Sonic Dream Team (New 3D Game from Hardlight, coming to Apple Arcade December 5)

I cannot the stand the fact that I cannot get my six year old son to finish Sonic Dream Team but he'll keep asking his mom and me for money to upgrade his character in Sonic Speed Simulator. Sega is a huge part of the pay to win industry. The best thing about Apple Arcade in my opinion you can share it with the entire household so they can use it on their devices too. That way the games are not only exclusive to me.

 

This does not excuse the giant megacorporations gatekeeping the game to a service where nobody can own it and where it will certainly die forever if their repeated statements about it not being brought to other platforms are true. I am actually not happy a game exists whose developers will have their work permanently destroyed for an exclusivity deal that never needed to happen for it to still be a good game. That is, in fact, worse than not making a game at all, the same way it's better to keep your milk, eggs and such in the fridge instead of baking them into a cake just so you can run it over with your truck tires.

 

Yeah, it is a bit disappointing how the exclusivity worked out just because of how little faith Sega had in this game in the first place. If they had some sense, the good feedback would inspire them to greenlight a spiritual successor.

 

Idk, I imagine the developers are happy that they were able to get paid and make a game that allowed them to showcase more creativity than the typical mobile titles they work on. If the reception is positive, it probably opens more doors for them and the studio in the future.

 

That doesn't contradict anything I said, and more importantly, all of that could still happen without locking the game to a format where nobody can buy it and it will die forever.

 

At the very least I hope it'll open a oportunity to SEGA let Hard Light develop a game for PC and consoles. It's a perfection opportunity to make "small" plataforming games while the main ones are in progress (open-zone). With that, I think "everyone" can be happy with that.

 

Does this not imply that you'd prefer the developers didn't make this? Please, go talk to some people at Hardlight who worked on the game and tell them you'd rather they sat on their hands or made some more gacha/F2P stuff out of consideration for their artistic integrity.

But it didn't. Sega wouldn't take the risk of having an unproven developer (at least in this format of game) make a title like this without having some assurance of return.

I find it annoying that this game isn't on something like the Switch, but I'm glad it's out there.

 

"They worked hard on this" is a dismissal of every criticism ever made. You're not going to guilt me into pretending this all isn't bullshit the whole way down. If "game that is forcibly killed across the entire planet for no reason" isn't an affront to developer intent, then I have no idea why you would think gacha/F2P trash is (and for the record, I would prefer that none of that shit exist either).

And that's not my fucking problem. I am not obligated to have sympathy for the "standards" of the company that makes Sonic Team put out "uh whatever" every couple years. I am going to blame them and keep blaming them for making bad decisions as long as they keep making them.

It's not out there! It's entirely under the control of parties that are, as of right now, planning on killing it the second that maintaining it becomes less profitable. You know what's better than a game that nobody can ever play again? Literally anything. I haven't personally experienced a single instance of unofficial emulation, porting or piracy of Apple Arcade games, and I haven't seen any fan projects get far at recreating it either. How is it going to be "worth it to get this game" in a few years when you can't get it?

 

We had 20 pages of this. You were wrong and weird about it then, you're even weirder about it now that we know the game is polished and decent (and we know we can attribute the business model for that at least in part). The game exists. The industry has never made any effort towards preservation -- on the contrary -- and your vitriol isn't anyone's problem either.

"It'd be better if the game never existed" boo-hoo. It does. People got paid to make it and now it even got extra content. So far we don't see signs or reports of shitty workplace conditions or brand micromanaging. Going off this platform is like screaming to the wind that SegaSonic is some sort of a moral transgression in itself because it was never fully localized or rereleased.

 

Geez, for someone who always goes for the labour side of disputes, you really don't seem to care about getting people employed and paid. Can you provide a plan for how we make the system you're proposing work? Where these people will make all the games you want, exactly how you want them, for every platform (except Epic, I imagine)! Where the games cost exactly how much you deem them to be worth but somehow the team gets paid handsomely.

To your point about this vs. gacha: I don't think either are inherently an affront to developer intent. They have contracts that they agreed to and signed. What they make is what they were hired/decided to make, and if they're unhappy, they can quit. If people choose to make F2P or gacha games, that's their prerogative. Some people like that stuff, I just imagined you didn't so I picked it as an example. It's not like how I view SoA butchering Sonic's characterization in the 90s which I would count as a betrayal of the creators.

