Trying to learn all the EZPZ categories.

[Sikutai]

You can also classify all Dark Souls games into the EZPZ category. All of them have a platinum rate of over 10%. Seems to be a EZPZ game series.

[DaivRules]

3 hours ago, enaysoft said:

I think you're maybe confusing Quality Control with Quality Assurance.

 

In no way would Quality Control or Quality Assurance, which get used interchangeably in the developer world, ever be Content Curation. Nintendo most certainly had Color Dreams, which was the Breakthrough of it's day. The seal was only a representation that games wouldn't be broken, not that they were curated, like you're claiming.

 

 

[You]

When I saw "DaivRules" was the latest person to comment in this topic.

 

I came for the cynicism, and I wasn't disappointed.

[DaivRules]

1 minute ago, enaysoft said:

When I saw "DaivRules" was the latest person to comment in this topic.

 

I came for the cynicism, and I wasn't disappointed.

Ad hominem response. Says a lot about your unfounded claim. 

 

[DrBloodmoney]

13 minutes ago, enaysoft said:

When I saw "DaivRules" was the latest person to comment in this topic.

 

I came for the cynicism, and I wasn't disappointed.

 

He is correct though - there was serious dross on Nintendo platforms, the same as anywhere else back in the "Seal of Quality" days - and the Nintendo Seal of Quality had no remit, nor desire, to stop that.

 

There were movie-tie in games, for example, that were barely games, and mechanically slim to the point of ridicule then - and they still released just the same.

 

There weren't games like the "Break" games or the "Jumping X" games - that's true - nothing that small and worthless...

... but that wasn't because Nintendo wouldn't have allowed them.

 

 It was simply because with cartridge games, there is a manufacturing and delivery cost associated with them that would have made charging $1.99 for a game impossible. 

 

The physical limitations of the medium were what prevented games like that - along with the lack of a trophy system to encorage them. Market realities of sales on a physical medium were what regulated the quality level of the games to a certain extent - not any QA/QC.

The "Nintendo Seal of Quality" or Nintendo themselves had nothing to do with it.

 

If it had been viable for a company to sell them and make a profit, Nintendo would have allowed it without issue.

Edited June 29, 2022 by DrBloodmoney

[visighost]

This article also makes a good point that it may help Nintendo, Sony, etc. with their numbers: "X games were released on our platform in month Y! Woot! Of those, a full Z% were indies! Double woot!"

[DrBloodmoney]

1 minute ago, visighost said:

This article also makes a good point that it may help Nintendo, Sony, etc. with their numbers: "X games were released on our platform in month Y! Woot! Of those, a full Z% were indies! Double woot!"

 

Also very true - along with the "We sold X no. of games through our platform!"

 

We know the difference between these games and... well... games...

 

...but don't underestimate how useful those statistics are when dealing with financial types / shareholders etc. who only know games as raw commodities on a graph.

[visighost]

10 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

...but don't underestimate how useful those statistics are when dealing with financial types / shareholders etc. who only know games as raw commodities on a graph.

 

Deciphering that is kind of what I do in life - I see so many people every day content with simply spinning/mindlessly forwarding data... One would think there was a risk or cost-benefit analysis done, and they figured the probably insignificant reputational damage was worth the extra sales/data spin.

Edited June 29, 2022 by visighost

[Helyx]

4 hours ago, enaysoft said:

I think you're maybe confusing Quality Control with Quality Assurance.

Back in ye old days the Nintendo Seal Of Quality was preliminary about covering both. I mean back then nobody would even think of making a shit game, and nobody would buy it either.

 

There were definitely shit games on NES.

[You]

I think some people are misinterpretating what I said.

 

1 hour ago, DrBloodmoney said:

There weren't games like the "Break" games or the "Jumping X" games - that's true - nothing that small and worthless...

... but that wasn't because Nintendo wouldn't have allowed them.

 

-----

If it had been viable for a company to sell them and make a profit, Nintendo would have allowed it without issue.

 

Yes, This is what I am talking about is "THE shit games", you know, the 5 minute long, obviously created for trophy transaction games, "not even making an effort" to make a competent game.

Those are the shit games I am talking about.

 

Awful games exist on every platform, I obviously wasn't talking about those ones. lol

 

Also, I never said the Nintendo Of Seal Quality was a certificate that games were good, or fun. More like QC passed quality control. And other things like make sure there's no nudity, or that it doesn't crash, testing of the product, not whether the game is fun or not, cos you know fun is subjective.

 

Once upon a time, Nintendo and pretty much every company would have definitely said wtf is this, a hotdog jumping up and down on a desk and that's the entire game? No way we are selling this shit. We'd be a laughing stock allowing this officially on our platform.

