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News of Disgaea smartphone RPG reveals NIS is in financial hot water; not able to pay employees.
- Thread starter Sagadego17
- Start date
Sure, if you ignore that they haven't been terribly successful for quite some time; this was just the straw that broke its back.
https://www.dualshockers.com/disgaea-nis-financial-trouble/
I remember a so called NIS leaker/employee on 4chan a while ago mentioned that the mobile game was just a massive money suck and they were focusing on recouping the losses. Guess that might have been true.
Yup it was the mobile game.
I remember a so called NIS leaker/employee on 4chan a while ago mentioned that the mobile game was just a massive money suck and they were focusing on recouping the losses. Guess that might have been true.
That's a fair point, but it's still a pretty bad look if they have managed to scrape by on their own and project that sinks them is the one where they partnered with one of the biggest companies in the industry who is currently making money hand over fist.
I don't blame them, this game had huge success written all over it before launch.
I doubt anyone has played it here, but I'm now wondering if Forward Works is still even involve in the project. Maybe, they left early in and left NIS with all the incomplete work. It was supposed to be a collaboration work, but we still hadn't heard anything from FW.
Thank you, that is good info to have, but by looking in there I'm now reminded by how many failures FW has had over these last couple of years with their only mild success coming from the Everybody's Golf mobile game.
Also of note the Twitter account for Eshigami No Kizuna(the Compile Heart/Tezuka game) hasn't tweeted anything since the end of April after regularly tweets the last few months from what I can tell.
To be entirely fair, Forward Works is not Sony specifically, it's a subsidiary of Sony that seems to be a pretty terrible company. Sony proper is not just going to funnel gigantic amounts of money into a mobile-game subsidiary to rescue flagging contract jobs with minor third party studios.
Point the blame where it belongs: at Forward Works for being what appears to be a Johnny-Come-Lately of a company that popped up when the mobile game fad was at its peak and was either too unprepared or too incompetent to manage the myriad projects it involved itself in. But expecting SCEJ to swoop in and rescue these studios was always going to be a fool's dream.
I don't think it's right to disassociate them too much though. Forwardworks is an extension to SIE(J), not just on the basis of being a subsidiary but the fact that all of their protects have either been SIE IPs, cross-media projects(working with other parts of Sony) or partnerships with third parties that definitely wouldn't exist if they weren't part of SIE.
Forwardworks may have helped NIS bungle their mobile Disgaea game, but NIS's actions had been leading in this financial direction for years.
1 and 2 are already there. As are a bunch of other PS2 era NIS (Phantom Brave, Makai Kingsom, etc). I keep seeing folks saying they should put their back catalogue on Steam, but like yeah, they've already tried that :P
Disgaea 1 released on PS4, PC Switch as a sort of remake in 5s engine (but with no new content) last year, and did not do well, at least in Japan. It was crazy expensive overseas too, so I doubt it was saved by the West again, but Anihawk can speak more definitively towards that.
Well, he tweeted a recent one, so I thought he obtained it first, but meh.
Exactly. ForwardWorks is certainly one of the factors that put NIS in this position, but NIS built this house themselves. All ForwardWorks did was knock down the wrong wall while trying to add an extension.
sorry if my post sounded like porting their games to PC would somehow "save" them. I just wish they would port their games because i never finished disgaea 3 and 4 because I barely play consoles anymore. I haven't ever play D2. Should NIS release those to steam i'd buy them day 1 or in their first sale (depending when they launched them).
I played disgaea 5 in the PC and it was an amazing experience - instant loadings, console controls, great resolution and very stable framerate. I'd be up for soul nomad and the rest of the disgaea series. i don't want to buy a PS3 to play those games again nor would i import disgaea for vita. I can't also buy digital games for PS vita because there is no way for me to know the language of a game before buying it. If the game has non english languages then i can't understand it, the main problem is that sony will not refund nor have any way to give me access to the english version of the game.
In short it is essentially impossible for me to play disgaea unless I either risk money or pay a "lot" for the games/hardware.
This is really such an awful situation.
Before anything, I hope those workers get the pay they deserved as soon as possible, and if anything were to happen to the company, they that they get new positions as soon as possible.
Afterward, I would hope that the IPs for NIS stay afloat somehow. The Prinnyverse of La Pucelle, Disgaea, Soul Nomad, Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave, and so on, is so great. It really is upsetting that NIS has done nothing with most of these IPs for almost a decade, but then again, that sentence could be said for a lot of companies these days.
Before anything, I hope those workers get the pay they deserved as soon as possible, and if anything were to happen to the company, they that they get new positions as soon as possible.
Afterward, I would hope that the IPs for NIS stay afloat somehow. The Prinnyverse of La Pucelle, Disgaea, Soul Nomad, Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave, and so on, is so great. It really is upsetting that NIS has done nothing with most of these IPs for almost a decade, but then again, that sentence could be said for a lot of companies these days.
never on era
but i hope NISA is gonna be fine, and the NIS peeps can find other jobs.
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Except for the many times ERA has shat on Sony but that doesn't count right?
That's not uncommon though. If you look at the release pipeline of many publishers, it's on those realms of releases. Only huge AAA publishers of the west maybe with the exception of Ubisoft don't have such quantity of releases per year.
