Topic: The smartest person on the Internet

[Urkel]

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Malstrom, but you should be.

http://malstrom.50webs.com/

Basically, he explains in great detail what Nintendo's business strategy of Blue Ocean really is, what disruption really is, and, among other things confirms what we all knew: analysts are full of rubbish.

I think much of his terminology should become standard on internet message boards. None of this "hardcore" or "casual" nonsense. Upstream and downstream market are far more accurate descriptions. (Read his stuff and you'll understand.)

If you read nothing else, read this:

http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html

It pretty much describes what Ubisoft and many others are doing in regards to what they erroneously believe is a "casual gamer boom".

And just for lulz and potential funhouse material:

http://malstrom.50webs.com/bingo.htm

Just a warning: "Hardcore" gamers will NOT like what he has to say.

[Kairon]

God I love reading this guy's work.

[SixthAngel]

I just read this and was going to post it until I did a search.

Can this thread be moved to a video games related subforum since I feel it would get a better response, and is, well, related to Nintendo and their current system?

Its great to see how the entire industry ignored the exact words they said and he keeps saying truth after truth.  It makes me want to buy all the books from the economist he continues to quote.

My favorites

-the current hardcore and current developers and publishers (who are hardcore) see the word "casual" games and think "retard" games and thus hate them and fail at making them by putting in as little effort as possible.  His dog to toy dog picture is great.  (I am not going to talk about casual games not existing and just being a brand these groups and analysts also made up for something they don't understand, read it)  I look forward to the elimination of these two terms like Urkel.

-the April fools gamestop article that talks about the Wii succeeding and is 100% correct.

-it seems that Microsoft and Sony are completely screwed and only a miracle can save them from the disruption and possible exit.  Seeing this coming makes it very interesting.

-An introduction to Christensen who's books I want to pick up.  I never studied business but this kind of thinking is the stuff I like.

[BeautifulShy]

I agree with Sixth Angel this needs to be moved.I was reading this and he is very insightful and he explains it so well.

[KDR_11k]

I think what many get wrong about casual gamers is that they think a casual game must be easy. I don't think that's the case, I really don't. A casual game could be hard as Contra and it would still work. What they do need is to ease the player into the game and avoid requiring prior knowledge about gaming.

A game can be hard and casual because casuals can be very persistent. Who doesn't have stories about some person who usually doesn't play videogames at all completely wiping the floor with them in Tetris or Dr Mario? Humans are adaptable and if they want to can get very good at something.

Easing the player into the game doesn't necessarily mean tutorials though those help. They aren't really mandatory if you can communicate the 1-2 buttons you use to the player in another way (e.g. on arcade machines the buttons have labels on them but of course that doesn't work with home consoles). First off you want to start easy, the player should see first successes during his first round of play, that's motivating and tells the player that he has enough basic proficiency to get into the game. You don't want the player to fail on the first level already and conclude that he can't get into the game (even if he could). You also need to let the player get used to his abilities. Take Super Mario Bros. At first you can move to the left or right and jump, that's a dpad and a button. Sure, you can run but noone does that this early. If you are used to the game to a degree where you can get a fireflower a second button comes into play that lets you shoot. With enough game proficiency you learn the benefits of the run button. Each of these stages takes its time, it's not a "try this once, on to the next lesson" thing like a tutorial, you actually do things until you're good at them.

Prior knowledge about gaming is something a hardcore gamer doesn't even recognize but a casual gamer will find problematic. There are many conventions and idiosyncrasies throughout gaming that seem completely alien to anyone who hasn't seen them often. The basic block pushing in Zelda games, for example. A veteran knows that some of the blocks are pushable and there's often clues which ones are, a casual just sees walls and gets confused (because it really is not obvious that usually unmovable blocks are suddently movable). A hardcore gamer knows that if there are three sockets and he has an item that fits on one of them there are most likely two other items he has to find and place on the other two. A hardcore gamer knows that when people talk about some object or location you need to get that object or go to that location, he knows how elemental magic counters elemental enemies of different types, he knows that bosses have patterns, he knows that flashing and charging is the preparration for a super attack, he can immediately spot important elements for a puzzle*, etc.

*=That's what I like about Toki Tori, it's not immediately obvious where you can or should use which item, in other games items tend to be limited to certain locations (e.g. grappling hooks being applied to grabbable objects) and usually the challenge is just the order or sometimes the right object to use with each, in TT you can never be sure that a bridgeable gap really needs a bridge placed on it.

