Marvelous just got bigger and managed to survive the current gaming industry onslaught thanks to the sales of the newest Rune Factory games, Guardians of Azuma. This is big because the company was at the risk of becoming irrelevant and getting into a ton of financial trouble, but thanks to this successful game making attempt they will still be with us. Making games in today’s industry is very hard, between “AI” attempting to knee cap the entire industry and crunch being impossible to tolerate most projects end up being quite soulless, but games from Marvelous have a soul to them.
Marvelous survived
The constant fight for getting to the leader board of rich corporations rages on as companies thread over each other attempting to dominate the attention economy. Games unfortunately are rarely made for the love of art itself when it comes to triple A developers, we need to look at indie examples to get a fix, however there’s companies like Marvelous that still keep things clean and try to make games like they should be made. This is reassuring because it means that as long as you can put out some good games you are still on the industry.
We can look no further than FromSoftware, which are still developing new projects since the 90s and each new release feels better than the last they did. What people desire is to have some neat games to play that are fun and respect the medium, similar to what happened in the past when things were going very smooth. Rune Factory has been a franchise that existed for decades already, so its neat to see the flagship title of Marvelous be the one that saves the company from some certain doom. If you are interested in knowing more, I highly recommend getting some games from Marvelous themselves.
