That's a pretty good point but I don't see it happening. Casual gamers actually buy a lot of the liquid feces on the market.

Well, I think it will be self contained to Nintendo if it happens. Namely, it is only happening on their software. But they do need to fix their overabundance of crap on the system soon.

Can't say I fear a market crash on the scale of the 80's Atari ordeal, as the industry has matured significantly since, he does have a great point.

Especially in reference to Nintendo. The game rankings stats for Nintendo consoles is terrible at best right now. If they don't start pushing for more quality over quantity things could get rough.

Unfortunately, the methods used by Nintendo in the 80's to revive the market from the first major crash seemed to get them into a lot of legal troubles...

Are people just now recognizing the possible negative outcome the trend of the so-called "casual gaming" approach can have? Funky peripherals can only stimulate the market so much.

Sounds interesting, though I'm not too informed on the Atari crash thing. I guess I"m too young for that. I don't think Nintendo is going under anytime soon though.

If he is making this argument for the DS, wouldn't his logic also apply to the Wii as well?

Knowledge is power. Seriously. I've worked in video game retail before and if parents and their kids were more informed about the games they're buying - we wouldn't have the glutton of craptastic games out on the DS/Wii.

Add to that the holiday aunts/uncles/grandparents buying "Mary-ooh for the Nintendo Xbox Gamestation" and then give up to buy shovelware for the kids. Kids know what crap is too!

Gamers - please help all generations be responsible by buying good games and inspire companies to up the level of quality in their games.

Lets hope it only happens to the DS market... They'll need a pretty big fucking reason to come out with a new handheld when that thing continues to sell out every holiday season...

you don't think nintendo saw this coming? WII is kanji for "liquid feces"

It may just result in the 'crash' of the 'brain training' genre. We won't have to worry about the second crash until someone makes a new ET game.

I don't understand -- Nintendo is the one making money hand over fist.

Nintendo is making more money than any company in the history of video games. The DS is selling way, way more software than its competitor PSP (this is still true by a wide margin, despite the PSP's hardware resurgance. The PSP has literally 60% the attach rate of the DS, which means every PSP owner is buying less games than the average DS owner).

By contrast, Sony and Microsoft have hemorrhaged billions, literally billions of dollars over the last 3-4 years. I'm preeeeetty sure this is just wishful thinking on the part of a person who loves games like Folklore, because it's games like Folklore that are in real danger of dying off.

Good read!
"While it may seem unlikely that a company on the scale of Nintendo"

don't forget a few years ago ninty was in the dumper with gamecube sales. times change real fast

Won't happen. As I personally see it, DS is much like PS2. Yeah, it does have some very crappy games... but there are lots of great games too.
It won't just crash out of nowhere.

Also, it not only made more profit than all other consoles, the sales are still stable at good numbers.

Just hope Nintendo releases more good stuff soon, that's all.

@LittleBallOfHate:

Isn't it kinda of scary games like Folklore are endanger while awful titles aren't? Maybe thats the bigger issue here.

It's way frustrating when I see games like "Left Brain, Right Brain" which challenges players to write with either hand to train both sides of one's brain. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. See, the developers of Brain Age didn't get their psych degrees out of fucking cereal boxes.

Great interview by Grové and Nutt. It's refreshing to hear a Japanese developer speaking so openly about the industry as Okamoto-san has.

I recommend people read the entire article.

:)

Why don't Nintendo just create a new division that would make a DSHousewife edition and spit out that kind of software (I'm not calling it games) for whoever wants it? And give us some actual games that are good...

Well, there always Megaman...

Here's a solution, Nintendo. You create a new division that makes DS Housewife Edition and software (I'm not calling that games) for it. And then you leave game-making and everything else to real developers. Deal?

I would not compare the clearly defective Atari games of yesteryear to the simple games of DS that are focusing on a broader audience today. Though he makes some valid point, the correlation he's trying to make is flawed. I just think Nintendo has a marketing strategy this is short-sited and unsustainable. The group of people buying casual DS games are not going to jump on the bandwagon for a new system once it comes out and they are not going to buy software as often. Those two things are almost a sure kiss of death on a long-term business strategy. I'm worried that the DS will even fall into the PS2 syndrome where the massive user base will be unwilling to move on. All these things said, I'd like to think Nintendo who has an infinitely more accurate perspective on the industry then I do and actually have a plan to combat this issues but I certainly can't see an easy way to get of the road they're headed down.

I don't really see this happening, but yeah, there is a flood of crap out there.

