This is a really interesting point. It's taken for granted that the Wii got left in the parking lot as third parties peeled out in their HD hot rods, but given the ongoing turmoil in the industry, it's not clear that those third parties made the right call in the long run. How many studios might still be open if they'd tried to capitalize on the Wii userbase in its prime with quality mid-budget software instead of chasing top-spec glory?
I don't feel like gameplay has advanced as much as graphics have. Instead of playing on the strengths of gaming (e.g. interactivity), most third parties are just trying to make everything look shiny and fancy. That's a problem. I enjoy great graphics as much as the next person, but if it's going to force companies to close down for failing to meet a ridiculous sales goal, I don't think it's worth it.
What people who keep grasping for better and better hardware don't seem to understand is that someone has to pay for all of it. Either developers make less graphically impressive games on smaller budgets (which makes the push for the best hardware moot) or gamers spend $100 per game to compensate for the increased cost of development. I don't see consumers shouldering that responsibility (I sure as hell wouldn't) so it has to start on the third party side.
I look at games like Tomb Raider, Halo 4, and The Last of Us and I am blown the hell away. That's all possible on hardware over seven years old. Games
can look better, but do they really
need to? What are we racing towards? What is the rush? Better hardware should be brought to market when current technology can't support the ability to make games play better. That's the way it was before. I really don't think developers' ability to create good games are limited by the hardware presently on the market. We don't have the same technological jumps (e.g. sprites to polygons) nor the same restrictions we had before. I love buying new hardware, but I don't like spending money on it. Do I want to spend $500 on a PS4 to play games I know could play the same except look slightly worse (yet still great) on a console I already own? Absolutely not.
I think Nintendo's strategy to reel in a new permanent consumer base could have worked, but the Western dev world made emotional/hobbyist decisions that I fear will drag everyone down in the long run. I remain highly skeptical that PS4/Durango are going to reverse any of the rotten industry trends.
I think Nintendo's goal is still to have casual gamers continue to come back. They won't play as frequently as core gamers, but they can still pick up the next casual game. And that's fine. Those games don't take nearly as much time or resources to make. It gives Nintendo some extra sales and there are, in fact, core gamers who buy them. And what Nintendo won't admit is that these casual games are suppose to be gateway drugs.
Still, I think Nintendo's strategy all along was to convince core gamers to also buy Wii through original content not found anywhere else. This also meant convincing third parties to support them which wasn't easy given Nintendo's rocky past with them. For example, Nintendo wasn't trying to get Soulcalibur IV (yet). Instead Nintendo
wanted Soulcalibur Legends and once fans were hooked, they could convince Namco to develop a version of IV (like Broken Destiny on PSP). Unfortunately, Legends was 10 kinds of awful, but it could have been awesome. I think Namco did themselves a great disservice by not taking the project as seriously as they took the mainline games. Spin-offs get a bad rap for all the times they're done poorly, but think of how many times Nintendo, for example, has done them well. Yoshi and Wario are both spinoff characters that are highly successful on their own.
That was the strategy's downfall. It only works if the games were worth it. Again, it's easy to say it didn't work. However, it's just as easy to see how it could have worked. Instead of asking consumers to pick one of three versions of the same game, Nintendo let them pick one of two (since if they got a version, it would probably sell the worst anyway), but hoped to still have something for fans of those series. Another gateway drug strategy.
I appreciate the effort even if it didn't pan out. Nintendo has a responsibility to itself and I can see where they're coming from. They're still a company today because they protected themselves and didn't continually take losses. Wii was risky; Wii with HD graphics in 2006 would have been suicide. I am worried about the direction of the industry. It's odd seeing all of these companies shut down and other companies failing to see the writing on the wall.
Topic: Satoru Iwata: Hubris versus Western Culture (Read 22232 times)
