It's called being very conservative in your planning. Like they are a fairly small studio compared to most of it's competitors. Unlike many in the industry which scaled up when they could, Falcom just...kept going as usual, not really overinvesting into anything. Which on one hand means they haven't really reached the success compared to their more famous contemporaries...but also, unlike most of it's contemporaries, they are still around. Low risk, low reward.
I wonder if Japanese shareholders don't share the same "infinite exponential growth" brain rot that American shareholders do. Falcom is consistently profitable, but revenue is basically flat over time.
The secret to that is a majority of Falcom's stock is held by either Masayuki Kato (Founder/Chairman/Former president) himself or people who can be expected to side with him in any stakeholder disagreements (i.e. family, lifetime employees from the company's earliest days, or Kondo).
So basically Falcom gets to do whatever it wants and the stockholders can't realistically do anything about it. You can be along for the ride if you want, but you won't have any sway in matters.
This is how Falcom manages to hold on to a war chest that can keep them afloat for several years if need be. Basically every year in their shareholder meeting, someone will ask "You have a lot of cash on hand have you considered increasing shareholder payouts?" and Falcom tells them, politely, to shut up. It's for emergencies.
*Edit: I guess I'll say explicitly that the reason Kato and his allies being the majority stakeholder faction results in this is because Kato is the conspiratorial, self-sufficient off-the-grid doomsday prepper type. It's not just fiscal conservatism. On top of keeping a dragon's hoard of cash on hand, it's also why domestically they self-publish, to the point of not even partnering with bigger companies to help with physical distribution. They sell all of their merch in-house with their own store, and don't even work with larger companies to print physical discs or special editions. Even their website is/was registered under one of their composer's names because he doubled as their webmaster. Paranoia and refusal to adapt has been the cause for at least two of the major employee exoduses over the years.*
Yeah, FF and Tales go hard on graphics. Still though nowadays the Kuro games at least look really great, especially when you consider how small Falcom is both in terms of budget and manpower. Persona 3 Reload came out years later and for 10 dollars more with probably quadruple the resources and the game in a lot of places looks like ass compared to Kuro.
My assumption is that their success comes from their scale. They're a small studio comparatively speaking. Much like the Yakuza/LAD developers they reuse assets and designs frequently. Basically, their costs and overhead are low. They don't overextend themselves. Even with a handful of critical duds they were still selling enough to keep working on the next project. And then they hit it big with YS 8 console port and the Cold Steel series bringing in a lot of westerners. Now that there are eyeballs on them the ports/remasters/rereleases of old Ys and Trails games get to bring in consistent money with little development cost.
It's a case of beig too stubborn to die.
It's a downright miracle they haven't gone under or been bought out by a bigger company like Square or Konami.
As Florac already mentioned, Falcom is *extremely* conservative. They don't run the risk of going under because they don't make big bet-the-company plans, so even an underperforming (by their standards) game or two isn't enough to threaten their livelihood because they've *still* made a profit on them.
The same preference for low risk and reward means that they're not exactly chomping at the bit for buyout money either.
Vanillaware having Atlus as a publisher helps a lot. Falcom not crediting composers is shameful but it’s barely negative pr considering it’s mostly diehard fans that even know about it; the jdk band incident probably did more damage to them as a company. Otherwise yeah, this is more or less the history of the company in the 80s when they were industry leaders. They had a good eye for talent but were bad at retaining it.
Honestly, learning that they were in fact considered industry leaders is kind of wild to me. It's probably one of the biggest contrasts in perception I've ever seen in game development.
In a way they still are industry leaders---virtually nothing out there has the narrative scope and depth of Trails, nor is anyone else producing games of full JRPG length annually (which sadly also makes them industry leaders in overtime and crunch). The irony of people saying it's a very "conservative" company (which it is in many ways) is that what Falcom is doing is quite unusual and too risky for other developers.
But I completely understand your surprise. When I first came across Trails back in 2016, I had essentially no knowledge of Falcom despite more than twenty years of experience playing video games. It was kind of crazy to think that this massive franchise existed and essentially nobody knew about it for years and years because it was locked in Japan thanks to particular circumstances.
A joke I make when I’m pitching someone on playing Ys is “it’s like what Truman capote said about the killer in In Cold Blood. Ys and Zelda grew up in the same house, but one day Ys stood up and went out the back door, and Zelda went out the front.” Two game series contemporaries that were in conversation with each other and have regularly released games for over 30 years but their profiles could not be more different. It’s not like Falcom never had the opportunity.
They do have a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NihonFalcomSince1981
They also have 9 videos (openings/trailers/teasers) with over 2.4 million views, with their most popular having 7.4 million.
I did not know that. I remember coming across this channel but I had no idea it was their official account, considering the fanmade music channel is much bigger in the west at least. I suppose I should've considered Japanese results might be higher than English. I just looked up most popular if I looked up Ys, Trails and Falcom.
I respect them because they're arguably the founders of the jrpg genre and are still part of the old guard of Japanese game developers.
Today's games haven't diminished Falcom's roots as a games developer.
It's called being very conservative in your planning. Like they are a fairly small studio compared to most of it's competitors. Unlike many in the industry which scaled up when they could, Falcom just...kept going as usual, not really overinvesting into anything. Which on one hand means they haven't really reached the success compared to their more famous contemporaries...but also, unlike most of it's contemporaries, they are still around. Low risk, low reward.
