User experience over marketing.
Here’s an example of the Dolby logo from another GameCube game that offered surround.
Honestly, 5.1 surround sound is worth waiting the extra like 2 seconds of the logo. The fact that the game only has mono or stereo sound output just because he didn’t want to have a logo on the screen for a few seconds is not putting user experience over marketing.
It would honestly make more sense that Nintendo told him he couldn’t add it because they didn’t want to pay for it and this is how he justified it to himself.
Most households have a TV with TV speakers, only capable of L/R. Why pay money and have people sit through a corporate short film for a feature most won’t use?
Its two seconds for the benefit of 5.1, so the people that have it can benefit. And the people that don’t can upgrade later.
Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.
If it was money thing, couldn’t he just say “I needed as much coin as I could scrape up to get Sora from Disney” like he basically said with the last wave of DLC characters?
Maybe it’s my nostalgia glasses, but this is something I actually believe coming from Sakurai. The man almost hates useless ads as much as Lemmy users.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I’d love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I’m sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you’re playing the game. If they’re even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo’s time.
Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: “The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
Two issues though. Sakurai was taking about how he likes the ability to jump from game to game at an arcade and jump straight into the game. But a lot of console games had you go through intros, menus, tutorials, etc. And he didn’t like that, hence why he was saying he’d rather not have an extra logo screen to click through
The second issue was that the game in question was a GameCube game. It only outputs in stereo. Surround sound wasnt a common thing in games at the time. It would have been the old school Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II encoding. Most gaming setups didn’t have surround sound receivers or sound bars yet. Also, it’s a Kirby game. The target audience wouldn’t have cared
The perception of delay is a lot larger for a single initial delay than a lot of smaller delays within the game. It’s very noticable if a game takes 20 seconds to get past the intro screens, while it is barely noticeable if a quarter of a second of delay is added to the loading between each level, even if it adds up to a lot more than the initial loading screen.
Considering that the use of 5.1 surround would be a very rare case for the target aidience, I find the choice of dropping it to be excellent to enhance the experience.
Because Lemmy hates everything that isn’t FOSS. The more time I spend here, the more I see that it is no better than Reddit.
Based. Unskippable logo screens are a nuisance.
They’re so pointless too. What are they even expecting forcing them in our faces to accomplish? You either care about audio or you don’t. Seeing your logo isn’t going to change that
Marketing. If people think Dolby is good, they will prefer products with Dolby compatibility, and Dolby makes money from that licensing.
Except most people don’t give a shit about Dolby. Even audophiles mostly don’t care about them as a company or the fact that they’re involved beyond the games ability to support high end output devices. Put that garbage on the box or in the credits at the end of the game where it belongs
PSA: On PS5, after launching your game, hit the PS button. If there are activities, you can probably hit square to resume. This speeds through all the startup wankery and the main menu straight to loading your save. It rarely saves time, but it means you can launch your game and walk away to get a glass of water or whatever. I enjoy it.
What a chad move
Things like these make might heart warm. They remind me of a time when video most games where about making a good experience for the users, not about endless MTX and soulless always online games that all try to be the same thing. Good to see that there are still some people in the industry, who carry own these principles.
Fucking based