Becoming a publicly traded company is a Faustian bargain. You get extra money, but you now have an obligation to perform well and perform better every year, by *_ANY_* means necessary.
I know it's crazy. Basically CAVE of the 1990's and early 2000's is essentially dead in a staffing respect, but the company still exists on paper for licensing and so forth.
I've always felt like Cave had to change its design philosophy to a more home console friendly one to stay relevant. Deathsmiles was a good step in that direction, but they dropped the ball after that.
Yeah evan for sure I think they basically leapfrogged entirely over home console and went straight to the mobile, which I think is not a great fit tbh.
Look a Qute (Judgement Silversword, Cardinal Sins, Eschatos, Ginga Force, Natsuki Chronicles). They have to operate as a health care and graphic design technology consultancy in order to pay the bills, publishing games on the side. For niche genres you have to follow the devs and artists who stay within the industry-not the companies.
@@drlight6677 Sega also has that problem. They have all of these legendary ips but practically no development staff left. Nagoshi & Rieko Kodama were the two most senior but even they're not at Sega any more. Although the later was presumably worked to death
This is probably the best video you've produced yet Mark. It's great to see some real data on this stuff. The most surprising thing for me was just how small a portion of Cave's budget went to gaming. Never underestimate how many different businesses a Japanese company can have.
I'm glad you enjoyed it christopher! It was quiet an undertaking both in terms of research and editing :-) It is super fascinating how japanese companies tend to do stuff like this where they are willing to essentially shift their company focus completely, I can only imagine it has some tie in with japanese culture in some way. Better to change a company entirely rather than let it fail.
@@TheElectricUnderground That sort of reminds me of the trend of "zombie companies" that they stay longer making losses and trying to alter to fit with trends than to close down the company. It seems that from a few presentations I attended about Japanese businesses, the modern trend seems to be keeping zombie companies alive rather than incentivizing an exit for business failing.
The worst thing to happen to the shmup genre occurred around 1996/1997. One: Nintendo put out the N64 which made 2D sprite-based games pretty much non-portable and non-codable to the console since the hardware was designed specifically for pastel-colored 3d polygons. Two: Even more egregious, around year 2 or 3 of the Playstation 1, SCEA decided to enact a policy of actively refusing to certify almost all North American releases (not sure about PAL region) of 2d sprite-based games that weren't fighting game ports or Castlevania games (there were a few rare exceptions such as Metal Slug X, Cleopatra Fortune, R-Types and a few others). This carried over into the PS2 era as well. The board at SCEA basically viewed 2d sprite-based games as having old outdated graphics that made their PS1 hardware look bad since "It's all about 3d graphics now!" and they purged the 2d sprite-based game market right out of existence for the PS1 in North America. These two events pretty much gave the 2d sprite-based game genre a death sentence since the N64 and PS1 made up the lion's share of the console market in North America. It relegated sprite-based shmups to Japan only, the doomed Saturn and Dreamcast, Nintendo's handhelds, the dwindling arcade market and made newcomers to video games not even consider them as a playable genre but something belonging to old dusty consoles.
holy crap I didn't know that about the ps1 policy. That makes a lot of sense why so many awesome ps1 games, like metal slug, are japan region only. Man the writing was on the wall even back then, crazy
@@TheElectricUnderground Yeah regarding SCEA's anti-2d policy, it began shortly before the N64 launched in North America in late '96 because SCEA saw what Nintendo and other devs were doing with the N64's hardware (Mario 64, Pilotwings 64, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, etc) and decided that 2d sprite-based games would give the Playstation 1 hardware a bad look in comparison to the graphically cutting edge N64 games that were looming on the horizon (have to imagine the top brass at Sony America were extremely nervous about the N64 coming out). Keep in mind too this is the tail end of the "Bit-Wars" era where graphics were considered everything by the console companies and SCEA were probably afraid that Nintendo would create ads comparing 2d sprite games on the PS1 to 3D N64 games and making the PS1 look weak and outdated compared to the new and "powerful" N64. So from mid-1996 onwards with the exception of giants like Capcom and Konami being able to flex their muscles to get 2D games of theirs like Mega Man X4 and Symphony of the Night published in North America, SCEA pretty much killed and made taboo the licensing and publication of almost all 2d sprite games on the PS1 in North America that weren't arcade fighting game ports. And Sony largely continued this policy with the PS2 as well. We basically lost two decades worth of 2d console gaming in large part because of this bs, but thankfully we're now in a new golden age of gaming where we shouldn't have to worry about that type of anti-2d discriminatory stuff ever again.
I'm not sure about the PS3 era but probably up through around 2012-2013 when Sony surrendered their anti-2D policies on PS3 with the explosion of the indie game renaissance that began during those years@@saturnexplorers
The biggest issue for these kind of games is that for the average player there just too hard. Take crimson clover arcade mode on the switch. Ship type 1. I think it’s 4 people have got all clear. I’m ranked in the 90’s and I can only get to stage 3. On the unlimited board something like 7th is still on stage 1!! I’m guessing the pc numbers are a lot higher but that’s what your up against After watching more of you vid you mentioned desthsmiles. It probably helps that you can play first 6 stages at level 1 so even though it ramps up bit you are more willing to stick with it cos you have already got through 6 stages so your invested in the game
I think the jump from CC novice to arcade may be very hard for some (for me personally, it's literally just the TLB - that shit forces you to no miss the entire game basically), but also players (if they don't bother doing some research / critical thinking) don't really understand the point of these games where most of your time is spent theorycrafting and practicing. Though that's also a "fault" of the designers (personally I love 30 minute 1cc hardcore games, but that format could def be improved)
That was a phenomenal video. Must have taken you and boghog ages. Cave itself seems gone but ts amazing library seems to be gradually becoming more accessible than ever before+ their influence remains pretty strong with titles like rolling gunner,like dreamer etc even if it's a niche within the niche Once again, just awesome content and thanks for doing it.
Thanks for the kind comment N1! Yes this video was a ton of work:-) cave have an incredible library and I think they will continue to outsource it, but new arcade style releases from them seems super unlikely
I would love to see how that alternative timeline would have played out. Because the wii did have an audience of arcade games already due to the neo geo stuff and virtual console.
I think it would have looked better, they maybe would have stayed productive for a bit longer with another game or two but I can’t imagine it would have ended differently, sadly. I do wish it had happened that way though regardless.
I knew they were niche but didn’t know by that much. The R-Type example really put everything into perspective. Kinda wish you went into the Guinness Book info a bit more, very interested in that. Great video man.
I know right, and here I was thinking a few years back the r-type wasn't really all that popular, boy I was wrong lol. On the world records thing, I wouldn't read into that too much basically Guinness wanted to do a "gamer edition" in 2010 so they were just going around trying to figure out various world records to put in the book, and cave happened to qualify lol.
i do think the more depressing reality is that many of their original creators and developers are gone anyway, some now at other companies like M2 and MAGES where they can usually still make what they actually want to - between the layoffs and corporate takeovers CAVE has had i understand only a smaller and smaller proportion of OGs have hung in there, merely for job stability for more than anything else
yeah I was thinking of that last night actually ted, where let's say the devs of ketsui wanted to break off and make their own ketsui 2, they would not be able to do so because CAVE still holds the IP. So at best they would have to make Shmetsui or something
@@TheElectricUnderground by the looks of things a lot of them have simply settled to work on different IP - i know of one CAVE producer now at M2 who got the chance to work on a new arcade-only STG again with senxin aleste, another moved to city connection not too long ago to work on their saturn conversions, etc hell, even live wire now have a lot of defects from other companies working on the CAVE ports, including some ex-treasure devs - because when all the legacy production houses either downsize or move into different avenues, there's always a migration of their original creators to places where they can still continue on a similar path...
Great video. Glad you shared this kind of stuff. My hot take is that Cave pretty much did this to themselves and caused a lot of harm to the shmup genre/industry by completely an absolutely abandoning the mass market and international markets by focusing on niche, anime-girl-filled titles (and skipping the most popular platforms). The titles we shmup fans enjoy most and think are popular are not the top sellers in any way. Sine Mora mopped the floor with Cave's entire library, sales-wise.
Jets N Guns 1 & 2, Sky Force and Jamestown have sold *_gangbusters_* compared to every single Japanese-exclusive SHMUP. It really puts into perspective how niche these games we love truly are.
I hope you don't get pushback over this video. Every time I bring up how old SDOJ is, certain more fanboyish people get ridiculously defensive about it, even calling Crimson Katana (Exa port of Akai with a new arrange mode) an "all new game". Something interesting about Muchi/Sweets on 360 is that it got a reprint. Perhaps as small as the sales were, it exceeded someone's planned expectations.
yeah I think the numbers are pretty hard to deny honestly. Even the ebay prices show how rare and expensive SDOJ copies on 360 are, whereas you can still get deathsmiles for about $25 :-) SDOJ is a cool game though, but yeah let's not get lost in the hype my friends
Great video! I picture the Japanese shmup dev community as being like half a dozen dudes that went from Compile to Toaplan to Raizing and Cave, churning out great games and bankrupting each company in the process 😃.
As I said in the post regarding this video, I'm new to shmups only starting in august of last year. It's been awesome learning about the history of the genre and the amazing devs in it like CAVE. CAVE has been my favorite of the bigger names in shmups and while it's disappointing that they are done making arcade shumps one thing is for sure is that they have left one hell of a legacy. At least it all ended on a solid game unlike some other studios that have ran their IPs into the ground. (mostly AAA stuff) It's just a new era for shmups I guess, the big juggernauts are mostly gone and now indie devs are rising up to the top more and more.
Oh no doubt about it Nickel, CAVE are my fav video game developer and i'm a massive fan of theirs ha. They may not be making any new shmups sadly, but they did go absolutely hard in the paint when they were active and the results were incredible.
Big thanks for all the work in analysing the data! I was hoping that CAVE would at least remain in the gaming market. They managed to revamp the genre once by creating the bullet hell sub-genre, so it would've been cool if they could innovate and revamp the genre once again, this time to make it fit other gaming markets better. I guess they sorta did that with Gomaotsu, but they were putting all their eggs in one basket, seeing as they didn't create any other shmup gachas, mobile shmups or console shmups (and by create, I do mean making something new, not just a port). I don't blame them for wanting to leave the arcade market, because it has been in constant decline for decades now. But they didn't seem to give other platforms much of a chance either before calling it quits. Heck, the writing has been on the wall for decades, so they should've experimented with making a console shmup way earlier while arcade shmups were still sustainable. Or just make some other game; it would be so interesting to see CAVE's scoring systems being turned into very engaging gameplay loops in other genres. I also wonder if porting to Nintendo consoles would have been better. A lot of the mainstream shmups like Gradius and R-Type were on the NES/SNES, and having the mainstream awareness makes a huge difference. Then again, that was the era when difficult games were the norm so shmups were more palatable then. But at the very least, I don't think the Xbox line has been very popular in Japan (don't remember if the 360 was an exception), unlike the Playstations and Nintendo's consoles. Bringing the games to the PS4 and Switch now after a long absence from the PS3 and Wii/Gamecube feels like doing too little too late. And of course, neglecting the international market. On this note, maybe CAVE should collaborate with more mainstream shmups. Like, imagine if CAVE made an R-Type or a Raiden game. It would be kinda like how Treasure developed Gradius V, which has elements of both Gradius and Treasure's game design. CAVE just needs a stronger brand name, while these mainstream shmups need better developers. A collaboration would help them both out! Sad to see they have been focusing more on other ventures instead, especially when some of them seem pretty weird. At this point, CAVE feels like it's a shadow of its former self. And these other ventures haven't been doing great either. Since the gaming division has been shrinking, it means CAVE has been relying more on those other ventures. And yet, their profits continue to plummet, which signifies that these other ventures also aren't bringing in money. Then again, I'm not well-verse in the finances of other gaming studios either, so maybe diversification is pretty common. In the end, as Mark said, it seems like shmups will only be sustainable at a small scale. And even then, I wonder if a lot of the indie shmups turn a profit. These games feel like passion projects as well, rather than a reliable source of income. ZUN is probably the only one who can live off of shmups, but even Touhou is pretty diversified so he's not just relying on the shmups (for example, he probably gets some money from the official manga and side games).
Based on discussions with other devs I can tell you that no, most indie shmups don't really turn a profit if treated as a business. Devs can make money on them because they have day jobs and treat gamedev as a hobby meaning next to no costs - but profit vs hours worked wise that time would have been better spent elsewhere.
The 360 had been considerably more popular than the rest of the Xbox line in Japan, although I wouldn't exactly call it the resounding success that Microsoft wanted it to be. For reference, the Xbox 360 sold roughly 1.6 million units in Japan, compared to 12.75 million Wiis, 10.47 million PS3s, 20 million PSPs and 33 million DS units. As low as that sounds, it's still absolutely huge compared to the rest of the Xbox line . Even by Xbox standards the Xbox One is the red-headed child of the group, with lifetime sales barely scraping 115k, which has already been comfortably outclassed by the Series X/S (at over 400k by late Jan 2023 and with MS openly stating that Japan is one of their fastest-growing markets), while the original sold around 473k. This would also make the 360 the second most successful western console ever in the Japanese market, behind only the 3DO of all things, at an estimated 3 million units! As for AAA game software sales, the expectations are often pretty low by our standards, with sales of even just 400k for a multiplatform title being considered pretty healthy and successful. So while the Xbox line has never matched the sales figures of Nintendo, Sony or Sega, at least on paper it should do well enough to be a viable target platform for most developers. To show this, here's a sample range from Famitsu's figures for the best-selling games of 2022: 2nd: Splatoon 3 (NS) - 3.687m 7th: Minecraft (NS) - 548k [lifetime total 2.96m] 10th: Elden Ring (PS4) - 356k 23rd: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (NS) - 178k 27th: Elden Ring (PS5) - 141.7k 32nd: Horizon Forbidden West (PS5) - 132.7k 45th: Dragon Quest X Offline (PS4) - 81.67k 56th: Bayonetta 3 (NS) - 61.6k 74th: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (PS4) - 47.6k 88th: Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsei (PS4) - 41.17k 100th: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (NS) - 33.8k [total 303.57k] ...And this is where we get to the big HOWEVER part. None of the games that cracked the top 100 are on an Xbox, whether it be the One or the Series. This is in part because the list *only counts physical sales* and most current Xbox users have the digital-only Series S, so these figures should be treated with a grain of salt. This is probably in part a consequence of the fact that few retailers carry Xbox games these days. It's also worth adding that the regular PS5 has outsold the digital-only one, so the Japanese console market likely still prefers physical games, and reinforces the idea that the success of the Series S over the Series X is due to necessity rather than choice. Despite all of that, I think that the Series X's physical game shortage is part of the One's legacy rather than a much older issue during the 2000s, judging by the number of region exclusives that the OG Xbox and the 360 had, so I don't think that this had really affected CAVE that much. Especially when you consider that the 360 was _the_ console of choice for the other shmup developers like Qute and G.Rev, I don't think the problem was that the platform was non-viable for them.
I think that with things like steam and psn, the modern shmups have a much better audience, importing these games from japan is a big wall in some countries. We do have a lot of shmups releases on ps4 and switch so I am optmistic about the future. Even if it won't be CAVE leading the charge, we can always look for the next CAVE!
DFK Black Label released as a standalone disc at the same time as DFK 1.5, so it was kind of a case of “if you’re REALLY a crazy fan, get this too.” It was available as a DLC at launch iirc, but that didn’t have Ketsuipachi. Also, i think the US didn’t get DFK physical on 360… i believe that was a JP and EU joint, with Rising Star publishing in the EU. I could be wrong there though, not 100% on it.
Oh that's a great point about the USA not getting a physical resurrection release. That makes a lot of sense because I never saw Resurrection in a gamestop or anything and always wondered why not. CAVE are weird, why would they skip on such a big market?
That's right. Black Label Arrange ("ketsuipachi") was only on the physical version of DFK Black Label. We did get a PAL physical release of Resurrection (I own the physical copy myself and also saw it in stores here in Australia, just like Deathsmiles and Akai Katana could be found in stores). Black Label of the English version was DLC to be purchased off the Xbox store and did not include black label arrange. Deathsmiles, Dodonpachi Resurrection and Akai Katana were also available digitally. In the PAL English version of Resurrection they removed many of the Japanese voice lines (e.g. "youi wa yorochii desu ka" when you get a hyper). They kept only basic voice lines like the count down when you begin stage 1 and "game over" if you don't continue, perhaps there were a couple of other lines I'm not remembering. I also had the game on Android and I feel like it was the same way (game is easier on mobile when you can zip around the screen with your finger and even a bad player like me would 1-all the game twice a day on the train to and from work). English versions had to wait until the steam port to get the voice lines back as well as access to black label arrange.
