| Sky Render said: So you see the problem too, Squilliam. Actually, nothing has changed at all in 20 years. The "haves" can survive no matter what; the "have-nots" are the birdmen, the Icarus in your metaphor, who can only survive when the conditions are right. Funnily enough, most of the developers who thrived on the NES (and Genesis and SNES) faded and vanished when the PS1 and PS2 took dominance. The reason is simple enough: they adapted to a specific point in the industry cycle, and were entirely unprepared when the cycle shifted towards the other extreme. This is just the other face of the cycle: the developers who learned to thrive in the conditions set by the PS1 and PS2 era are failing due to the cycle being in the other phase now. |
Successful people find success pretty much in anything they do, unsuccessful people tend to blame the environment or luck or some other intangible force for their failings. Its a similar situation here, theres a lot of money to be made but it seems the developers are all trying to make sports cars when the market demands the Camry. There are too many good releases on the HD consoles and too few on the Wii and other systems. The developers who aren't being successful with HD consoles need to sit back and think where their talents are best directed.
There are some MASSIVE holes in the Wii lineup,and you could drive the Titanic through them. The words, "Conventional game" and "Wii" don't seem to belong in their diction. HD development can be extremely profitable but only if you know how to navigate the bergs and find a safe way through.
Unfortunately the Publishers have taken the "Quantity over Quality" matra a little too far. They have a massive pool of mediocre developers and it follows with poor pay and conditions. They are not retaining their experienced staff so the real sickness in the industry is really in the mass produced sweatshop mentality of the Publishers who expect 100 hour weeks in crunch time. They cannot continue to get away with this mentality, they need to retain a smaller force of talented developers and the examples I put up earlier are examples of that. Those developers could make money on any system you told them to make games on. They are also extremely talented.
Tease.
