Foamstarsis an unusual game.Square Enixis launching the online party shooter forPS4andPS5next month and is counting onPlayStation Plusto bring it to a wider audience. It’s hoping to pull aRocket League, which ensnared millions of players as a freebie and holds an audience to this very day.Foamstars also makes use of generative AI for some of its player cosmeticsand doesn’t like being compared to a game it takes inspiration from:Splatoon.
Speaking toVGC, game producer Kosuke Okatani is humoured by this, yet understands the comparison. On the surface, audiences labelling Foamstars as a Splatoon clone is perfectly understandable. Both feature a colourful variety of characters using opposing types of substance (foam or ink) to do damage and cover the environment in their dominant colour. Those with the most points at the end emerges the winner. If you’ve yet to playFoamstarsand have plenty of experience with Splatoon, your first impression is naturally going to swing in this direction.
Splatoon has become a full-blown phenomenon since the first game arrived almost a decade ago, andt I’m surprised it has taken so long for a copycat to come along.
That being said, I don’t believe it’s entirely fair to label a shooter like Foamstars as a clone simply because it also wants to explore a colourful and cheerful aesthetic instead of overly grim greys and blacks that the genre is so accustomed to - are those not all clones of each other too?
Foamstars is willing to try something a bit different and, putting AI art shenanigans aside, that’s well worth celebrating. But it has bigger things to worry about. For one, it’s a new live-service IP in alandscape of oversaturationwhere very few can survive, at least not without losing money and taking big risks, something Square Enix has made abundantly clear it has no interest in doing.
RememberBabylon’s Fall? The live-service game developed byPlatinumGamesbegan life as a cryptic action game only ever glimpsed in a handful of trailers and screenshots before promptly being kicked out the door where roughly ten players bothered to ever play it. Square Enix promised a revamp following its mediocre launch, only to then close up shop, offer refunds, and pretend it never existed. I don’t want to think about how many millions got wasted on production for a game like this, and how much hard work and talent was poured into bringing to life what was always doomed to be a misguided creative vision.
It was chasing a trend it was never going to catch, and time and time again we keep seeing titles like this fail as the bubble bursts and the industry fails to learn harsh lessons. I could write an entire book on how these failures have defined an entire generation of video games, where only a select few emerge unscathed and go on to influence millions. Foamstars is a result of these trends whether it wants to admit that or not, and is far more part of that conversation than a fleeting comparison to Splatoon.
It has a lifeline in its PlayStation Plus launch, but in a world of service ecosystems and many subscription services boasting thousands of titles, a freebie of this magnitude doesn’t mean nearly as much as it used to. It didn’t work for Destruction All-Stars at the PS5 launch, and at that point we were absolutely desperate for games to play on the new console.
Now we exist in a time when live-service titles are abundant and have their hooks in, when new blockbusters and indies are dropping on Game Pass every other week with half the impact they used to hold. It takes something very special to stand out in 2024, and time will tell if a game like Foamstars can weather the storm and maintain an audience in such rapid waters.
Next:Sorry Ubisoft, But I’d Like To Keep Owning My Games
