I say any developer that doesn't want to put a AAA game on the Wii is scared their game isn't good enough to work on the Wii, and try to pretend their vision will somehow be comprimised. A good vision will stand up despite the lower specs.

People will follow the games regardless. Whether their reasons are right or not, they could stumble into the right idea by accident. It's basically what Nintendo wantd them to do with the Wii anyway.

I don't mean following. I mean getting out of the idea that their games need loads of numbers to be good.

I believe a fundamental problem the videogame industry has run into is how funding is obtained. To get money for projects, the investors want to see that what they are investing in has a track record. This means they keep throwing money at things that have sold in the past. By doing this, they end up creating red oceans that work against their long-term interests. They also look to put things in boxes that fit. Well, the entertainment industry has an aspect that is KEY to it working... that is novelty. You want to get people entertained, you better do it by providing something new that captivates. Unfortunately, you aren't going to get investors who will put the money up for it.

The end result of all this? The innovation comes in on the lower end, with lower production values, because the risks are seen as too high. And you get an excess of me-to mentality.

I personally run into this a bunch, when I try to get some money to help with a non-profit I am working on that is promoting classic games, like chess, and other modern abstract strategy games. Because I am unable to show real financials, it ends up being a futile effort to get money and help to show anything. Oh, I do get progress, working on the margins, that costs next to nothing. Because there is no track record, financially, sp there is no funding. No funding means it can't get the track record. However, the moment someone does something like Nintendo did with the Wii... BLAMMO you have a whole bunch of vultures swooping in, thinking they can do the same, but add a feature or two, and they have success. Well, they don't get the sales they expect. Rather than try to find real untapped needs, and playing to that, they do me to.... just make it more expensive and it is sure to sell.

Two examples of how this works: Puzzle Quest and Tower Defense.  They end up surprise hits, so people think that, with tower defense, you can grab a big name license and slap it on a tower defense game, and BLAMMO it is a lock for a win.  And then the Puzzle RPG gets its own glut, because people think that all you need to do is just somehow combine the two?  Why weren't the me to's done before?  Well, the investors and management of companies wouldn't back these ideas.

I liked the read. I got the impressions though that he is still being hopeful about High End producers will succeed in lowering their market target.

The presentation is interesting, but as with all too many short-sighted presentations, it focuses too much on momentary and circumstantial evidence, essentially picking out the trees and missing the forest entirely.

Instead of asking "why?" in the latter half of the presentation, they simply present bald-facedly a decline in Wii popularity based on a handful of disconnected surveys. This is not good business practice, as smart businesses look into the why of shifts like that instead of just making up reasons which ultimately only restate the surface-level details given by the surveys. Any idiot can look at a survey and conclude what it says. It takes a genuine interest in success to take it a step further and look into the actual cause of those survey results.

Also, that was some seriously faulty logic at the end concerning how PC gaming will make a comeback just because PCs are in widespread use. That's exactly the logic which was used to justify why consoles would never take off in the first place, and it proved itself to be very wrong indeed when the NES completely trounced all expectations and forged the way for the entire console gaming industry. They're too busy counting the trees and assuming they're all deciduous when they're actually looking at a predominantly coniferous forest: most PC users don't want to use their PCs for gaming.

So overall, while the presentation did make some good points, it all came across as very ironic, like a student who didn't do his homework reading word-for-word passages of the book he did his report on and then misinterpreting those passages entirely in a way that could only happen if he hadn't read the book at all. In trying to bluff, the student ultimately just reveals his ignorance to the informed audience. EA has done much the same here.

I don't know... a lot of eyewash in there. The graph about the potential of different platforms, consoles vs facebook vs pc - come on, that's rubbish. Wii 47m vs Facebook 120m vs PC 2000m. Great, let's make games for Facebook...
And about PC's: There have ALWAYS been much much much more PC's than game consoles. Still most people won't use their PC's for gaming! Cause that's not what they bought them for, cause they can't play with their PCs from the couch, ... every single game console on the other hand was bought explicitly for gaming. So this 47m vs 2000m comparison is really shady.

do all the charts load properly for everyone else? I don't know what the columns mean on slide 24 (3rd party Wii development graph columns)

That only further proves my point that they didn't do their homework at all, of course, and just worked off the Cliff Notes version (which they didn't even read all the way through). Those who strive to know instead of simply to think they know have come to recognize that Nintendo's home console had a rather striking drop in popularity due to a lack of the release of something quite as earth-shatteringly popular as Mario Kart Wii during 2008 or most of 2009. It's a very easy thing to spot, of course, if you have the basic knowledge set of "game sales drive console sales" and "long-selling titles sell more systems overall than blockbuster titles do".

Had they truly been interested in knowing what was going on instead of just thinking about it, they would have seen that Nintendo's would-be biggest hitters of that time, Animal Crossing and Wii Music, instead did comparative flops (3mil sold over 2 years may be impressive for some companies, but not when the flagship titles that push the system break eight to ten times that in 2 years). Nothing kills momentum faster than putting the brakes on the proverbial steam engine by breaking the flow of system sellers.

And furthermore, had they studied their history of game sales (a brief search on this site for "Mario" combined with noticing the trend of the first-iteration releases of any given 2D Mario game selling more than any of the full-3D ones), they would have realized that this momentum drop was temporary at best since there was a genuinely new 2D Mario right around the corner. But, as noted, they did not do their homework, and their presentation comes off as more of a "what if all water suddenly turned into air" sort of presentation than a "what if reality continues to work the way it seems to work" presentation. Their arguments probably make perfect sense in the context they're working in, but the context they're working in doesn't really mesh up with anything that's likely to happen.

I've got that too. Some of the slides look like they're only half-loading for me.