Tag: Tale of Tales

“F*** Gamers” Developer Tale of Tales Returns To Game Development


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Following their high profile meltdown last year, in which Tale of Tales developers Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey quit the industry, blamed gamers for the failure of their game Sunset, and left with the message “FUCK GAMES! FUCK GAMERS! FUCK THE GAME INDUSTRY!” along with an expression of hope that gamers as a concept would die in agony, has returned to making video games. While the developer initially left in a huff, owing to the fact that Sunset barely sold any copies, the alleged failure of Leigh Alexander to properly market the title, and that the game was derided and quickly turned into a meme over situations including one where the player is told to remove “upsetting books” including Sun Tzu The Art of War, they have returned. According to posts on Twitter, everything they said about gamers was in jest.

They were joking, they swear, but they still hate you.

Their next title, The Endless Forest: Second Decade, has raised more than €5 thousand on Indiegogo since its launch from 144 people, with at least €1,800 of that coming from six backers. The game recreates The Endless Forest, a title that Tale of Tales refers to as a “social screensaver,” and one that will likely go over as well with gamers as Sunset did due to its lack of chat, quests, tasks, puzzles, story, or meaningful gameplay.

The Endless Forest is a relaxing multiplayer online game where everyone plays a deer. Instead of chatting, questing or killing, people play with each other creatively in a virtual forest filled with magical surprises. The current version of the game has been going strong for 10 years with 170,000 registered players but we haven’t been able to expand it because its technology is outdated. Now we want to continue the endless growth that we have always envisioned for this project .

Tale of Tales is hoping to raise €40,000 to bring The Endless Forest up to speed.

[Column] Jack Thompson’s Prodigies Will Meet The Same Fate


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It’s been seven years since Jack Thompson was pulled from the spotlight in disgrace, and his absence has created something of a power struggle among his unofficial prodigies, those who wish to continue his crusade against the evils of video games and gamers everywhere. But anyone stepping up to the plate to bat for Jack should be well aware of a very serious reality: You’ll probably end up just as he did.

If you’re already familiar with Thompson, feel free to skip this paragraph. For everyone else, a brief history: Jack Thompson is an ex-lawyer most famous for his crusade against video games, linking violent games to killing sprees and demanding that the industry (both developers and retailers) be held responsible for breeding murderers.

Jack Thompson was disbarred in 2008 over a set of very serious allegations, including making false statements to the court, sending hundreds of harassing pages to people involved in his lawsuits and targeting individuals not involved in the case including a state representative, and making accusations of corruption toward a sitting judge. Like his prodigies, when Thompson failed to gain any ground on the gaming industry, his tactics transitioned over time to harassment, bullying, and threats, ending his career and what credibility he had maintained in the process.

For Michael Samyn of Tale of Tales, the story is a little different, but the outcome is just the same. In a blog on Gamasutra titled Violence Begets Violence, Samyn continues his recent attack on gamers as “belligerent hooligans.” If you are unfamiliar with Samyn or Tale of Tales, odds are you’re wondering what spurred his contempt for the industry.

“We don’t need theories about the correlation between violent games and violent behavior.”
-Michael Samyn

Samyn is right, we don’t need theories. Multiple long term studies have been conducted over the years and have come to the same conclusion: There is no correlation between violent games and violent behavior. There are no facts presented in the blog to support Samyn’s case, but that is par for the course in a post that could easily be confused for Jack Thompson’s writing: Unsupported vitriol, black and white accusations, against gamers and game developers. Samyn even concludes by blaming the industry for shootings and harassment.

A game developer who claims to be a peaceful tolerant person while producing murder simulators is a hypocrite. I will not accuse them of being directly responsible for mass shootings and online harassment. But they are beyond a doubt guilty of neglecting to prevent such things.

So why the contempt? Tale of Tales recently dropped out of the gaming industry after their most recent venture Sunset failed commercially, selling a total of four thousand copies. Rather than quietly fading from the view of the community that had soundly shown its lack of interest in their products, ToT went on the offensive with a series of vitriolic, vulgar tweets, against gamers and the gaming industry.

And it isn’t hard to see why they would be angry: Tale of Tales wanted to be paid to make games that, as evidenced by their sales, nobody wanted to play. With gamers roundly rejecting the titles as viable products, Tale of Tales had been relying on grants from the Belgian government for most of its existence to keep them afloat. With government grants drying up due to financial troubles in Europe, ToT turned back to the gaming industry who once again responded with a flat rejection.

Naturally, ToT has gone on the Twitter record to decry the evils of capitalism, the system that refused to just hand them money to sit around making games for an industry whose intelligence and culture they’ve professed to not have much faith in. Michael Samyn is willing to talk about how much he hates the gaming industry, but only if you’re willing to pay him. As of this publishing, only 74 people have taken his offer. One would hope that with $405 per article funding his ventures, that Samyn could afford to do some fact checking.