I know how much time you've spent on this video and the effort behind it so before I comment on anything I wanted to mention that. I'll have to watch the vid in segments so I'll keep updating this comment as I do so. 14:15 the point you make here is one I've mentioned before but love that you bring it up... Midsized companies are really affected by macro factors in the market, especially so if they're public companies. A similar thing is happening now (just look at the amount of M&A going on with gaming companies right now). 37:30 the reason CAVE chose Xbox over any other console is simply because Microsoft approached them to do so. Back in the day Microsoft was trying to grow their install base on Japan and one of the ways they tried to do so was paying exclusivity deals with particularly japanese niches (arcade games and more particularly shmups being the best example). Think of it like the deals that Epic Games Store and GamePass pull around. They pay a certain amount of money upfront which provides cashflow and while it might be smaller overall than it could've been releasing elsewhere, it's a sure bet with immediate cashflow (which CAVE needed after 2007-2008 crash). It's really no brainer for CAVE to accept such a deal and it was also a no brainer for Microsoft to pay say... 100,000 upfront to absolutely lock a whole niche genre for Japan in their console. A deal where both would benefit. I do think, however, that they really miscalculated costs of ongoing development for consoles and releases where hardware gets updated (like PC, which is the reason we don't get PC ports for stuff). 50:30 this already happened... The only ahmup dev staff still at the company are the people who basically escalated up to admin positions... Perhaps everyone except YGW. IKD was president at a time too but he hasn't worked in game dev in decades. A lot of the smaller doujins we see around right now or games at M2 and Mages come from CAVE though (the rolling gunner guy, the A2B people, Mages staff, a ton of M2 people, etc). Great vid Mark! This is the sort of discourse and conversation that I like to engage in the most, a more realistic approach to the industry.
thank you for the clarification on the xbox 360 microsoft deal! I've heard about that but the details were always fuzzy as to whether microsoft actually funded cave to do these ports, or if cave got a sort of break on the costs of dev kits and so forth. so the fact that cave were like, hey bros here's some cash makes a lot of sense with the 360 was really struggling. Basically it was microsoft that was floating all the devving which is so fascinating, as they were such a rare case of perfect place and time ha. Looking back on it now, it's sort of ironic because basically the whole venture was a complete failure (cave didn't break microsoft into the japanese market and microsoft didn't launch cave into prosperity) but the result of this bad business deal is some of the best games ever made being ported to a really good platform for them. Art and business are such a weird combo at times.
Fantastic research!!! 👏 Everyone involved did an amazing job. This is extremely valuable information for all future SHMUP developers and publishers. Some personal conclusions I've come to watching this: 1) *Arcade games are ultra niche and mobile games have a much wider audience.* (We all knew that, but it's good to have data backing that up.) 2) *Releasing a game in multiple regions and with multiple language options will boost sales drastically.* (Again, we all knew this, but it shocked me to see the _massive_ difference between Deathsmiles and Akai Katana compared to Mushihimesama Futari, which was NOT region locked.) 3) Platform of release is crucial to improving sales. (The difference between R-Type Final in PS2 and Sin and Punishment: Star Successor in Wii compared to most other Cave games is shocking. Really begs the question: _WHY_ did Cave decide to publish so often in the Japanese Xbox 360?) 4) A latge-size company should not focus on niche games, as much as we'd like them to. (There's a reason why most indie studios have less than 30 people on staff.) 5) The Touhou mobile game will sell gangbusters almost certainly. People still love spending money on Gacha and Touhou is still a very famous IP. I can guarantee Cave's game division will hyper focus on that Touhou game once it releases, and it will go on to influence much of the company's future decisions. 6) Seems we should start thinking of Cave as an e-commerce company that occasionally does videogames instead of the other way around. Basically, Cave wants to be a smaller Japanese version of Amazon.
great summaries my friend! I'll have to dig into this more, but I believe the reason why cave went with the 360 is because microsoft was trying super hard to win over japanese devs during the 360 era (they basically gave up on it now), so they were giving japanese companies some sweet deals to make games for the console. So I think microsoft was somehow involved with the funding of the ports. Again, this is what i've heard rather than hard facts so it would be interesting to look into more.
A personal conclusion of mine is that it's really important to 1.) Get into 3D, decent looking 3D games just seem to be much more successful in general 2.) Have a really nice eyegrabbing aesthetic that really distinguishes your game from other shmups 3.) Focus on characters Also the multiple languages option seems like it's an xbox thing but it's actually still very much relevant even now - I've seen some data that simply adding Chinese/Russian support on steam boosts sales a lot.
4. They had been until they couldn’t, which is the tragic part. Atlus cut ties with CAVE after SMT Imagine. I’m sure CAVE would love getting more bucks from clients, but I guess no one was willing to hire them… Capcom gave up, Atlus yeeted out, Natsume got traumatized, CAVE is all alone in this cold industry 😢 5. Er, that’s the good question. The Touhou rhythm game only survived for 1 YEAR. That’s averagely bad for any gacha games these days. So no guarantee that CAVE’s gacha Touhou game will even have the same success as Mahou Otome, let alone when the main players of this gacha game are hardcore scorers. Touhou is less discussed when shmup in general is involved. Heck, Mahou Otome is the only surviving shmup gacha game these days. Mahou Otome had been around for 7+ years not for nothing.
@@weebnerdgaming4908 Touhou Lost Word still survives today (probably because it has the backing of Good Smile Company), and Touhou Danmaku Kagura would continue on Steam (as TDK Phantasia Lost, and to my knowledge it's the first gacha game to do this - with different gameplay and pricing model of course). EDIT: Oh, and from what I've heard, TDK failed because it 'didn't monetize enough'.
Understandable though. "The normies" cba to stick with a game for a long time. They don't play for score it's credit feed and move on (often to a AAA-game that plays more like an interactive movie with unlimited continues and autosaves). Shmups often require patience and practice. That's not interesting to the average modern gamer... Yes I felt like a dirty hipster writing that.👍
sadly that is the case sicket, it is really hard to convey to normie players the value of a shmup release until they actually get into the genre. So it's a huge hurdle to try to clear.
A couple of points: -Wirh respect to releasing on the 360, I expect that MS might have "bought" the ports - they were throwing a lot of money at developers back then in a deluded effort to be the #1 console worldwide. -Good video. The big takeaway for me was that Cave didn't understand the shmup market. They listened to the wrong people - the hardcore. Personally, they lost me from DDP DFK 1.5 as that's really when their games got OOC with the whole cancelling and other bullet hell mechanics that most shmuppers don't care about/don't want to learn. There's a reason why Deathsmiles I and II massively outsold everything else - the art helped but they weren't bullet hell. It's the same folly with Garegga - the hardcore love it while everyone else is meh - the silly aggressive rank system makes it a no go for most people (including me). I love shmups but I grew up on the ones in the 90s so it's what I and I expect most other shmuppers my age expect (Musha Aleste, Rayforce, VV, Hyper Duel, Tatsujin, Thunder Force and so on). For the record ESP Ra De is one of my top 3 shmups so I do appreciate Cave, just nothing after DDP DOJ.
Yeah I think the porting situation with microsoft was that microsoft directly funded the ports being made, a lot of people in the comments seem to be reporting this. Which is a pretty sweet short term gig ha, but sadly the sales numbers on the 360 just weren't there as it was a niche genre on a niche console, at least in terms of Japan the 360 was niche. So sort of a nasty combination sales wise.
@@TheElectricUnderground: that and MS being really welcoming for smaller, arcade devs. I don't know about Nintendo, but Sony were in their arrogant phase and IIRC didn't want arcade ports/2d games getting physical releases on PS3. Which years later might not have been terrible (if still not ideal), but early on in the generation might have even worse results. I don't remember if stuff like The iDOLM@STER and Dream C Club was directly a result of that, or just the really heavy otaku audience having moved there already, but it's the reason why that kind of stuff went to Xbox. I'd have to read up on the development of Sin & Punishment 2, because 400k copies on what was basically a last-gen hardware (without the costs rising as much due to more details/new pipelines etc.) being considered a failure sounds like troubled development.
@@TehstroyerSony didn't even want 2D games on the PS1 originally, or at least Sony of America. Capcom had a hard time releasing Megaman 8 because Sony didn't want the PS1 to be seen as a 2D console. Sony only relented when they saw that the Saturn was getting a port as well.
yeah it is odd mushi didn't come to ps4, i have no idea why not. Also on futari maybe a complication there is that m2 did the 360 port (which is why it's so good), so maybe that adds a barrier for porting it over to the switch for livewire.
YOU ARE THE BEST SHMUP CONOSSIEOUR I KNOW AND ENJOY UTTERLY, IN THE WHOLE WORLD. KUDOS, YOU ARE SO NICHE THAT YOU DO NOT GET THE RECOGNITION YOU DESERVE BY THE NORMIES. BUT YOU STOOD TRUE TO YOUR PASSION, YOUR VOCATION, AND SO, YOU ARE THE BEST. AND THE FEW OF US WHO RECOGNIZE YOU, WE TRULY DO UNDERSTAND YOU AND APPRECIATE YOU WITH HONESTY. IT IS ABOUT QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY. MAY GOD BLESS YOU. (CAPS ARE JUST CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL, A STYLE FORMAT, NOT YELLING)
Hey miguel thank you for the kind comment!! I'm glad you enjoyed the vid, I thought this was a topic fans often wonder about so rather than doing the old tisk tisk I dug into what info i could find.
@@TheElectricUnderground I SAVED IT FOR LATER THO, BECAUSE I DO WONDER WHERE CAVE IS, THEIR SHMUPS IMPRESS MY NEPHEWS THAT OWN SWITCHES WITH MODERN GAMES. CAVE IS MASSIVELY ARTISTIC, HIGH ART. BUT YEAH, THE AGE OF COMMODIFICATION OF EVEN GOD. WILL COME LATER TONIGHT TO WATCH. (NOT YELLING, I JUST LIKE CAPS)
Xbox 360 Dev kits and licences were inexpensive in Japan, as Microsoft wanted to get into Japan and the idea was to make it easy for Japanese devs. So probably that explains why Cave games were not released for the Wii. Though for the commercial aspects it would make sense to release them even for PS3, which was way more popular in Japan.
After the video I concluded that really doesn't pay for a big company to produce shooters nowadays... In the 80s everyone played shooters, it was good business. But in the early 90s there was a market saturation accompanied by a certain rejection by players, who then yearned for new genres, and in the course of the decade several developers were closing their doors - Cave lasted much longer than the others... The games themselves became more and more dedicated to existing players, pushing away potential new players with more and more bullets on the screen to dodge, and today shmup is niche. Compared to the amount of Pokemon trainers (for example) our numbers are insignificant🥲And worse, besides being few, we are very demanding.😁 The trend for the genre seems to be to stay limited to small developers, with exceptions here and there.
Exactly honved, I think cave sealed their fate when they became a public company. For their arcade business model to continue, I think what they needed to do is cut the margins and costs of production to the absolute minimum and just consolidated their team into a tiny company of pros pumping out masterpieces. Expansion was not the move.
Thanks for this. Financially it's actually worse then I had suspected. I do wish they'd ported more to the Wii I it had been possible. As much as it was a console for the masses it also had the Virtual Console which allowed access to classics, unreleased in the West games(Sin & Punishment 1), and new retro games(the Rebirth series). It might not have panned out but it does feel like a missed opportunity that they didn't release at least one game to test the waters. You mentioned jazz and while I'd love to know if there is any CAVE released jazz albums available (it just seems cool) it struck me how much jazz and shmups seem related. I'm a jazz novice but I have several friends who are musicians and really knowledgeable in it so this take is cribbed from what they've told me. From the 1920 through the 1940s or so jazz was sort of a genre of American "pop music". Dances, concerts, big bands at events, etc. Sort of like the arcade heyday. While you have a few major albums (you see them on merch; Kind of Blue, Time Out, A Love Supreme) that came our later and are known, jazz largely got too "complicated" for the general public and they moved on. Jazz never regained the broad popularity it enjoyed during those decades. Modal jazz, hard bop, cool jazz, free jazz, etc. It was great but it became very niche. Records got made and breakthroughs happened, but these things were happening in front of a shrinking audience of listeners and aficionados. Hello chaining systems, rank systems, bullet cancels, etc. Far cry from Gradius 2 or something to the general public. I don't know if I have a point to this but I find it pretty interesting CAVE has anything related to jazz because essentially shmups have been toying with a basic formulas/idea for decades too. That's less of an insult and more an observation that both forms of media have been perfecting particular flavors for their audience. Unfortunately it can difficult to gain mass appeal doing that. For the future, bring on the Tohou game. I'd love to give CAVE (or M2) money instead of resellers. Even if we don't get many "new" games their legacy is important enough that all their major releases should be available to play fairly hassle-free in the west on current platforms. If we can put Skyrim on every electronic device released in the past decade we should be able to get some decent ports. Also please Guwange physical already.
Yes I think the wii alternate timeline would be an interesting one. For example SNK and their games I think found new life on the wii via the virtual console and a lot of people became much more aware of them thanks to their presence on the virtual console. Same thing with the switch, where if you remember when the switch first came out it didn't have many games, so the neo geo ports on there were really popping. Cave could have potentially fallen into a same situation, big sales of a console but not a lot of stuff on the console, makes your game stand out to a built in audience.
[Edited for typos] That was definitely an interesting video and I stayed to the end. My first thought in regards to sales numbers was whether there was any correlation between sales numbers for ports and the degree of coverage (not scores or quality of reviews, just any coverage at all) in the larger outlets. I seem to remember in a previous video of yours (though I can’t remember if it was about a beat-em-up or a shmup) you talked about how just getting any coverage would be a big step up. Looking at Ketsui Deathtiny’s dearth of coverage in this video really drove that point home. When even games as great as that (or Final Vendetta for beat-em-ups) can’t get coverage in the big outlets, it’s extremely difficult for the majority of the larger audience to even know they exist. If they don’t know they exist, they won’t buy them. Before I found your channel, CannotBeTamed, ShmupJunkie and Mudprints, I hadn’t ever heard the term Cave shooter let alone played one of their games. In 2018 I went on the US PS3 PSN and bought as many pixel art shmups from earlier eras as I could but before that the last time I bought either a horizontal or vertical shmup was Einhänder on the PS1 in Sweden (in what turned out to be a gray market version). With R-Type Final 2 having a free demo on the Switch, I went looking for reviews and found you, Shmup Junkie and Mudprints and came back to shmups again. I didn’t end up buying Final 2 (though I beat it when it came on PS+) but the combination of a series that I had pre-existing relationship with (I had already bought Dimensions in 2018, finally) and quick and easy domestic digital availability (with a demo no less) meant that it was easy to get me interested. But it was channels like yours that were the reason that I found out about M2 ShotTriggers, made a Japanese PSN account and bought every single shmup they distributed digitally. I think if shmups are going to reach a wider market (especially on consoles), the developers/publishers need to find out exactly what it will take to get coverage and do that.
SHMUP devs need to work on getting more interviews, articles, video essays and sponsored showcases. Word of mouth can only get you so far. If a relatively large influencer can get behind a game and promote it to their audience, I feel that would also help a ton with sales.
excellent comment lichtman! Yes as annoying as it is for me to admit as a youtuber, the influence of the larger outlets like IGN, on the general audience's awareness of a smaller release is huge. One reason for this, that I've come to understand, is that IGN is like the head of a hydra where if IGN spotlights something, that doesn't just trigger the radar of their viewers, it also triggers the radar of other mainstream outlets which in turn also spotlight the release. It's like a massive chain reaction from the top down. Whereas being a youtuber, I can only influence a small audience and have no crossover power really for other youtubers to do the same.
This is a well-researched video about CAVE. It's unfortunate yet expected; At least the DonPachi franchise ended on a high note. 🐝 The good thing is, we have games such as Gunvein around!
thank you spectrum!! Yes even though cave aren't going to be making any new arcade shmups, their influence will absolutely carry over to the indie side with games like GV :-)
I guess the sad reality is shmup is a niche game genre, so even in the best of times it's sales will never reach the heights of other mainstream game genres (for example, Elden Ring has sold over 20 million copies!). Hence shmup games are all passion projects and so we should be really grateful for them when they do come out. IMHO, they shouldn't have expanded so much and then become a publicly traded company. They should have stayed a lean company focused on their core competency.
