with won't get you very far either, and acquiring any studio that is making a sucessful game so that you can be on the publishing credits, only to continue the series by keeping everything exactly the same for 10+ instalments is probably the worst publishing sin of all.