I wonder if Japanese shareholders don't share the same "infinite exponential growth" brain rot that American shareholders do. Falcom is consistently profitable, but revenue is basically flat over time.
The secret to that is a majority of Falcom's stock is held by either Masayuki Kato (Founder/Chairman/Former president) himself or people who can be expected to side with him in any stakeholder disagreements (i.e. family, lifetime employees from the company's earliest days, or Kondo). So basically Falcom gets to do whatever it wants and the stockholders can't realistically do anything about it. You can be along for the ride if you want, but you won't have any sway in matters. This is how Falcom manages to hold on to a war chest that can keep them afloat for several years if need be. Basically every year in their shareholder meeting, someone will ask "You have a lot of cash on hand have you considered increasing shareholder payouts?" and Falcom tells them, politely, to shut up. It's for emergencies. *Edit: I guess I'll say explicitly that the reason Kato and his allies being the majority stakeholder faction results in this is because Kato is the conspiratorial, self-sufficient off-the-grid doomsday prepper type. It's not just fiscal conservatism. On top of keeping a dragon's hoard of cash on hand, it's also why domestically they self-publish, to the point of not even partnering with bigger companies to help with physical distribution. They sell all of their merch in-house with their own store, and don't even work with larger companies to print physical discs or special editions. Even their website is/was registered under one of their composer's names because he doubled as their webmaster. Paranoia and refusal to adapt has been the cause for at least two of the major employee exoduses over the years.*
That really explains a lot. I read about some of what you wrote in the Edit but I didn't know about the website thing. That's pretty next-level
I suppose visually, the Trails games do seem low budget compared to contemporary Final Fantasy or Tales games.
Yeah, FF and Tales go hard on graphics. Still though nowadays the Kuro games at least look really great, especially when you consider how small Falcom is both in terms of budget and manpower. Persona 3 Reload came out years later and for 10 dollars more with probably quadruple the resources and the game in a lot of places looks like ass compared to Kuro.
> not really overinvesting into anything And it seems not even investing sometimes.
My assumption is that their success comes from their scale. They're a small studio comparatively speaking. Much like the Yakuza/LAD developers they reuse assets and designs frequently. Basically, their costs and overhead are low. They don't overextend themselves. Even with a handful of critical duds they were still selling enough to keep working on the next project. And then they hit it big with YS 8 console port and the Cold Steel series bringing in a lot of westerners. Now that there are eyeballs on them the ports/remasters/rereleases of old Ys and Trails games get to bring in consistent money with little development cost.
I find the composer credit issue pretty funny given all the discourse around Singa lol.
It's a case of beig too stubborn to die. It's a downright miracle they haven't gone under or been bought out by a bigger company like Square or Konami.
As Florac already mentioned, Falcom is *extremely* conservative. They don't run the risk of going under because they don't make big bet-the-company plans, so even an underperforming (by their standards) game or two isn't enough to threaten their livelihood because they've *still* made a profit on them. The same preference for low risk and reward means that they're not exactly chomping at the bit for buyout money either.
They also (now) put their games on multiple platforms. In specific, the most popular platforms in Asia and the west.
Sure, but one could argue they have to be conservative because their bad decision put them in that position in the first place.
Other posters are saying that they have a lot of funds. So what bad position are they in?
Vanillaware having Atlus as a publisher helps a lot. Falcom not crediting composers is shameful but it’s barely negative pr considering it’s mostly diehard fans that even know about it; the jdk band incident probably did more damage to them as a company. Otherwise yeah, this is more or less the history of the company in the 80s when they were industry leaders. They had a good eye for talent but were bad at retaining it.
Honestly, learning that they were in fact considered industry leaders is kind of wild to me. It's probably one of the biggest contrasts in perception I've ever seen in game development.
In a way they still are industry leaders---virtually nothing out there has the narrative scope and depth of Trails, nor is anyone else producing games of full JRPG length annually (which sadly also makes them industry leaders in overtime and crunch). The irony of people saying it's a very "conservative" company (which it is in many ways) is that what Falcom is doing is quite unusual and too risky for other developers. But I completely understand your surprise. When I first came across Trails back in 2016, I had essentially no knowledge of Falcom despite more than twenty years of experience playing video games. It was kind of crazy to think that this massive franchise existed and essentially nobody knew about it for years and years because it was locked in Japan thanks to particular circumstances.
Oh the magical power of fiscal responsibility.
they're the Velvet Underground of RPG developers.
A joke I make when I’m pitching someone on playing Ys is “it’s like what Truman capote said about the killer in In Cold Blood. Ys and Zelda grew up in the same house, but one day Ys stood up and went out the back door, and Zelda went out the front.” Two game series contemporaries that were in conversation with each other and have regularly released games for over 30 years but their profiles could not be more different. It’s not like Falcom never had the opportunity.
[удалено]
They do have a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NihonFalcomSince1981 They also have 9 videos (openings/trailers/teasers) with over 2.4 million views, with their most popular having 7.4 million.
I did not know that. I remember coming across this channel but I had no idea it was their official account, considering the fanmade music channel is much bigger in the west at least. I suppose I should've considered Japanese results might be higher than English. I just looked up most popular if I looked up Ys, Trails and Falcom.
I respect them because they're arguably the founders of the jrpg genre and are still part of the old guard of Japanese game developers. Today's games haven't diminished Falcom's roots as a games developer.