Having Sin and Punishment Star Successor on that chart is fun for comparison but it's not a meaninful one because it's too different, the main differences that affected sales I can think of are: - It was published and marketed by Nintendo. - It was exclusive to Wii and was the only/main title for it's release month/quarter. - It used the pointer which is one of the main attractions of the Wii (and a differentiating factor even now). - There was previous "light gun" games that did well enough like the Resident Evil rail shooters, House of the Dead Overkill and Dead Space Extraction (well maybe not this last one). - Is a sequel to a game strongly associated with Nintendo. - Has some appeal for Star Fox fans which is a Nintendo exclusive. - 3D presentation and a very dynamic camera makes the game an expectacle to a broader audience. ... And it's also a great game on top of that. Sin and Punishment 2 really got a lot out of it's association with Nintendo. BTW fantastic video, really enjoy your content that goes beyond the products (games).
Very true differences, there is one important crossover point that I think is important to remember though, both cave and treasure made arcade games. So sin and punishment 3d action could have been a route for cave to go down rather than right to mobile :-) thanks for tuning in my friend and the insightful comment!
I can't really blame them for branching out, gotta remember these are normal people trying to justify their place in the market, and to do that you have to make money and exist in it. I think the best way we get a new cave game is for them to make a mobile game, and passionate devs re-use the assets to make a game on their spare work hours like that power rangers fighting game did.
No kidding! So much unfinished business like guwange 2, ketsui 2, and the 3rd mushi. It's a bummer but it's also insane how many games I've managed to make at such high quality in a short span of time.
Time to consolidate companies for a final decade of greatness. Create the... "Cave of Treasure" or "Treasure Cave" or something like that and just kill it for their retirement accounts. (Which other companies should join this "old geezers" development club?)
It kills me that the newer M2STG titles haven't gotten a domestic digital release. They put in an absolute ton of work into developing amazing ports only to just stop short of releasing it on the US PSN store.
Yeah I think that's because they make no money (possibly lose it) and so m2 is keeping expenses as low as possible, even localization is like nah too expensive.
Dare say the numbers don't justify the extra work. They tried with Garegga which is god-tier and relatively well known and publicised, and it's likely even that underperformed.
ButtGreg is only really well-known within the shmup community I feel. Outside of that, it's not an iconic long-standing name that many general retro game fans will recognize like Gradius or R-Type, nor is it a glitzy cutesy "fill the screen with artistic curtain fire patterns" game like CAVE or Touhou games that appeal to the younger "what's a shmup? Oh you mean bullet hell" crowd.
@@RinMariiiiiWhile Garegga is a big name in shmups and some people might have heard of it due to its difficulty. Yet I can annecdotally say that even people into other arcade genres like fighters dont even know Cave. I think Touhou is the only property that trascends the fandom and the touhou actual shmups are not the biggest part of it.
Haha oh man it's good that you recaptured the devastating moment of us going from looking at the pretty solid net sales to absolute misery and debt hell spiral that is the actual profit :( Another interesting "checkpoint" in the data that needs to be looked at closer is how SMT : Imagine went for them because a lot of their reports/projections around 2007 were really optimistic about it. The analysis of why they don't bundle their games also sounds very familiar to me from an indie dev POV. The genre is easy to break into because the shmup community actively HUNTS GAMES DOWN, and it's very stable overall, but appealing to people outside of the niche is very difficult. Players gotta ask CAVE certified Fortune Tellers™when they'll get their next PB.
So glad that you helped Mark make this video possible and I can’t wait for your most recent game to hit consoles so I can buy it. For what it’s worth, as someone that only played a few shmups growing up but have bought dozens of them since 2018, I would say that one barrier to appealing to a broader audience (outside of the obvious lack of coverage in many outlets) would be the discourse surrounding the games themselves within the community. Outside of Fromsoft games, if you look at the way most really popular RPGs are talked about, it tends to be pretty outsider friendly and the difficulty level labeling is targeted at a large audience, too. “Normal” often means “most players can beat it with a little effort” and “Easy” often means “if you struggle with video games or don’t want to pay attention, you can still enjoy it on this level.” Those that want to be challenged will generally pick a mode labeled “Hard” or higher. By contrast, when I came back to shmups in 2018, it wasn’t unusual for me to spend days trying to beat a shmup on a difficulty labeled “easiest”, “practice” or “kids mode.” I saw lots of posts from other new players saying similar things only to be told by more experienced (or naturally skilled) players “but that game is SO easy!” By contrast in many (but not all) RPG message boards if someone expressed difficulty with a game or level or boss, you would mainly see people giving constructive suggestions on how to deal with it. If shmups started consistently labeling difficulties based on the perspective of people that aren’t good at the genre and if the community started talking about them in ways that more consistently welcomed new unskilled players, then that would help a lot. To be clear - I am not in any way shape or form saying that shmups should stop catering to their core audience in terms of providing more difficult options. Those should absolutely stay in. But it would be a good starting point to recognize that there are a lot more potential customers coming in from the starting point of sucking at shmups than there are ones that are good at them. Few potential customers want to feel demeaned for being poor at a genre they are trying to get started in.
@@perlichtman1562 I think it was more of a problem in communities back in 2018, it's a lot less true nowadays. Content creators make a real effort to give beginners a hand. Discords have beginner channels with a lot of good tips, game recommendations and words of encouragement. Devs (especially western devs) are catching onto the idea that naming difficulty modes "easy stuff for babies" isn't exactly a great idea, and so on. I try to build decent tutorials and such into the games I make which other devs will hopefully steal since the genre's tutorials have been pretty bad. Something to note though is that RPG's tend to have a lot clearer knowledge-based strategies newbies can use, exploits, etc. Stuff like enemy weaknesses, gear, buffs, and so on. A lot of that stuff is very "discrete" & clean, not to mention there's a lot of options in general so it's really good for getting conversations going in the fanbases. In shmups it's more about these very hard to describe general skills that require a lot of practice & a lot of investment to explain. It's something the genre struggles with a lot, and unlike fighting games/FPS/etc. they don't really have a direct social element to keep people going.
@@boghogSTG I think those are all fair points, for sure. From what you describe, I hope they emulate you as well. I have appreciated seeing more content targeted at newcomers. One additional wrinkle, is several terms in the community in general being a little intimidating to outsiders. The term “bullet hell” for instance made me want to avoid a lot of games that turned out to be enjoyable once I played them. And then there’s all the terms that get bandied about where a newcomer gets confused, like how “danmaku” is used both as a sub-genre name in the title “Danmaku Unlimited.” Figuring out when a UA-camr is using a term to describe a game made by a certain company (“Cave Shooter”, “Compile Shooter”, “Toaplan Shooter”, etc.) vs. a certain style (“Tohou Game”) or a certain layout (“Hori Shooter” as opposed to Hori gamepads or arcade sticks) means that newbies may spend a lot of time being confused by videos about the genre. I know I was at least. It’s not a problem entirely unique to shmups of course and the fighting game community has some parallels (what makes learning that “no miss” means “didn’t lose any lives” any more difficult than learning that “cancelling” in fighting games means starting another move before the first one ends) but with shmup community being smaller and the terms being potentially even more prevalent, it’s a bit of a barrier to entry.
@@perlichtman1562 Yeah the terminology can be an issue, but I think solving it is less of a matter of changing the terms and more of a matter of just explaining them better. Since a lot of terms like bullet hell/danmaku/etc. are here to stay. That's how fighting/action games went about it, terms are still used but more people know them. Also, incorporating the terms into the games themselves & tutorials will help. Stuff like "nomiss" has to go though. It's similar to the hellish "okizeme" people use when they could just say wakeup game.
@@boghogSTG Yeah, explaining them more often would do the trick and I agree about your example at the end. I think that either saying danmaku or using the translation “bullet curtain” would still be more inviting than bullet hell (and MudPrints did well with “Bullet Heaven”). But overall the explanations are more important than the terms.
In America R-Type Final had the Eidos FRESH yellow box dressing that Legaia: Duel Saga shared. It was the most random selection of games they chose to publish
Excellent bit of investigative journalism, Mark. The most eye opening thing for me is the numbers. I'm just surprised they were even doing 20,000 of anything. Agreed on the Espgaluda 2 sales. I think the best we can hope for is if M2 continue as they are and perhaps bring in guest directors. I suppose it all hinges on how the new Aleste game does as to whether we're going to get polished, Cave-esque quality shmups from Japan, going fwd. Maybe Co-Ops rather than publicly traded companies are the way to go? Also, in your research did you see how Nin 2 Jump did?
Thank you very much skeletons! yes i think the final conclusion (if I can come to one) is that if a studio is going to rise up and take over being as prolific and quality as cave was, that company better remain private because the profit expectations of being publicly traded will kill it. Shmups are no doubt "unprofitable content" as the report said ha.
Very awesome video Mark. Great research by you and Boghog. I can't wait for your channel to morph into fashion and makeup videos so you can get the Cave collab! :D
That's not that surprising about R-Type Final to me, I remember that game had a HUGE marketing push and was loved by mainstream audiences and reviewers. Way before I was into shmups I owned this game and put a ton of hours into...but never 1cc'd it. This is because it had a ton of unlockables and branching paths that you had to grind out. Not only that they put a ton of emphasis on the graphics and music, one of the selling points was that they got a Blue Man Group song in it lol. I have a ton of nostalgia for this game so I went back to 1cc it last year and my God is it bad as an "arcade" game, the pacing is horrendous and the balance is a joke. But if your just a casual blowing through with continues it's great. At least Ikaruga has a good game behind all the hype lol
R-Type Final was my first horizontal SHMUP since the NES. (I did play Touhou.) Didn't know the series, but that game could be found in almost all game stores. Irem was definitely pushing for that game to sell well. (I don't know if it succeeded, taking marketing into account.) And yeah, the game was a mess. Really fun to unlock stuff, but most levels were soooooooo sloooooooooooow...
Yeah r type final does have some pretty sweet tunes and presentation (i like them more the final 2 visually), but absolutely the pacing of the game is mind numbing. It does feel like the game was designed to play through a time or two because it takes its sweet time
I wish cave the best, but I don't think they'll make an arcade style game ever again. Maybe they can build on their iced tea business, I heard they have a history with that.
Great video, very interesting. I do like this type of discussion and at the very least I think a lot of people should open their eyes more to how much of our favourite games and devs are at the mercy of profit. It definitely makes me think that this period we are in where we get some ports on PS4 or Switch of classic games might not continue into the age of PS5, PS6 etc. Strangely enough I saw Deathsmiles for sale on a store shelf in a tiny town, on a tiny island, in Australia. Bizarre.
Exactly zhukov, if I were to identify the moment cave went wrong, at least looking at the data, it was their decision to become publicly traded, that shifted the whole focus of the company and basically made continuing to make arcade style shmups impossible.
Thank you for doing this in-depth video on our favorite genre of games. I never though I’d care about this side of Cave until I starting watching your video!
To the point about the X-Box 360 games being exclusive, I believe that was Microsoft's way of building a bigger audience in Japan by having exclusives that market would want since they weren't exactly doing great out there. And looking at Cave's wiki it is crazy all the different things they are doing. Beyond the games and e-commerce, they also have their hand in investment management somehow.
This showed up in my YT recommended, glad I clicked it! Very good and informative video. While I don't usually play shmups, I did try some of Cave's old games like ESP Ra De, Guwange, Progear and enjoyed them. Too bad Cave don't seem too interested in making new shmup games anymore. From what I am seeing, it seems that they figured arcade shmups were too niche to make a decent profit and so started branching out into other game genres and platforms like visual novels and mobile games. But the most surprising thing is diversifying into non-gaming related markets. Like I understand Cave trying to move into mobile gaming, but fortune telling and jazz events?
Cool video, informative, entertaining....and yeah, a bit depressing. Maybe Cave should cooperate with indie shmup developers and push already (nearly) finished games in a sort of "Produced by Cave" way. Maybe both sides would profit from this, just an idea. The comparison of Cave games to the other shmup releases is a bit apples and oranges imho... M2 shot triggers releases are not really available in the west outside of the US. You can't buy them through an EU PSN account. Many mainstream players - even ones interested in shmups - don't even know they exist. R-Type Final 1 was pretty popular in Europe. R-Type in general plays in a whole different league than any bullet hell shmup - the franchise is still known and respected in Europe, probably because of its history with European Micro computers back in the 80s and 90s. Sin and Punishment 2 was heavily pushed by Nintendo and a lot of people bought it because they liked Ikaruga on Gamecube. The possible scenario of Cave games on the Wii is interesting but I'm very sure that putting stuff out on Wii instead of 360 would have been much more expensive and complicated. There were lots of rumours back in the days that Microsoft helped Cave to port their games to their platform. It kinda worked...for a while;-)
So basically, CAVE cornered itself into hardcore shmups so hard they had no idea how to reach out to casuals. At least Touhou, for all its gameplay flaws (according to the hardcore shmup fans), experiments a lot. For example, the IWBTG-like Pointdevice Mode in Touhou 15 (those who fight the major salt factory known as Clownpiece know this well) and the Ability Card Shop in Touhou 18. CAVE's Touhou derivative game is going to be interesting at least - we'll see their take on the Touhou shmup style. Maybe the Touhou game is their Hail Mary considering how many Touhou fans there are?
Yeah the touhou gacha game could be really popular, but from what I ve heard they don t even have arcade staff anymore to they ll probably just stick to mobile and porting old games moving forward
Thanks for another great vid! It's interesting to see how seemingly small a part of their revenue as a company Cave's games brought in (since 2004 at least). I know that there are currently some really bad numbers for arcades in Japan across the board, with many people saying that only the really huge arcades will survive (though not even all of them will make it). The same underlying worries about the future of arcades is likely what caused Konami's shift as well (though Konami's arguably very stupid decisions surrounding that could fill many hours of rambling)
Interesting vídeo. As much as we try to análise and explain the cave business is always Impossible to do it propely because many information is absent and we try to fill the Blanks the Best we can. In the end it was a video that personally Gave me more questions than answers (and that is a good thing) Probably without the internet boom cave would remain a small cult company in Japan. One of the main reasons that you speak is the quantity of games that they publish in such a small Windows of time completely devaluates the product in the point of view of the consumer.
yeah I think cave jumped on the e commerce train thinking it could launch their company into this big operation, only to have the market crash right underneath them. it would be like if I decided to take the electric underground public and invest all my time and energy into crypto or something ha. It's just such a radical shift in focus that the old days of banging out arcade games is impossible to return to.
OOF This is just brutal. I really don't like seeing people screwed over, even companies - If it is something that happened outside their control. I really feel for these guys. So many great visions remain unfulfilled thanks to the way our world works. Aww that's so sad. :(
Yeah they're quite niche, but I've gotten into cave Shmups over the last few years with my Switch. When I want to play a game just for it's gameplay and chill.
Step 1 buy a majority of shares and make the company private again. Step 2, get a bunch of devs in a tiny office and lock them in there. Step 3, let the magic happen ha
@@TheElectricUnderground Yeah. I was hoping for an in house Futari port. Oh well maybe CC can get its act together or M2 decides to treat us with PC ports of Shottriggers
@@FiRezfps *>PC ports by ShotTrigger* lol, that ain't happening. I wish they did, but it's been many years since they started their ports, and I've lost all faith it's ever gonna happen.
I can see arcade style games coming back in a big way because of subscription based services like Xbox Game Pass. Seems to me if you’re wanting to flesh out such a service with more and more content, (which they’re going to need to do) the easiest way of doing so would be smaller style games that were previously reserved for arcades. The ever increasing cost of buying a game may have killed what would’ve been home ports of arcade games in the past, but I can see this subscription service stuff bringing back a lot of stuff.
I do dig the optimism my friend, but I think subscription style stuff is going to be a massive problem for smaller genres because it s gonna cut the legs out of individual sales and the games will only make pennies in a Spotify style model
super interesting deep dive. do we know where the Cave shmup developers went? (he says, hoping they are all beavering away on a cave-like mega shmup somewhere)
It' sounds like they've bled off to smaller companies over the years, like rolling gunner, aka to blue, and livewire. Of the three I think livewire might be the most interesting as they are doing a pretty solid job with the 360 ports. I could see them possibly doing something in the future, who knows.
Absolutely great upload Mark! CAVE seems very muddled which direction they want to go. We know that no matter what they produce it will not hold a candle to what has gone before 😔.
