Topic: The smartest person on the Internet

[KDR_11k]

It ties into his earlier comments about UGC though pinning the blame on Iwata is stupid as the only "UGC" game Nintendo made was Wii Music (which is questionable since WM is not about designing a toy to have fun with and then having fun with it but having fun with the song as you play it). It was LBP and Blastworks that tried to turn UGC into their main attraction. As for the "write your own article" thing, well, that's what the marketers call Web 2.0 and he's participating in it by having a blog. It's Wordpress who said to him "here's an empty page, you can write your OWN articles on it".

Anyway, the mythos thing kinda makes sense except I don't look at my games like that. I've stopped caring about most videogame characters long ago.

[NWR_pap64]

Why does he start babbling about user generated content?  Did I miss something?  Is the new Zelda made with Little Big Planet?

He goes from a train destroying the "mythos" and innovative gameplay not being what people want to suddenly blaming Iwata for user generated content.  His train (he he) or thought makes absolutely no sense.

He's been talking about UGC for a while now. He simply believes that UGC might not have the future some people claim it has simply because the idea of creating content only appeals to a small part of the fanbase and thus its not that profitable.

He uses games like "Little Big Planet" and "Spore" as examples of this idea.

[KDR_11k]

More importantly, he argues that the stuff that sells a game is the included content, not the usermade content.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

UGC is like all those people on the internet making wallpapers in the mid-90s as soon as they learned a little photoshop.

Yeah, got tired of them a while back.

[Deguello]

I don't understand his Zelda criticisms either.  He says a lot about the "mythos" of Zelda, without saying exactly what that is.  Particularly boggling is his use of Link's Awakening as an exemplar of that, when that game has as much to do with the Zelda "mythos" as Tetris does (Link's in both.)  No Zelda, No Triforce, No Ganon, No Master Sword...  Heck the title screen has a giant egg on it.  A classic game, to be sure, but drenched in "mythos?"  Hardly.  I hope he's not being contrary for contrariety's sake.  He even delves into his hated "lawyer speak" by saying "Zelda used to be the crown jewel of any system's game library."  Which was easy for the original to do and ESPECIALLY easy for Link's Awakening to do, seeing as the NES had a worse shovelware problem than the Wii supposedly has, and the Original Game Boy mirrors the Wii exactly, with Nintendo games being number 1 and most third parties making garbage which ruins it for the third parties who try.  But on the DS?  With the cornucopia of ridiculously awesome games from Nintendo and third parties, both in creative and familiar fields, it says nothing of Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks that they may not be as universally prized in the library.

I like malstrom a whole lot, but when he talks about the nuts and bolts of games, there is this small tingling I get that he may not know what he's talking about and tries to present that limited knowledge of it as a universal truth.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Well, he's a biased, lapsed gamer afterall, admitting to being very partial to the Atari-NES transitional era.

He can't speak about the nuts & bolts of games nor relate well enough to gamers because he hasn't been playing the games between the Stone Age and now.

He does a great job of delivering business analysis tho: people, quotes, industry phenomena -- the things that are far removed from the experience of being a regular gamer-customer.

[NWR_pap64]

I agree that Malstrom is great when it comes to analyzing business talk, society and how the industry moves. But when he starts talking about games he really does fall apart.

He bashed "Excite Bots" for having "no legacy" (or because the titles in the other games were clearer). Yet he agrees that a game sells on word on mouth. If Excite Bots does well it wasn't because of the title, it was because the title was good.

[KDR_11k]

Since this is the core implosion thread, FF13 needs 10x the sales of a regular game. Spirits Within again?

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Oh man, that's great news.

Someone please start the countdown to S-E bankruptcy.

[Mikintosh]

Ooh, maybe Nintendo can buy them! I want them to buy SOMEBODY, just so Miyamoto can upturn some more tea tables in these stupid companies.

[NWR_pap64]

I'm actually quite saddened that the game is going to cost S-E badly. I don't care what anyone says or what any fanboy cynicism dictates I like S-E, and I want to see more support from them before they go under (if they do).

[Luigi Dude]

Don't worry, if SquareEnix puts a bald space marine as a playable character in the 360 version, the game will sell an extra 5 million copies it's first week.

[NWR_DrewMG]

I have no interest in what Malstrom writes.   Him and I do not see eye to eye on just about anything; I don't care how many trends he "predicted."

I'm more interested in what makes a game GOOD, not what makes it sell to the most consumers.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

That's not interesting cuz you already realize it by playing it, and the mediocre blawg press is full of it, or they at least constantly try to write about how they assume the rest of us think.

The Retail WarStarRiskCraft that companies have to play behind the scenes is interesting cuz we're not the major players.  It's a different world than we're used to trolling about.

[Rize]

Interesting articles.  However, I don't see Nintendo neatly and cleanly sweeping away the hardcore market.  They may make some inroads, but Sony and Microsoft will remain entrenched in the minds of savvy consumers as long as they maintain their technological edge.

[Deguello]

You mean like Sega was in the mid-nineties?

"Technology" is more than just graphics.  Who says the savvy consumers aren't actually buying Wiis because it's something new on the user interface department, which is technologically superior (and about to be more so) than both of what the others offer?  Imagine the "hardcore" gamers of tomorrow, brought up solely on the Wiimote.