Are you opposed to subscription games, subscriptions with Apple, exclusivity in general, or the potential ephemerality of these kind of games? I think that ultimately I'm a bit more optimistic that we'll eventually see it on other platforms than you are. If you could definitely tell me that this game WILL be lost forever... yeah, I'd be a bit mad. I just don't think that will happen.

Sega has clearly begun pumping more money in the franchise (and game dev business in general), after the success of the Sonic movie. They ARE obviously receptive to market forces and indicators of demand. Sonic Mania's success paved the way for Superstars (despite what some people here may feel about it), Frontiers paved the way for Sonic X Shadow, etc. We have been getting more Sonic shit recently than almost any point in time. If the ROI is there, they can always get the rights from Apple. Otherwise, I'm pretty confident some fan will recreate it.

 

Unlike you, I'm not optimistic at all about the game's chances of being recreated or rereleased. I do think it'll be lost to time, forever, in three years time. I also think that sucks.

But I also think labor is conditioned to the material conditions that make it possible. Sonic Dream Team couldn't have been made as easily under other conditions, and a very strong evidence for it is the fact that it wasn't. It didn't exist, ready to be shipped in someone's dilettante mind, but then was made to be accommodated to the Apple deal. The Apple deal provided the conditions for it to be what it is to begin with. Gacha games are the same: any artistic intent that exists has the model as one of the conditions for it to arise. It's predatory, yes -- but so is every single commodification of pleasure under capitalism. This is beside the point.

Again: 87% of the games ever made are unplayable today. Every single effort for preservation is made in spite of the industry's wishes and C&D orders. It's an uphill battle and, although the Apple model is worse than (say) physical media multiplatform games in a lot of regards, it doesn't make Dream Team unworthy of its existence of people's labor. Games aren't abstract constructs that you just so happen to play through an arbitrary interface that could be changed at will if CEOs were good enough people. The media is (part of) the message, and that in turn is what's exploited.

We should criticize the model and point out in which ways it makes gaming as a hobby, as a culture and as technology worse. But under the conditions that we have, it makes no sense to say Dream Team is so particularly egregious it shouldn't exist at all while every other game that's also trapped in fundmentally amoral and immoral industry should.

 

Hey, genuinely all excellent points but I want to note that Apple doesn't make permanent exclusivity deals and never have.

The only one I can think of personally is this Steven Universe RPG that was the end of a decent selling trilogy that Apple funded the third entry of. They had done well enough on consoles that 13 months after it showed up on Apple Arcade, it got PS4 and Switch ports as well.

There's been nothing indicating this deal is different than the others. SEGA had some other Apple Arcade exclusive games that never got ported but they never got the attention, love, and critical praise that Dream Team received.

There's no way they let this game die on this service when there's going to be money in keeping it around. It was also made in Unity so it should be easy to port as well.

 

Okay, it feels like I'm being misread here. My #1 problem with Sonic Dream Team is that it is on death row. The fact that said death row is also a stupid subscription platform that sucks is secondary, but if it weren't currently set up to be murdered, I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed. I'm not just butthurt about all exclusivity. I mean, exclusivity is still dumb, gaming tech is still a bubble that's going to crash, and with any kind of sense left in humanity, games won't be limited by hardware the same way movies and music aren't, but obviously demanding that everything gets a version for every platform is wrong, and I never intended to give that impression.

I may have been responding to comments about exclusivity in general as if they were about the game dying, so I apologize for the confusion there. I'm talking about the fact that this game was born on life support. We've had Iizuka as recently as last week saying that Dream Team isn't leaving Apple Arcade. There's already one other Sonic game there that's languished, I don't know if you can even play Sonic Racing anymore, and the ChuChu Rocket game I'm pretty sure is gone. Maybe the fact that people liked it will get it ported, but there are games that have been loved by fans for years that aren't getting attention, and they have infinite lifespans!

If they're going to put it on other platforms, I'll give them the thumbs-up, but they're not doing that right now nor has anything they've said indicated they're going to. I refuse to give them credit for something they haven't announced.