Which makes me wonder why Spike Chunsoft new publishing arm on america don't localize the games from Kadokawa games, considering that they already do that for Mages games.
i don't think kadokawa wants spike chunsoft to get their titles. i don't believe dwango group and kadokawa get along.
maybe they get along outside the games division. i don't know. they might start working together soon, but i doubt spike chunsoft gets the next from software game for instance.
Shame this is happening. Hope the workers get paid soon. NIS are going the way of TellTale by the sounds of it. Very messy affair and a great shame.
After FFXII, Yasumi Matsuno went back to Square temporarily to work on the Tactics Ogre Remake on PSP and the FFXIV Ivalice part of the latest expansion.
After FFXII, Yasumi Matsuno went back to Square temporarily to work on the Tactics Ogre Remake on PSP and the FFXIV Ivalice part of the latest expansion.
Kadokawa is the parent company of Dwango since february. Before that, both companies were a subsidiary of Kadokawa Dwango.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/ne...eps-down-as-kadokawa-dwango-president/.143351
Well, that's because aside from owning From Software, Kadokawa don't do too much to the company. Their gaming division which is Kadokawa Games don't even get involved with it.
There's 4 companies with gaming bussiness on the Kadokawa Group now (Kadokawa Games, From Software, Mages/5pb and Spike Chunsoft) and only the last two have efforts together, which is with the american arm of SC localizing and publishing mages games here.
This really bums me out. While I've never been able to get into Disgaia personally I've always loved the community around it and the craziness of the games. Hope the devs get taken care of :(
NIS has had it rough for most of the time since the the PS2 ended, with blips of success. The PS3 era wasn't great for Japanese sales especially at the beginning and when the PSP wound down the Vita did not really replace it by any means, but the titles kept flowing that way and NIS were prolific to say the least during the last decade.
I'm pretty sure the Sony thing is just an excuse. Fact of the matter is they put out too much, too fast, and none of it sold.
Nah, ForwardWorks was totally inept launching the game and it seeped into NIS, even tanked their stock.
the issue was that after 2011, a lot of main talent left, including the guys in charge of disgaea (except niikawa of course). at the same time, witch and the hundred knight was in development hell. witch sold fine, but it didn't earn back on the investment because it had stayed so long in development. afterwards, nis started their internal indies program to seek out new talent (where firefly diary, liar princess, and yomawari come from), and they tried to build on past success in weird ways (guided fate paradox following up zhp instead of being zhp 2, witch ps4 instead of witch 2, and reviving the criminal girls and hayarigami franchises). they also banked a lot on disgaea d2 being a new way to make disgaea games, but also it was the new team's first original game (i guess they would have also had experience on disgaea 3 for vita but i'm not sure if they got their feet wet there or not).
after their push to make those somewhat well-known games into big franchises failed (because most were on ps3 in 2014 and beyond), they doubled-down hard on games with low risk and low return, in the hope that something might strike it big every now and again. their internal indies program basically worked in this way, but none of the others managed aside from labyrinth of refrain - and they can't even follow up that success properly.
they can't even manage the disgaea franchise properly anymore. disgaea 4 on vita was the last time a re-release had new content. disgaea d2 was never ported to anything, and all the games the did get ports were basically updates on previous versions on new hardware.
and people still remember and enjoy their old stuff like phantom brave, la pucelle, and soul nomad. they may have thought soul nomad was a sign that their srpg formula was getting stale due to its sales, but i would attribute it more to it releasing on ps2 in 2007. they've just seemed pretty aimless since 2014.
Why did they work with forwardworks instead of Aniplex? Both of which are sony companies, and one of which has the popular game FGO.
They were pretty stubborn in refusing to support the DS/3DS/Pc, all of which having the significant large number of audience, due to their brand loyalty, limited their growth. Especially when they make niche game with limited appeal
Its only in recent years when they are forced (probably financially) to support Nintendo Switch but by that it is already too late.
To some extent sure, like said earlier this might be just the straw that broke the camel's back but as DarkDetective pointed out, they have still managing to make a (meagre) profit right up until this year.
Someone earlier also mentioned that a supposed leaker on 4chan had described the project was a giant moneysink before this. It would be interesting to see the source on that.
I have my fair share of issues with NIS (well mostly because of NIS A) but I hope they get through this anyway. It is never a good thing to lose a gaming studio (especially one that I have a love hate relationship with).
I hope they overcome this.
I hope they overcome this.
Market-competitive mobile games are expensive as fuck, so I have no doubt it probably ate up more than a lot of what else they were releasing combined.
They are crap. Only Arc the Lad mobage that had some bits of money making position.(top 300) while the rest of their mobage had exploded faster than Chaos Dragon.
It got delayed to 2020 so...
That might have been because they realised they should probably have a Switch version though
well it was delayed a year and there's no switch version announced so the only platforms two platforms that will be dead in japan by then.
I always thought that their games were really cheap to make (at least the Disgaea games recycle insane amount of content and evolve realllllly slowly from game to game), but I expected them to sell enough to be in a good position.
I always thought that they should try to make better or more different games instead of tons of them though....
I always thought that they should try to make better or more different games instead of tons of them though....
No clue if they were trustworthy, but the point in their favor was they apparently had access to NISA's file system? They went by DaniRamenNIS, and a ton of people asked them questions. They mentioned Disgaea 6 was shelved as they had to recoup the mobile game's losses.
The only problem is they mention Danganronpa but that wasn't an NIS game so I was confused.
Anihawk confirmed it was all fake
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