Who REALLY makes the games we play

It's like the print industry, in many ways. Look how many printed products there are around you. You don't see a printing company's logo sitting in the bottom right hand corner of McDonald's menu's or learn who prints Coke's labels by looking at the product. But there is most certainly a third party company that they outsource to. Sounds like Tose is similar that way in the games industry.

I thought many people knew about TOSE and their role in porting and making games for major publishers. Hardly a surprise, or as 1Up put it, a secret.

Where is your god now?

Er ... no, it's not really the same at all. Tose is actively giving credit to the people that hire them - they don't just outsource little things, they develop entire games from the ground up. Then someone else's company logo gets slapped on the side of the product to inspire brand loyalty.

I don't buy Coke because I think that Coca Cola made the label on the outside of the bottle - I buy it because I'm expecting a certain kind of taste that the Coca Cola plants make. I don't buy McDonald's because ... well, because I have enough money that I would never be forced to. But that's not the point; they're actively misleading consumers into buying products that don't go through the company whose name is on them.

Hypothetically I think it would be great if we found out major fan boy titles like Zelda, Halo, Final Fantasy came from one small publisher.

Its almost as if there where a million screams and were all instantly silenced.

They aren't a publisher, they're a developer - and they aren't small, they have over 1,000 employees.

AHHHHHH! Not TOSE!!!!

Maybe they've gotten better over the years, but seriously, all you have to do is take a look at FF Anthology to see how bad they were at one point.

It looks like Ferrari Racing on the DC and Virtua Quest are also fiascos they're responsible for, so, yeah, "thanks" Tose.

I'm guessing these TOSE people just do the "grunt work": writing "var1 = function3(var2, var3)" 700 times, while the REAL developers make descisions about sound, art, story, mechanics, and basically telling TOSE where to put different lines of code. It's a miserable, subservient existence...

@4: uh...do you fail to understand the workings of big business? You think ATT created their entire website? or verizon or any of a number of companies? Most of them pay a web designer loads of money to design and code the entire thing.

This doesnt mean you aren't getting what you paid for. The company doesnt just go to the contractor and say I want a game or a website and the contractor obliges. There are massive numbers of hoops. I'm sure the games are designed and developed with a handful of Nintendo people on the team. But the contractor can pay to have a staff of programmers that are constantly busy while nintendo just pays mostly designers with a few programmers to have an idea of what's possible.

OhJustSomeRandomGuy, are you talking about Ferrari F355 Challenge? Since it's generally regarded as one of the best racing games ever, certainly far more realistic than the Gran Turismos and Forza. Obviously TOSE aren't the ones who originally created it, but there was nothing wrong with their Dreamcast port.

A lot of the titles that they've worked on aren't really that special. Super Princess Peach was good though. And I've never played Stafy, but I've heard that's a good series as well.

And if the horrid post-apocalyptic future that #5 fortells is true then I'd lose faith in all gaming for its workers and artists to stand out. :P

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060518/sheffield_01.shtml

1UP and/or Sam Kennedy = plagarist...or with the benefit of the doubt, very lax on research....or can google-fu, but sucks at attributing credit. Take your pick.

i knew this happened but to say that it doesn't matter is foolishness. i am seriously seeking a future in game development, and this makes it that much harder for me and all the other devs out there. it puts even more pressure on all of us.

Yeah, this news was great when I read about it on Gamasutra and insertcredit six months ago...

I thought everyone already knew about TOSE. No one objects to work being subcontracted to them, because they're a prety awesome dev studio. When a company subcontracts a game to TOSE, it actually increases interest in the title.

Indeed, it is old news.

...and the article wasn't constructed well, either.

Quite frankly, I don't care where the labor comes from in a good product, so long as the workers are paid well enough. We should be intelligent enough to understand that outsourcing is a way to drive down wages, and be cynical towards corporations that do it.

Sorry, but my panties are bunched.