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Originally posted by: Ian Sane
Hell, even if the mainstream does like games forever who wants an industry where WiiPlay outsells Zelda? If the East focuses on non-games and the West focuses on EA-style games then who's left to make games for game fans?
The non-games market isn't replacing the games market in Japan, it's piggybacking on it. The honest-to-god games market had a slight contraction in recent years there, but it's still a multi-multi-billion dollar industry. Companies like Koei and Square Enix and Namco Bandai and Konami have invested enormous amounts of money in attracting the people capable of making the real games that industry wants.
With apologies to Majesco and Hudson, any idiot can make a Crossword Puzzle simulator or a Sudoku game. Those products have their place and even among gamers they're not totally without interest. It's fine for those products to exist... it's even fine if there wind up being more of those products sold than the real games. The game industry isn't going to vanish.
The talent in the industry is not being steered into non-games. Miyamoto is not making a Wiimote calisthenics program. Yu Suzuki is not making a Japanese to Korean dictionary. Hideo Kojima is not going to make a touch-sensitive sculpture program. Hironobu Salaguchi is not producing a photorealistic simulation of that little game at Japanese festivals where you catch koi with a paper net.
These are the sort of guys the great games have always come from, and they're where the future great games are going to come from.