That Cave financial graph is such a depressing thing to see, especially the precipitous decline after 2012. Why is Cave not working on creating new shmups for PC and console, or at least primarily targeting that market now that arcades have started to fade. Crimzon Clover and other top-tier indie shmups have done very well with this strategy. Why haven't they explored other genres like twin-stick shooters and rogue likes? Yes, the hardcore audience wants to see more Cave shmups, but their team is so talented that I could easily see them dominating in other related genres. Why does Cave historically all but acknowledge their fan base outside of Japan? Only some of the 360 ports were region free, and US releases have been few and far between, with most coming in the last couple of years. I do greatly appreciate them stepping up releases of ports to western audiences in the last few years. And finally, why is there still no Steam release of Futari? Why were EspRade PSI and Ketsui Deathtiny not released on Steam? There is a fan base out there with plenty of money to throw around on Cave's art that would likely buy nearly every game they release, especially new shmups. I also disagree that Cave releasing a bundle wouldn't be effective. I think back to how I found out about these games in the first place, and it was via ROMs and emulation that I had discovered on websites listing all the cool arcade games that I'd either never heard of or that were never brought to US arcades. Bundles are the perfect vehicle to expose casual and curious gamers to the company's back catalog and the genre in general.
1. Probably the same reason the other Shmup devs didn't. Their success in the Shmup genre trapped them. Also, didn't they also have a specific hardware to work with when they made those Arcade games? That's not mentioning having to introduce the software slowdown and the variance in PC Hardware that they can't account for. 2. I think Instant Brain WAS their attempt to branch out. It bombed too, didn't it? 3. Counter-question: how many CAVE fans are there outside of Japan? 4. Just play Touhou Gensou Eclipse if you miss CAVE.
Yknow what I consider the turning point for the arcades in general (outside of Japan anyway) becoming an irrelevance in terms of mainstream appeal? When the ps2 launched. Because that's the system that got ridge racer v at launch we'll before the arcade release, and tekken tag was a much superior version on console than in arcade! So many folks were like what's the point in arcades anymore? Outside of the big amusement sit down driving/ ddr cabs of course.
Still have a couple near me. After so many years away from that initial "what is this for?" feeling, I can confidently say now, that it is and was for the social experience. Same reason for split-screen/local multiplayer.
@Scarred Steel that's true. But the notion of the arcade being the home of the cutting edge in gaming is well and truly dead compared to the 80s and 90s when it ofte felt like arcade games were a generation or 2 above what you'd get at home
@@whatamalike right, but that technology was the means to the social end. At least, in my opinion. It was creating those "water cooler" moments right there in the moment.
@@n2oshotandironman >the social experience this is why i love any games still remaining in public places and why most people don't care much about them they give you a context and a reason to meet people but normies have a web of contacts built from like age 10 in the social media so they go for who the already know
I've accepted idea that CAVE will never make arcade-style games again. It's not been their jam since 2012 and I imagine they don't have the sort of specialist workers to make those sort of games anymore. Besides it's not like other shmup devs exist nor is the entire shmup genre going to die if CAVE hypothetically goes bankrupt.
I got the impression from Shmup fans that if CAVE goes bankrupt there would be a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth. I got the impression that all these Indie Shmup devs have to develop games that are like CAVE to be considered good enough for these Shmup fans. Is the Shmup market still shrinking day by day?
I originally found you when you chatted with BGE and a couple others, and I had mentioned the downfall of CAVE and how a shmup player was a great person to have on. Little did I know, you'd already done this whole video on it! Glad I found it now, great work as always.
Honestly what gravitated me towards Cave shooters is Manabu Namiki himself for the composition of DFK and SDOJ, very similarily to how Touhou soundtracks got me to try the games themselves, like most people did of that time period. Its possible that they may gain popularity if the osts gain more exposure, but thats just speculation on my part.
Xbox 360 Espgaluda II and Mushihimesama Futari (and Black Label DLC was on the NA stores) Platinum Collection were all-region. AFAIK only the limited editions where locked to the NTSC-J region. DoDonPachi Resurrection was region-locked. But the 2011 Rising Star PAL-region release worked on NTSC-U/C consoles (but not NTSC-J). Muchi Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets was all-region but had a low quantity initial run. There was later a "Cave the Best" budget reprint. Rumor was that it was quite a bureaucratic nightmare to get an all-region release on Xbox 360. Because the Xbox 360 market was so tiny in Japan print runs were (allowed to be) smaller than for their Western counterparts.
excellent summary! Yes the 360 era being region locked seems so outdated these days doesn't it? Imagine if the ps4 was region locked, no more m2 for western players without importing a ps4 from japan or something.
@@TheElectricUnderground The region coding had largely to do with licensing (and publishing) territories (these days there still are ratings territories). Pure speculation but it felt like Sony and Nintendo couldn't be bothered with Cave at the time (Treasure had a shoe-in because of Ikaruga (GC) and Gradius V (PS2)) and Microsoft subsidized Cave in an attempt to grow the NTSC-J Xbox 360 market. 5pb/Mages on the other hand was already dealing with Sony so they where able to push Ketsui onto the PS3 in 2013 (presumably to capitalize a bit more on the license they were still holding).
I remember ppl talking about Rtype Final back in the day. What i don't remember was ppl talking about Cave games. System11 is the only reason Cave have some relevancy outside Japan, so it's not really a surprise that their games have piss poor sales.
so giga this is a really interesting observation so I dug around a bit and have a little theory. I wonder if these "platinum collections" have any connection to the game being listed to be purchased digitally. Because it sounds like (and this is just preliminary digging around) when a game is listed for sale digitally, it's not uncommon for it to have a platinum collection counterpart. So perhaps that is the reason why, as both SDOJ and Futari have these platinum collections.
Hi Mark. I've been periodically watching your channel and I recently subscribed. I want to get into the PC shmup scene as I just got a new computer. I'm a fan of shmups and have played them on consoles. I apologize if you covered this on a video I haven't seem, but two questions. 1. What is the best arcade stick to get for the PC to use on shmups? 2. How do I get mame or some other medium on the PC to emulate shmups? Thank you, Brian
Hey Brian def check out shmuparch 7 and low latency mame to get started with emulation (I have an emulation playlist on the channel) and I have this video on arcade stick to start with ua-cam.com/video/31aIbVEwjks/v-deo.html
I agree that there is no money left in arcades but surely if CAVE made a PS4 Shmup with regular dlc and extra soundtracks and ships to purchase and levels and competition leaderboards and lots of super ltd editions etc there are a lot of people That would throw money at it. I think they done super well in gothic wa otome. That was huge in Japan with all The merch. They could also make a fortune from a direct toy line . Imagine DFK Transformers at 100 bucks a pop. I’d buy the lot.
The problem cave runs into though is that they are a public company, so they need big profits and they need them fast, which shmups cannot deliver. The genre has too tight of a bottleneck
The key would be if they could “pull a Disney.” The animated movies provide the prestige and the “raw cultural material” and while they usually do well in ticket sales, the big money makers is in merchandising, toys, theme park tickets , etc. Of course “pull a Disney” is far easier said than done.
Update from 2024: Their game revenue suddenly jumped in the latter 2 quarters of Fiscal Year 2023... because they made Deluxe Games their subsidiary. Deluxe Games is the developer of Monster Strike. Oh, also Touhou Gensou Eclipse's downloads far exceeded CAVE's expectation and they're now focusing on player retention. Gomaotsu's having a collab with Gensou Eclipse in 2 days, and we'll probably see a Gomaotsu collab in Gensou Eclipse for its 1st Anniversary.
You realise that every single VGChartz sales figure that's not supplied by a publisher or has a link to a source eg. Famitsy etc is literally a made up guesstimate by their own admission. For Japan sales it's pick a number between 1K & 50K if it's not a famous, well known (to them) title. For America it's a bit higher. They're completely meaningless. They say Raiden Fighters Aces sold 60K in the US despite never being released there. Garegga PS4 seemingly sold
I did mention that ohfivepro that VG charts isn't going to be dead on accurate (you can tell how much rounding there is in the reports), but it is all we have and it at least gives a general picture that I think makes sense. For example what you can do is check the sales on VG chart and then cross reference them with the current ebay prices of the game, and there is a pretty solid correlation there where the lower selling games like SDOJ are really expensive and the higher selling ones like deathsmiles are cheap. It's not perfect but like I said it's basically all we have. I'd love to get my hands on really concrete sales data but video games keep that info under wraps classified for some reason.
They had a good run and made a lot of amazing games, but their influence has created a multitude of newer developers who are pumping out great games now. The shmup community seems stronger than ever right now.
yeah cave's fate really isn't too different from most other shmup companies like treasure and so forth. It's just impossible to keep the dev doors open at that scale sadly.
Making money in the arcade with a proper videogame is a big ask now. Even with a small team. I think they should look to the pinball home market and see if they can replicate something like that. If someone like Stern today can sell enough $10,000+ tables to turn a profit (and people like Todd Tuckey says it's mainly home sales and some barcade too), surely JAMMA PCB home sales could be looked at with PC/console sales backing it up?
it makes me sad that the mobile shmups were what lead to gothic mahou and now touhou gensou eclipse taking over all their remaining game development. the daioujou ios port was the first cave shmup i played and a surprisingly good introduction. i think there's absolutely room for traditional shmups on mobile in terms of game design, but when it comes to financial viability it's a different story (see aka to blue's switch port seemingly getting cancelled and tanoshimasu making no more games because casuals were refunding it and reviewing it negatively on the play store for being too hard and too short...) so it makes sense that cave went even further into the casual market with gacha and stuff, and still only to diminishing returns even then. just wish there was another way because mobile is such an interesting platform with some unique potential for shmups, it's just been totally taken over by a parasitic and predatory market.
Great video! I think they should maybe just crowdfund any potential new games. There are enough people out there (if they market it right) to make it profitable and it’s as risk-free as possible. It seems to me that this is the kind of niche that crowdfunding is great for.
So technically... the company had a cave in? Also, I'm gonna say it, I'm one of the those weirdos who doesn't like Deathsmiles, just never felt good game-play wise. Art style was good though. Also never heard of Pink Sweets... sounds cursed.
indeed they caved to the demands of being publicly traded ha. Also pink sweets is a pretty fun but crazy game, it's just not a good port at all in the double pack.
Thanks for bringing up the possibility about the games potentially being more successful on the Wii. I know that's uncomfortable to hear for some people but install base really matters and it's interesting to think what could have been. I think (and hope) that getting games into the switch is making a difference.
Wii owners didn't buy a lot of games especially the hardcore type like a bullet hell game. I think cave made the right choice staying off. several companies tried to make those kind of gamer focused games for the Wii and lost their shirts
it's hard to know exactly how it would have turned out because lets not forget that the majority of cave's sales came from japan, not the west, and the japanese wii player base may have had different tastes. One that stands out to me is how well neo geo seems to have done on the virtual console, so I could see a crossover there in terms of a potential player base. Whereas on the 360 the cave shmups sort of stand in no man's land, a tiny slice of a niche genre on a niche console (in japan the 360 was very niche).
@@TheElectricUnderground true but I don't think they could have got it out on the virtual store because of the tight space requirements. I remember correctly Nintendo wouldn't allow games more than 128 MB.
Excellent video. I am a casual cave shooting fan. I bought every release on 360 and the first arcade game I ever played when I went to Japan was SaiDaiOuJou in 2012. I really wish they would make deathsmiles 3 and make it super kick ass
Very interesting and informative. Great job! Japanese companies are maybe a bit weirder with their tendency to diversify. Thinking how Nintendo for much of its history wasn’t game related. Wonder if Cave keeps the game division alive despite losses for personal nostalgia from board members, to keep a toe in the market or for some technical reason to do with taxes or something like that. As I said, Japanese companies are weird.
Japanese companies are so wierd!! I guess because they have to work all the time they end up doing these weird fusions of personal interests and unrelated business
Great video but regarding to sales figures of the physical Cave games: Ketsui DS = well surprise I dont want my bullet hell Shoot'em ups on a handheld = that was reason enough for me to not buying it. DDP DOJ was a borked port with a hell of a lot of issues done not by Cave themselve but instead from an unknown company (for Shoot'em ups at least) called 5PB - did not buy it for that reason. Death Smiles was Caves first game they ported themselve, it was glorious, it was released in every region and the Japan version was region free - for me it was the reason to finally import a Japanese X 360. From that point onward - region free or not did not matter anymore for me = with that said - it was a hugely STUPID decision to not just release EVERY game region free - no they switched that between each release which was just dumb. Mushi Futari = top tier port. Ketsui - after DDP DOJ people were highly suspicious if 5PB would make a good port of Ketsui. The sales on Death Smiles 2 were low because after the masterpiece that was Death Smiles 1, DS 2 was just a HUGE disappointment. Pink Sweets / Muchi Muchi Pork double pack = it was dumb that both games were bundled together but otherwise 2 great games. Espgaluda 2 was also a great port. :( :( DDP Resurrection was awesome. Akai Katana is just genious and it was released worldwide. Mushihime Sama HD is gorgeous but I think most people thought this is a re-release of Futari not realising it was the first game. SDOJ was a very late release when the X360 was dead in Japan already. Just a few things to consider. Oh God how I wish Cave would make new Shoot'em ups again - imagine a proper Death Smiles 3 :)
The Xbox 360 was a flop in Japan. A total of 1.6 million units sold by the time the Xbox ONE came out in Japan back in 2014. So no wonder the sales was low. Especially the 2013 SDOJ console release. Death Smiles and Akai Katana was also released in Europe on physical disks. I guess that explains the sales. Cave also said in an interview way back that it was much easier to port their arcade games to Xbox 360 then PlayStation.
We need to accept that cave is done and move on. We need to look forward into new developers that could take their legacy with new games. Like gunvein for example. And we , as fans and consumers, try to involve more people into de genre so it could became more profitable for devs. And more production could be put into the games.
![History of the Amazing PC ENGINE! [Book I]](/img/n.gif)
imagine going from "best shmup dev of all time" to nft mobile games and fortune telling
Becoming a publicly traded company is a Faustian bargain.
You get extra money, but you now have an obligation to perform well and perform better every year, by *_ANY_* means necessary.
I know it's crazy. Basically CAVE of the 1990's and early 2000's is essentially dead in a staffing respect, but the company still exists on paper for licensing and so forth.
@@BknMoonStudios damn right broken, that would be my take away as well, they should have stayed private
Cave is really putting Konami to shame.
Someone should ask a Cave fortune teller if Cave will make more arcade games
That s would be great ha
I've always felt like Cave had to change its design philosophy to a more home console friendly one to stay relevant. Deathsmiles was a good step in that direction, but they dropped the ball after that.
Yeah evan for sure I think they basically leapfrogged entirely over home console and went straight to the mobile, which I think is not a great fit tbh.
Sad but expected, they have moved on. Time to support the up and coming guys.
yeah I've heard (though this is unconfirmed) that they literally have no development staff left. Hence the outsourcing of the ports.
@@TheElectricUnderground Same situation with Treasure =(
Look a Qute (Judgement Silversword, Cardinal Sins, Eschatos, Ginga Force, Natsuki Chronicles). They have to operate as a health care and graphic design technology consultancy in order to pay the bills, publishing games on the side.
For niche genres you have to follow the devs and artists who stay within the industry-not the companies.
@@drlight6677 Sega also has that problem. They have all of these legendary ips but practically no development staff left. Nagoshi & Rieko Kodama were the two most senior but even they're not at Sega any more. Although the later was presumably worked to death
This is probably the best video you've produced yet Mark. It's great to see some real data on this stuff. The most surprising thing for me was just how small a portion of Cave's budget went to gaming. Never underestimate how many different businesses a Japanese company can have.
I'm glad you enjoyed it christopher! It was quiet an undertaking both in terms of research and editing :-) It is super fascinating how japanese companies tend to do stuff like this where they are willing to essentially shift their company focus completely, I can only imagine it has some tie in with japanese culture in some way. Better to change a company entirely rather than let it fail.
@@TheElectricUnderground That sort of reminds me of the trend of "zombie companies" that they stay longer making losses and trying to alter to fit with trends than to close down the company. It seems that from a few presentations I attended about Japanese businesses, the modern trend seems to be keeping zombie companies alive rather than incentivizing an exit for business failing.
The worst thing to happen to the shmup genre occurred around 1996/1997. One: Nintendo put out the N64 which made 2D sprite-based games pretty much non-portable and non-codable to the console since the hardware was designed specifically for pastel-colored 3d polygons.