@okenny :):

It's certainly possible, but I think the problem was that there was a perfectly acceptable console in the PS2 with a huge library that cost a fraction of the new offering. I don't see the DS successor having that problem as at most it will cost twice as much as what the DS will cost at the time and most likely be backwards compatible (albeit so was the PS3).

When you are talking something like a $500 difference, that is when it gets harder to justify. Certainly not impossible, but harder.

The whole gaming industry is on a completely different level these days than it was back then. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I agree.. like in 1983 there are too many companies trying to get in the market and too many low quality products around.. a new crash might be coming..

It probably won't damage the big companies like Capcom, EA, Sony and Nintendo.. but the smallest ones will suffer..

Nintendo's response to the original crash was to introduce a strict publishing policy when they released the NES. They put limits on how many games each company could release for the NES each year. The idea was that developers would have to put effort into each release, rather than flooding the market with dozens of cheap, crappy games.

Nintendo have been steadily moving away from that strategy since, and I don't think it is really going to hurt them. The PS2 flourished despite having mountains of shovelware released for it, so Nintendo will probably be fine as well.

the ds reminds me more of the ps2 than the atari debacle. and lets remember, there wasnt really that much of a crash, the commodore 64 and arcades thrived in that time still, nintendo may have revived the home console market, but gaming was still doing ok back then.

I don't know why but I read the article/title as saying Okamoto was making a SF game for the DS lol. :( I'm obsessed with SF

It's possible a crash is coming of a kind. Take a GTA4 or MGS4. They cost, what, 100 million plus whatever they spend on advertising? When games require minimum 2 million sales to start turning a profit, it leads to a lot of worrying about when the proverbial wheels fall off the wagon.

Add in a glut of software, a huge number of casuals jumping in on this new fangled Wii thing and I can see a bunch jumping right out next gen when they decide they didn't buy any games outside Wii Sports or others they played for a week and then never touched again.

Add in the troubling mergers going around, like Activision / Vivindi or EA and potentially T2, and you'll be looking at a field of a handful of publishing houses controlling the market and all flooding it with yearly rehashes and once a gen updates of the same WWII, Madden or Tom Clancy game. People are going to start wondering what happened to the quality new experiences they used to get.

So, ya, I can see a possible crash in the near future. I think it'll be more of a bubble burst and not a full blown crash like after Atari and the near death of gaming altogether. This'll be more of a return to basics with less focus on movie level CGI and graphics.

I was talking to my mom about that Wal-Mart Mother's Day Wii deal. I was being cynical, of course. She was like "Hey, I want a Wii".

I then had to explain to her why that was a terrible idea, because on top of the Wii's limited library, she also wouldn't give a damn about the Nintendo franchise games.

So there you go, ladies and gentlemen. Moms like mine are going to break the market.

Boy oh boy, in these last few years everyone's become a doom prophet. There's nothing good about those me too publishers but the way I see it no one is going to suffer but them when everyone stops buying their games.

The only companies in trouble of going under are the ones who rely solely on mega-multi-million releases in the hopes that enough people will buy their games. Rockstar North and Square Enix and other such companies are an exception in that their games actually sell enough to make back money lost on expenses, but think of all the, for example, FPS studios who crash and burn. We just heard about Crytek and how Crysis didn't meet their sales goals. Epic, even with the recent success of Gears of War, is actually making their money from licensing their Unreal engine.

The shovelware companies, like Data Design Interactive, are ironically the ones turning big profits. Their games are so cheap to produce that it takes literally a handful of sales to recoup costs and then make a healthy profit.

Seriously, the business of gaming is absolutely crazy! I love it!

People seem to forget one of the biggest reasons a crash happened was the fact that Atari and most of the others were complete and total idiots with their profits and ran wild with them while at the same time was not only letting tons of crap end up on their system but they themselves were funneling crap onto it simply so they could make more money. Nintendo does not do that.

If any sort of crash does happen, it will be from the games with 20-30+ million dollar budgets failing to recoup development costs+less people willing to buy games new. The idea that the DS or the Wii is going to be the main cause of a 'crash' is insane. What is going to happen is a lot of the half-ass devs are going to end up taking it in the chin and Nintendo is not one of them. Regardless on the never-ending chant from hardcores about how flaky causals are, Nintendo knows what it needs to do in order to not only keep casuals hooked but slowly transform them into core gamers.

There's lots of other factors that led to the 83 crash that simply are no longer a issue, like video games being sold and carried by huge toy chains who thus carried all the retail power, a major major push from the PC market to get into homes by billing themselves as 'Family Machine." and finally the refusal of Atari to give developers even the slightest bit of limelight.

