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In previous statements, if any of you will recall, Iwata has mentioned more than once his feeling toward the industry and the concern over a collapse. I maybe misquoting or providing misinformation, but this is not a detail I think I would confuse, so correct or support me in my claim to verify this.
I cant verify it for you, I cant recall reading his thought on the industry but it doesn't take a genious to notice that the industry is on it's knees. And this relates to Iwata stating that the current systems have reached their limits. So listen up.
Over the past few years we've been hearing two loud trends in the video game industry. 1. Sales/Revenue is going up and surpassing the hollywood box office. 2. Companies are going broke, (hundreds of examples) being swallowed, (EA are hungry) laying off employees, (Midway is the most recent example) reporting losses (Nintendo) etc. etc.
So how can an industry that's seemingly growing quickly be crumbling? I think it's two things, rising development costs, and overdevelopment. Games cost HUGE amounts of money to make these days. HUGE. And companies are suffering. They wot make a game that wont sell, so they wont try anything new, and if something doesn't sell after they did make it, spending millions in the process, they've failed big time, suffering huge losses. If the next console generation leap is as big as the last one, then you will only see developmetn times and costs soar higher. Games will need better graphics, which will take longer to make, so you have to pay your employees for longer. The graphics need better engines to draw them and so on. Nintendo shoot themselves in the foot by making a more powerful machine, because in the end they have to spend more money just using it. PSX owners might remember Net Yazooie or something, basically it was a homebrew development of playstation and a good game would be shoved on demo disks. Why isn't there one for PS2? Well self taght programmers dont have millions of dollars just to make a tetris clone anymore.
The other problem, Overdevelopment is most evident in the MMORPG market. At first it was just Ultima Online and Everquest and a few others. Then it started getting ridiculous and there are now dozens of games on the market and in development, most struggling to survive. I mean, we gamers only have a finite amount of time/money to play/pay for these games, we cant keep buying them.
I think with this Third console Nitnendo wants to do something to eliminate these problems and get themselves and their industry back on it's feet. Just dont ask me what could do it. I say we just blame the whole capaitalist system
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