 

Fast forward to the past 5 years or so. AJRadio Mentions that "Quality control is a joke with Sony."

 

It's actually unfortunately not a joke, quality control has sunk low on purpose, because there's a profit in doing so.

 

Sony are fully aware of what they are doing. People are heavily invested now in the trophy eco system and so if a dev offers them a product that requires zero cost in marketing, development costs and can be sold at an incredibly low price and has a past record of being successful in the market it is being aimed at (People on this website for example) you bet it's going to be green lit and then "sequels" will be made if it's shown to turn a profit.

 

Like that article posted says, Shovelware games on Nintendo platforms are cheap and aimed at children or trying to con people out of their cash, so cheap most people won't or can't ask for a refund. Nintendo makes a profit, it’s that simple. "Oh it's a crap game, but it was only a dollar"

 

In ye old days, the amount of games sold was limited by how much physical space there was to store them in shops and how much supply and demand for carts to be manufactured. A store now can have almost unlimited amount of games. None of the shit games will ever be promoted on the store directly so they are there for the customers that yearn them, without any embarrassment to Sony, Nintendo or whoever else is offering these games.

 

That's the sad thing, in the 80s, if people bought "The Jumping Egg Floater" on NES for 50 dollars because it came with a very rare baseball card (which actually was worthless but people REALLY wanted these cards), Nintendo would have definitely allowed it without issue.

 

It's a shame that selling trash has not only become profitable, but desirable for some people.

Edited June 29, 2022 by enaysoft

[DrBloodmoney]

9 minutes ago, enaysoft said:

Fast forward to the past 5 years or so. AJRadio Mentions that "Quality control is a joke with Sony."

 

It's actually unfortunately not a joke, quality control has sunk low on purpose, because there's a profit in doing so.

 

That's all true - but my point was more that - yes- one could argue that Quality Control standards have dropped...

...but actually, these "games" like "The Jumping X", "The Animal X", and" X Run" aren't an example of that - because they are generally the most likely games to pass QA/QC.

 

If someone wanted to make a genuine argument about the lack of QA/QC standards, it's not those game that would make that argument - it's games like Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Unity, Halo: The Masterchief Collection, Sim City - big games that were hopelessly broken at launch, and took years of backpedaling and patches to fix...

 

Whether those games got to an acceptable state eventually are a matter of degrees, and based on personal levels of qualitative standards - but those are really the games where QA/QC were caught with their pants down.

 

These non-games aren't.

 

They're a sign of tastes, and market realities, not QA/QC - and only a change in tastes or market realities will change them.

Edited June 29, 2022 by DrBloodmoney

[LukeTheGooner]

pretty much if a game has a pretty stupid name then it's most likely an easy plat

[Helyx]

6 minutes ago, LukeTheGooner said:

pretty much if a game has a pretty stupid name then it's most likely an easy plat

 

"Horizon Zero Dawn" sounds like it could be a GIlson B Pontes game.

[You]

40 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

If someone wanted to make a genuine argument about the lack of QA/QC standards, it's not those game that would make that argument - it's games like Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Unity, Halo: The Masterchief Collection, Sim City - big games that were hopelessly broken at launch, and took years of backpedaling and patches to fix...

 

Yeah QA is a separate and equally awful issue, due to the fact games can be released and then worked on or patched indefinitely, there's very little need to have it perfect on launch, a lot of people even expect it and just hope it's not broken (but many can't wait and are seemingly happy to put with the bugs just so they can be playing it now and not later)

 

I think certain companies get special treatment anyway and get wavers basically, an underhand gentlemen's agreement to fix that stuff on or after launch, which is more likely if you're the developers of Cyberpunk 2077 and less likely if you're the developer of Dragon Fin Soup. Of course doing so doesn't always mean that a game is good enough at launch hence Cyberpunk 2077 temporarily being removed.

 

I don't think anyone is under the illusion that Cyberpunk wouldn't be fixed eventually after Day 1 and the shit games, well they will never be fixed. Not that any of them are broken in the technical sense, I don't think even anyone would care if they were broken, just as long as the trophy pops worked and the list wasn't glitched.

Edited June 29, 2022 by enaysoft

[Moridin83]

Without getting too far into the weeds on QC vs QA, I am going to chime in on the "this wouldn't have happened years ago" front. Branding means something, and there was a time when it meant you stood behind your product, despite the occasional clunker getting through anyway. Someone upthread said as long as a game works, it's passed QC/QA.  Let's compare that to cars for a minute. If you got a Bugatti with plastic door handles, plastic cupholders, and the exact same gear shifter from a Toyota Yaris,  it all technically works and would have passed that definition of QC. However, I don't think anyone can argue with a straight face that it meets the quality standards you expect from Bugatti. Every system has always had bad games, but it's the seeming willful acceptance of a torrent of truly inferior products that has a lot of people (myself included) annoyed. For the record, I mainly mean the breakthrough gaming/jumping x line. Rata and the like have ridiculously easy plats, but at least they are actual games, where you can get something out of it other than the plat if you're so inclined. I think we need to distinguish between shit trophy lists, like Rata, and actual shit games, like breakthrough/zippy/jumping etc.

