strideo

But I can bet that there are more mid-core gamers than casuals in the PS2 demographics.

zoesch

megaStryke

Talk about double standards in hidden trolling eh?

zoesch

megaStryke

There wasn't a hardcore gaming community when the Atari VCS reigned supreme, I mean Vectrex and Odyssey owners were by far a minority, likewise Intellevision and Colecovision owners.

Guess what sort of games Atari owners were buying? Not deep complex games like Yar's Revenge, Warlords, Buck Rodgers or B-52 Bomber Run, no, they were buying Pong, Centipede and so on... simple arcade ports which were the casual games of the 80's.

People think that it was ET that killed Atari, it was the fact that people got sick of Galaxian, Breakout, Centipede, Asteroids, Pacman and so on, and their clones and derivatives.

The whole brain game craze is eerily reminiscent of Pacman and the tens of clones that spawned afterwards and what do you think consumers do? Once they get sick and tired of Professor Layton and Brain Training they won't be picking up that shiny port of Final Fantasy or that nice Advance Wars game... they might pick up Mario and be frustrated by it and never finish it.

After that what do you think happens? That lovely DS fades into obscurity, isn't picked up again and no new software is purchased for it, sure, Nintendo got the money but not the publishers.

That's what happened to the Atari (Along with an economic slump) and it's what Okamoto is hinting at.

@justhesh: Your mom exemplifies my point (And BTW she sounds like an awesome lady if she took time to play with you and she loves Sonic and Galaga). People think that casuals gamers are walking around with tons of games and finishing them, the reality which all console manufacturers know is that this is a niche market, a very profitable one, but a niche market still, I applaud Nintendo for trying to broaden the market but at the same time you can't feel too sad about them because they basically brought it upon themselves.

zoesch

You obviously don't know my mother, or the countless other people that have the same reaction. She doesn't see it as what it is, a gaming machine. She sees it as a "neat thing".

This is the woman that bought a Gamecube for ONE game (Outlaw Golf), played it for a couple months, and let it gather dust. The last game I think she actually sat down and played was an arcade classics collection for the Xbox that I bought her for Mother's Day, and then only for Galaga. Actually, she might have also played a little of the Sonic the Hedgehog collection for PS2, that I also bought her. That saw the same fate, and those are two of her favorite games, Galaga and Sonic.

Look, I'm not telling her what to like. I'm telling her what there actually is, and she won't like it. She doesn't care about Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart, SSBB, or anything first-party. She would play the Wii Sports pack-in, and that's it. And considering the state of the economy, and the state of their bank account, would you think it was wise to pay $150 for something that will become a candle-holder within a couple months?

I'm not preventing anyone from becoming a gamer. I've been playing since I was a child, and she has too, albeit in a smaller capacity. We both loved Solomon's Key and the old Mario games. Then SHE bought the Sega Genesis, which brought on her fondness for Sonic (and nothing else that I can recall). Then I had a Super Nintendo, which I don't think she bothered with. Then a Sega Saturn, where she played Bug!. Then a PS1, where she played Crash Bandicoot and a select few others. I've already mentioned the PS2 (she was also a big Hot Shots fan) and Xbox.

Now we have a 360. I even went so far as to set up a profile for her, but she never uses it for more than playing Tiger Woods with my dad. Yes, my dad plays, too. He owns as many video games as I do, and usually plays more than me. In fact, a lot of the games I have played since the PS2 came out, I have played because my dad had them. A good deal of them because my mom encouraged him to get them, or got them as gifts. Racing games, cowboy games, golf games.

But the Wii is just going to be another Gamecube to them. Now imagine how many millions of people that this will apply to. Or even imagine how many will buy another game, regardless of its quality, just to have something for it. It's not unlike the DS shovelware situation; buying anything and encourage the fall.

justhesh

People, the "shovelware" studios are not in trouble. Big budget studios are. If there is a crash, the big companies will fall, unfortunately. Oops.

megaStryke

"Hardcore gamer" basically means FPS, RTS, MMORPG.

"Casual gamer" is -- what, everything else? Is Mario casual gaming? Is Brawl?

Nintendo isn't going to attract the "hardcore gamer" market, not by a long shot. What kind of gamers are they attracting then, and why?

bitwize

BPMο

Roto13

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

I think that there will be a healthy market for both forms of gamers. Though there could be the opportunity for a new industry in casual games reviewing that is independent of the Hardcore Market news outlets. I'm not going to stick my neck out and say there is though.

scotty999

Clstirens

I think it's a misconception that somehow the burgeoning pc market "stole" customers from the gaming market and that was what caused or at least contributed to ye olde crash. It would probably be better to ascribe some of the growth of the pc market to the faltering games market - with all the crap and clutter it was an easy transition to make. For all the console owners I knew it was never a matter of graduating to the pc and leaving game consoles behind. True, we were being promised that a personal computer in our house would usher in a new age of convenience, and many companies were trying to position themselves in that space. But, as has been proven over time, healthy game and pc markets can co-exist.

As far as something to think about, software drives hardware sales. But not any software, it has to have some consumer quality. So Space Invaders drove sales of the 2600. Oddly enough, the hype over Pac-Man for the 2600 drove sales, too, until it was actually released and consumers saw or played the product. I worked in retail during that time, at (I believe) the only franchised Electronics Boutique. I was there the morning we started selling Pac-Man for the 2600 and I was there a few hours later when we started receiving the first returns of it. I've always considered that release to be the beginning of the collapse, or at least the first sign that things were about to go a little caacaa.

OldManGaming

ekstrapiksels

evilralphwiggum

Pezdispenser

Placentasaurus

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).

BPMο

@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.

TheUncleBob

Gomerboy

Roto13

pandafresh

samaine

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.

megaStryke

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.

Balius

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

Foxstar Sixtail

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

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.

ryohazuki

Foxstar Sixtail

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.

Foxstar Sixtail

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...

supercrap

slacker164

Frank

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?

Channing

Foxstar Sixtail

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)

Foxstar Sixtail

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!

megaStryke

jive238

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.

justhesh

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.

KirbyMorph

Superstar90

ryanfrost

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.

Marlor

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

CockroachMan

Roto13

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.

houser

Cannedpasta

okenny :)

MaxS

VakeroRokero

MaxS

I recommend people read the entire article.

:)

as702ecs

Narsil

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

pandafresh

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.

Bokusatsu_Tenshi

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

pandafresh

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.

LittleBallOfHate

blackadvent

diodegrey

William "Killer" Shatner

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.

emuc64

KidU

Shadowmist

justhesh

TheUncleBob

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.

Tulkamir

rabidkeebler

Samos42