That being said, I also think these:

are terrible arguments. 87% of games are not unplayable. They're unplayable legally. I can pirate a copy of Super Metroid, and I could even if it never left the SNES. I have SegaSonic and MAME on my PC right now. But I can't pirate most MMOs, I can't pirate Overwatch, I can't pirate The Crew, and the number of games held hostage by being distributed as services is much, much smaller than the ones that are sold as normal products. I linked Ross Scott since he's currently running a legal campaign to try and make it illegal in several countries to shut down servers that people paid for and making it totally unplayable (although this wouldn't save subscription games, but the principle of "it's art and shouldn't be destroyed" is there). Preservation is and has been shit for most media since the beginning of time, there's tons and tons of movies, television, music and books that will never be seen or heard from by another human again, but piracy has been integral to saving media in all of them, and there is no tool more effective at deliberately preventing preservation than what we're seeing here. If you're telling me to just be complacent with that system, then yeah, I might as well be hoping that the games that do get killed are the ones that don't deserve to live. I can't take a phrase like "the game exists, I like that this game exists, deal with it" seriously at all when the biggest problem is that it won't exist, potentially soon, and that problem is completely artificial.

Also, I'm not sure if the "labour" stuff is just being directed at exclusivity in general, but it should go without saying that destroying a creator's work has absolutely no positive impact on them and definitely has a negative one. Me demanding they not do this is directed at corporate suits, not at real workers.

 

This kind of comment is worthless. It's the same as Nintendo (or Sony or Xbox) holding out on announcing new consoles, that we obviously know are coming, in order to maintain existing sales. Iizuka isn't going to make a statement that leads to fewer people getting Apple Arcade.

 

It is in fact a comment though, which means it's more than the assumption against precedent that the game will be ported is worth. New consoles (from companies that still have money) are a(n eventual) guarantee, ports of Sonic games people say are good most certainly are not.

Listen, there is still plenty of time for me to be wrong about this. Feel free to @me and say "I told you so", I welcome the prospect of a game not being killed (and yes, me being able to play it conveniently certainly doesn't hurt) more than I give any shit about predicting the future, but the future hasn't happened yet, and I can see the present just fine. It feels like every day I say "this would be such an obvious thing for SEGA and Sonic to do", and then someone else chimes in with "why would you expect them to do the obvious thing?". Is it that crazy to imagine that a company famous for its questionable handling of its flagship mascot would let one of his games disappear, especially when it's already happened?

 

As I said, I'm glad you enjoy it, but you and others here really, really are downplaying how badly the industry wants to erode our ability to own any product at all, or even preserve it in any meaningful way. It's become a hot topic point of contention lately because a 'lot' of IPs are falling into that trap. Live Service should have meant simply getting updates after release, which is a good thing, but has instead devolved into "digital only title that endlessly churns out mixed quality content that you can never permanently own", which is objectively bad in pretty much every sense. Dream Team is not one of the worst examples in terms of the product itself, and I'm in no way saying you're "bad" for enjoying it, but the release method is quite bad and isn't worth defending.

The fact that SEGA isn't taking steps to make this more accessible is a major error on their part. They're continuing to ignore legitimate demand while catering to a model that hurts consumer rights. You can justify it with "this is how it got funded" all you want, but that's not really an excuse. The Sonic 3D fandom has grown huge, and the money to support a high quality stand alone product in this style is there. They're just chasing the same subscription model/live service trend a lot of publishers are right now and in 99% of cases it's bad for the consumer and bad for the content. They're choosing a less ethical way to make money, and it reflects poorly on them as a publisher. This could be corrected, but may now never be.

I repeat. As it is right now, I'm glad you can enjoy this, but I can't at all support this model. I've never paid for a single MMO subscription in my life, and yet I don't even consider most MMOs anywhere near as bad as what modern live service titles are becoming. Admittedly, I got burned badly by a few years in the Pokemon GO community, but I was able to justify that for awhile because it had IRL social connections and outdoor exercise benefits I found beneficial for a time. That stopped when the company kept changing up the gameplay flow to the point where it disrupted and broke down most of our communities, and made me realize just why I avoided live service games in the first place; because the publisher is always incentivized to maximize profit over any enjoyable experience and will happily break good gameplay loops and increase addictive incentives to do it. You end up losing your personal freedom to enjoy the title at your own pace, and you truly do miss out due to time gated events and product availability. It's incredibly predatory and the worst thing about gaming now, by far.