Two: Even more egregious, around year 2 or 3 of the Playstation 1, SCEA decided to enact a policy of actively refusing to certify almost all North American releases (not sure about PAL region) of 2d sprite-based games that weren't fighting game ports or Castlevania games (there were a few rare exceptions such as Metal Slug X, Cleopatra Fortune, R-Types and a few others). This carried over into the PS2 era as well. The board at SCEA basically viewed 2d sprite-based games as having old outdated graphics that made their PS1 hardware look bad since "It's all about 3d graphics now!" and they purged the 2d sprite-based game market right out of existence for the PS1 in North America.
These two events pretty much gave the 2d sprite-based game genre a death sentence since the N64 and PS1 made up the lion's share of the console market in North America. It relegated sprite-based shmups to Japan only, the doomed Saturn and Dreamcast, Nintendo's handhelds, the dwindling arcade market and made newcomers to video games not even consider them as a playable genre but something belonging to old dusty consoles.
holy crap I didn't know that about the ps1 policy. That makes a lot of sense why so many awesome ps1 games, like metal slug, are japan region only. Man the writing was on the wall even back then, crazy
@@TheElectricUnderground Yeah regarding SCEA's anti-2d policy, it began shortly before the N64 launched in North America in late '96 because SCEA saw what Nintendo and other devs were doing with the N64's hardware (Mario 64, Pilotwings 64, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, etc) and decided that 2d sprite-based games would give the Playstation 1 hardware a bad look in comparison to the graphically cutting edge N64 games that were looming on the horizon (have to imagine the top brass at Sony America were extremely nervous about the N64 coming out).
Keep in mind too this is the tail end of the "Bit-Wars" era where graphics were considered everything by the console companies and SCEA were probably afraid that Nintendo would create ads comparing 2d sprite games on the PS1 to 3D N64 games and making the PS1 look weak and outdated compared to the new and "powerful" N64.
So from mid-1996 onwards with the exception of giants like Capcom and Konami being able to flex their muscles to get 2D games of theirs like Mega Man X4 and Symphony of the Night published in North America, SCEA pretty much killed and made taboo the licensing and publication of almost all 2d sprite games on the PS1 in North America that weren't arcade fighting game ports. And Sony largely continued this policy with the PS2 as well.
We basically lost two decades worth of 2d console gaming in large part because of this bs, but thankfully we're now in a new golden age of gaming where we shouldn't have to worry about that type of anti-2d discriminatory stuff ever again.
Wasn't that policy against 2D games during the PS3 era?
I'm not sure about the PS3 era but probably up through around 2012-2013 when Sony surrendered their anti-2D policies on PS3 with the explosion of the indie game renaissance that began during those years@@saturnexplorers
The biggest issue for these kind of games is that for the average player there just too hard. Take crimson clover arcade mode on the switch. Ship type 1. I think it’s 4 people have got all clear. I’m ranked in the 90’s and I can only get to stage 3. On the unlimited board something like 7th is still on stage 1!! I’m guessing the pc numbers are a lot higher but that’s what your up against
After watching more of you vid you mentioned desthsmiles. It probably helps that you can play first 6 stages at level 1 so even though it ramps up bit you are more willing to stick with it cos you have already got through 6 stages so your invested in the game
I think the jump from CC novice to arcade may be very hard for some (for me personally, it's literally just the TLB - that shit forces you to no miss the entire game basically), but also players (if they don't bother doing some research / critical thinking) don't really understand the point of these games where most of your time is spent theorycrafting and practicing. Though that's also a "fault" of the designers (personally I love 30 minute 1cc hardcore games, but that format could def be improved)
That was a phenomenal video. Must have taken you and boghog ages. Cave itself seems gone but ts amazing library seems to be gradually becoming more accessible than ever before+ their influence remains pretty strong with titles like rolling gunner,like dreamer etc even if it's a niche within the niche Once again, just awesome content and thanks for doing it.
Thanks for the kind comment N1! Yes this video was a ton of work:-) cave have an incredible library and I think they will continue to outsource it, but new arcade style releases from them seems super unlikely
I can only imagine if these Cave games were ported to the Wii. The Wii was the last console that was capable of outputting a native 240p.
I would love to see how that alternative timeline would have played out. Because the wii did have an audience of arcade games already due to the neo geo stuff and virtual console.
I think it would have looked better, they maybe would have stayed productive for a bit longer with another game or two but I can’t imagine it would have ended differently, sadly. I do wish it had happened that way though regardless.
I knew they were niche but didn’t know by that much. The R-Type example really put everything into perspective. Kinda wish you went into the Guinness Book info a bit more, very interested in that. Great video man.
I know right, and here I was thinking a few years back the r-type wasn't really all that popular, boy I was wrong lol. On the world records thing, I wouldn't read into that too much basically Guinness wanted to do a "gamer edition" in 2010 so they were just going around trying to figure out various world records to put in the book, and cave happened to qualify lol.
i do think the more depressing reality is that many of their original creators and developers are gone anyway, some now at other companies like M2 and MAGES where they can usually still make what they actually want to - between the layoffs and corporate takeovers CAVE has had i understand only a smaller and smaller proportion of OGs have hung in there, merely for job stability for more than anything else
yeah I was thinking of that last night actually ted, where let's say the devs of ketsui wanted to break off and make their own ketsui 2, they would not be able to do so because CAVE still holds the IP. So at best they would have to make Shmetsui or something
@@TheElectricUnderground by the looks of things a lot of them have simply settled to work on different IP - i know of one CAVE producer now at M2 who got the chance to work on a new arcade-only STG again with senxin aleste, another moved to city connection not too long ago to work on their saturn conversions, etc
hell, even live wire now have a lot of defects from other companies working on the CAVE ports, including some ex-treasure devs - because when all the legacy production houses either downsize or move into different avenues, there's always a migration of their original creators to places where they can still continue on a similar path...
Great video. Glad you shared this kind of stuff.
My hot take is that Cave pretty much did this to themselves and caused a lot of harm to the shmup genre/industry by completely an absolutely abandoning the mass market and international markets by focusing on niche, anime-girl-filled titles (and skipping the most popular platforms).
The titles we shmup fans enjoy most and think are popular are not the top sellers in any way. Sine Mora mopped the floor with Cave's entire library, sales-wise.
Jets N Guns 1 & 2, Sky Force and Jamestown have sold *_gangbusters_* compared to every single Japanese-exclusive SHMUP.
It really puts into perspective how niche these games we love truly are.
@@BknMoonStudios yeah. Even look at like... Geometry wars or top down shooters. Or resogun! So many successful shmups fr.
I hope you don't get pushback over this video. Every time I bring up how old SDOJ is, certain more fanboyish people get ridiculously defensive about it, even calling Crimson Katana (Exa port of Akai with a new arrange mode) an "all new game".
Something interesting about Muchi/Sweets on 360 is that it got a reprint. Perhaps as small as the sales were, it exceeded someone's planned expectations.
yeah I think the numbers are pretty hard to deny honestly. Even the ebay prices show how rare and expensive SDOJ copies on 360 are, whereas you can still get deathsmiles for about $25 :-) SDOJ is a cool game though, but yeah let's not get lost in the hype my friends
Great video! I picture the Japanese shmup dev community as being like half a dozen dudes that went from Compile to Toaplan to Raizing and Cave, churning out great games and bankrupting each company in the process 😃.
As I said in the post regarding this video, I'm new to shmups only starting in august of last year. It's been awesome learning about the history of the genre and the amazing devs in it like CAVE. CAVE has been my favorite of the bigger names in shmups and while it's disappointing that they are done making arcade shumps one thing is for sure is that they have left one hell of a legacy. At least it all ended on a solid game unlike some other studios that have ran their IPs into the ground. (mostly AAA stuff)
It's just a new era for shmups I guess, the big juggernauts are mostly gone and now indie devs are rising up to the top more and more.
Oh no doubt about it Nickel, CAVE are my fav video game developer and i'm a massive fan of theirs ha. They may not be making any new shmups sadly, but they did go absolutely hard in the paint when they were active and the results were incredible.
Big thanks for all the work in analysing the data!
I was hoping that CAVE would at least remain in the gaming market. They managed to revamp the genre once by creating the bullet hell sub-genre, so it would've been cool if they could innovate and revamp the genre once again, this time to make it fit other gaming markets better. I guess they sorta did that with Gomaotsu, but they were putting all their eggs in one basket, seeing as they didn't create any other shmup gachas, mobile shmups or console shmups (and by create, I do mean making something new, not just a port).
I don't blame them for wanting to leave the arcade market, because it has been in constant decline for decades now. But they didn't seem to give other platforms much of a chance either before calling it quits. Heck, the writing has been on the wall for decades, so they should've experimented with making a console shmup way earlier while arcade shmups were still sustainable. Or just make some other game; it would be so interesting to see CAVE's scoring systems being turned into very engaging gameplay loops in other genres.
I also wonder if porting to Nintendo consoles would have been better. A lot of the mainstream shmups like Gradius and R-Type were on the NES/SNES, and having the mainstream awareness makes a huge difference. Then again, that was the era when difficult games were the norm so shmups were more palatable then. But at the very least, I don't think the Xbox line has been very popular in Japan (don't remember if the 360 was an exception), unlike the Playstations and Nintendo's consoles. Bringing the games to the PS4 and Switch now after a long absence from the PS3 and Wii/Gamecube feels like doing too little too late. And of course, neglecting the international market.
On this note, maybe CAVE should collaborate with more mainstream shmups. Like, imagine if CAVE made an R-Type or a Raiden game. It would be kinda like how Treasure developed Gradius V, which has elements of both Gradius and Treasure's game design. CAVE just needs a stronger brand name, while these mainstream shmups need better developers. A collaboration would help them both out!
Sad to see they have been focusing more on other ventures instead, especially when some of them seem pretty weird. At this point, CAVE feels like it's a shadow of its former self. And these other ventures haven't been doing great either. Since the gaming division has been shrinking, it means CAVE has been relying more on those other ventures. And yet, their profits continue to plummet, which signifies that these other ventures also aren't bringing in money. Then again, I'm not well-verse in the finances of other gaming studios either, so maybe diversification is pretty common.
In the end, as Mark said, it seems like shmups will only be sustainable at a small scale. And even then, I wonder if a lot of the indie shmups turn a profit. These games feel like passion projects as well, rather than a reliable source of income. ZUN is probably the only one who can live off of shmups, but even Touhou is pretty diversified so he's not just relying on the shmups (for example, he probably gets some money from the official manga and side games).
Based on discussions with other devs I can tell you that no, most indie shmups don't really turn a profit if treated as a business. Devs can make money on them because they have day jobs and treat gamedev as a hobby meaning next to no costs - but profit vs hours worked wise that time would have been better spent elsewhere.
The 360 had been considerably more popular than the rest of the Xbox line in Japan, although I wouldn't exactly call it the resounding success that Microsoft wanted it to be. For reference, the Xbox 360 sold roughly 1.6 million units in Japan, compared to 12.75 million Wiis, 10.47 million PS3s, 20 million PSPs and 33 million DS units. As low as that sounds, it's still absolutely huge compared to the rest of the Xbox line . Even by Xbox standards the Xbox One is the red-headed child of the group, with lifetime sales barely scraping 115k, which has already been comfortably outclassed by the Series X/S (at over 400k by late Jan 2023 and with MS openly stating that Japan is one of their fastest-growing markets), while the original sold around 473k. This would also make the 360 the second most successful western console ever in the Japanese market, behind only the 3DO of all things, at an estimated 3 million units!
As for AAA game software sales, the expectations are often pretty low by our standards, with sales of even just 400k for a multiplatform title being considered pretty healthy and successful. So while the Xbox line has never matched the sales figures of Nintendo, Sony or Sega, at least on paper it should do well enough to be a viable target platform for most developers. To show this, here's a sample range from Famitsu's figures for the best-selling games of 2022:
2nd: Splatoon 3 (NS) - 3.687m
7th: Minecraft (NS) - 548k [lifetime total 2.96m]
10th: Elden Ring (PS4) - 356k
23rd: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (NS) - 178k
27th: Elden Ring (PS5) - 141.7k
32nd: Horizon Forbidden West (PS5) - 132.7k
45th: Dragon Quest X Offline (PS4) - 81.67k
56th: Bayonetta 3 (NS) - 61.6k
74th: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (PS4) - 47.6k
88th: Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsei (PS4) - 41.17k
100th: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (NS) - 33.8k [total 303.57k]
...And this is where we get to the big HOWEVER part. None of the games that cracked the top 100 are on an Xbox, whether it be the One or the Series. This is in part because the list *only counts physical sales* and most current Xbox users have the digital-only Series S, so these figures should be treated with a grain of salt. This is probably in part a consequence of the fact that few retailers carry Xbox games these days. It's also worth adding that the regular PS5 has outsold the digital-only one, so the Japanese console market likely still prefers physical games, and reinforces the idea that the success of the Series S over the Series X is due to necessity rather than choice.
Despite all of that, I think that the Series X's physical game shortage is part of the One's legacy rather than a much older issue during the 2000s, judging by the number of region exclusives that the OG Xbox and the 360 had, so I don't think that this had really affected CAVE that much. Especially when you consider that the 360 was _the_ console of choice for the other shmup developers like Qute and G.Rev, I don't think the problem was that the platform was non-viable for them.
I think that with things like steam and psn, the modern shmups have a much better audience, importing these games from japan is a big wall in some countries. We do have a lot of shmups releases on ps4 and switch so I am optmistic about the future. Even if it won't be CAVE leading the charge, we can always look for the next CAVE!
Yeah I think following a new more lean business model, we can see new shmup studios rising up :-)
That online fortune telling app was a real plot twist I didn't see coming.
DFK Black Label released as a standalone disc at the same time as DFK 1.5, so it was kind of a case of “if you’re REALLY a crazy fan, get this too.” It was available as a DLC at launch iirc, but that didn’t have Ketsuipachi. Also, i think the US didn’t get DFK physical on 360… i believe that was a JP and EU joint, with Rising Star publishing in the EU. I could be wrong there though, not 100% on it.
Oh that's a great point about the USA not getting a physical resurrection release. That makes a lot of sense because I never saw Resurrection in a gamestop or anything and always wondered why not. CAVE are weird, why would they skip on such a big market?
That's right. Black Label Arrange ("ketsuipachi") was only on the physical version of DFK Black Label. We did get a PAL physical release of Resurrection (I own the physical copy myself and also saw it in stores here in Australia, just like Deathsmiles and Akai Katana could be found in stores). Black Label of the English version was DLC to be purchased off the Xbox store and did not include black label arrange. Deathsmiles, Dodonpachi Resurrection and Akai Katana were also available digitally. In the PAL English version of Resurrection they removed many of the Japanese voice lines (e.g. "youi wa yorochii desu ka" when you get a hyper). They kept only basic voice lines like the count down when you begin stage 1 and "game over" if you don't continue, perhaps there were a couple of other lines I'm not remembering. I also had the game on Android and I feel like it was the same way (game is easier on mobile when you can zip around the screen with your finger and even a bad player like me would 1-all the game twice a day on the train to and from work). English versions had to wait until the steam port to get the voice lines back as well as access to black label arrange.
I know how much time you've spent on this video and the effort behind it so before I comment on anything I wanted to mention that. I'll have to watch the vid in segments so I'll keep updating this comment as I do so.
14:15 the point you make here is one I've mentioned before but love that you bring it up... Midsized companies are really affected by macro factors in the market, especially so if they're public companies. A similar thing is happening now (just look at the amount of M&A going on with gaming companies right now).
37:30 the reason CAVE chose Xbox over any other console is simply because Microsoft approached them to do so. Back in the day Microsoft was trying to grow their install base on Japan and one of the ways they tried to do so was paying exclusivity deals with particularly japanese niches (arcade games and more particularly shmups being the best example). Think of it like the deals that Epic Games Store and GamePass pull around. They pay a certain amount of money upfront which provides cashflow and while it might be smaller overall than it could've been releasing elsewhere, it's a sure bet with immediate cashflow (which CAVE needed after 2007-2008 crash). It's really no brainer for CAVE to accept such a deal and it was also a no brainer for Microsoft to pay say... 100,000 upfront to absolutely lock a whole niche genre for Japan in their console. A deal where both would benefit. I do think, however, that they really miscalculated costs of ongoing development for consoles and releases where hardware gets updated (like PC, which is the reason we don't get PC ports for stuff).
