| DMeisterJ said: Wow. Could he not beat a dead horse anymore? We all know that everyone was wrong about the Wii, TWO YEARS AGO! Now he wants to rub it in our faces, yet again. Get a life Malestrom. He acts like such an elitist prick, and I agree with squilliam, what drugs is he smoking, or what disorder does he have? |
I’m not sure if you read and/or understood this article which had nothing to do with who was right and wrong about the Wii two years ago. This was about the blindness some of the industry has shown by convincing themselves that 30 million people are this huge new alien species that just dropped in from another planet, or were too young, or too old to have ever played a “real” video game and therefore have nothing to do with their business.
As long as this myth of this huge army of hardcore gamers who buy tons of games and play them 24/7 and this other group of casuals that never buy games and never actually play games at all persists we will see console makers continue to manage to at best make tiny profits that will never pay back development costs, or to lose so much that they finally abandon the business.
As long as game developers believe that they must write super blockbusters only for the HD consoles and shovel crap at the casuals on the Wii, the more studios will close. Let’s look at game sales frome Gamenode http://www.gamernode.com/news/7340-the-top-selling-video-game-this-year-is/index.html :
Yep sure enough GTA 4 is the best selling game this year at 6.3M copies. Congratulations, {pause for applause}. Now you notice that SSBB isn’t all that far behind at 5.4 and MK Wii at 4.7 and even (shudder) Wii Fit at 3.6. Now I’m no industry expert but I’m willing to bet my mother’s virginity that in six-nine months all three of these will pass GTA IV. Now here’s the rub, GTA 4 cost allegedly $100M to produce, not even sure if that includes all publishing costs, but even so they’ll make some bucks for sure. Now I don’t know what SSBB cost to make and Nintendo will never talk but you reckon maybe it was less than $100M, maybe a whoooooooooooooooooooole lot less than $100M. Same goes for Kart and Fit. So those casual types seem to buy few games after all and I have to reckon maybe they actually play them because if they are so damned casual, why would they buy games and not play them.
Now of course we all know they only sold because they were Nintendo IP’s. Certainly there is a lot of truth in that for SSBB & KART but what about Wii Fit. It never existed so it could just as easily have come from Sony or Microsoft …. If they had that kind of imagination. So much for only Mario sells. The few really decent third party games have all exceeded their maker’s expectations. Personally I don’t care who writes the game. The first publisher that writes a really good FPS for the Wii (from the ground up – not ported) will probably do very, very well. After all, if all the Wii buyers are these brand new previous non-gamers how would they have such brand loyalty to Nintendo games. Or is it that Nintendo is the only one who so far who has taken the trouble to do a first class job?
I think that the sooner the industry takes a valium and some Maalox and actually reads that essay and understand what it says the better off they will be because there is no Magic Kingdom market out there, just fellow gamers that maybe are looking for a somewhat different experience than you.
