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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.
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
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
Marketing. If people think Dolby is good, they will prefer products with Dolby compatibility, and Dolby makes money from that licensing.
Except most people don’t give a shit about Dolby. Even audophiles mostly don’t care about them as a company or the fact that they’re involved beyond the games ability to support high end output devices. Put that garbage on the box or in the credits at the end of the game where it belongs
Most people that say they give a shit about surround sound don’t have it set up correctly anyway lol
They’re lucky if the speakers are even in the right place…let alone tuned properly. Good AVRs come with a microphone and most of the takeover projects I did when I was in home AV had it sitting unopened in the box.
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.
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?
Anyone with good media equipment cares.
You don’t need to be reminded about sound encoding every time you boot the game even if you do care.
Dolby (and others) have determined that it is in the best interest of their brand to put this alongside developers, producers, publishers, and others. It is now part of their license agreement.
Anyone with good media equipment cares when they consider purchasing a game. Nobody needs this info every time they launch it.
The two go hand in hand. Want DolbyVision? The logo comes with that.
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?
At least some games parallelize this. The game then already loads assets, caches shaders etc while the intro rolls.
Lots of people ITT complaining that Lemmy is blanket anti-business, meanwhile I’m just surprised that something involving Nintendo isn’t being downvoted into oblivion
This place is getting more diverse, I like it
