Injustice: Gods Among Us was a pretty good fighting game with a really good comic-book story. Anyone who didn’t want to pay full price to experience that story could just wait for all of the cutscenes to be uploaded to YouTube instead. The dynamics of streaming across Twitch and other platforms are now widely accepted within gaming, but there are still developers who are clearly concerned about fans who might be content to watch someone else play their games rather than going out, buying them, and playing them themselves.
One of those developers is Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. He recently talked about the special threat that streaming can pose to certain games in an interview following the reveal of Final Fantasy VII Revelation at Summer Game Fest last week. “One thing RPGs like Final Fantasy need to be careful about today is the possibility that people might simply watch a stream and feel satisfied without ever playing the game themselves,” he told 4Gamer, according to a translation by Automaton. “This is a bit of a crisis for the work itself, or rather, it’s not something game creators can wholeheartedly celebrate.”
To avoid this, he said games need to offer players enough agency and high-stakes choices that they aren’t content to just sit back and vicariously experience the story through someone else. Hamaguchi continued, “If people watch a stream and it makes them think, ‘What would I do in that situation?’ or ‘How would I experiment with that?’ then hopefully they’ll be inspired to try it themselves.”
You can see this born out in the way that the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy expands various gameplay mechanics and story beats in ways that go beyond the streamlined and mostly linear adventure of the original PS1 game. In some ways, it’s the antithesis of the philosophy that guided a game like Final Fantasy XIII, which almost felt like a linear movie punctuated here and there by challenging turn-based fights until more exploration opened up near the end of the adventure. Even Final Fantasy XVI was surprisingly linear, with an emphasis on real-time combat and cinematic spectacle over more open-ended gameplay.
I love that about that game, but you can see why it might make it more susceptible to the “crisis” Hamaguchi is talking about. Some games have tried to get around that tension by actually prohibiting livestreams at launch. Back when Persona 5 launched, Atlus put strict guidelines in place, backed up by the threat of potential copyright strikes to prevent the game from being spoiled. RPGs like Tales of Zestiria and Tales of Berseria also had restrictions in place.
The industry as a whole has mostly moved away from that approach to dealing with the issue, and fortunately, the proliferation of gameplay videos and livestreams doesn’t seem to have stymied enthusiasm for RPGs, even linear ones. If anything, it’s helped with their recent renaissance.
