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donathos on 02 December 2008
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SnowWhitesDrug said:
clerk said:
I tried to give a reasonable answer, to something we all know you just wrote up to try and provoke. I've already seen you do it several times, and your pattern is kinda easy to see through. You've gotten exactly what you wanted out of this thread, so stop your pathetic sobbing.

 

 your the one trying to provoke, and as for seeing me do it before, one of my pet hates it when I asked a question and I get a million and one responses from people repeating what I just asked as if they came up with it them selves and im wrong for no aparent reason.

@ stoff

Im not looking at any shifts in the industry curently, im just asking the question,"price was one of nintendos big factors to successfully selling their system, so will these new price drops then alow the 360 to play on a leveler playing field with the wii?" Im also wondering if this will then 'cause' a shift of wii gamers who baught into the wii because of its price and are fed up with SD gaming and want HD gaming now its cheaper. And I'm wondering if there will be alot of these people out there because in my own little world the people I've spoken to seem to prefer the HD gaming over their wiis. I also want to know if this price thing has covered up a 'fad' nature of the wii or something entierly different if it so does turn out to be true that people were more inclined to purchase a wii for its cheapness

 

Not everyone believes that the difference between SD and HD is that big of a deal.  Everytime I say something like that, someone always comes in saying "then you must not have seen HD," and they're always wrong.  I felt the same way about laserdiscs back in the day, and laserdisc snobs always burned to hear it.  If you love HD and can't imagine life without it, that's cool.  But for me (and others)?  Not that big a deal.

So, honestly, the idea of people getting "fed up with SD gaming" sort of doesn't compute for me.  There are a lot of people (one might say, perhaps, an "ocean's" worth) who still play retro games, or flash games, or Solitaire/Minesweeper, etc.  The idea of their being fed up with, oh, Diner Dash or Bejeweled because it isn't pimping cutting edge tech just seems sort of silly.  And anyways, the Wii is actually offering something new and cutting edge in the market with its often derided motion controls.  I could talk about people becoming "fed up with analog controls" and it would probably make as much sense to you as being fed up with Standard Def makes to me.

Much of the Wii's market is made up of customers who feel the way that I do -- they're not obsessed with graphical output, and weigh it against other values in the games that they play.  So, do I anticipate some massive "shift" from the Wii to HD consoles when those HD consoles drop sufficiently in price?

No, I don't.  I expect that many to most of them will be perfectly satisfied with the console that they opted to buy in the first place.  While I believe that a lower price removes barriers from a sale, I do not believe that a lower price causes a sale, per se.  People could have bought an 360 for a while now, and if they instead bought a Wii and have been buying Wii games since, I suspect they did so for a reason and that they're likely to continue buying Wii software. Further, where new sales are concerned, it seems as though even those places where the 360 is currently cheaper than the Wii that the Wii continues to outsell its competition by fairly significant margins.

To suggest that the Wii continues to sell in the increasingly record-breaking fashion that it does, and contrary to any reasonable expectation given the sharp global economic crash late this year, simply because it's cheap and trendy, and not because people genuinely, actually want to own it... well... it seems to be a pre-determined conclusion, and not based on any of the data we have thus far.  Right now the numbers say that the Wii is on track to become the most successful home console ever.  If we want to predict future gloom for it, that's fine, but at the moment we can only do so because we want it to happen for some personal reason, not because of any hard evidence.  If we want to continue to find ways to label the Wii "a fad," then I think that we stretch the word to its breaking point, and will have to call all prior and contemporary video game consoles fads, too.

Finally, if you feel you've been getting a negative/hostile reaction (or if Esa is mystified at it), I think it's because there are people who like the Wii, not because it is cheap, and not because they've been drawn in by some faddish hype, but because they like it.  And those people have had to hear these same criticisms, and the same negative predictions, since before the the Wii launched.  The criticisms and predictions continue to get repackaged, but they always sound the same at their core: the HD consoles are somehow the real consoles, while the Wii is not; the Wii will be revealed as a fad as soon as X happens.

If you look carefully at your original post, you'll see these same ideas appear to be there, too, for instance when you refer to motion controls as a "gimmick" or call the PS3 and 360 the "giants of this generation."  Giants in your mind, perhaps, but not in everybody's.