Every now and again, I’m come up with a Tough Question. I’ve put capital letters there on purpose, so lets justify them before my editor removes them. A Tough Question is differentiated from a lot of my other general wonderings by the following criteria.
A Tough Question:
- Has an answer that can either be known with currently availible technology, or is known by someone.
- BUT, cannot be answered by me, or any “general” individual, without either insane amounts of effort, money, or some combination of both.
As an example, “Does Hidetaka Miyazaki (director of some of the Dark Souls games) actually have a thing for feet?” is a good one. I was going to put a picture here to demonstrate the weird consistentcy with which models in From Software games have rigged and properly modeled feet. Then I google “Elden Ring Feet” and instead of a finding a poly mesh with rigged images, I found other things.
As such no images will included.
In this case, Miyazaki knows if he likes feet, but I’m never going to get a chance to ask him about that.
Another one was “Do Manga authors die earlier due to stress then their contemporaries?”. This one seems like it would be fun, but then about 20 minutes into looking things up, and realizing that many authors have schedule that allow for 4 hours of sleep a day, and nothing but work, you get into the weird shit, and end up learning that Japan’s criminal justice is kind of a joke. I also learned that life expectancy doesn’t mean what I thought, and before long you’re completely in the weeds, and have no good way of answering the question whatsoever.
Anyway, I actually did have a point with today’s writeup, so here’s today’s Tough Question.
“Why is it that Bandai can design, publish, and presumably make money off of producing multiple card games?”
Between Gundam Card Game, One Piece Trading Card Game, and the Digimon TCG, it seems like all of these products would presumably be competing with each other. At least a little bit.
But they don’t seem to be! All of these games exist, all have their playerbase, and all were popular enough in Japan to localize into the US.
All of which is to say, someone out there understands this enough to understand why this is a solid financial decsion, and could presumably tell me!
But I don’t.