50:30 this already happened... The only ahmup dev staff still at the company are the people who basically escalated up to admin positions... Perhaps everyone except YGW. IKD was president at a time too but he hasn't worked in game dev in decades. A lot of the smaller doujins we see around right now or games at M2 and Mages come from CAVE though (the rolling gunner guy, the A2B people, Mages staff, a ton of M2 people, etc).
Great vid Mark! This is the sort of discourse and conversation that I like to engage in the most, a more realistic approach to the industry.
thank you for the clarification on the xbox 360 microsoft deal! I've heard about that but the details were always fuzzy as to whether microsoft actually funded cave to do these ports, or if cave got a sort of break on the costs of dev kits and so forth. so the fact that cave were like, hey bros here's some cash makes a lot of sense with the 360 was really struggling. Basically it was microsoft that was floating all the devving which is so fascinating, as they were such a rare case of perfect place and time ha. Looking back on it now, it's sort of ironic because basically the whole venture was a complete failure (cave didn't break microsoft into the japanese market and microsoft didn't launch cave into prosperity) but the result of this bad business deal is some of the best games ever made being ported to a really good platform for them. Art and business are such a weird combo at times.
Fantastic research!!! 👏
Everyone involved did an amazing job.
This is extremely valuable information for all future SHMUP developers and publishers.
Some personal conclusions I've come to watching this:
1) *Arcade games are ultra niche and mobile games have a much wider audience.* (We all knew that, but it's good to have data backing that up.)
2) *Releasing a game in multiple regions and with multiple language options will boost sales drastically.* (Again, we all knew this, but it shocked me to see the _massive_ difference between Deathsmiles and Akai Katana compared to Mushihimesama Futari, which was NOT region locked.)
3) Platform of release is crucial to improving sales. (The difference between R-Type Final in PS2 and Sin and Punishment: Star Successor in Wii compared to most other Cave games is shocking. Really begs the question: _WHY_ did Cave decide to publish so often in the Japanese Xbox 360?)
4) A latge-size company should not focus on niche games, as much as we'd like them to. (There's a reason why most indie studios have less than 30 people on staff.)
5) The Touhou mobile game will sell gangbusters almost certainly. People still love spending money on Gacha and Touhou is still a very famous IP. I can guarantee Cave's game division will hyper focus on that Touhou game once it releases, and it will go on to influence much of the company's future decisions.
6) Seems we should start thinking of Cave as an e-commerce company that occasionally does videogames instead of the other way around. Basically, Cave wants to be a smaller Japanese version of Amazon.
great summaries my friend! I'll have to dig into this more, but I believe the reason why cave went with the 360 is because microsoft was trying super hard to win over japanese devs during the 360 era (they basically gave up on it now), so they were giving japanese companies some sweet deals to make games for the console. So I think microsoft was somehow involved with the funding of the ports. Again, this is what i've heard rather than hard facts so it would be interesting to look into more.
A personal conclusion of mine is that it's really important to
1.) Get into 3D, decent looking 3D games just seem to be much more successful in general
2.) Have a really nice eyegrabbing aesthetic that really distinguishes your game from other shmups
3.) Focus on characters
Also the multiple languages option seems like it's an xbox thing but it's actually still very much relevant even now - I've seen some data that simply adding Chinese/Russian support on steam boosts sales a lot.
4. They had been until they couldn’t, which is the tragic part. Atlus cut ties with CAVE after SMT Imagine. I’m sure CAVE would love getting more bucks from clients, but I guess no one was willing to hire them… Capcom gave up, Atlus yeeted out, Natsume got traumatized, CAVE is all alone in this cold industry 😢
5. Er, that’s the good question. The Touhou rhythm game only survived for 1 YEAR. That’s averagely bad for any gacha games these days. So no guarantee that CAVE’s gacha Touhou game will even have the same success as Mahou Otome, let alone when the main players of this gacha game are hardcore scorers. Touhou is less discussed when shmup in general is involved. Heck, Mahou Otome is the only surviving shmup gacha game these days. Mahou Otome had been around for 7+ years not for nothing.
@@weebnerdgaming4908 Touhou Lost Word still survives today (probably because it has the backing of Good Smile Company), and Touhou Danmaku Kagura would continue on Steam (as TDK Phantasia Lost, and to my knowledge it's the first gacha game to do this - with different gameplay and pricing model of course).
EDIT: Oh, and from what I've heard, TDK failed because it 'didn't monetize enough'.
Understandable though. "The normies" cba to stick with a game for a long time. They don't play for score it's credit feed and move on (often to a AAA-game that plays more like an interactive movie with unlimited continues and autosaves). Shmups often require patience and practice. That's not interesting to the average modern gamer...
Yes I felt like a dirty hipster writing that.👍
sadly that is the case sicket, it is really hard to convey to normie players the value of a shmup release until they actually get into the genre. So it's a huge hurdle to try to clear.
A couple of points:
-Wirh respect to releasing on the 360, I expect that MS might have "bought" the ports - they were throwing a lot of money at developers back then in a deluded effort to be the #1 console worldwide.
-Good video. The big takeaway for me was that Cave didn't understand the shmup market. They listened to the wrong people - the hardcore. Personally, they lost me from DDP DFK 1.5 as that's really when their games got OOC with the whole cancelling and other bullet hell mechanics that most shmuppers don't care about/don't want to learn. There's a reason why Deathsmiles I and II massively outsold everything else - the art helped but they weren't bullet hell. It's the same folly with Garegga - the hardcore love it while everyone else is meh - the silly aggressive rank system makes it a no go for most people (including me). I love shmups but I grew up on the ones in the 90s so it's what I and I expect most other shmuppers my age expect (Musha Aleste, Rayforce, VV, Hyper Duel, Tatsujin, Thunder Force and so on). For the record ESP Ra De is one of my top 3 shmups so I do appreciate Cave, just nothing after DDP DOJ.
Yeah I think the porting situation with microsoft was that microsoft directly funded the ports being made, a lot of people in the comments seem to be reporting this. Which is a pretty sweet short term gig ha, but sadly the sales numbers on the 360 just weren't there as it was a niche genre on a niche console, at least in terms of Japan the 360 was niche. So sort of a nasty combination sales wise.
@@TheElectricUnderground: that and MS being really welcoming for smaller, arcade devs.
I don't know about Nintendo, but Sony were in their arrogant phase and IIRC didn't want arcade ports/2d games getting physical releases on PS3. Which years later might not have been terrible (if still not ideal), but early on in the generation might have even worse results.
I don't remember if stuff like The iDOLM@STER and Dream C Club was directly a result of that, or just the really heavy otaku audience having moved there already, but it's the reason why that kind of stuff went to Xbox.
I'd have to read up on the development of Sin & Punishment 2, because 400k copies on what was basically a last-gen hardware (without the costs rising as much due to more details/new pipelines etc.) being considered a failure sounds like troubled development.
@@TehstroyerSony didn't even want 2D games on the PS1 originally, or at least Sony of America. Capcom had a hard time releasing Megaman 8 because Sony didn't want the PS1 to be seen as a 2D console. Sony only relented when they saw that the Saturn was getting a port as well.
With how popular Mushi seems on Steam, I’m shocked we haven’t seen a Futari port for Steam. Or even a Mushi port for PS4
yeah it is odd mushi didn't come to ps4, i have no idea why not. Also on futari maybe a complication there is that m2 did the 360 port (which is why it's so good), so maybe that adds a barrier for porting it over to the switch for livewire.
@@TheElectricUndergroundI was so hyped by the trailer, before I'd ever even played a cave game... Is the music good in the first one?
YOU ARE THE BEST SHMUP CONOSSIEOUR I KNOW AND ENJOY UTTERLY, IN THE WHOLE WORLD.
KUDOS, YOU ARE SO NICHE THAT YOU DO NOT GET THE RECOGNITION YOU DESERVE BY THE NORMIES.
BUT YOU STOOD TRUE TO YOUR PASSION, YOUR VOCATION, AND SO, YOU ARE THE BEST.
AND THE FEW OF US WHO RECOGNIZE YOU, WE TRULY DO UNDERSTAND YOU AND APPRECIATE YOU WITH HONESTY.
IT IS ABOUT QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY.
MAY GOD BLESS YOU.
(CAPS ARE JUST CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL, A STYLE FORMAT, NOT YELLING)
Hey miguel thank you for the kind comment!! I'm glad you enjoyed the vid, I thought this was a topic fans often wonder about so rather than doing the old tisk tisk I dug into what info i could find.
@@TheElectricUnderground I SAVED IT FOR LATER THO, BECAUSE I DO WONDER WHERE CAVE IS, THEIR SHMUPS IMPRESS MY NEPHEWS THAT OWN SWITCHES WITH MODERN GAMES. CAVE IS MASSIVELY ARTISTIC, HIGH ART. BUT YEAH, THE AGE OF COMMODIFICATION OF EVEN GOD.
WILL COME LATER TONIGHT TO WATCH.
(NOT YELLING, I JUST LIKE CAPS)
Interesting video. A lot of this I would have expected but I admit I was astounded at how bad sales were even during their heyday.
Yeah they were having rough times for sure
It’s weird to know a bunch of cave games were made with such a small percent of total money going into it. Imagine if it was around 80-90%!
Xbox 360 Dev kits and licences were inexpensive in Japan, as Microsoft wanted to get into Japan and the idea was to make it easy for Japanese devs. So probably that explains why Cave games were not released for the Wii. Though for the commercial aspects it would make sense to release them even for PS3, which was way more popular in Japan.
Yeah I think short term 360 was really nice, but long term it did not pan out sales wise
After the video I concluded that really doesn't pay for a big company to produce shooters nowadays... In the 80s everyone played shooters, it was good business. But in the early 90s there was a market saturation accompanied by a certain rejection by players, who then yearned for new genres, and in the course of the decade several developers were closing their doors - Cave lasted much longer than the others... The games themselves became more and more dedicated to existing players, pushing away potential new players with more and more bullets on the screen to dodge, and today shmup is niche. Compared to the amount of Pokemon trainers (for example) our numbers are insignificant🥲And worse, besides being few, we are very demanding.😁 The trend for the genre seems to be to stay limited to small developers, with exceptions here and there.
Exactly honved, I think cave sealed their fate when they became a public company. For their arcade business model to continue, I think what they needed to do is cut the margins and costs of production to the absolute minimum and just consolidated their team into a tiny company of pros pumping out masterpieces. Expansion was not the move.
Thanks for this. Financially it's actually worse then I had suspected. I do wish they'd ported more to the Wii I it had been possible. As much as it was a console for the masses it also had the Virtual Console which allowed access to classics, unreleased in the West games(Sin & Punishment 1), and new retro games(the Rebirth series). It might not have panned out but it does feel like a missed opportunity that they didn't release at least one game to test the waters.
You mentioned jazz and while I'd love to know if there is any CAVE released jazz albums available (it just seems cool) it struck me how much jazz and shmups seem related. I'm a jazz novice but I have several friends who are musicians and really knowledgeable in it so this take is cribbed from what they've told me. From the 1920 through the 1940s or so jazz was sort of a genre of American "pop music". Dances, concerts, big bands at events, etc. Sort of like the arcade heyday. While you have a few major albums (you see them on merch; Kind of Blue, Time Out, A Love Supreme) that came our later and are known, jazz largely got too "complicated" for the general public and they moved on. Jazz never regained the broad popularity it enjoyed during those decades. Modal jazz, hard bop, cool jazz, free jazz, etc. It was great but it became very niche. Records got made and breakthroughs happened, but these things were happening in front of a shrinking audience of listeners and aficionados. Hello chaining systems, rank systems, bullet cancels, etc. Far cry from Gradius 2 or something to the general public. I don't know if I have a point to this but I find it pretty interesting CAVE has anything related to jazz because essentially shmups have been toying with a basic formulas/idea for decades too. That's less of an insult and more an observation that both forms of media have been perfecting particular flavors for their audience. Unfortunately it can difficult to gain mass appeal doing that.
For the future, bring on the Tohou game. I'd love to give CAVE (or M2) money instead of resellers. Even if we don't get many "new" games their legacy is important enough that all their major releases should be available to play fairly hassle-free in the west on current platforms. If we can put Skyrim on every electronic device released in the past decade we should be able to get some decent ports. Also please Guwange physical already.
Yes I think the wii alternate timeline would be an interesting one. For example SNK and their games I think found new life on the wii via the virtual console and a lot of people became much more aware of them thanks to their presence on the virtual console. Same thing with the switch, where if you remember when the switch first came out it didn't have many games, so the neo geo ports on there were really popping. Cave could have potentially fallen into a same situation, big sales of a console but not a lot of stuff on the console, makes your game stand out to a built in audience.
[Edited for typos] That was definitely an interesting video and I stayed to the end. My first thought in regards to sales numbers was whether there was any correlation between sales numbers for ports and the degree of coverage (not scores or quality of reviews, just any coverage at all) in the larger outlets.
I seem to remember in a previous video of yours (though I can’t remember if it was about a beat-em-up or a shmup) you talked about how just getting any coverage would be a big step up. Looking at Ketsui Deathtiny’s dearth of coverage in this video really drove that point home. When even games as great as that (or Final Vendetta for beat-em-ups) can’t get coverage in the big outlets, it’s extremely difficult for the majority of the larger audience to even know they exist. If they don’t know they exist, they won’t buy them.
Before I found your channel, CannotBeTamed, ShmupJunkie and Mudprints, I hadn’t ever heard the term Cave shooter let alone played one of their games. In 2018 I went on the US PS3 PSN and bought as many pixel art shmups from earlier eras as I could but before that the last time I bought either a horizontal or vertical shmup was Einhänder on the PS1 in Sweden (in what turned out to be a gray market version).
With R-Type Final 2 having a free demo on the Switch, I went looking for reviews and found you, Shmup Junkie and Mudprints and came back to shmups again. I didn’t end up buying Final 2 (though I beat it when it came on PS+) but the combination of a series that I had pre-existing relationship with (I had already bought Dimensions in 2018, finally) and quick and easy domestic digital availability (with a demo no less) meant that it was easy to get me interested. But it was channels like yours that were the reason that I found out about M2 ShotTriggers, made a Japanese PSN account and bought every single shmup they distributed digitally.
I think if shmups are going to reach a wider market (especially on consoles), the developers/publishers need to find out exactly what it will take to get coverage and do that.
SHMUP devs need to work on getting more interviews, articles, video essays and sponsored showcases.
Word of mouth can only get you so far.
If a relatively large influencer can get behind a game and promote it to their audience, I feel that would also help a ton with sales.
@@BknMoonStudios I completely agree.
excellent comment lichtman! Yes as annoying as it is for me to admit as a youtuber, the influence of the larger outlets like IGN, on the general audience's awareness of a smaller release is huge. One reason for this, that I've come to understand, is that IGN is like the head of a hydra where if IGN spotlights something, that doesn't just trigger the radar of their viewers, it also triggers the radar of other mainstream outlets which in turn also spotlight the release. It's like a massive chain reaction from the top down. Whereas being a youtuber, I can only influence a small audience and have no crossover power really for other youtubers to do the same.
This is a well-researched video about CAVE. It's unfortunate yet expected; At least the DonPachi franchise ended on a high note. 🐝
The good thing is, we have games such as Gunvein around!
thank you spectrum!! Yes even though cave aren't going to be making any new arcade shmups, their influence will absolutely carry over to the indie side with games like GV :-)
I guess the sad reality is shmup is a niche game genre, so even in the best of times it's sales will never reach the heights of other mainstream game genres (for example, Elden Ring has sold over 20 million copies!). Hence shmup games are all passion projects and so we should be really grateful for them when they do come out. IMHO, they shouldn't have expanded so much and then become a publicly traded company. They should have stayed a lean company focused on their core competency.
Space Invaders was huge back in the day. I know it’s not like the modern shmup but still it’s possible for them to appeal to a wider audience.
Having Sin and Punishment Star Successor on that chart is fun for comparison but it's not a meaninful one because it's too different, the main differences that affected sales I can think of are:
- It was published and marketed by Nintendo.
- It was exclusive to Wii and was the only/main title for it's release month/quarter.
- It used the pointer which is one of the main attractions of the Wii (and a differentiating factor even now).
- There was previous "light gun" games that did well enough like the Resident Evil rail shooters, House of the Dead Overkill and Dead Space Extraction (well maybe not this last one).
- Is a sequel to a game strongly associated with Nintendo.
- Has some appeal for Star Fox fans which is a Nintendo exclusive.
- 3D presentation and a very dynamic camera makes the game an expectacle to a broader audience.
... And it's also a great game on top of that.
