Why did Touhou manage to sustain a decent audience but arcade style couldn't?
Touhou games are arcade style shmups though.
Touhou doesn't have a real audience it's all fake interest, 99% of proclaimed Touhou "fans" have never even booted up one of the games, and only 1% of the 1% who does actually seriously plays them
>>11688604/thread
>>11688604OP here, that actually makes sense.
>>11688604Fuck you I 1cc'd and extra'd some of the games and I unironically love early ZUNart.
>>11688643Congratulations, you are part of the 0.01% of the Touhou "fanbase"
>>11688643For the most part he's right, you're an outlier, hooray.Ime ppl listen to the music, watch the shitty fan anime, draw fanart, and talk about it as some social signal that they're in the secret in-crowd or whatever. I assume most of the ppl who actually play them are Japanese.I don't claim to be a fan but I played 8 all the way on easy lol and enjoyed it.
>>11688594Weebs
>>11688643>Most people don't play toohoo games>but I play doePeak midwit response.
>>11688647>>11688651Not 0.01% for sure, I can't 1cc UM on Normal.
>>11688604Counterpoint: ZUN keeps making new games and they keep selling, while every other major shmup devs are gone, so that small audience of people who actually play Touhou games is large enough to keep the series alive, unlike other shmup fanbases.
>>11688829ZUN is a random person who doesn't need to make that much money and all of his shit is super high profit margin because he copy-pastes the same stuff, compare that to a real publicly-traded company
>>11688604Wrong.
>>11688594Because Touhou stuck to its origins as a shmup, but expanded the lore and music and practically everything else. It's for "for the fans" type honorable shit.
>>11688851If we're going to be charitable and interpret getting a normal mode 1cc as "seriously playing", then that's still only 3,000 people. There are ~300 million people in the world who claim to be touhou fans
>>11688992Your math and statistics teachers should have been fired.300 million people are twice the population of Japan and then some.
>>11689036You DO know that Chinese people also claim to be Touhou fans, right?
>>11689039Man, nta, but you can’t be serious rn jfl. You’re telling me you think 4% of the planet not only knows what Touhou is, but claims to be a fan of it? Until Xi announces on live TV that he’s a Touhou fan, I’m not buying that for a second.
>>11688594STGs struggled to transition out of arcades because they're extremely expensive to make but don't take very long to play (if you're an experienced STG veteran). So as a player it's hard to justify purchasing one over something like a Final Fantasy that can entertain you for hours and hours.Touhou was a better fit for the home system era because:1. Touhou games don't cost shit to make because Shanghai Alice has one fucking employee and he's willing to be paid in beer2. Touhou games don't cost shit to sell because they're just CDs in jewel cases Early on in the series they weren't even that fancy; Touhou 1 was sold as just a floppy disk and a manual in a ziploc bag. No paying licensing fees, no futzing about with publisher.ZUN's games are also a lot more welcoming to beginners. A complete neophyte to the genre can play a Touhou game on easy and have a great time; but in the arcade you can't do that. ZUN made level-based games like Shoot the Bullet where you can try as many times as you like until you succeed; there's nothing like that in the arcade.Touhou furthermore benefits from being one big series. After you play one game, you want to play the next, and the next. Everyone who played Touhou 8 played Touhou 9. I don't know that everyone who played Gunbird also went on to play Strikers 1945, even though those two games are much more similar to each other than Touhou 8 and Touhou 9 are.And then the games are just really, really good and well made and you feel the love pored into every bullet of every spellcard and every note of every song.Arcade STGs didn't deserve to die out, but Touhou absolutely deserves its success.
>>11688604Fantasizing about ravishing the maidens is more fun than the games.
Early ZUN art is good. The characters in EoSD are quite expressive and decently shaded. IDK how we went from that to MoF Reimu except that ZUN wasn't sober at the time of drawing her. I love his music, and every one of his games are fun. Even the spinoffs made in collaboration with other devs are fun. ZUN is a man of taste and I will keep buy his games as long as I have money to do so.
>>11688594I'm mad touhou doesn't exist on retro consoles
>>11689769PC is the oldest retro console.
>>11688604This, 90% of touhou fans can't even beat the second level of a touhou game.
>>11690146shit I'm not sure if I can beat [^1] the second level of a touhou game.[^1]: hard mode, no bomb, no miss
>>11690175kek, I couldn't. I kept positioning myself too aggresively and Cirno spawned bullets right in front of me.
>>11690189The best advice that I received was not to look at your ship directly. Look at where you want the ship to be continuously. Also don't listen to no bomb / no miss retards. First beat the game without using continues, and then add further challenges.
>>11690207dude I AM a no bomb / no miss retard. It's just I haven't played touhou in 5 years.
>>11688594In terms of audience, >>11688604 is right. There are still people who play arcade shumps too, but they aren't as loud as the touhou fanbase despite having roughly the same amount of people who actually play the games. A lot of it also depends on the fact that it's relatively easy to release fan material without having to deal with royalties or copyright strikes, that is a big part of its popularity as well.Financially, they are made by one person who keeps recycling most of the assets so he's selling at infinite profit, along with the side material. Arcade games were made by companies, you had CAVE still trying to release until around SDOJ but basically doing it worse than for free in terms of profits.It's not really a win for anyone who is into the genre since touhou games only do one style of shmup, and it's still half-assed compared to literally any other danmaku franchise or even indie. But on the other hand it's not a complete loss either, because the fact a shmup franchise just happens to be relatively popular even in [current year] at least reminds people these games were a thing, better than dying out completely.
>>11688604i always thought there was something weird about seeing so much fandom for a series that started on the PC-98 of all things
>>11690259Most of the """fans""" only heard about it during the Windows era
>>11690259Metal Gear started on the MSX. A series starting on an obscure platform doesn't mean shit.
>>1169027099.9999% of the fans heard about it during the Windows era. Touhou was essentially unknown before EoSD. This is an image from the Touhou Project website during the development of EoSD. As you can see, it's celebrating the website's 30,000th pageview.In September 2004, just after the release of Imperishable Night, the website got it's 3,000,000th pageview. It went from virtually unknown to having its own convention in just over a year.
