325 points

User experience over marketing.

permalink
report
reply
15 points

Here’s an example of the Dolby logo from another GameCube game that offered surround.

https://youtu.be/cE4KVPJYLCo

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Is that the whole thing? I thought it would be a long screen with JUST Dolby. That’s like two seconds and has other credits on it. I don’t understand folks’ rage over that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

GREAT game

permalink
report
parent
reply
-121 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
137 points

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?

permalink
report
parent
reply
-77 points
*

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
42 points

Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

Yepp. Surround sound is not tied to Dolby.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Nah, not for me anyway

permalink
report
parent
reply
-14 points
*

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.”

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
-27 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
219 points

Based. Unskippable logo screens are a nuisance.

permalink
report
reply
45 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
30 points

Marketing. If people think Dolby is good, they will prefer products with Dolby compatibility, and Dolby makes money from that licensing.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
25 points

Yup. The game company intros are the first thing I edit out of a game’s config files. Especially if they’re unskippable.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
122 points

What a chad move

permalink
report
reply
76 points

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.

permalink
report
reply
11 points

well I guess it was because the person who spearheaded the game project was also someone who liked and knew what games were about. Now that it has become a lucrative industry, the whole dynamics has shifted to something else.

permalink
report
parent
reply
71 points

Fucking based

permalink
report
reply

Games

!games@lemmy.world

Create post

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

Community stats

  • 9.6K

    Monthly active users

  • 4.1K

    Posts

  • 87K

    Comments