Why Saints Row Failed

the Saints Rose series went from being one of the only franchises that could compete with Grand Theft Auto to literally killing its parent company what went wrong and how did one developer lose nearly everything due to one failed game well the Story begins in the early 2000s when there was only one open world game that dominated the entire gaming landscape and of course it was Grand Theft Auto the series seemed completely Untouchable that is until two young companies worked together to introduce a worthy rival known as Saints r the first Saints Row game was developed by volition and published by THQ way back in 2006 the game was a bit buggy and unpolished but it was embraced by critics and players alike it was brimming with personality and scratched a unique itch that Gamers didn't even know they had fi was incredibly smart about how they tried to create a competitor to GTA they knew that they couldn't beat RockStar at their own game and if they tried to publish a typical gritty shooter set in the city their project would be dismissed as a knockoff the only way to to compete with Grand Theft Auto was to bring something new to the table for Saints Row it was a fact that the game didn't take itself too seriously where Grand Theft Auto was about realism Saints Row was about fun and this starts with the characters who were exaggerated stereotypes of gangsters with banter that was packed with fun not so serious onliners the story follows your character as you helped your fellow gang members take down rivals in the city of Still Water and while this first installment was much more serious than its successors it still found a unique voice when compared to G GTA the writing was balanced keeping the tone light while also allowing one to genuinely fall in love with the main protagonists there were some deeper themes mixed in with missions where you have to rag doll your character into traffic to collect insurance money it was the perfect balance and the quirkiness of the game was held up by legitimately solid and engaging Gunplay centered on the story's escalating gang war Saints R's combination of fun gameplay and unique humor quickly earned the young franchise a healthy fan base by the end of the year it had sold more than a million copies vition had the start of a real franchise on its hands it was clear that Saints throw had a lot of potential so both THQ and valtion knew that they had to be very intentional with their next moves regarding the series they needed to turn their smash hit into an Empire that could truly challenge Grand Theft Auto and at least in the early stages they would do exactly this within 2 years volition followed up with a solid sequel Saints Row 2 was built directly on the foundation that was established by the original the story is set a few years after the first game and keeps the core characters in off-the-wall humor in action and expands on it and because of this Saints Row 2 is the most beloved game of the entire franchise they really knocked it out of the park so of course they followed this up with Saints Row 3 the third game in the series takes us to a new city and leans even more into the humor of previous games Saints R 3 feels like a massive amusement park entirely focused on allowing the player to have a good time and cause massive amounts of chaos and this is also the title where the franchise finally left Grand Theft Auto Shadow and establish itself as its own unique IP and part of this reason is because they continue to drift further away from the serious tones in the previous two games and focus more on outlandish wild and edgy humor and as you probably know this is what Saints Row became known for to give you a glimpse into the edgy and hilarious themes that the Saints Row series leaned into let's introduce Johnny Gat this fan favorite character is a dead pan edgy sociopath who always shoots first and never asks questions at all cares nothing about civilian collateral damage and is extremely self-obsessed he says things that he shouldn't say does things that he shouldn't do and his edginess is why fans loved him fans also loved the insane array of hilarious weapons like the Shar omatic which shoots shark guts at enemies the apoca fist which are comically large fists that splatter civilians and the penetrator which we aren't going to talk about the character customization the vehicles the combat everything about Saints Row 3 was extremely unique and it all had a lot of charm bition used this quirk humor as a key differentiating factor to play Saints Row over Grand Theft Auto and this is a big part of what helped it to excel as a franchise the Saints Row series had climbed to the top and amassed support from fans and critics fairly quickly but could this momentum last forever felici was in the process of developing an expansion for Saints Row 3 called enter the dominatrix but as work was being done on this new spin-off THQ fitions publisher went bankrupt this was bad and it meant that funding for the new expansion and all future Saints Row projects was on hold this could have very easily been the singular moment that killed Saints Row but deep silver saved the day the publisher Deep Silver won the bidding for both Saints Row and vition meaning that they took full ownership of the entire studio and would publish future Saints Row games this was great news for vition because it likely saved the entire franchise from being canceled altogether they now had the backing and financial support to continue to work on the series and that little Saints Row 3 expansion project now had the potential to be turned into something larger a full game and with deep silver being known for publishing other outlandish titles like Dead Island they were likely much more comfortable than THQ with the increasingly quirky and bizarre direction that Saints Row was going in it was the perfect partner for volition and Saints Row 4 was on the horizon in 2013 the game launched instead of the usual semi- grounded gang battles the protagonist in this game somehow developed superpowers became the president and needed to fend off an invading alien race it was by far the funniest and strangest game yet and it seemed like volition and many of its fans had fully Embrace this new identity the game was great well for most despite the positive reviews the release of the sequel was a mixed bag some fans felt that had gone completely off the rails and lost itself as much as the early games