Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo
Just a moment...
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
Yup. The game company intros are the first thing I edit out of a game's config files. Especially if they're unskippable.
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.
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.
Fucking based
It's especially weird to have all that time dedicated to something nobody cares about. Who goes looking to see if a game or movie was made using Dolby?
yea, ill go looking for great movies and games which have good Dolby Atmos... but once i buy it, i dont need to see a splash screen every time.
Wish we could have a single splash screen with all the bits of tech. then its only one, instead of screen after screen...
Anyone with good media equipment cares.
Anyone with good media equipment cares when they consider purchasing a game. Nobody needs this info every time they launch it.
You don't need to be reminded about sound encoding every time you boot the game even if you do care.
That information belongs in the specs/feature list on the encasing, not in the fucking splash screen as dedicated video.
For the buyer that would be too late and for the one who bought it already and now wants to play it's utterly pointless.
You were down voted, yet here I am. A person who cares about surround sound options.
Pro gamer move
The only thing worse than unskipable ads are the waiting screens (press a button to continue) in front of the loading screens.
I mean, the machine is capable of billions of operations per second. Why is it waiting for ME to push a button?
Dunno if you want a serious answer, but 'press start' titlescreens that start up an animation if you leave it unpressed too long are a throwback to when if a screen showed the same image for too long, it would fry the image on to the screen and leave a little ghost image, so screensavers were a screen saver. This allowed one to demo software and just leave it running without worrying about damaging the product hardware.
These days however it is totally unnecessary.
So that if you leave the room to make yourself a tea or something while the game is loading, your won't miss the cut scene / beginning of the action / lose the game because it started without you present.
It's just an arcade feature that got brought over
At least some games parallelize this. The game then already loads assets, caches shaders etc while the intro rolls.
But however will it determine the player one controller .... on a desktop computer?
I am so glad when a PC game just has the intro videos as separate file, always go there to delete them, I do it with every game.
That's what integrity looks like
Most games don't use Dolby anyway. It's PCM (although the console can often convert to DTS or Dolby Digital if you have a crappy old sound system).
Dolby Surround was only needed for mixing the surround channels into stereo output.
Kirby sucks and blows anyway
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Oh, nvm, sorry
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
This took me back so fucking far I'm so old
I definitely wish there was more negotiation with tech library companies about this. It makes sense for movies - it's a one-time experience, you only see the supporting studios' logos one time, and it's just building anticipation for the opening moments of the movie. But games are things people play twenty times a week. Someone might see the logos more if they play in shorter sessions, and maybe even avoid playing for a night because they're familiar with the two minutes of setup to get to "actually playing".
I even wish there was more effort to put gaming menus before the launch. A long time ago, Steam standardized a server picker for their own games, so you could skip "launching the game, hitting Server Browser", instead just open the server list, double click one, and then that's your "launching" task taking you to the thing you want to play. Even consoles could do this, even for games using matchmaking. I remember this being something the PS5 promoted in its menus but, not having a PS5, I'm curious if many games followed though.
You would think that the shit-shoveling marketeers would figure out that showing an unskippable logo does brand damage.
luckily, most games are easily modded: Just put a 1-2 frames black video file where the brand logos used to be. Done.
Sakurai is the goat.
Can't you add surround without dolby?
I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it'll decode it properly.
As far as I'm aware, yes.
I use Dolby with a lot of my games but don't have the 'Ad screen".
You might have to due to licensing, if the technology is patented. I don't know about this
Short answer, Yes.
Longer answer, no. This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
I don't think people are playing Kirby games expecting Dolby surround sound anyway, so this seems like it'd be a pretty easy decision.
The hero we didn’t deserve.
You deserve it.
Oh fuck I forgot about Kirby Air Ride. That game was amazing. My mom and I would get insanely competitive over it.
Wise man. I don’t care about Dolby but I do care about loading
The only Dolby worth sitting through is Thomas.
Corporate loga are cancer. I don't give a fuck about your shiti brand. I paid you for use the license. You don't get to fucking stick your shiti advert into my life after I pay you.
Actually yes, they do. You paid for a license.
See, now before you used to be able to buy an individual copy of the game. Then you did have the right to edit those out. Can't do that when you only buy a license.
Yarrr ;)
Dolby Surround is just weird to me. Why no just use multichannel wav/flac/etc?
Most people have just two speakers, and if you have headphones a good stereo surround software can actually be even better than the surround from multichannel
I approve.
Yeah... i don't understand why this is a good move. Sacrificing an element that would noticably improve a core aspect of the games design for the sake of not looking at a picture for a few seconds on startup? Seems completely backwards if you ask me.
You need to toake into account that we're talking about a Kirby game here, which are all 2/2.5/sometimes 3D platformers. So The real effect of Dolby in such a thing would have been close to zero.
The context is Kirby Air Ride, a racing spinoff. Not that it changes much, but it is fully 3D and a genre that can take advantage of surround sound.
Yeah I did consider that when I made my comment. And keep in mind I do see where they're coming from. It's not like I'm calling them stupid for this decision. I personally just see it as a massive overcorrection for something that will, in the grand scheme, have virtually no effect on the quality of the game for literally anyone besides the person who made this decision.
I know it's not the best comparison, but to me it would be like if RTX support required an RTX logo, and a major studio just removed RTX from their game, not for any performance or quality issues, but solely for a logo. Again, it just seems like an overcorrection for a non-issue. I'll admit, I sometimes get annoyed by intro logos, but never enough to the point where I'd think it's worth removing features to get rid of them.
This is Sakurai's explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."
I remember one of l Hank Green's older videos when he added up all the viewtime from all of their videos and realized it was longer than the average human lifespan. Of course, he immediately framed it as "We've killed a man!"
You realize this is Lemmy, and on Lemmy you have to hate every business and every product produced by a business apparently, right? If it isn't FOSS, then you aren't allowed to like it.
Hey bro, just pause the game and play their jiggle on your phone if you miss it so much.
This scrub is why Brawl ran in slow motion and included random tripping because the 5 melee players scared him with enjoyable competitive gameplay.
It's probably because they didn't want to pay Dolby licensing fees, not because it makes a 2 second difference in the loading screen.
even see how this would affect the loading screen considering I run live AC3 encoding on an old laptop much older than the switch and it has zero effect on the boot and login time. nvm it was a GC game.
Basically every Wii game shipped with Dolby Digital no issue.
User experience over marketing.
Here's an example of the Dolby logo from another GameCube game that offered surround.
https://youtu.be/cE4KVPJYLCo
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.
GREAT game
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?
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.
Nah, not for me anyway
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."