And of course Nintendo won't get every single gamer out there, but they'll have a firm majority and a nice chunk of the hardcore market (and they maybe even already have a majority of that too, because who says to join that market all you need is a 360 or PS3, and who says every owner of said consoles is "hardcore"?).  And their obscene profits will allow them more leverage and investment capital to attack those markets that the 360 and PS3 already lay claim to.  It'll be interesting, nonetheless.

[NWR_DrewMG]

Pretty much every major video game website that wasn't intended to focus solely on Nintendo spends the majority of their time covering 360 or PS3 games.  Call it bias if you wish, but I spend time daily on MTV Multiplayer, Joystiq.com, and listening to about a dozen weekly gaming podcasts and they maybe spend 20% of their time covering Nintendo products compared to other systems.

The hardcore market pays more attention to the 360 and the PS3 because Sony and Microsoft actually respond to these markets, whereas Nintendo historically has been unresponsive.  Look at Major Nelson - a major figure in the Xbox Live community.  Contrast what he's doing versus what Reggie says in his interviews. 

Interviewer: It's said that Nintendo is trying X strategy.

Reggie:  We don't comment on rumors or speculation.

Interviewer:  How do you respond to claims that Nintendo isn't responding to the hardcore market.

Reggie: We are.

Interviewer:  What are the chances we'll see X game from Japan making it's way to the US?

Reggie:  I like that game.

[KDR_11k]

Interesting articles.  However, I don't see Nintendo neatly and cleanly sweeping away the hardcore market.  They may make some inroads, but Sony and Microsoft will remain entrenched in the minds of savvy consumers as long as they maintain their technological edge.

PLEASE call those core gamers, before the Wii and the whole casual scare came up you had to publicly renounce graphics and count at least one game from the DOS or pre-NES era to your favourites in order to get any hardcore cred, now you get it for playing Madden or Halo, the stuff that was decried as casual, shallow crap for idiots who don't know about good games before the Wii came around.

[Rize]

Nintendo might have an interface edge, but if the others maintain a big visual edge, then they will maintain a very large niche in the market at worst.  Companies can survive like that in the long term (Apple).

Anyway, call them what you like, but I don't think the group of people who like the very best graphics and still enjoy a regular controller (if not prefer it) are going anywhere any time soon.  In fact, the best controller of the next-gen might just be the one that manages to combine good motion controls with good classic controls.  Note that the d-pad is still included on every modern controller.

[KDR_11k]

They can maintain a technical graphics edge but filling that edge with content is going to be much harder. A powerful system is only one part, the more important part is developers that actually spend the time and effort to use the graphics the system can show. More graphics cost more money. An AAA PS360 game costs 25 million USD, an AAA Wii game costs a mere 10 million (averages, I heard GTA4 cost as much as 100 million). The gen after that would see a cost of 62.25 million USD per AAA title. That is not sustainable in a niche market.

[Stogi]

I see it both ways.

Technology raises overhead costs for developers. There's no way to sustain yourself by simply dealing with a niche market.
&
Technology raises popularity of all videogames. Videogames may rival movies one day in popularity.

Let it fall where it may.

[KDR_11k]

But not all technology increases the popularity equally. Better graphics do almost nothing in that area now despite the exponentially increasing costs to make them. The Wiimote massively increased the popularity with only minor investments.

[Stogi]

Sure, but there is no doubt that the Wiimote increased the overhead cossts.

[Rize]

Yes, there is a question as to whether or not more and more powerful consoles can exist without driving production costs too high.

I don't think it's as big a problem as you think for the gen after this one.  Current games could get a lot better looking without driving the production budgets way up.  Going all the way back to Doom 3 the models were created by making super detailed models and then using a program to generate a low poly model with normal maps to simulate the high quality model.  On more and more powerful systems, this procedure can be done the exact some way (except you flip a few switches on the compiler program to output a higher quality model with higher res normal maps and more polygons).

Environmental textures are already frequently produced at ultra high quality for PC games and then scaled down versions are used for the console ports.

You can also improve visual quality significantly by using more intensive lighting models and shaders.  These things can be built as a one-time cost into the engines of choice for the next gen (cry-tech, unreal engine 4 and whatever id is working on).

It won't be as hard as you think to churn out high res games for the next gen.  Eventually the process for designing beautiful CG in movies will converge with the process for video games and the shared resources of the entire industry will keep costs down.

Things aren't as bad as they seem.

[KDR_11k]

The hipoly-to-lowpoly bake is an additional step in the process, it does not replace any traditional step. Additional shaders require additional textures, e.g. I recall the UE3 making attempts at SSS which requires another texture. More polygons in the lowpoly model (those aren't generated automatically usually) require more work, more detail texture stuff (skin pores?) needs more texture work, etc.

CG in movies may be the ceiling but movie budgets are way too high to be feasible for games, at least without a hollywood-style consolidation with only 5 or so conglomerates remaining in the blockbuster business.

The bigger issue is that the current budgets are already too high. Hollywood can pump that much money into a movie because there are that many people who watch movies. Expensive movie-like games currently have a significantly smaller audience (especially when you consider what part of the audience would still buy happily if the graphics were weaker) and are much less likely to make money on the same scale as hollywood.