[KDR_11k]

Hm, you know what this whole talk about the wave of disruption reminds me of?

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

[Ian Sane]

It seems that predicting the end of gaming as we know it is a common idea.  The different viewpoints entirely seem to be whether or not this a good thing.  Predict it like a negative thing and you get flack from fans and say it's a good thing and you get praise.

I personally just wish Nintendo was more subtle about games vs. non-games.  Is there any reason why Wii Sports is so gimped regarding options?  I don't have to be some videogame expert to be able to understand options.  Why can't I have a full nine inning baseball game?  Why is there only one golf course?  Why are tennis and baseball stripped of so much functionality that core elements of the sport like moving in tennis or fielding in baseball are not even available as an option?  That's what offends me.  This idea that depth or options or complexity or challenge will confuse and scare away non-gamers.  Bullsh!t.  Guitar Hero grabs the non-gamers but it doesn't feel like it caters to them.  It's a game that would have been released in the "old market" and still sold well.  It isn't neutered like Wii Sports is.  If Nintendo made it it would have had three songs and no selectable difficulties.

People bring up stuff like Super Mario Bros. and Tetris and retroactively declare them to be non-games because people that aren't nerds actually play them.  But those games didn't compromise their design to attract a mass audience.  They were easy to figure out the basics of but they're weren't designed with this concern that too much complexity here or there would confuse everyone.  In other words they didn't treat the player like a moron.  Now on the flip side, games requiring you to be familiar with videogame conventions is a problem.  It's a flawed design anyway.  We've all been pissed off at some obscure puzzle that required too much "videogame logic" to solve.  But Nintendo response to that is hand-holding and stripping out complexity and challenge.  Wii Sports is fun but it's the videogame equivalent of a participation trophy.  It caters to the dumb "everyone is special" bullsh!t popular today.  That's why third party non-games are such crap.  Nintendo has the exceptional talent to make such a design work.  But they created the "us vs. them" nature of all this blue ocean stuff.

Iwata's Nintendo would never have designed Super Mario Bros. in a million years.  It was vastly more complicated than the "high score" themed games at the time.  It was so much bigger too.  And it was hard.  The last castle is a time limited maze that offers no indication that the player is doing the correct thing or that it even is a maze in the first place.  How does something like THAT get compared to a non-game?  Meanwhile Wii Sports tells me how to bowl every time I play the game even though I've done it a hundred times already and know what the hell I'm doing but for some reason can't turn off the instructions.

[Urkel]

Ian, did you even read what this guy has to say? Or did you just assume "Stupid Nintendo fanboys love him so he must be stupid"? You didn't comment on anything specific he had to say which leads me to believe you just skimmed.

He has answers for just about every point you came up with. No, I'm not going to hunt down all his quotes for you.

Stop copy and pasting the same old stuff you say in every thread and comment on the specific stuff he has to say, plz.

[Urkel]

It seems that predicting the end of gaming as we know it is a common idea.  The different viewpoints entirely seem to be whether or not this a good thing.  Predict it like a negative thing and you get flack from fans and say it's a good thing and you get praise.

That's really not at all what Malstrom is saying. It's not whether it's "good" or "bad", only that it IS happening.

He also points out that there are still old school PC gamers that are bitter that Nintendo "killed" gaming for them when Nintendo last disrupted the game industry with the NES, and that Nintendo was "dumbing down" games for the masses. History is repeating itself.

[KDR_11k]

I don't get why he makes all these snarky comments about hardcore gamers losing ground, if Nintendo is really moving upstream then doesn't that just mean that there will be more "hardcore" games in the future? Third parties aren't necessarily going to be crushed by the wave, only Sony and MS are and it doesn't really matter IMO whose console we play the games on. Sounds to me like the only change will be that the "hardcore" games go on the Wii instead of PS3 or 360.

Also he could be less wordy, those articles are HUGE LIEK XBOX.

Ian, Wii Sports was a controls demo. More complexity means more development work, it was supposed to be a simple game to show people that the Wiimote does work and that any failings they might experience are probably the fault of shovelware. Making it a fulöl implementation of the sports would not only eat loads of additional dev resources, it'd also increase the chance of failure (a game is only as good as its weakest mechanic) and, if good, hurt the possibilities of selling more advanced single-sport implementations later on. That and the reasons described in the article.

In closing, RTFA.

