Random blog post follows: Why does every other games company completely and blatantly rip off Konami, and why do Konami let them get away with it? If it were Microsoft, dare I say it, there's no way they'd let these things slide... Beatmania gets copied by EZ2DJ, Dance Dance Revolution gets copied by Pump It Up (and several others), Guitar Mania gets copied by Guitar Hero, Thrill Drive gets copied by Burnout... And the list probably goes on. These aren't just influences, these are all cases where someone has gone "Ooh, that looks cool... Let's do that!" and re-implemented the game. To add insult to injury, some of the plagiarisers have done a lot better than Konami, without adding anything new (Criterion with Burnout, Harmonix with Guitar Hero (and their up-coming band game too..)). Whoever heads Konami must be very understanding and very honourable. Or very oblivious. If this was my work, I wouldn't be too happy about it..
Adam Williamson says:
Have you seen how much money Bemani makes?
Your view is skewed by your location. Sure, most Bemani games don't do too well outside Asia - DDR is the notable exception. In Asia, though, it's a completely different story. Every Bemani line is wildly, insanely popular. Bemani coins money hand over fist.
The main reason most of the games don't do well outside Asia is that the content doesn't translate. Beatmania could be an exception as the songs are fairly generic dance music, but the thing with Beatmania is it's really, really hard; it's pitched above the difficulty level most western players will accept. It's not an accessible game.
GuitarFreaks and Drummania are stuffed with very Japanese music. So is Popn.
There's also the fact that the entire Bemani set of games is heavily arcade-based. The console versions are conversions of the arcade games, the arcade editions take precedence. This doesn't play well outside of Asia, because game arcades are dying out in the U.S. and Europe. In Asia, though, they're still huge.
In the end, anyway, this is nothing new. Game mechanics have always been copied. It's just a fact of how the industry works. There were rhythm action games around before Bemani started up, you could argue they ripped those off...it's just a process of development.
It's not really true to say that the copiers didn't add anything new, either. Guitar Hero is a very well made game; the basic play mechanic is more or less copied from Guitar Freaks (although they added two buttons, hammer-ons and pull-offs, hold notes, and dropped the difficulty level substantially), but the innovative area is the presentation. Bemani games don't have much in the way of presentation - they're arcade games, they work like arcade games. Guitar Hero is very well set up and obviously made by people who understand music, which increases the immersion factor of the game a lot.
I really doubt Konami are crying into their beer about this. Sure, I guess they'd have liked it if the U.S. releases of Beatmania had done as well as Guitar Hero...but then, go to Tokyo and see how Guitar Hero sells there. They're playing in their own market.
(There's a rumor that they're doing location tests of a U.S. version of GFDM this year...if they don't license a bunch of different songs it'll probably sink without trace. Heh.)
belal1 says:
As Miyamoto once said, "imitation is a form of flattery" referring to all the other hardware vendors copying Nintendo's technology.
Chris Lord says:
Interesting response, and pretty much all true... It's not the imitation that bothers me, we'd have nothing if we weren't allowed to imitate. It's the outright blatant copying, without improvement or acknowledgement. I have to disagree with you about Guitar Hero, I don't think it's presented particularly well at all; you're probably right with the fact that it isn't presented as an arcade game, but it doesn't do much more than Guitar Freaks does in that domain.
Bemani aside though, Burnout 1 is almost identical, even in musical styling, to Thrill Drive... I don't really know what I'm getting at, maybe I'm just bitter because it's hard to get Bemani games over here and Thrill Drive (as far as I know) never got a console port (I spent a lot of money on it in my arcade gaming days :))
Any comments?
