And another hardcore parody ITT. Since when are accessibility and family-friendliness negative traits? You're just bitter you're no longer a non-conformist by liking Nintendo.
They never learned to get the old gamers back, they just targetted a huge brand new group of customers.
Did you read about this whole disruption thing? The "old gamers" you're talking about are the top of the market, by going in at the top you get killed by the incumbents since they see you as a major threat and have more resources to use. Nintendo had no choice except to go for the bottom of the market first (which the other companies didn't even serve at all and are happy to cede). They then move upmarket slowly (i.e. closer and closer to the "core gamers") and exploit their opponent's willingness to cede the "casual" gamers while focussing more and more on the hardcore. They're eating Sony and MS's market from the bottom up. Had Nintendo aimed for the hardcore first they'd either have failed right away (as they have in the past) or if they had any success MS and Sony would just steal their innovations. By going for the markets the other two consider unworthy they don't WANT to copy Nintendo's approach, they don't WANT to become "casual game companies". Even if they see Nintendo's sales and try to grab them by stealing Nintendo's innovations they'd likely fail because they'd attribute the success to the wrong factors, e.g. motion control (which was really just a way of making games more accessible) or crappy casual games (when Nintendo made sure to make high-quality games that cover new ground).
Though I'm thinking what has really killed videogames is the Japanese market suddenly deciding that videogames aren't cool anymore. Japan always made the best games. It seemed like that market had such intelligently good taste in videogames, while here in the west the attitude was more like one should make crappy games and trick dumb people into buying it. It was like that trick didn't work in Japan; you HAD to make a good game. But now it's reversed and in Japan making a good game is actually a BAD strategy. It's hard for someone from a different culture to understand it but it seems the Japanese are sheep. Something is either liked by everyone or nobody likes it at all. It seems like the concept of individual tastes and niche markets doesn't exist. So when everyone liked good games it was very beneficial but now that everyond likes crap it's really hurt gaming. A golden age has ended.
As they say, [citation needed]. I don't see anything supporting your story there, care to back it up?
There's this revisionist history crap that seemingly everything from 2000 onwards was crap and thank God Nintendo is dumbing things down! Complexity is not bad. Neither is making something that the mainstream doesn't get.
Complexity is not bad if done right but it's done more and more wrong. Easy examples, Chess and Go are fairly simple games rule-wise but the actual play is sometimes considered the definition of complexity. Now compare, say, Agricola which gives you a shock the first time you open the box and read the materials list. It's manageable once you understand it but most people would have trouble understanding the game even after reading the manual (explaining it in person works better).
The complexity of the game should not be pushed directly onto the player! A PS2 game I got recently, the FPS Black (apparently started selling well once it hit the bargain bin), pretty much a run and gun game, has all face buttons and the dpad on the Dualshock mapped to different actions (of course the shoulder buttons as well). Considering this is a game where you usually just point and shoot, maybe lobbing a grenade occassionally, it's total overkill. Why are there so many buttons? Hell, half the time I forget which button is which (since they're used for fairly rare and often not very meaningful actions like attaching a silencer or adjusting the fire mode on your gun). There's your complexity, tons of buttons that could have been struck from the game along with their functions without much impact!
Good complexity is the kind that comes with a simple interface. Wii Tennis allows hitting the ball in many ways, yet all most people see of it is that you can swing the racket. Oh, right, you people complain that you can't aim your ball with the dpad or analog stick. Because every racket comes with one of those. A game can be very complex without needing tons of buttons because for the game to be complex the thought processes involved must be complex, not the controls.
Of course it's easy to slap more and more afterthought actions on your controller until every last button is full...
Topic: Worth a watch/listen... (Read 9234 times)