Sin and Punishment 2 really got a lot out of it's association with Nintendo.
BTW fantastic video, really enjoy your content that goes beyond the products (games).
Very true differences, there is one important crossover point that I think is important to remember though, both cave and treasure made arcade games. So sin and punishment 3d action could have been a route for cave to go down rather than right to mobile :-) thanks for tuning in my friend and the insightful comment!
I can't really blame them for branching out, gotta remember these are normal people trying to justify their place in the market, and to do that you have to make money and exist in it.
I think the best way we get a new cave game is for them to make a mobile game, and passionate devs re-use the assets to make a game on their spare work hours like that power rangers fighting game did.
Imagine what games we would have from Cave if the arcade scene didn't die.
No kidding! So much unfinished business like guwange 2, ketsui 2, and the 3rd mushi. It's a bummer but it's also insane how many games I've managed to make at such high quality in a short span of time.
Time to consolidate companies for a final decade of greatness. Create the... "Cave of Treasure" or "Treasure Cave" or something like that and just kill it for their retirement accounts. (Which other companies should join this "old geezers" development club?)
It kills me that the newer M2STG titles haven't gotten a domestic digital release. They put in an absolute ton of work into developing amazing ports only to just stop short of releasing it on the US PSN store.
Yeah I think that's because they make no money (possibly lose it) and so m2 is keeping expenses as low as possible, even localization is like nah too expensive.
Dare say the numbers don't justify the extra work. They tried with Garegga which is god-tier and relatively well known and publicised, and it's likely even that underperformed.
ButtGreg is only really well-known within the shmup community I feel. Outside of that, it's not an iconic long-standing name that many general retro game fans will recognize like Gradius or R-Type, nor is it a glitzy cutesy "fill the screen with artistic curtain fire patterns" game like CAVE or Touhou games that appeal to the younger "what's a shmup? Oh you mean bullet hell" crowd.
@@RinMariiiiiWhile Garegga is a big name in shmups and some people might have heard of it due to its difficulty. Yet I can annecdotally say that even people into other arcade genres like fighters dont even know Cave.
I think Touhou is the only property that trascends the fandom and the touhou actual shmups are not the biggest part of it.
Haha oh man it's good that you recaptured the devastating moment of us going from looking at the pretty solid net sales to absolute misery and debt hell spiral that is the actual profit :(
Another interesting "checkpoint" in the data that needs to be looked at closer is how SMT : Imagine went for them because a lot of their reports/projections around 2007 were really optimistic about it.
The analysis of why they don't bundle their games also sounds very familiar to me from an indie dev POV. The genre is easy to break into because the shmup community actively HUNTS GAMES DOWN, and it's very stable overall, but appealing to people outside of the niche is very difficult.
Players gotta ask CAVE certified Fortune Tellers™when they'll get their next PB.
So glad that you helped Mark make this video possible and I can’t wait for your most recent game to hit consoles so I can buy it.
For what it’s worth, as someone that only played a few shmups growing up but have bought dozens of them since 2018, I would say that one barrier to appealing to a broader audience (outside of the obvious lack of coverage in many outlets) would be the discourse surrounding the games themselves within the community.
Outside of Fromsoft games, if you look at the way most really popular RPGs are talked about, it tends to be pretty outsider friendly and the difficulty level labeling is targeted at a large audience, too. “Normal” often means “most players can beat it with a little effort” and “Easy” often means “if you struggle with video games or don’t want to pay attention, you can still enjoy it on this level.” Those that want to be challenged will generally pick a mode labeled “Hard” or higher.
By contrast, when I came back to shmups in 2018, it wasn’t unusual for me to spend days trying to beat a shmup on a difficulty labeled “easiest”, “practice” or “kids mode.” I saw lots of posts from other new players saying similar things only to be told by more experienced (or naturally skilled) players “but that game is SO easy!”
By contrast in many (but not all) RPG message boards if someone expressed difficulty with a game or level or boss, you would mainly see people giving constructive suggestions on how to deal with it.
If shmups started consistently labeling difficulties based on the perspective of people that aren’t good at the genre and if the community started talking about them in ways that more consistently welcomed new unskilled players, then that would help a lot.
To be clear - I am not in any way shape or form saying that shmups should stop catering to their core audience in terms of providing more difficult options. Those should absolutely stay in. But it would be a good starting point to recognize that there are a lot more potential customers coming in from the starting point of sucking at shmups than there are ones that are good at them.
Few potential customers want to feel demeaned for being poor at a genre they are trying to get started in.
@@perlichtman1562 I think it was more of a problem in communities back in 2018, it's a lot less true nowadays. Content creators make a real effort to give beginners a hand. Discords have beginner channels with a lot of good tips, game recommendations and words of encouragement. Devs (especially western devs) are catching onto the idea that naming difficulty modes "easy stuff for babies" isn't exactly a great idea, and so on. I try to build decent tutorials and such into the games I make which other devs will hopefully steal since the genre's tutorials have been pretty bad.
Something to note though is that RPG's tend to have a lot clearer knowledge-based strategies newbies can use, exploits, etc. Stuff like enemy weaknesses, gear, buffs, and so on. A lot of that stuff is very "discrete" & clean, not to mention there's a lot of options in general so it's really good for getting conversations going in the fanbases. In shmups it's more about these very hard to describe general skills that require a lot of practice & a lot of investment to explain. It's something the genre struggles with a lot, and unlike fighting games/FPS/etc. they don't really have a direct social element to keep people going.
@@boghogSTG I think those are all fair points, for sure. From what you describe, I hope they emulate you as well. I have appreciated seeing more content targeted at newcomers.
One additional wrinkle, is several terms in the community in general being a little intimidating to outsiders. The term “bullet hell” for instance made me want to avoid a lot of games that turned out to be enjoyable once I played them.
And then there’s all the terms that get bandied about where a newcomer gets confused, like how “danmaku” is used both as a sub-genre name in the title “Danmaku Unlimited.” Figuring out when a UA-camr is using a term to describe a game made by a certain company (“Cave Shooter”, “Compile Shooter”, “Toaplan Shooter”, etc.) vs. a certain style (“Tohou Game”) or a certain layout (“Hori Shooter” as opposed to Hori gamepads or arcade sticks) means that newbies may spend a lot of time being confused by videos about the genre. I know I was at least.
It’s not a problem entirely unique to shmups of course and the fighting game community has some parallels (what makes learning that “no miss” means “didn’t lose any lives” any more difficult than learning that “cancelling” in fighting games means starting another move before the first one ends) but with shmup community being smaller and the terms being potentially even more prevalent, it’s a bit of a barrier to entry.
@@perlichtman1562 Yeah the terminology can be an issue, but I think solving it is less of a matter of changing the terms and more of a matter of just explaining them better. Since a lot of terms like bullet hell/danmaku/etc. are here to stay. That's how fighting/action games went about it, terms are still used but more people know them. Also, incorporating the terms into the games themselves & tutorials will help. Stuff like "nomiss" has to go though. It's similar to the hellish "okizeme" people use when they could just say wakeup game.
@@boghogSTG Yeah, explaining them more often would do the trick and I agree about your example at the end.
I think that either saying danmaku or using the translation “bullet curtain” would still be more inviting than bullet hell (and MudPrints did well with “Bullet Heaven”). But overall the explanations are more important than the terms.
The “Everyone likes Pink Sweets” bit felt like an acid flashback 😂
ha yeah that was trippy to see at gdq, so I couldn't help bu include the clip XD
In America R-Type Final had the Eidos FRESH yellow box dressing that Legaia: Duel Saga shared. It was the most random selection of games they chose to publish
The only company whose used cardboard boxes sell for $300, yet still can't manage to make a Mushihimesama 3 😭
by the sound of it, cardboard boxes is all they have left sadly.
Great topic and well presented. Thanks for doing this, would love to see more videos by you on Cave's history.
Thanks 1cc! It would be cool to do a history of cave video, I've wanted to for a long time it's just so hard to research
Excellent bit of investigative journalism, Mark. The most eye opening thing for me is the numbers. I'm just surprised they were even doing 20,000 of anything. Agreed on the Espgaluda 2 sales. I think the best we can hope for is if M2 continue as they are and perhaps bring in guest directors. I suppose it all hinges on how the new Aleste game does as to whether we're going to get polished, Cave-esque quality shmups from Japan, going fwd. Maybe Co-Ops rather than publicly traded companies are the way to go? Also, in your research did you see how Nin 2 Jump did?
Thank you very much skeletons! yes i think the final conclusion (if I can come to one) is that if a studio is going to rise up and take over being as prolific and quality as cave was, that company better remain private because the profit expectations of being publicly traded will kill it. Shmups are no doubt "unprofitable content" as the report said ha.
Very awesome video Mark. Great research by you and Boghog. I can't wait for your channel to morph into fashion and makeup videos so you can get the Cave collab! :D
It's the logical next step lolberta, fashion is the future. I am the future of fashion.
That's not that surprising about R-Type Final to me, I remember that game had a HUGE marketing push and was loved by mainstream audiences and reviewers. Way before I was into shmups I owned this game and put a ton of hours into...but never 1cc'd it. This is because it had a ton of unlockables and branching paths that you had to grind out. Not only that they put a ton of emphasis on the graphics and music, one of the selling points was that they got a Blue Man Group song in it lol. I have a ton of nostalgia for this game so I went back to 1cc it last year and my God is it bad as an "arcade" game, the pacing is horrendous and the balance is a joke. But if your just a casual blowing through with continues it's great. At least Ikaruga has a good game behind all the hype lol
R-Type Final was my first horizontal SHMUP since the NES. (I did play Touhou.)
Didn't know the series, but that game could be found in almost all game stores.
Irem was definitely pushing for that game to sell well. (I don't know if it succeeded, taking marketing into account.)
And yeah, the game was a mess. Really fun to unlock stuff, but most levels were soooooooo sloooooooooooow...
Yeah r type final does have some pretty sweet tunes and presentation (i like them more the final 2 visually), but absolutely the pacing of the game is mind numbing. It does feel like the game was designed to play through a time or two because it takes its sweet time
I wish cave the best, but I don't think they'll make an arcade style game ever again. Maybe they can build on their iced tea business, I heard they have a history with that.
Great video, very interesting. I do like this type of discussion and at the very least I think a lot of people should open their eyes more to how much of our favourite games and devs are at the mercy of profit. It definitely makes me think that this period we are in where we get some ports on PS4 or Switch of classic games might not continue into the age of PS5, PS6 etc.
Strangely enough I saw Deathsmiles for sale on a store shelf in a tiny town, on a tiny island, in Australia. Bizarre.
Exactly zhukov, if I were to identify the moment cave went wrong, at least looking at the data, it was their decision to become publicly traded, that shifted the whole focus of the company and basically made continuing to make arcade style shmups impossible.
Thank you for doing this in-depth video on our favorite genre of games. I never though I’d care about this side of Cave until I starting watching your video!
Thanks very much scott! CAVE are my fav dev so I think and wonder about what they are up to pretty frequently ha.
To the point about the X-Box 360 games being exclusive, I believe that was Microsoft's way of building a bigger audience in Japan by having exclusives that market would want since they weren't exactly doing great out there. And looking at Cave's wiki it is crazy all the different things they are doing. Beyond the games and e-commerce, they also have their hand in investment management somehow.
This showed up in my YT recommended, glad I clicked it! Very good and informative video.
While I don't usually play shmups, I did try some of Cave's old games like ESP Ra De, Guwange, Progear and enjoyed them. Too bad Cave don't seem too interested in making new shmup games anymore. From what I am seeing, it seems that they figured arcade shmups were too niche to make a decent profit and so started branching out into other game genres and platforms like visual novels and mobile games.
But the most surprising thing is diversifying into non-gaming related markets. Like I understand Cave trying to move into mobile gaming, but fortune telling and jazz events?
Cool video, informative, entertaining....and yeah, a bit depressing. Maybe Cave should cooperate with indie shmup developers and push already (nearly) finished games in a sort of "Produced by Cave" way. Maybe both sides would profit from this, just an idea. The comparison of Cave games to the other shmup releases is a bit apples and oranges imho...
M2 shot triggers releases are not really available in the west outside of the US. You can't buy them through an EU PSN account. Many mainstream players - even ones interested in shmups - don't even know they exist.
R-Type Final 1 was pretty popular in Europe. R-Type in general plays in a whole different league than any bullet hell shmup - the franchise is still known and respected in Europe, probably because of its history with European Micro computers back in the 80s and 90s.
Sin and Punishment 2 was heavily pushed by Nintendo and a lot of people bought it because they liked Ikaruga on Gamecube.
The possible scenario of Cave games on the Wii is interesting but I'm very sure that putting stuff out on Wii instead of 360 would have been much more expensive and complicated. There were lots of rumours back in the days that Microsoft helped Cave to port their games to their platform. It kinda worked...for a while;-)
So basically, CAVE cornered itself into hardcore shmups so hard they had no idea how to reach out to casuals.
At least Touhou, for all its gameplay flaws (according to the hardcore shmup fans), experiments a lot. For example, the IWBTG-like Pointdevice Mode in Touhou 15 (those who fight the major salt factory known as Clownpiece know this well) and the Ability Card Shop in Touhou 18.
CAVE's Touhou derivative game is going to be interesting at least - we'll see their take on the Touhou shmup style. Maybe the Touhou game is their Hail Mary considering how many Touhou fans there are?
Yeah the touhou gacha game could be really popular, but from what I ve heard they don t even have arcade staff anymore to they ll probably just stick to mobile and porting old games moving forward
Thanks for another great vid!
It's interesting to see how seemingly small a part of their revenue as a company Cave's games brought in (since 2004 at least).
I know that there are currently some really bad numbers for arcades in Japan across the board, with many people saying that only the really huge arcades will survive (though not even all of them will make it). The same underlying worries about the future of arcades is likely what caused Konami's shift as well (though Konami's arguably very stupid decisions surrounding that could fill many hours of rambling)
Last time I checked Konami we’re doing financially better than Capcom when they moved out of video games
Interesting vídeo. As much as we try to análise and explain the cave business is always Impossible to do it propely because many information is absent and we try to fill the Blanks the Best we can. In the end it was a video that personally Gave me more questions than answers (and that is a good thing) Probably without the internet boom cave would remain a small cult company in Japan. One of the main reasons that you speak is the quantity of games that they publish in such a small Windows of time completely devaluates the product in the point of view of the consumer.
yeah I think cave jumped on the e commerce train thinking it could launch their company into this big operation, only to have the market crash right underneath them. it would be like if I decided to take the electric underground public and invest all my time and energy into crypto or something ha. It's just such a radical shift in focus that the old days of banging out arcade games is impossible to return to.
Cave should have stored a stockpile of their pcbs in a vault and now sell them and make $$$$$$$
ha the limited run strat XD
Great stuff, thanks for digging into all this data for us! Alternative title for this vid: "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"
OOF
This is just brutal. I really don't like seeing people screwed over, even companies - If it is something that happened outside their control.
I really feel for these guys. So many great visions remain unfulfilled thanks to the way our world works. Aww that's so sad. :(
Yeah they're quite niche, but I've gotten into cave Shmups over the last few years with my Switch. When I want to play a game just for it's gameplay and chill.
their library is incredible. My fav shmup dev hands down
I vote Mark MSX for Cave CEO. He’ll turn it around.
Step 1 buy a majority of shares and make the company private again. Step 2, get a bunch of devs in a tiny office and lock them in there. Step 3, let the magic happen ha
48:34 Almost rolled my eyes. Man this is discouraging I was at least hoping for more Steam ports :/
I think we might see more steam ports, but not from cave themselves. They will likely outsource them to city connection, with mixed results ha
@@TheElectricUnderground Yeah. I was hoping for an in house Futari port. Oh well maybe CC can get its act together or M2 decides to treat us with PC ports of Shottriggers
@@FiRezfps *>PC ports by ShotTrigger*
lol, that ain't happening.
I wish they did, but it's been many years since they started their ports, and I've lost all faith it's ever gonna happen.
I can see arcade style games coming back in a big way because of subscription based services like Xbox Game Pass. Seems to me if you’re wanting to flesh out such a service with more and more content, (which they’re going to need to do) the easiest way of doing so would be smaller style games that were previously reserved for arcades. The ever increasing cost of buying a game may have killed what would’ve been home ports of arcade games in the past, but I can see this subscription service stuff bringing back a lot of stuff.