Ninendo did something similarly predatory with their digital only Mario collections. That was awful and I didn't buy any copies because of it. Emulation only and a great big bird flip to the big N for that one.

This stuff is a serious problem with the game industry that risks actively getting worse, and fast. Start paying attention to the talk about AAA games we've seen in just the past few months and you'll start to understand why. Publishers are deliberately gatekeeping more and more content behind predatory live service models and using addictive psychological methods to influence people to stay hooked on the product, rather than creating a stable, legacy "game" you can enjoy and beat like we've grown up with. Inflated budgets are a big factor in this, and the indie scene may fill in the gaps, but we very well could see a 'major' crash from publishers soon as their investors simply decide that supporting the live model is what they want, while players increasingly get tired of the live model and its less satisfactory experiences.

I could go on. There's been a lot of talk about this problem lately, and though Sonic Dream Team is a small and less harmful example of the trend, it's still a direct example of it.

 

I see things completely differently going off my observation of things throughout the years.

You see it as a predatory practice meant to force you into subscription services for games. I see it as a company having a service they want to sell and making amazing products to justify your investment.

Because of the streaming wars and competition I've seen a Golden Age in terms of quality content that literally would not exist if not for streaming. Zack Snyder's Justice League being realized. Adventure Time getting the Distant Lands spin off and later Fionna and Cake which were explicitly mentioned to only exist because MAX wanted more content for streaming.

Beavis and Butthead receiving an excellent second movie, Seth McFarlane's Ted receiving an excellent TV adaptation, Pluto finally receiving an amazing anime adaptation. These are all the result of the streaming wars.

If people don't feel a service is worth the money, they don't have to invest in it. That's why Paramount went from being a huge company to being near bankruptcy because no one felt their streaming offers were worth keeping a subscription for and Paramount went all in on it. Captain Marvel went from 1 billion dollar first movie to The Marvels barely crossing 200 million. There are no monopolies in entertainment. People will just move elsewhere if your content isn't worth the investment.

Apple gave us a great Sonic game that justified me getting a monthly subscription to Apple Arcade, and the other great games on the service like Marble It Up and Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop have kept me around for now.

Video Games are a very viable and lucrative field to get into if you can navigate it correctly and make a product many people want. But that's only if people are willing to spend money on them. And we've seen many excellent single-player games fail and studios get shut down because the sales their games received (I know there are other factors but Tango would still be open if Hi Fi Rush had sold 5 to 10 million copies). This is exactly why companies push so much for big multiplayer games that people play for years and invest money into. I'm happy Apple is showing a belief in the single player experience.


Apple provided a new revenue stream and funding source that didn't exist before, and gave us excellent content to show the benefit of this. Like they've done with Apple TV and amazing shows and movies like Ted Lasso, Monarch, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Or like they've done with Apple Music and having free live stream and physical concerts for fans, and publishing albums like Frank Ocean's Blonde, which they had exclusivity rights for a year.

For all the praise we're giving this game, there's no way we would have been as on board if this was announced as a console game. It comes close to the quality of one but it sure doesn't look like one and would have needed way more money to get made under those circumstances, which SEGA weren't interested in.

Consumer trends evolve and so does how companies receive the financing to make games we enjoy. No matter how many times you say "Apple funding and paying for this game SEGA would never make isn't a good enough reason" it will remain one to me because it's the only way a game like this could exist these days under the way big AAA companies make games which is usually go for broke or don't attempt at all.

Lastly...something isn't amazing because it lasts forever. I got to play a really great 3D Platformer that works as a proof of concept that the type of gameplay I've wanted forever IS possible under SEGA and they have people talented enough to bring this type of production together.

It might get ported, it might not. It might be recreated by a fan in 20 years it might no-...well no this is Sonic so that'll for sure happen. But regardless I got to enjoy it while it was here and that's all anyone involved in the production probably could ever ask for.