If there is any such crash, Nintendo honestly would suffer the least from it, along with small developers like PixelJunk, Seeds, etc. I will even dare say that the Wii and DS are efforts from Nintendo to keep the market from crashing but bringing in a ton of fresh blood to grow the market and break the inbred waters created by 'hardcores'

As for people wanting Nintendo to do the "You can only publish x number of titles a year on our system." or anything related to quality control, it's simply not at all possible and more often then not it hurts (Nintendo's censoring, Sony's refusal to allow 2d games on their system, resulting in the Saturn getting more Capcom love then anyone else ever has, etc)

@justhesh:Honestly? Your mother is smarter then you are. She has a better idea on what she wants then you do, I think. She's not going to break the market, she's going to help save it from the naysayers and doomcallers.

@justhesh:
I read this as "No, mother, I tell you what you like!"

I mean, seriously? If she wants a Wii what the hell is wrong with that? Are you going to strap her in a chair and make her play Metal Gear Solid 4 until she likes it?

The DS has shown that you can create a glut of games and it will sell. The Atari crash was mainly an ET thing...

The type of crash seen with Atari in the 80's doesn't really seem possible now. There may be a crash in the 'brain game' market or the bottom may fall out for shovel ware pushers, but there's a lot of high quality software in every genre out there to keep the market from actually crashing. The DS isn't going to be doomed just because a few brain games flop. Sounds like more BS doom and gloom trash.

All they need is to make a game that trains your brain to like liquid feces. Problem solved!

In all seriousness, I had a great childhood due to the video game market crash, since I could get a lot of games for a dollar (good ones were usually 3 or 5 bucks) Boy it was rough when the NES came out and I could only afford a couple of games a year...

@megaStryke:SE was in a shitload of trouble a few years back to the point where Sony had to funnel money their way. It wasn't all related to FF:Spirits Within as well, nor has it been the first time, it was the third. Hell SE closed up it's US branch due to money issues right after the release of Secret of Evermore and that was supposed to be one of SE's strongest times.

Rockstar also has been in a fair bit of trouble themselves, one reason the 50 million dollars from Microsoft was seen more as a lifeboat then a bribe, Hot Coffee caused them a load of damage along with typical idiot handling of money. They still are not that stable and GTA can't keep them afloat forever.

BTW, anyone who wants to know why Atari blew up? It's greatly covered in Game Over, in stunning detail along with the aftereffects of it happening too.

@justhesh:
Wait, wait, wait: let me get this straight. Your mom wanted to get a Wii, and you told her no? What the hell's wrong with you!? (I kid, I kid ... partially.) Seriously, most kids would KILL to have a mom like yours! A GAMING MOM! And you tell her "No, bitch -- get back to your quiltin'!"

I mean, did you at least encourage her to check out the consoles you do approve of? or did the two of you walk out of the store with her gamer spirit in fragments and the shopping cart one console lighter than it might have been?

I see your point about "moms like [yours]" being the ones who are killing hardcore gaming, but sons like you are killing the dreams of hardcore gamers everywhere. Keep the dream alive, man! Keep the dream alive.

The glut of games is not what caused the crash of 1983-1984. That's a common misconception.

I lived through that crash, and have practically studied it since then. The glut of games was one issue, yes, but a glut of games doesn't cause a system to die. Think about it. It causes developers to die, not hardware manufacturers. And back then, third-party developers were much less important than they are now. (Lest we forget that Activision was the first-ever third party developer, and they came to be in the Atari 2600 era.)

What caused the hardware crash was the rise in cheap personal computers, which played games just as well and just as easily in those days. (Most computers had a cartridge slot, but even those that used disks just required you to put in the disk and boot... and there weren't nearly so many hardware configurations to worry about as today.) The dropoff in game console and software sales coincided exactly with the rise in personal computer and computer game sales.

There's a reason why Atari and Coleco tried releasing personal computers of their own. Atari even released a specialized "gaming computer" called the XEGS. The computer, everybody thought, was going to outright replace the game console. It could do more, was just as easy to use and cost about the same.

There's no similar threat to the DS. I mean the PSP is a threat, but a "crash" isn't just one competitor eclipsing another. A crash is an industry-wide thing. The DS could still die a slow death at the hands of the PSP, but one way or another, the handheld game industry in Japan isn't going anywhere.

