Soundwave said:
lol Sonic was a huge deal in the 90s and buoyed the Genesis into contention against what really was Nintendo's monopoly. Sonic balloon at Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was a big deal. You're out to lunch on that one. Plenty of genres and once popular IP never regain peak popularity. Lots of people got their panties in a wad when other people said Labo wasn't going to be a run-away hit either, and they were correct. The whole fad of having 50 different pieces of plastic shit all over your living room (Guitar Hero, giant wall of 300 DVDs, Rock Band, Wii accessories, etc. etc.) in general I think peaked in the late 2000s, it's not "cool" to have so much crap lying around anymore anyway. It's more about minimalism and one device (the smartphone) doing more. Even fitness things like P90X are passe these days. |
Sorry, if I disagree to the idea of the Wii-crowd being gone I don't speak about IPs. You are right, IPs come and go. But gameplay principles that people were interested years ago are most likely something people are interested in today. For instance, many people are interested in the gameplay principles, that the game presents you the targets, probably moving one and you take aim and shoot them. 40 years ago it was possible to implement this gameplay principle into a game named Space Invaders. And you're right, nobody wants Space Invaders anymore. But the Space Invaders crowd isn't gone, these days it plays CoD, Battlefield, Fortnite and PUBG. Just the games that are technical possible these days implementing these principles.
So if you say the WiiFit crowd is gone, I ask where. If you would say they now play all EA Fit, then I would say for Nintendo to win them back they need to innovate. But I just don't see where they might've gone.
For some more examples:
- Guitar Hero →a shitload of different rhythm games and even combinations with other gameplays, like Roguelike in Crypt of the Necrodancer
- Metroid+Castlevania →a lot of Metroidvanias, including but not limited to Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Guacamelee, Steamworld Dig and Bloodstained
- LucasArts adventures →point&click-adventures where dormant for a while, but now have many games and evolutions of the main gameplay concepts like Syberia, Oxenfree, The Telltale games, Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, Portal, L.A. Noire
- isometric RPGs →were also not much for a while, but came back with games like Divinity, Pillars of Eternity and now Baldur's Gate 3
- Pacman → at it's base Pacman is a time-pressured puzzle game, it was replaced back in the day by Tetris and Puyo-Puyo, and now we have so many different of these
So it is the same story. Companies and IPs might die, but the crowd playing the games isn't going anywhere. You might have to readjust or sometimes innovate to keep the gameplay-ideas alive, but the players are still there.
