BombermanBoard

DragonBomber · #16 Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 12:03 pm

The thing that caught me off guard was the sudden-ness of it, from my under-a-rock perspective. I would get messages from one of their employees on Facebook often enough, given the past story they did on the collections Paul and I had then, more bits now though not as many as I'd like if I stopped getting as much instrument/music gear since then. ;) They really tried to do some interesting things, and still keep a bit of the flow going as far as their Facebook presence goes, but the loss of their website potential/limited forum there is a bit sad. I still held the hope I would get to drive around demoing new games for them someday during regular time off from my day job, but alas, that never had a chance to bloom since they were West coast and I am too far off. I really wanted to have made some of their events out there, or just visit the offices and get a bit of the Hudson magic first hand.

To give them credit, the markets have just changed so much. They really tried to ride the waves well, getting into the mobile ringtone side of things, mobile games, and the downloadable content that a lot of the population wants. Sure, most of us, or collectors in general still want physical optical media, if not carts, but the reality is even the collectors I know are unloading the older media in droves. I see them go from massive rooms of stuff, to those powerpacks, emulation, and other options, all for the sake of the trouble it takes to store it all, they never use it, and the money comes in handy. Just my experience with the collector's community. You have new blood buying up the old stock, but they do not seem to have as much of the energy of the old guard.

I do not know where Hudson Entertainment could have gone focus wise to really keep their own independent face of the larger merged entity going here. Not with the transition to mobile games like all the iOS content they have now, the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii apps, and so forth. Converting older titles to our region would have still found digital distribution their home, rather than physical media, and it may have killed them even sooner budget wise. New games would have been fraught with issues between demographic needs. Some of the buyers pushing the design to more contemporary areas seen in the other games, and some of the others like myself begging for something closer to what we had on older consoles. No one would have been happy enough to see sales surge beyond what we can expect, and saw with the downloadable games. The new properties they pushed were interesting and fun, but they did not have enough draw and innovation to drive a whole market swing toward Hudson's content over new indie developers and other standouts who made a dent in the pre-order wakes. It seemed to be too little too late.

I will always support them and be a fan, but the changes needed to stay current and outselling the other guys might well prove too much for them in the long run. Some fun new games and the full body of past awesome, but nothing jaw-dropping to a big enough section of the game-buying population to make them truly viable commercially as a power player in the industry. :( Makes me sad to see that too. I cannot say that Hudson Soft or Konami was ever the most potent developer but they put out a LOT of games over the years, with a lot of popular franchises between them. Hudson continually developed software that sold units, even when it was made using other peoples' IP characters, good example being the Mario Party franchise. Have to wait and see where the merged entity goes in the next decade. :)