[SixthAngel]

I don't get why he makes all these snarky comments about hardcore gamers losing ground, if Nintendo is really moving upstream then doesn't that just mean that there will be more "hardcore" games in the future? Third parties aren't necessarily going to be crushed by the wave, only Sony and MS are and it doesn't really matter IMO whose console we play the games on. Sounds to me like the only change will be that the "hardcore" games go on the Wii instead of PS3 or 360.

There will be hardcore but they will be very different from the hardcore of today.  The values that hardcore gamers care about now are being replaced by new values.  The hardcore of tomorrow will have these new values and not the ones of today.  Todays hardcore call tomorrows hardcore "casual."  He says the same thing happened when the NES came out and the old guard looked down on the players and called them "casual."  Hardcore gamers will die only in the mind of the current hardcore, because they see what they are doing as the mainstream and the ultimate in games even if it isn't true.  They will never except the new breed as being truly hardcore because they value something different then they do.

For example in the last change he describes.
Old hardcore: Computer adventure games, text heavy, graphically more advanced, overly complicated.

The NES appears
New hardcore:  Mario and stuff, little text, easy to understand, much simpler

The old hardcore hate the new Mario platformers, Zelda and other games because it is going a very different direction then they want.  They see at as going backwards because they want epic stories, better graphics, like overcomplicated controls, and they don't care about the new values.

Some of the old guard will move to Wii and become hardcore gamers with the new values while others will not accept them and be relegated to a tiny niche always looking back at the "pinnacle" of gaming and think it died despite it being very much alive, only different from what they want.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

The hardcore are very reactive and explode when prodded (the hardcore have no problem belittling the non-hardcore, but the hardcore don't take jokes or the market threats to their "status" well).  There is entertainment in that.

[Kairon]

Considering that the hardcore gamers of yesteryear were computer gamers who looked down their noses at the NES, and today's hardcore users are console/PC gamers who look down their nose at the Wii and DS, will today's "casuals" find someone else to disparage in 20 years?

[DAaaMan64]

We already do. Those players of the electronic handheld games everyone leaves are their toilets.

[Deguello]

I was wondering when Ol' Malstrom's site would make it here.

I don't mean to brag or anything, but I've had some repeated discourse with this fella for a while.  Nice fella.  Real Ladies' Man.

I agree with him about everything except for one thing.  He doesn't think Nintendo should open the purse strings and start buying people out.  I do, but not in the way you'd think.  I would rather Nintendo buy out a company like UBISoft or Konami or Namco or any other company that's been pussyfooting around and being purposefully thick when it comes to the Wii and liquidate all their assets.  Sure, it probably will never happen, but it would certainly feel good in a schadenfreude kinda way.

Edit: Oh yeah he also likes GoNintendo, and cites them as a disruptive type of journalism.  Which I guess is true, if you count stealing content from other sites without the author's permission disruptive.

[KDR_11k]

Was there really a change between the old hardcore and the new one? Sure, games got more user friendly but I don't think that's a defining mark. Less cheapness, etc. There's always people who managed to get accustomed to the shortcomings of an old implementation and cry when newer implementations fix that but are the changes really so fundamental that it's not possible to adapt? To me it doesn't look like Nintendo is trying to reinvent the hardcore genres, the "disruption" looks more like a series of games with slowly increasing complexity that acts basically as training for new gamers to turn into hardcore gamers.

[Mashiro]

The future is always uncertain, markets can always change and all it takes is another new idea to swing the pendulum in someone else's favor.

It's too early to declare certain things are/will be dead yet.

[Mario]

Is there any reason why Wii Sports is so gimped regarding options?  I don't have to be some videogame expert to be able to understand options.  Why can't I have a full nine inning baseball game?  Why is there only one golf course?  Why are tennis and baseball stripped of so much functionality that core elements of the sport like moving in tennis or fielding in baseball are not even available as an option?  That's what offends me

What offends me is your abillity to think of two things at once, the other being that "Wii Sports" isn't one game but 5 in 1.

[Infernal Monkey]

Stop copy and pasting the same old stuff you say in every thread and comment on the specific stuff he has to say, plz.

Ian's been pasting his same old tired bullshit for years now, he's a spam-bot, robots don't sleep.

[mantidor]

I think I'm the only one who sees wii/ds and hardcore gaming going hand in hand even now. For starters all of us here can't claim to be "casual", we post in internet gaming forums and know names like Aonuma or Mikami. "Hardcore" is just the level of investment you put into something, The sims can be the most "casual" Pc game ever but just go to one of the crazy forums when there are people completely dedicated to make extremely detailed dresses, quality designed furniture and complex hairstyles, if that isn't hardcore I don't know what is. It's perfectly logical that "hardcore" wiisports fans exist.