didn't take themselves too seriously they still had respect for the characters and the narrative that they were spinning abandoning the core tension of grounded gang wars seemed like a misstep to a lot of people many fans wanted the game to go back to its roots and ironically Deep Silver would later attempt to do this and like I said as we all know it failed and these fans were even more disappointed when in 2015 volition developed another Saints Row game called Gat out of hell this was again supposed to be an expansion but somehow turned into yet another entirely new game and well the reception wasn't great fans of the original grounded Saints Rose style hated this even more than Saints Row 4 and people who actually enjoyed the new style thought it should have just a DLC for the previous game across the board Gat out of hell was widely regarded as something that simply shouldn't have been made and coming out only 2 years after Saints Row 4 fans were getting a bit worried that deep silver was going to milk and potentially ruin this franchise and oh boy were they right now real quick I was going to dive into the disastrous launch of Agents Of Mayhem which was set in the Saints Row universe and was supposed to be some kind of spin-off but the story of this game could be an entire video so let me know in the comments if that's something you want to see long story short valtion used the ssro name to try to sell copies of this new uninspired spin-off game and everything about this game was extremely underwhelming and disappointing this combined with the uninspired and pointless release of G Out of Hell really made fans lose hope in the series and people had genuine concerns that deep silver was going to absolutely kill the Saints Row franchise if the series were to survive they would need something amazing and it sucks when a developer ruins a game franchise these days we don't even own our game anymore and if a developer or a platform like steam decided that they wanted to remove your game from your account they have the ability to do that in fact most games these days have DRM which basically means that the games you buy aren't really yours you can use them as long as the developer allows it but you don't own it and this is something that I'm extremely passionate about I feel like Gamers should actually be able to own their games and not be controlled by the whims of money hungry developers and to be honest that's why I buy most of my games from go gog is a marketplace where you can buy games and actually own them you can download the actual files and store them wherever you want and use them however you want the games are truly yours and unlike Steam and epic and all these other places that prevent you from owning the games that you spend your hard-earned money on you can play them wherever and however you want without having to log into an account or be connected to the internet so if you want to actually own your games again consider purchasing them from goog using my link in the description I I am a part of their affiliate program so I will get a small commission from purchases and it's a great way to support a solid company and this channel if you're interested now back to what I was saying so after 4 years of near silence Deep Silver would announce the newest title in the Saints Rose series at Gamescom 2021 interestingly the new game was a complete reboot of the franchise rather than a direct sequel because of the absurdity of the last full release and the even more absurd expansions the devs believed that they had written themselves eles into a corner as stated by Jim Boon the chief creative officer at bition even though we love the mechanics with all the superpowers there isn't a whole lot of Runway to go past that it's why it was a pretty easy decision to go back to our roots and do something that was more contemporary this reboot was supposed to do exactly that take the series back to its roots and give it a fresh start and the chance to recapture new and old fans alike it's easy to make a case for why this was a good idea I mean Saints R 4 was nearly 8 years old and gaming had come a long way in that time although the franchises sequels had innovated in numerous small ways each game still relied on the same basic formula that was now almost two decades old the reality is that many fans were calling for the series to end by the third game and even more thought it should have stopped at the fourth game people had liked Saints Row but they were beginning to feel like the series was just getting milked for money the devs needed to prove that they actually had interesting ideas for those sequels and that they were more than just a cash grab and although there were certainly benefits to a reboot there were also a lot of downsides reboots have gotten a pretty bad reputation in recent years fans are tired of childhood favorites being puppeted by cynical companies looking to profit off Nostalgia and that was part of the reason why fans reacted harshly when they realized that none of the old characters were returning for this game instead we were getting an entirely new cast and story and the writing changes weren't just limited to new characters but a complete tone shift the edgy humor that had made people fall in love with the franchise was gone instead the devs had attempted Ed to shift to a writing style that was meant to appeal to younger audiences I say attempt because the writers completely dropped the ball every word of dialogue in Saints Row 2022 comes off as trite and cringey a game series that was known for its unique humor was suddenly dropping awful lines like this get the away from my friends Saints Row's main characters had always been parodies of the traditional gangster by contrast the new series was trying to replace them with a squad of scrawny Millennials who were actually trying to be cool and just weren't I mean just take a look at the comments on the revealed trailer the reboot was supposed to be a return to the series Roots yet Saints Row had never felt less like Saints Row right off the back the game was met with a ton of hate from fans trailers are supposed to be an opportunity for companies to put their best foot forward and generate hype and somehow this trailer had actively pushed people away from buying the game and things were only going to get worse almost right after the announcement of the reboot it was revealed that Mike Watson AKA Idol ninja had passed away way Watson