Malstrom: Nintendo’s Shield & Defense = “Sustained” Disruption?

[Avinash_Tyagi]

Alby_da_Wolf said:
^^
Not every developer is in a bad shape, but only Nintendo looks able to do monster titles selling more than 20 million. It looks like every other one has the possibilty to do bad, good or very good, but only Nintendo can do monstruosly good this gen. But even Nintendo can achieve this only on a selected few titles amongst its many ones. This is maybe the most disrupting thing, no SW house looks able to do as much, but maybe this is also the thing that pushes some SW houses to avoid direct competition with Nintendo. About excessive costs threatening SW houses in case of even a single flop, you are right, this is a degeneration, and I'm persuaded HW developers should provide better dev tools to help lowering these costs. There should be also more game development courses at universities, and they should be kept reasonably up-to-date, to reduce training costs for SW houses.

Not every, but usually only the really big developers are doing ok, and really none is doing as well as Nintendo AFAIK.  This is a bad sign for the old market, as it means games have to sell better and better to make a profit, or they have to increase profit margins, of course the problem there is, people are used to $50-60 games, so higher will not be well received, people aren't ready for Direct Download consoles, as the PSP GO proved, used game sales are here to stay, as are rentals, so really the old market is in a lot of trouble.

Even if better training and tools occur, there is only so much of a cost that they can reduce, a lot of the cost is incurred in adapting assets to new games,  and these costs will likely rise as companies keep trying to eke out more out of the 360 and PS3.

Either the old market must reduce its costs and drastically or face demise, because outside of normal population growth and multiple console households,its not growing, and those increases are not enough to cover the rising costs of game production.

Nintendo was brilliant in keeping the power of the Wii down.