The real problem with gaming is its niche status, not how "hardcore" or "casual" some gamers are. Nintendo does the real solution which is expanding the audience, and does so by making something accessible, again accessible doesn't mean whether something is hardcore or not, pacman is accessible, but can be as hardcore as what the player wants it to be.

This is the only way the gaming industry has any future, the reason obscure indie films or creepy odd japanese manga exist is because their respective markets are so damn huge that they can support niche things with little appeal. Only a small percentage of people would like this material, but the audience is big enough to reach enough people to pay back the costs of producing these things. If gaming doesn't increases its market it will just implode, small studios would had no chance whatsoever and we would be facing another crash. (I'm almost sure that without the wii we would be in the middle of one right about now, at least in Japan).

Its so frustrating the "hardcore" don't understand this is needed for their games to survive, specially with the kind of budgets "hardcore" games need.

[DAaaMan64]

I'm going to be the most hard core Babyz player ever.

[Ian Sane]

Considering that the hardcore gamers of yesteryear were computer gamers who looked down their noses at the NES, and today's hardcore users are console/PC gamers who look down their nose at the Wii and DS, will today's "casuals" find someone else to disparage in 20 years?

Of course.  This happens with everything.  Still sucks.  Still didn't want it to happen while I was in my 20's (being an old fuddy duddy before even turning 30 seems unfair).  Still didn't want Nintendo of all companies leading the charge.

But it does happen with everything.  If it lasts it changes.  For some people it was the crash.  For some it was the switch to 3D.  For some it's now.  For some it's later.  But because everything changes eventually videogaming will change in such a way that what drew you into videogaming has been lost.

This happens with music.  This happens with pro wrestling.  This happens with sports.  This has happened with The Simpsons because the show has been on so long.  It happens with long lasting franchises like Star Trek.  I'm sure it even happens with long running soap operas.

If it hasn't happened to you at some point you're either very young, very easily pleased or very lucky.  Eventually you will hate something you used to love.  It will turn to sh!t and the frustrating thing is all the younger fans around you will love it and won't notice the change because they lack the perspective.  Try arguing that The Simpsons sucks now with someone younger than the show itself.  How do you argue that the show went downhill around Season 7 when the person started watching in Season 10?

[Deguello]

If gaming doesn't increases its market it will just implode, small studios would had no chance whatsoever and we would be facing another crash. (I'm almost sure that without the wii we would be in the middle of one right about now, at least in Japan).

For proof of this, mantidor and others, it is necessary to do a little thought exercise.  First, take the combined sales of all the consoles this generation up to this point.  It's been about 124 weeks since the launch of the Xbox 360 which is, I suppose, the start of this current gen.  There have been 59 million consoles sold, a majority by the Wii, which was launched launched in the 2nd year.

At this point I'd like to direct your attention to the similar stats from last gen.  The combined totals for this point last gen are 55-56 million, a majority by the PS2, and not including the Dreamcast.  I mean wow look, games have expanded by 3-4 million!  But wait!  Since the Wii serves "another market"  and is full of "new people" like "girls and grandmas" and "casual gamers" so all of the Wii numbers have to be excised.  So let's take 27 million away from 59 million and holy cow.  The combined total for the industry becomes 32 million, a 43% decrease from the previous generation.

This data presents an interesting set of logical mazes.  If, on the one hand, the Wii is solely populated by new people, then Nintendo has quite possibly staved off another videogame crash.  With Sony and Microsoft losing $5.5 billion combined and a 43% decrease, this indsutry would have died a high-definition death.  However, if one argues that the Wii has little effect and the wii owners would have bought the 360 and PS3 instead, then that is certainly a hell of a lot of gamers choosing the Wii over the other two.

There is also the argument that these are all Nintendo fans who bought the Wii, and let me tell ya... the idea of Nintendo fanboys being the majority audience after being characterized a tiny niche last generation is certainly pleasing to hear, but probably not the truth, considering the Wii has already sold more than the GC.

The Wii-denying talking points are fading away one by one and third parties, blogs, websites, and fanboys are running out of things to say.  The only thing left is "doesn't have HD" and that's something everybody already knows.

[mantidor]

Thanks! I had some superficial knowledge of the numbers so I threw the hypothesis without much back up but I knew I wasn't that far off. Now it would be interesting to compare software sales I won't , I'm lazy

[EasyCure]

Thats a hell of alot to think about.