| Girl Gamer Elite said: The 360 and its games will always sell well but the real question is how big can the console's userbase really get with such a limited demographic of consumers? |
It's a major problem for the 360. Action/adventure/shooter games are 15% of the world market, so Halo 3 was never going to decide the fate of the console market. Unfortunately, Microsoft's ad campaign made the situation worse, with clunkers like "Believe" and "Finish the Fight". They seem bent on convincing the planet that the 360 really is a boy toy for wannabe space Marines. Which is unfair to the 360, which has some fine games.
The deeper problem with Halo 3 is its timing. We live in an age when the vast majority of the citizens on this planet are pissed off at the US for invading and occupying Iraq on the basis of a pack of scoundrelous lies. Large numbers of people in Japan and the EU will not even consider buying a game which glorifies heroic US soldiers blowing up evil fundamentalist aliens. (Of course, Halo's story is really a WW II story of good vs evil, but this is what people will think.) This is why Sony was careful to package Killzone 2 as an explicit WW II story, and why Nintendo was careful to create such a rich sci-fi background story for Metroid 3.