[Ashande]

Something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet in the discussion of “what should be allowed” (which has strayed quite a bit from the original topic, but…) is the issue of gatekeeping, perceived or real. If Sony was to say - regardless of the reason, the game in question, the publisher or developer making or releasing it - “No, we’re not having that” it would be a matter of minutes at most before they were being slammed on Twitter and everywhere else for being some flavor of istaphobic gatekeepers, being the Evil Greedy Corporation(TM) that won’t let those nice innocent developers who belong to demographic <x> earn a living on their platform. Sane people would go “Uh, saying that The Dog K is a cash-grab pile of crap that doesn’t need to exist is not the same as saying that people can’t make ‘real’ games.” but that would only add fuel to the fire. “Who are you to decide what does or doesn’t deserve to exist?” is the next shriek, and down the hill we’ll all go. I suspect it entirely possible that Sony not wanting the social media headache may also be a contributing factor.

 

That said, the question does have merit; who decides what constitutes a “real” game? The Dog K and those like it are obviously on the “naughty” list, but I see people throw around Raitalaka, EastAsia Soft and My Name Is Mayo quite a bit. Mayo is actually quite funny, and Mayo 3 has some surprisingly varied gameplay and some interesting things to say about grief; Raitalaka, while known for being “trophy trash” has quite a few games that were actually pretty good and worth the price (Red Bow and Just Ignore Them were both games I really enjoyed); EastAsia Soft gets the same slap, but published titles like Demetrios, Wife Quest and Trigger Witch, which are all full “games” by any standard definition and are no more “trophy trash” than Grim Fandango or Death’s Door would be. Where’s the line? Is there actually a line, or are we going to use Potter Stewart’s “I’ll know it when I see it” marker?

 

What about visual novels? Something like NekoPara, where you can set it to fast forward, wait ten minutes and have a plat probably qualifies as “EZPZ” and “buying Plats;” Sakura Succubus or A Winter’s Daydream are probably also in that group. But what about Clannad, that even if you opted to put it on fast forward is still going to take many hours and a hefty guide? How about Danganronpa, Ace Attorney or Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly?

 

TL;DR: There’s a social media storm just waiting to land on Sony if they up and say “No more of this.” The categories/companies listed are too vague, too varied, and too broad. There is no statement as to who the ultimate arbiter on what constitutes an “EZPZ category” or a specific game within that category.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[DaivRules]

If the conversation is going to further off collecting the categories of EZPZ games, it needs go into a new thread.

 

[Jeanolt]

7 hours ago, Sikutai said:

You can also classify all Dark Souls games into the EZPZ category. All of them have a platinum rate of over 10%. Seems to be a EZPZ game series.

Yeah, and attacking zegetta has more than one achiever!!

[Puertoking654]

As long as a game is only in the online stores, it's not a problem. If i see ZJ The Ball at Gamestop physically, like when the Nintendo Wii had about 65% of it's physical library these kinds of shovelware, then that's when ill throw in the hat and say it's gone too far.

[DeepEyes7]

Why Sony changed their standards about when a game had a platinum or a shorter non-plat list? If all this games had a short list with few trophies probably we shouldn't have the abomination that we have now, some people only like the "plats" and not gaining so much from stacks of 2 min trophy lists could have prevented the gap between players on the LB to became so big (still we could have the gap but around 70% shorter). The answer is... just to scratch some dollars from trophy hunters? Because I really really doubt that more than 5% of people that buy a breakthrough game is because they enjoy them.

[Letenko]

6 minutes ago, DeepEyes7 said:

Why Sony changed their standards about when a game had a platinum or a shorter non-plat list? If all this games had a short list with few trophies probably we shouldn't have the abomination that we have now, some people only like the "plats" and not gaining so much from stacks of 2 min trophy lists could have prevented the gap between players on the LB to became so big (still we could have the gap but around 70% shorter). The answer is... just to scratch some dollars from trophy hunters? Because I really really doubt that more than 5% of people that buy a breakthrough game is because they enjoy them.

This right here. Even the PS3 had EZPZ PSN games, but they didn't have plats... I wished it stayed that way.