 

Why do you talk like an advertisement? This is just going to ridiculous and frankly a little bit gross lengths to massage the image of blatant corporate predation. Every single positive you're acting like Apple Arcade made possible is completely achievable without the Fuck You It Dies Forever™ Service.

"Movies and TV exist on services"? Yeah sure, you may notice that anyone can record and save a movie off a streaming service, though. Every single thing you listed is going to be torrented even if it gets burned off the service, but the less-popular stuff that's not being saves is just as victimized as Dream Team. I guess they just don't count? You love what this status quo has done for these mediums so much that you're willing to let a bunch of art die because some suits don't feel like spending the cents to maintain them?

"Something isn't amazing because it lasts forever"? Yeah of course not, because that was the standard for basically everything ever made up until a few years ago.

"Fans will port it"? This is just the "modders will fix Colors Ultimate" shit again. You might as well just dismiss all criticism forever. Even if that happens, it shouldn't have to because this was a completely avoidable issue from the start.

 

Haha that totally destroys my entire argument! Not like I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone who loves quality art and want to see it find new funding or ways for it to exist or anything which was the entire point of my post!

I'm being realistic about what a game like this needs to be able to exist and able to be funded. And I used other examples of things that only exist under the circumstances of subscription services and streaming.

While also saying we don't have to buy into or subscribe to services that don't offer value and giving examples of big titans that collapsed due to not bringing value to what they make.

I don't even know why you bothered to respond if you were going to say this especially when I have gone out my way not to quote or respond to you for a reason.

Edit : When this person originally posted this all they said was the first sentence so that's all I will be responding to. Except to say that when I said that fans will recreate it, that was obviously a joke about Sonic fans dedication. I think anyone not reading what I said in bad faith would understand that.

 

No, you proved to SEGA that the type of content you want is something you're desperate enough to give up ownership rights over without a second thought as to the consequences, while you dismiss the rest of us who are concerned that the game literally cannot be preserved right now with current tech at all (something which is not true for pretty much all streaming TV content you mentioned). And you're justifying it in a community that literally only exists because it was built on reverse engineering practices that these methods seek to make impossible, for a franchise that has survived financially in great part 'because' members of this very community used their reverse engineering skills and copyright infringing content (literally any fan content, including fan art) to make the brand more successful and accessible. If publishers gain full control over their content to that degree, the thing that kept this community going ceases to exist. Worse yes, it can embolden companies to be even more aggressive to those who reverse engineer their product in any way, as we've already seen Nintendo do to varying degrees.

You are telling a publisher that you do not care what they do so long as you gain a temporary version of a game, while blowing off the rest of us who are concerned about its accessibility, a practice which has been widely supported for years. You ignore the dangers of helping a corporate publisher succeed at a questionable practice, and ignore how these practices are literally eroding our ability to enjoy similar games in other IPs right now. How AAA publishers divest away from traditional games as soon as people are foolish enough to make subscription content viable, and you incorrectly argue that a game like Sonic Dream Team could not be funded or successful on its own merits, which I think everyone here knows is ridiculous.

I'm not arguing for blatant piracy here, only perhaps as a last resort. I'm arguing for our ability to pay the developers a reasonable price for a product we can own as we typically have for a decade now, with minimal DRM if not physical at bare minimum. I already have to deal with Denuvo crap on PC, but now locking new 3D sonic behind a subscription service and not committing to any port? That goes a step even further, and again, the idea that they'd gatekeep one of the most in demand types of gameplay for the IP to do this? That's truly not cool, and it has little real justification.

Yes, maybe we'll get lucky and see this game turned into a full flagship release spinoff based on the gameplay style. Maybe. But that becomes less and less likely the more normalized these streaming service exclusives become.

I won't lose sleep over my inability to play this game, perhaps ever. I've skipped MMOs, Gatchas, and countless other live service games for years, including small mobile titles for Sonic before. And I repeat what I've said, I don't think you're a bad person for enjoying the game. Your sole purchase doesn't tip the scale one way or another, but don't mindlessly defend the practice without recognizing what's going on here and what's happening in the broader game industry right now.