I’ll end this column with a note: This is the last time MMO Fallout space will be used to discuss Tale of Tales, its products, Michael Samyn, or Auriea Harvey. Like Thompson’s post-law diatribe, covering Samyn’s bitterness toward the industry that rejected him would only serve to offer more attention to someone desperately trying to remain relevant.

[Column] Gamers Never Rejected “Art Games”


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Let me just start by saying that I hate the premise of this article. Not because of the ideas within, but as a gamer who has spent the better part of the past ten years, if longer, trying to make the argument that video games are indeed art, when not pushing against the idea that they make people violent.

So if we, as gamers, argue that all games are art, it leads to an important question: What does that make an “art game?” Ask around and you’ll likely hear a pretty consistent answer: A game with no combat, minimal interactivity, created by an independent art house developer trying to convey a personal message/experience. If I had my way, ‘art game’ would be a redundant term, but I can’t always have my way.

If you haven’t realized by now, this is mostly set around the recent failure of Tale of Tales and their game Sunset. I’m well aware of the developer’s response and demonization of the industry, gamers, and capitalism, and their overall attitude following their departure from the gaming scene. I touch on that near the end.

One idea I’ve seen pushed by the supporters of Sunset is that its failure is proof that the gaming industry needs to “grow up” and “mature” to join the other mediums, a fallacy if I’ve ever seen one. What other mediums? Television? Where the highest rated cable shows for 2014 were Game of Thrones, Major Crimes, sports, Nascar, and reality shows? Or film, where eight of the top ten grossing films of last year were riddled with sex and violence? Or perhaps in novels, where the best-selling list is dominated by the likes of 50 Shades, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and Bill O’Reilly?

If you want to put gaming on the same pedestal as other mediums of art, it holds up pretty well. Even the artistic side of gaming matches up against the other genres. A few big successes, a bunch of smaller successes, and a whole lot of failures. The industry is saturated on all levels, and there isn’t enough consumer time and money to go around when just about anyone can release a game and hundreds of new titles add to the clutter on Steam on a weekly basis.

But the thing about Sunset is that the more we try to rationalize why the game failed, the closer we should be getting to the realization that sometimes success or failure can’t be explained. Sunset was focus tested, marketed to specific groups, and at the end of the day it sold 4,000 copies and knocked its developer out of the gaming industry. Sometimes you can do everything right and still wind up failing. The game was never going to sell millions of copies and I doubt that Tale of Tales expected it to.

To say that games like Sunset have no place in the genre is a farce, full of condescension from the gamers claiming to speak for the market and from those on the outside talking down to the community like we’re all a bunch of uncultured morons. The idea that a walking simulator is doomed to failure doesn’t hold water in a reality where games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Ether One have made a comfortable place for themselves. The industry is massive, it outperforms Hollywood, and as with film the people who call themselves gamers aren’t a hive mind that agree on everything (and often don’t seem to agree on anything).

If the gaming industry was truly populated by dullards banging controllers, we wouldn’t see unconventional titles that manage to grab hold and survive despite the hailstorm of “I don’t know what people see in this.” Games like Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, and Gone Home attract substantial audiences and loyal followings. The horror genre has seen an entire subsection of games built on the idea of not being able to fight back (Amnesia, Alien: Isolation, Outlast, etc), and Telltale has managed to grow an empire on the strategy of episodic gaming and powerful narratives that make us feel our feels.

The evidence of diversity in the gaming community is no more obvious than when you consider that the anti-indie sentiment has been able to grow alongside animosity towards AAA developers. More and more, people turn toward the indie community as a source of content that is deemed too risky or not profitable enough for big publishers who seem all too concerned with making the same low risk cookie cutter games year after year. People are getting tired of AAA gaming pushing out titles at premium prices with content slashed to sell at a later date, for a title that despite its massive budget can’t even make it out the door without game breaking issues.

On the other hand, people are getting really sick of the shenanigans coming from the indie development scene, between the unprofessional behavior of certain developers either trolling, constantly arguing, or throwing temper tantrums whenever someone responds negatively to their game, to the entitled reaction from other developers and their blogger friends when their games fail in the market. People who think that consumers have an obligation to throw money at them because they made a thing, and inevitably when the game fails the blame is put on the market, with the implied or explicit reason being that gamers are too uncultured/stupid to know what they want.

One of the earliest popular Youtube videos was from a vlogger Chris Crocker going on a rant about people criticizing Britney Spears, culminating to one point in the video where he says “you’re lucky she even performs for you bastards.” This is a mentality that I see a lot in gaming, both in the indie and AAA field from producers and customers. That we, the consumer, should just shut up, pay up, and be grateful that we get anything at all, and just be happy that the content creators are willing to grace us with their presence and work.

To say that Sunset failed because its genre has no place in the industry is inaccurate, as is saying that it failed because gamers don’t support indie devs. At the end of the day, it didn’t sell, but its failure isn’t indicative of a greater problem in the industry, it shouldn’t have PC gamers worried as some publications have stated, and it shouldn’t put off other people who might be interested in trying their hand in creating products. It didn’t sell and the blame definitely doesn’t fall on the consumer.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the subject.