[AJ_Radio]

17 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

(this isn't aimed directly at you, AJ, but generally, as yours is a common sentiment in this regard.)

 

I see this statement being bandied around a lot: the idea that all these joke games demonstrate a lack of "Quality Control" at Sony.

 

 

Quality Control in games is not about genre, or length, or scope, it's not about artistic or stylistic merit, or even about whether a game is predatory, or exploitative, or downright cynical and nasty - it's purely about functionality.

Whether the games function technically as intended.

 

Say what you want about the merit of these "games" (and I could say plenty)... but the fact of the matter is, they are functional.

They work as intended, and, what's more -  they do it right out the gate.

They never need patched or updated... there isn't enough game in them to require it.

 

Unlike bigger games, with many thousands of moving parts, interconnected elements, and a million potential unforeseen conflicts or errors or unintended outcomes that can't possibly be fully explored by an in-house QA team prior to launch, and where a long tail of patching is required to keep the train on the rails...

...these just work.

It would be virtually impossible for them not to, given how mechanically sparse they are.

 

 

The fact of the matter is, these games actually help make Sony's Quality Control look better than it is, not worse.

 

If the only games on PSN were "real" games, then Sony's statistics on how many games "work flawlessly at launch" would be in the region of like 5%, if that.

Almost all "real" games require patches of some sort, post-launch.

That these ones are so bare-bones that they don't, actually helps Sony - it means they can legitimately state that, say, "60-70% of the games on their platform had no technical issues at launch."

 

 

So... really...

...when people complain at length, (as we often see,) that modern games are launching "broken" or complaining that "back in the old days, games just worked" and they didn't need day one patches, or have broken elements that needed fixing etc...

 

...they should probably at least consider the idea that they are - brick by little brick - adding to the situation that led to these kind of joke "games" being so openly embraced and ushered onto the PSN store in the first place. 

 

 

There's a stark difference between what the PS Store was like in 2012 and what it is today. The big difference is quality control. Big issue with the PS3 was it was hard to code for due to its hardware, so a lot of indie games ended up on either the Xbox 360 or on Steam.

 

The PS4 in contrast has PC architecture, which definitely explains the influx of indie titles. Sony of late has mostly been putting indie stuff on the backburner. There's a bunch of solid indie games on Steam and Nintendo Switch that have not received a Sony release. 

 

I'm not saying people should avoid these categories of EZPZ games entirely, what I'm saying is the PS Store is becoming a joke due to how many there are. They were not only designed to sell easy trophies, there are multiple regional stacks being done on purpose. So a niche group of people who trophy hunt buy up several stacks of the same game. You have to pay more money for regional stacks, which in turn generates profits for these developers. Sony is probably getting chump change in contrast to big AAA titles like Horizon Forbidden West, as that appeals to a much bigger audience. While I don't like the direction that AAA gaming has been going, I can at least acknowledge and respect all the hard work that goes into those games.

 

For every Trine and Axiom Verge that come out, there are literally dozens if not a hundred throwaway EZPZ titles. They may be fun for about 10 to 20 minutes, but you're more than likely going to forget them within the week.

[Nitro]

Ratalaika, EAS are incomplete. Can confirm.

[grim_fendango]

On 28/06/2022 at 4:47 AM, AffectatiousDonk said:

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the most played of this EZPZ category.

 

Sony First Party 

 

- Horizon Zero Spam (especially 2nd one)

- Spiderman

- Miles Morales 

- Astro Spam Room

 

 

I think those get a bit of a pass because they aren't 1/10 in difficulty and take 3-20 hours to complete. But I guess by that logic the assassin's creed games and any ubisoft open world could fit into this category.

 

I think there's an underlying assumption in that by EZPZ the OP means grubby plats/lists that are effectively pay to win from a leader board perspective that offer little intrinsic value beyond that.

[Puertoking654]

23 hours ago, DeepEyes7 said:

Why Sony changed their standards about when a game had a platinum or a shorter non-plat list? If all this games had a short list with few trophies probably we shouldn't have the abomination that we have now, some people only like the "plats" and not gaining so much from stacks of 2 min trophy lists could have prevented the gap between players on the LB to became so big (still we could have the gap but around 70% shorter). The answer is... just to scratch some dollars from trophy hunters? Because I really really doubt that more than 5% of people that buy a breakthrough game is because they enjoy them.

It's not only the Platinum trophy, it's the fact that these 10 minute games have like 20+ gold trophies on top of the Platinum. You have hard games with 80% of the list being bronze trophies and these games could take 80 hours, and then here's a game where you platinum it in 10 minutes and the entire list besides the trophy is gold trophies, You can level up faster doing like 4 of these games than the entire Dark souls series plus Elden Ring lol.