Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo
Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo
The Smash Bros director says waiting time should be kept to a minimum when games boot…
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User experience over marketing.
Here's an example of the Dolby logo from another GameCube game that offered surround.
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?
Its two seconds for the benefit of 5.1, so the people that have it can benefit. And the people that don't can upgrade later.
Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that's only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would've had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?
It was uncommon, but not so uncommon that it didn't warrant being added to the game. Especially when Dolby was handing out licenses like candy apparently. I would imagine it was cheap to get a license, and would make some sense why Air Ride wouldn't have it. Air Ride is my favorite Kirby game, but even I recognize that Air Ride is probably one of the lowest budget Kirby games.
That sounds a bit as if you were saying: The plebs shall wait for the joy of the wealthy.
The problem people have with your argument is not the existence of 5.1 surround sound.
Nor is it that the vast majority of households can’t afford a properly tuned surround sound setup instead of haphazardly throwing speakers around which arguably creates a worse experience than stereo.
It’s that the Dolby implementation requires publishers to license it and pay for an unstoppable ad that plays before every session, while benefitting only the petit bourgeois.
Notice how you reverted so quickly to your capitalist brainwashing. May be a good inspiration to see what other ideologies have been implanted into you.
It is two seconds.
Per use.
I strongly prefer 0 seconds.
If every single software a company licensed to produce a video game required this, you would be waiting an hour to see the start menu. Don’t let any company do this or they all will.
Negative change worms it's way in through small defeats. The first DLC's were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what's 3 seconds? What's 4, 5, 6? What's 30 seconds? What's 2 minutes? We've seen examples of this all throughout capitalism's history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.
Not only is it just 2 seconds, but it's 2 seconds while the game is no doubt being loaded into memory while it plays anyway.
This is like whining about the Pixar animation that plays before all of their movies (for much longer than 2 seconds).
Gamecube doesn't have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.
Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn't be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I'm going to trust Sakurai's word here!
Sure, and the Spectrum ZX I used to use 35 years ago had even less. The GameCube is ancient history, it's not the benchmark for a reasonable amount of memory for anyone.
Edit: apologies, I forgot we were talking specifically about a GameCube game.
I would understand the complaint if it was longer, like 5 or 7 seconds long for just the Dolby logo. But its not.
Like, if seeing a logo for two seconds bothers you that much, better close your eyes when
drivingriding the buswalking around town, otherwise you might see a dreaded billboard or advertisement.Gonna just completely ignore that said 2s is otherwise unneeded so you can feel like you still have a point, hm?
Seeing an ad while walking does not require me to stop what I'm doing and wait for the ad. Putting an unstoppable ad in your pre-game logo does
Loading screens in a game take longer than two seconds and don't have the benefit of running one time before the game starts and adding surround sound support. So you would rather be greeted with a black screen as a game with less features loads instead?
Great idea.
My state banned billboards for the same reasons.
It's a really good reminder when I'm ever in another state that things like that just... Aren't needed.
The advertising thing is a slippery slope, and it's OK for people to draw the line for how far down the slope they're willing to go higher up than you would. It's also OK that your line comfortably holds a 2-second ad.
No position here is unreasonable, and everyone should keep that in mind.
So many assumptions here.
Let me refute them through educated guesses.
- most people don't have anything other than stereo
- most people don't want anything other than stereo
- not everyone has the money to even get a decent TV, let alone 5.1 or God forbid 7.1
- Kirby does not focus an people with high end playback devices. It's traditionally a kids game.
- 2secs Everytime you open the game can add up and be really annoying. Especially for kids, which are the core audience.
So because some people have a crappy home theater setup everyone should have a crappy experience?
Hey my setup's great, I just don't need 5.1 surround sound that bad
Without at least 5.1, why even bother playing games or watching movies?
Now you're just playing
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
IMO
Watching a movie with 5.1: great
Watching a movie with 2.0: great
Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool, and I find good sound design at least as important as good visuals. It's all part of the aesthetics package. One of my fondest media memories is watching Jurassic Park at a relative's house with the sounds of the raptors coming from speakers all around. I even spent great expense setting up my own 5.1 setup.
But I've been chasing this dragon for too long. Audiovisual fidelity doesn't move the needle for me anymore (pardon the metaphor overload). I no longer feel the need to have my media reach out and immerse me - if it's good, I can do the work and use my imagination to get lost in the fantasy
Imagine consuming media with speakers rather than high-end OEMs to shut out all outside sound. Might as well just read books in a crowded café.
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
Sorry I'll be explicit: I'm making fun of how pretentious you sound and can't take anything you say here seriously. I actually agree that a monster sound system can greatly enhance a movie or game experience, but the difference depends on the specific media. I saw Fury Road three times in the theater because I knew my home system would never match the experience. Something like Star Trek TNG or My Cousin Vinny or, as the topic of this post, Kirby's Air Ride hinges far less on the audio quality to deliver the intended content. Gatekeeping enjoyment behind speakers makes you a colossal ass.
From the pareto principle it can be said that if the cost for adding a feature for the little percentage of users is quite high, it is not worth it.
Who games on a 5.1 surround setup?
Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.
Yepp. Surround sound is not tied to Dolby.
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."
Two issues though. Sakurai was taking about how he likes the ability to jump from game to game at an arcade and jump straight into the game. But a lot of console games had you go through intros, menus, tutorials, etc. And he didn't like that, hence why he was saying he'd rather not have an extra logo screen to click through
The second issue was that the game in question was a GameCube game. It only outputs in stereo. Surround sound wasnt a common thing in games at the time. It would have been the old school Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II encoding. Most gaming setups didn't have surround sound receivers or sound bars yet. Also, it's a Kirby game. The target audience wouldn't have cared
The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it's nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it's not something that adds up a lot unless you're jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn't make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.
As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn't worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don't pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.
The perception of delay is a lot larger for a single initial delay than a lot of smaller delays within the game. It's very noticable if a game takes 20 seconds to get past the intro screens, while it is barely noticeable if a quarter of a second of delay is added to the loading between each level, even if it adds up to a lot more than the initial loading screen.
Considering that the use of 5.1 surround would be a very rare case for the target aidience, I find the choice of dropping it to be excellent to enhance the experience.
Perception plays a huge role, that's true, but I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree since it's ultimately subjective.
Because Lemmy hates everything that isn't FOSS. The more time I spend here, the more I see that it is no better than Reddit.
Nope. It's just an unnecessary label which provides no additional features, i.e. no benefits. You can have Dolby sound without the Dolby label.
The title states "Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo" presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it's likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn't use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).
Don't like it? Write your own equivalent and selfhost it using my favorite distro. /s
Exactly. This place sucks just as bad as Reddit, and the only reason I don't go back to Reddit is out of principle.
Cry moar!