I do dig the optimism my friend, but I think subscription style stuff is going to be a massive problem for smaller genres because it s gonna cut the legs out of individual sales and the games will only make pennies in a Spotify style model
Really interesting and impressive video, congrats!
thank you riff!!
super interesting deep dive. do we know where the Cave shmup developers went? (he says, hoping they are all beavering away on a cave-like mega shmup somewhere)
It' sounds like they've bled off to smaller companies over the years, like rolling gunner, aka to blue, and livewire. Of the three I think livewire might be the most interesting as they are doing a pretty solid job with the 360 ports. I could see them possibly doing something in the future, who knows.
Absolutely great upload Mark! CAVE seems very muddled which direction they want to go. We know that no matter what they produce it will not hold a candle to what has gone before 😔.
That Cave financial graph is such a depressing thing to see, especially the precipitous decline after 2012.
Why is Cave not working on creating new shmups for PC and console, or at least primarily targeting that market now that arcades have started to fade. Crimzon Clover and other top-tier indie shmups have done very well with this strategy.
Why haven't they explored other genres like twin-stick shooters and rogue likes? Yes, the hardcore audience wants to see more Cave shmups, but their team is so talented that I could easily see them dominating in other related genres.
Why does Cave historically all but acknowledge their fan base outside of Japan? Only some of the 360 ports were region free, and US releases have been few and far between, with most coming in the last couple of years. I do greatly appreciate them stepping up releases of ports to western audiences in the last few years.
And finally, why is there still no Steam release of Futari? Why were EspRade PSI and Ketsui Deathtiny not released on Steam?
There is a fan base out there with plenty of money to throw around on Cave's art that would likely buy nearly every game they release, especially new shmups.
I also disagree that Cave releasing a bundle wouldn't be effective. I think back to how I found out about these games in the first place, and it was via ROMs and emulation that I had discovered on websites listing all the cool arcade games that I'd either never heard of or that were never brought to US arcades. Bundles are the perfect vehicle to expose casual and curious gamers to the company's back catalog and the genre in general.
1. Probably the same reason the other Shmup devs didn't. Their success in the Shmup genre trapped them. Also, didn't they also have a specific hardware to work with when they made those Arcade games? That's not mentioning having to introduce the software slowdown and the variance in PC Hardware that they can't account for.
2. I think Instant Brain WAS their attempt to branch out. It bombed too, didn't it?
3. Counter-question: how many CAVE fans are there outside of Japan?
4. Just play Touhou Gensou Eclipse if you miss CAVE.
Come on Cave! Fashion-based/fortune teller themed shmup. The idea is right there for the taking.
Yknow what I consider the turning point for the arcades in general (outside of Japan anyway) becoming an irrelevance in terms of mainstream appeal? When the ps2 launched.
Because that's the system that got ridge racer v at launch we'll before the arcade release, and tekken tag was a much superior version on console than in arcade! So many folks were like what's the point in arcades anymore?
Outside of the big amusement sit down driving/ ddr cabs of course.
Still have a couple near me. After so many years away from that initial "what is this for?" feeling, I can confidently say now, that it is and was for the social experience. Same reason for split-screen/local multiplayer.
@Scarred Steel that's true. But the notion of the arcade being the home of the cutting edge in gaming is well and truly dead compared to the 80s and 90s when it ofte felt like arcade games were a generation or 2 above what you'd get at home
@@whatamalike right, but that technology was the means to the social end. At least, in my opinion. It was creating those "water cooler" moments right there in the moment.
@@n2oshotandironman >the social experience
this is why i love any games still remaining in public places and why most people don't care much about them
they give you a context and a reason to meet people but normies have a web of contacts built from like age 10 in the social media so they go for who the already know
@@inakilbss you say normies like it's normal to be a friendless shut-in
I've accepted idea that CAVE will never make arcade-style games again. It's not been their jam since 2012 and I imagine they don't have the sort of specialist workers to make those sort of games anymore.
Besides it's not like other shmup devs exist nor is the entire shmup genre going to die if CAVE hypothetically goes bankrupt.
I got the impression from Shmup fans that if CAVE goes bankrupt there would be a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
I got the impression that all these Indie Shmup devs have to develop games that are like CAVE to be considered good enough for these Shmup fans.
Is the Shmup market still shrinking day by day?
I remember seeing Akai Katana at gamestop when I was in high school
Me too! Rare sigh ha
I originally found you when you chatted with BGE and a couple others, and I had mentioned the downfall of CAVE and how a shmup player was a great person to have on. Little did I know, you'd already done this whole video on it! Glad I found it now, great work as always.
Honestly what gravitated me towards Cave shooters is Manabu Namiki himself for the composition of DFK and SDOJ, very similarily to how Touhou soundtracks got me to try the games themselves, like most people did of that time period. Its possible that they may gain popularity if the osts gain more exposure, but thats just speculation on my part.
Xbox 360 Espgaluda II and Mushihimesama Futari (and Black Label DLC was on the NA stores) Platinum Collection were all-region. AFAIK only the limited editions where locked to the NTSC-J region.
DoDonPachi Resurrection was region-locked. But the 2011 Rising Star PAL-region release worked on NTSC-U/C consoles (but not NTSC-J).
Muchi Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets was all-region but had a low quantity initial run. There was later a "Cave the Best" budget reprint.
Rumor was that it was quite a bureaucratic nightmare to get an all-region release on Xbox 360. Because the Xbox 360 market was so tiny in Japan print runs were (allowed to be) smaller than for their Western counterparts.
excellent summary! Yes the 360 era being region locked seems so outdated these days doesn't it? Imagine if the ps4 was region locked, no more m2 for western players without importing a ps4 from japan or something.
@@TheElectricUnderground The region coding had largely to do with licensing (and publishing) territories (these days there still are ratings territories).
Pure speculation but it felt like Sony and Nintendo couldn't be bothered with Cave at the time (Treasure had a shoe-in because of Ikaruga (GC) and Gradius V (PS2)) and Microsoft subsidized Cave in an attempt to grow the NTSC-J Xbox 360 market.
5pb/Mages on the other hand was already dealing with Sony so they where able to push Ketsui onto the PS3 in 2013 (presumably to capitalize a bit more on the license they were still holding).
I remember ppl talking about Rtype Final back in the day. What i don't remember was ppl talking about Cave games. System11 is the only reason Cave have some relevancy outside Japan, so it's not really a surprise that their games have piss poor sales.
yeah the cave releases really snuck under the radar sadly. Well to an extent that still goes on now, no one talked about deathtiny at all pretty much.
Interesting SDOJ only sold 10k copies but got a platinum release on 360.
so giga this is a really interesting observation so I dug around a bit and have a little theory. I wonder if these "platinum collections" have any connection to the game being listed to be purchased digitally. Because it sounds like (and this is just preliminary digging around) when a game is listed for sale digitally, it's not uncommon for it to have a platinum collection counterpart. So perhaps that is the reason why, as both SDOJ and Futari have these platinum collections.
Much respect for the deep dive into this side of Cave’s journey.
Hi Mark. I've been periodically watching your channel and I recently subscribed. I want to get into the PC shmup scene as I just got a new computer. I'm a fan of shmups and have played them on consoles. I apologize if you covered this on a video I haven't seem, but two questions. 1. What is the best arcade stick to get for the PC to use on shmups? 2. How do I get mame or some other medium on the PC to emulate shmups?
Thank you,
Brian
Hey Brian def check out shmuparch 7 and low latency mame to get started with emulation (I have an emulation playlist on the channel) and I have this video on arcade stick to start with ua-cam.com/video/31aIbVEwjks/v-deo.html
@@TheElectricUnderground Thank you so much for the reply. I'm gonna check all of that out, im super stoked!
Great video, this clearly took a lot of work
Off topic but I love the film Eyes wide shut.
The music by Jocelyn Pook during the ritual 👌🤌🤌🤌
A man of culture and taste. I love eyes wide shut too, one of my fav films. Such a masterpiece.
maybe they should have made Steep Slope Sliders 2
that was the key ha and instant brain: the revenge
DoDon Pachi was the first for me and I went on to LOVE all their shoot em ups, great video man.
Although I own Futari on 360, I've been praying for a switch release. Even a steam release would be great. Seems that will never happen.
I think we will see livewire release futari, but they have to get the clearence from m2, so that might be tricky.
I agree that there is no money left in arcades but surely if CAVE made a PS4 Shmup with regular dlc and extra soundtracks and ships to purchase and levels and competition leaderboards and lots of super ltd editions etc there are a lot of people
That would throw money at it. I think they done super well in gothic wa otome. That was huge in Japan with all
The merch. They could also make a fortune from a direct toy line . Imagine DFK Transformers at 100 bucks a pop. I’d buy the lot.
The problem cave runs into though is that they are a public company, so they need big profits and they need them fast, which shmups cannot deliver. The genre has too tight of a bottleneck
The key would be if they could “pull a Disney.” The animated movies provide the prestige and the “raw cultural material” and while they usually do well in ticket sales, the big money makers is in merchandising, toys, theme park tickets , etc.
Of course “pull a Disney” is far easier said than done.
Update from 2024:
Their game revenue suddenly jumped in the latter 2 quarters of Fiscal Year 2023... because they made Deluxe Games their subsidiary. Deluxe Games is the developer of Monster Strike.
Oh, also Touhou Gensou Eclipse's downloads far exceeded CAVE's expectation and they're now focusing on player retention. Gomaotsu's having a collab with Gensou Eclipse in 2 days, and we'll probably see a Gomaotsu collab in Gensou Eclipse for its 1st Anniversary.
You realise that every single VGChartz sales figure that's not supplied by a publisher or has a link to a source eg. Famitsy etc is literally a made up guesstimate by their own admission. For Japan sales it's pick a number between 1K & 50K if it's not a famous, well known (to them) title. For America it's a bit higher. They're completely meaningless. They say Raiden Fighters Aces sold 60K in the US despite never being released there. Garegga PS4 seemingly sold
I did mention that ohfivepro that VG charts isn't going to be dead on accurate (you can tell how much rounding there is in the reports), but it is all we have and it at least gives a general picture that I think makes sense. For example what you can do is check the sales on VG chart and then cross reference them with the current ebay prices of the game, and there is a pretty solid correlation there where the lower selling games like SDOJ are really expensive and the higher selling ones like deathsmiles are cheap. It's not perfect but like I said it's basically all we have. I'd love to get my hands on really concrete sales data but video games keep that info under wraps classified for some reason.
They had a good run and made a lot of amazing games, but their influence has created a multitude of newer developers who are pumping out great games now.
The shmup community seems stronger than ever right now.
yeah cave's fate really isn't too different from most other shmup companies like treasure and so forth. It's just impossible to keep the dev doors open at that scale sadly.
Making money in the arcade with a proper videogame is a big ask now. Even with a small team. I think they should look to the pinball home market and see if they can replicate something like that. If someone like Stern today can sell enough $10,000+ tables to turn a profit (and people like Todd Tuckey says it's mainly home sales and some barcade too), surely JAMMA PCB home sales could be looked at with PC/console sales backing it up?
it makes me sad that the mobile shmups were what lead to gothic mahou and now touhou gensou eclipse taking over all their remaining game development. the daioujou ios port was the first cave shmup i played and a surprisingly good introduction. i think there's absolutely room for traditional shmups on mobile in terms of game design, but when it comes to financial viability it's a different story (see aka to blue's switch port seemingly getting cancelled and tanoshimasu making no more games because casuals were refunding it and reviewing it negatively on the play store for being too hard and too short...) so it makes sense that cave went even further into the casual market with gacha and stuff, and still only to diminishing returns even then. just wish there was another way because mobile is such an interesting platform with some unique potential for shmups, it's just been totally taken over by a parasitic and predatory market.
Thank you for this video. Fantastic job!!!
Thank you very much my dude!!
Great video! I think they should maybe just crowdfund any potential new games. There are enough people out there (if they market it right) to make it profitable and it’s as risk-free as possible. It seems to me that this is the kind of niche that crowdfunding is great for.
So technically... the company had a cave in?
Also, I'm gonna say it, I'm one of the those weirdos who doesn't like Deathsmiles, just never felt good game-play wise. Art style was good though.
Also never heard of Pink Sweets... sounds cursed.
indeed they caved to the demands of being publicly traded ha. Also pink sweets is a pretty fun but crazy game, it's just not a good port at all in the double pack.
@@TheElectricUnderground Ah ok.
Thanks for bringing up the possibility about the games potentially being more successful on the Wii. I know that's uncomfortable to hear for some people but install base really matters and it's interesting to think what could have been. I think (and hope) that getting games into the switch is making a difference.
Wii owners didn't buy a lot of games especially the hardcore type like a bullet hell game. I think cave made the right choice staying off. several companies tried to make those kind of gamer focused games for the Wii and lost their shirts
it's hard to know exactly how it would have turned out because lets not forget that the majority of cave's sales came from japan, not the west, and the japanese wii player base may have had different tastes. One that stands out to me is how well neo geo seems to have done on the virtual console, so I could see a crossover there in terms of a potential player base. Whereas on the 360 the cave shmups sort of stand in no man's land, a tiny slice of a niche genre on a niche console (in japan the 360 was very niche).
@@TheElectricUnderground true but I don't think they could have got it out on the virtual store because of the tight space requirements. I remember correctly Nintendo wouldn't allow games more than 128 MB.
Excellent Production Idea. Great Show. Top Channel. NIce One.
Thank you very much x20spec! A ton of work went into this one, editing all those damn graphs was a pain ha
Excellent video. I am a casual cave shooting fan. I bought every release on 360 and the first arcade game I ever played when I went to Japan was SaiDaiOuJou in 2012. I really wish they would make deathsmiles 3 and make it super kick ass
great investigation... So weird how little information there is on many japanese companies that have large fanbases in the west.
IT REALLY IS Taylor, I don't know what it is with Japanese companies but they are so tight lipped about everything. It's pretty frustrating
Very interesting and informative. Great job! Japanese companies are maybe a bit weirder with their tendency to diversify. Thinking how Nintendo for much of its history wasn’t game related.
Wonder if Cave keeps the game division alive despite losses for personal nostalgia from board members, to keep a toe in the market or for some technical reason to do with taxes or something like that. As I said, Japanese companies are weird.
Japanese companies are so wierd!! I guess because they have to work all the time they end up doing these weird fusions of personal interests and unrelated business
@@TheElectricUnderground I think you're right. Keeping a labor group occupied lest you lose them is actually a thing.
Great video but regarding to sales figures of the physical Cave games: Ketsui DS = well surprise I dont want my bullet hell Shoot'em ups on a handheld = that was reason enough for me to not buying it. DDP DOJ was a borked port with a hell of a lot of issues done not by Cave themselve but instead from an unknown company (for Shoot'em ups at least) called 5PB - did not buy it for that reason. Death Smiles was Caves first game they ported themselve, it was glorious, it was released in every region and the Japan version was region free - for me it was the reason to finally import a Japanese X 360. From that point onward - region free or not did not matter anymore for me = with that said - it was a hugely STUPID decision to not just release EVERY game region free - no they switched that between each release which was just dumb. Mushi Futari = top tier port. Ketsui - after DDP DOJ people were highly suspicious if 5PB would make a good port of Ketsui. The sales on Death Smiles 2 were low because after the masterpiece that was Death Smiles 1, DS 2 was just a HUGE disappointment. Pink Sweets / Muchi Muchi Pork double pack = it was dumb that both games were bundled together but otherwise 2 great games. Espgaluda 2 was also a great port. :( :( DDP Resurrection was awesome. Akai Katana is just genious and it was released worldwide. Mushihime Sama HD is gorgeous but I think most people thought this is a re-release of Futari not realising it was the first game. SDOJ was a very late release when the X360 was dead in Japan already. Just a few things to consider. Oh God how I wish Cave would make new Shoot'em ups again - imagine a proper Death Smiles 3 :)
The Xbox 360 was a flop in Japan. A total of 1.6 million units sold by the time the Xbox ONE came out in Japan back in 2014. So no wonder the sales was low. Especially the 2013 SDOJ console release. Death Smiles and Akai Katana was also released in Europe on physical disks. I guess that explains the sales. Cave also said in an interview way back that it was much easier to port their arcade games to Xbox 360 then PlayStation.
We need to accept that cave is done and move on. We need to look forward into new developers that could take their legacy with new games. Like gunvein for example. And we , as fans and consumers, try to involve more people into de genre so it could became more profitable for devs. And more production could be put into the games.
yes as far as new arcade games, it's over my friends. But we can at least look forward to the m2 ports, which I enjoy a lot ha.
@@TheElectricUnderground I play on pc so I can't haha.