@badasscat: Don't forget the "Developers getting props? Fuck that, back to the coding labs monkies" mindset, the fact that Atari was so out of their minds with the money they were busy opening pizza parlors and other shit with profits instead of keeping the money flowing back into the games and best of all, toy retailers who had enough with getting stuck with piles of plastic.

Oh yeah, Atari selling the rights to make a 2600 to every tom, dick an harry didn't help anything.

Giving casual games negative reviews may be encouraging shovelware.

Here's my line of thought. Casual gamers obviously like different things than the people liable to call themselves gamers. Peggle, Wii Sports, Wii Play, Mario Party, and other minigame collections appeal to that casual market because of the quick time requirement, low learning curve, and relatively unintrusive nature of such games. The ideal casual game is easy to pick up and play while doing other things, or as a social event.

The gaming review community, however, has criterion in place to rank only the more "hardcore" games. Things like plot, graphics, difficulty, and depth are relatively unseen in games that appeal to the casual market, but are keystones on which reviews are written. I.e. objective analysis fails. And people who make a career out of reviewing games are rarely the kind that consider themselves "casual". Casual games, it can be assumed, are not to the taste of the reviewers, and typically recieve lower scores.

So now we have a situation in which review scores do not match quality of the game, where quality is considered to be a measure of the enjoyment the target audience gets. And if reviews cannot be used by these casual gamers to judge quality, these relatively uninformed consumers have no reliable way of judging the quality of games prior to buying.

Which essentially means that bad games have a shot at being bought.

@Foxstar Sixtail: Well, there you go! I am apparently giving waaaaaaay too much credit to some of these big studios! So that means that the industry is in even more trouble than I originally thought.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying a selection of "hardcore" titles. Big budget games are fantastic and offer a level of polish (sometimes) that you don't see in smaller releases. That's cool. That's fine. Those alone can't sustain the market, and until companies realize that, we will continue to hear these tales of doom and gloom.

Funny... it would seem that the big shot developers and industry personalities who slam Nintendo's new direction and the advent of "casual" gaming (which has been around even before the DS *cough*PopCap*cough*) are the ones who are struggling to stay in the black. Sounds like these people would rather find a scapegoat than address the real issue.

A gaming crash may be coming, but Nintendo is more on the right track than Sony and MS. Both GTA4 and Super Smash Bros. Brawl suffered playability issues, and Nintendo offered anyone who had that problem to send in the console to them and Nintendo would fix it for free. Not so with Rockstar's fix.

@samaine: but Rockstar is planning to patch the game...soooo moot point.

@justhesh: And I bet you were making awkward slurping noises randomly throughout the conversation.

Interesting thought; it would be cool to see how certain games gain shelf space at Target, et al. Since there's only limited space and Nintendo created games are filling up most of them, I wonder how the rest of the space fills up.

@pandafresh: GameCube sales may have been low, but Nintendo was still pulling in crap loads of cash... Mostly because of the GameBoy line.

@Marlor: Nintendo moved away from the overly-restrictive policies because third-parties hated Nintendo for it - that's why so many jumped ship to the Genesis and PlayStation as soon as the platforms became sustainable.

I think Nintendo should review these "non-games" on a one-by-one basis.

If they bring something truly original to the table, then great! Let 'em publish it.

But if it's gonna be yet-another-Brain-Age-ripoff, then halt that. Seriously.

It's not too surprising, though. When one person does something right (and profitable), everyone else wants to cash in on it.
Super Mario Bros. pretty much made the hop-and-bop platformer into what it is now, and everyone else had to do it, too.
Sega created Sonic, a platforming animal mascot with attitude. Then everyone else had to make their own (forgettable) animal mascots.
Hell, even Megaman got at least one knockoff (The Krion Conquest, which isn't such a bad game in its own right, but it is such a blatant ripoff).

Pokémon led to all the multi-version "gotta catch 'em all" games. Even existing franchises weren't immune to the effect (Bomberman MAX: Red/Blue, MegaMan Battle Network, Dragon Quest Monsters, etc.).

And now it's the whole "brain" game thing. Why? Many publishers don't want their developers to make something original, but to make what's profitable. Nintendo made Brain Age, and it was a runaway sucess (as was Nintendogs, but pet sims existed before that, so I can't blame them for the glutton of pet games on DS).

Wouldn't it be ironic if Nintendo, the very company that saved the industry from the first crash, destroyed its own system with another one? Probably won't happen though, the DS is more popular than the Atari 2600 could have ever hoped to be.

I gotta admit, it does sound pretty plausible, and I probably should be concerned. However, I'm holding out faith that we'll all weather this just fine, and hopefully it will lead to a PC Revival.