After the opening medley of game symphonies, the host stepped onto the stage, and this year's TGA officially began.
First came a montage of videos showcasing games released throughout the year, presented in rapid succession to give players a glimpse of everything that had come out over the past twelve months.
Watching the footage on the big screen, Hazuki smiled and said, "Ichin, I saw Tales of Berseria!"
"Yeah, I saw it too," Ichin nodded with a smile. "Apex and Fall Guys were in there as well. Looks like these live-service online games were included too. Still, I didn't expect there to be this many games released this year. There are quite a few I don't even recognize, and some I know about but never got around to playing."
"That's because our own development schedule is already packed," Yagami Kou said from the side. "We don't have much time to play other games. At most, we check out games similar to what we're working on for reference. And honestly, for a lot of games in the same genre, ours are just more fun. For example, Umiko has completely stopped playing PUBG and Battlefield. She only plays Apex now."
"That's true."
Ichin nodded in agreement.
Every year, countless games are released, but to be honest, probably less than half achieve both strong sales and good reviews.
Some games only gain a bit of attention when they first release, only to be completely forgotten within ten days or half a month. Cases like that are far from rare.
If a game sells well, it doesn't matter if people stop talking about it later. The worst situation is for games that neither sell nor even generate negative discussion.
As a company that consistently develops high-quality games, while their employees do try out games from other studios, more often than not, after looking around, they find that games in the same genre aren't as enjoyable as their own.
Take RPGs, for example. Games like Dragon Quest have been cleared by almost everyone, and few would replay them. Looking around, they couldn't find any new RPGs that were truly engaging. Some even went back to replay Persona, and a few even came to Ichin's office to ask when a new Persona title would be developed.
Although the RPG genre has declined somewhat in recent years, there are still a large number of players who love it.
As the video montage on the big screen came to an end, Ichin said quietly, "Hopefully this TGA will announce some games that actually interest us."
With the video finished, the awards ceremony officially began, and the first award was Best Action Game.
One by one, the nominated games were displayed, and Tales of Berseria was among them.
As expected, the award was won by Tales of Berseria. Amid a round of applause, Ichin went on stage and received the first trophy.
The second award was Best VR Game, which had nothing to do with Ichin's team. The winner was Sony's first-party VR title released this year, Horizon Call of the Mountain.
Although VR gaming has been developing for several years, there are still many issues in the field. Whether it's hardware requirements, production costs, or development capabilities, the industry hasn't reached a mature stage yet. The gap between top-tier VR games and ordinary ones is still enormous.
Ichin still had plenty of projects on hand, so there was no way he would allocate resources to the VR industry right now. That would be extremely unwise.
That kind of thing was better left to companies like Sony and Valve, which also develop hardware.
Speaking of Valve, they didn't seem particularly interested in VR anymore either. After releasing Half-Life: Alyx, which gained massive attention and praise, it didn't achieve particularly high sales.
As a result, there had been no news of new VR titles from Valve since Alyx. Instead, they shifted focus to developing their handheld console, which turned out quite well.
Ichin had even received several prototype units from Valve and bought two himself.
Although the chip performance was still somewhat lacking and battery life was a major issue, the built-in optimizations and support for the Steam library were excellent. It was quite enjoyable to use for playing smaller games casually.
As for Microsoft, there hadn't been much news about VR device development from them either.
And Nintendo, the last of the big three, had always taken a different approach compared to Sony and Microsoft, never really aiming to compete in hardware power. They had dabbled in VR long ago but eventually abandoned it.
Watching the developer of Horizon Call of the Mountain go on stage to accept the award, Ichin shook his head. "I wonder when we'll see truly advanced VR devices. What we have now still isn't quite there."
"It'll take time," Hazuki said with a smile. "From what I've heard through friends, it'll probably take another three to five years before VR can make a real leap forward. There won't be any major breakthroughs anytime soon."
Ichin shrugged. "That's about what I expected. I'll wait until it reaches my standards before getting involved."
After the Best VR Game award, the next category was Best Mobile Game.
As expected, the award once again went to Genshin Impact. This marked its second consecutive win in this category.
Although Ichin himself didn't play Genshin Impact, he had to admit that the game's revenue-generating ability was terrifying. There had been several times when he was tempted to enter the mobile game market because of it, but fortunately, he held himself back.
Mobile games could actually serve as a good way for single-player game developers to support their main titles, and many companies had already adopted this approach.
However, at present, there was no need for him to do so. Their existing single-player titles were selling extremely well, and their two live-service games were also generating strong revenue.
Moreover, even though mobile games had lower development costs compared to single-player games, the manpower costs still required building everything from scratch. Planning and operations teams would need to be newly recruited, essentially equivalent to setting up an entirely new studio.
If he were to enter the mobile market in the future, Ichin would most likely go for a buy-to-play model rather than a free-to-play system with microtransactions.
After Best Mobile Game, it was finally time for Best RPG.
Ichin immediately became more focused. This was an award he cared deeply about.
...
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