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Farmageddon on 27 October 2009
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Avinash_Tyagi said:
Farmageddon said:

Yeah, I'm on the side that thinks he's wrong, or at least mainly wrong.

 

I mean, he shows that chart and says "This collapse shown above is not due entirely to “less accessibility” or “going away from the basics of gaming”. From someone who participated in this ‘bleed’, it is clear to me that a big reason why is that Nintendo refused to compete with its past."

If that's so, then why did those gamers go to the competition? Did the competition have these games? Truth is, as the whole industry went away from some of those classic designs, it was expanding. Maybe people left Nintendo, but they clearly went somewhere else. Somewhere else where there was no catering to the things he claims the lack of is alienating players.

So yeah, of course the effect he describes exists. It's just so much far from being as big as he makes it seem. I think he's projecting his personal experience on the entire industry and suspect that's all he does all the time.

It was entering new markets and taking advantage of a larger population in the world, it wasn't expanding outside of that, in fact in many ways it was contracting, towards the core audience

As I said, the effect does exist, it's just not as big as he makes it seem.

Also, just to make it clear, I love those old games and do agree many of them are among the bests and all that, I just don't think it's the most relevant thing ever in this case.

I mean, are we perhaps forgetting handhelds here when we talk about the "industry"? Cause, bar this last gen (PSP specially, but DS too on a smaller scale), handhelds have been all about that kind of gaming while consoles "moved forward". And maybe the growth is due to market expansion (as in new markets), population growth and multiplatform owners (not that big IMHO, as it affects mainly the "hardcore", early adopter market), but even then, I believe if you compare the numbers (and there's no way I'm gonnatake the time to do that :P) you'll find out that, if you do have some receding in relative numbers, it won't be nearly as big as he makes it look.

Maybe moving away from the NES era style has alienated part of the NES era. But the PS2 kids couldn't give less of a damn about it, and they're just as valuable as the older, NES-initiated are. So by not cathering so much to that audience, the industry may have lost some of them (many kept on anyway, many would mve away anyway), but that doesn't mean this new style couldn't gather and keep a new generation of gamers interested. Now, obviously, it would be smarter to do both. It just wasn't possible/feasible/affordable/obvious at the time, I think.

And videogames are not any less mainstream now, or last generation, then they were on the NES days, so this whole "contracting towards the core audience", I don't quite agree with it, it's just a matter of looking at PS2 and realising it was pretty mainstream.

Anyway, Nintendo is now going back and revisiting old classics simply because it's a good time now. On N64, it would be too soon to take time out of Mario 64 development to try something like NSMB (and I don't mean these titles specifically, I mean the general idea), they had to prove the 3D vision. And it showed lots of promise, but the hardware was still really weak for some of that. So the GC days were naturally about exploring those new, intriguing elements.

(Just as a last comment, I do realise his point is not about 2D or 3D, but the same point I made there can be applied to lots of other elements/areas/ideas/designs/etc in a similar fashion)