had been one of the most influential modders in the Saints Row community he was responsible not just for some of the best mods in the community but also for working on an official patch for Saints Row 2 to fix many of the issues with the PC Port Watson had been battling cancer for a while but that hadn't stopped him from pouring his heart and soul into the community and some fans felt that the reboot was a slap in the face to his legacy others felt that the studio should be dedicating more resources to finish the patch that Watson had been working on before his death to ensure that the project was fin finally completed regardless of the quality of the Saints Row revamp it's undeniable that many at valtion cared for Watson and were genuinely devastated by his passing a lot of the insults and digs that fans took at grieving employees were legitimately uncalled for however it was also a representation of just how much Saints Row fans had turned against volition in many ways Mike acted as a bridge between the company and fans his loss ensured that the Divide between them was only going to grow wider the game hadn't even dropped and volition was facing a fan base that was more against them than they had ever been before but it was too late to cancel the game or make any big changes all they could do now was release it and pray that the full experience was a lot better than the trailer LED people to believe Saints Row was released on August 23rd 2022 with all the grace of a car crash somehow the game was even worse than players thought even critics who usually give everything positive reviews were trashing the game it was buggy to the point of being unplayable the graphics were dated and lifeless and it wasn't just the graphics that felt old but the entire design of the game itself in an attempt to go back to its roots Saints Row somehow only succeeded in bringing back outdated design choices that modern games have avoided for years the game is packed full of repetitive side missions that are tedious more than anything else practically every side quest boiled down to stealing something or shooting someone there are annoying stealth sections which as we all know people hate the AI for enemies is incredibly stupid and you can't even interact with most of the world there are bicycles you can't ride casinos you can't enter and much more in the modern era where open world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and breath of the wild have become the standard Saints Row 2022 was laughably outclassed but the real disaster with the new release was the absolutely atrocious writing and corporatized lifeless characters in story all the runchy and edgy jokes of past games were actively sanitized to the point in which nobody really understood who it appealed to the game's characters came off as sitcom teenagers rather than hardened gangsters there was no depth to these characters and no attempt to get us to like them they were all basically archetypes that existed to do nothing but spout quirky onliners that weren't even funny and you could feel vian's desperation to be hip with the kids oozing through the screen but more importantly the game didn't have anything to say there could have been real comedy in this setup you have a bunch of loser privileged teenagers acting as wannabe gangsters if volition leaned into this there maybe could have been potential for a lot of actually good jokes and something like this would be somewhat different from the past s row sequels but that wasn't what happened fici made their cast boring and tried to toss in every buzzword they could justify and it came off as a painfully corporate attempt to seem modern and the poor writing poisoned the rest of the game some of the other design choices could have been forgiven if the game at least made you laugh but it didn't so in the end we were left with a game with dated mechanics terrible writing and so many bugs that it was practically unplayable it should be obvious how Saints Row became one of the worst reviewed games of 2022 it was undefendable Saints Row was a disaster from a corporate perspective as well volition's parent company embracer group immediately entered panic mode the CEO released statements expressing their shock and disappointment at the game's reception which is crazy because they should have seen this coming Saints R was in a particularly horrible spot too because volition had burned so much Goodwill from the fan base that it was unclear if they could ever even bounce back frankly a good amount of fans had already sworn off the series for good and another sequel wasn't going to fix that and all of these factors led embracer to make a pretty tragic decision they shut down volition the studio was merged into a subsidiary company of gearbox entertainment who was just acquired by Take 2 interactive so now there are so many levels in the structure that volition is pretty much Irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and that at least for the foreseeable future there is little to no hope of Saints Row coming back and redeeming itself and there's something kind of sad about that but a lot of people may look at it as a good thing so is Saints Row dead for good maybe the rights to the game still belong to Deep Silver they may choose to bring the series back but it's more likely that the game is finally laid to rest especially since they no longer own volition and they only own the rights to the IP honestly the whole reason that any of this happened is because deep Silver's insistence on milking the franchise for all it had and because of this perhaps it's for the best that the game is finally done for good would you guys want another Saints Row or do you think that the series is a lost cause how do you feel about the tragedy of the newest Saints Row did you ever play the old ones let me know your thoughts on this whole situation in the comments I would love to see what you think if you enjoyed this video make sure to like And subscribe to the channel and I will see you guys next time peace

Channel: RoboKast

Views: 63,086

Keywords: why saints row failed, why saints row 2022 failed, saints row failed, saints row 2022 failed, why saints row died, saints row why it failed, what happened to saints row, the story of saints row, how saints row failed, saints row failure, saints row bad, why saints row was a failure, robokast why it failed

Id: E4bkwHJij30

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024