Gnizmo said:
His basic premise is flawed though. I can think of only a very small number of publishers or console makers (past and present) that have a different focus at all from Sony. The concept that they alone want a large and diverse library of million sellers is, quite frankly, absurd. Firstly because it assumes the two goals are mutually exclusive. Secondly because it assumes Sony would not like to accomplish both goals at once. Capcom, Nintendo, EA, Activision, Sega, Square-Enix (post Eidos buy out more so), Tecmo, Konami, Atlus, THQ, and more all have a very very wide range of games they sell that are multi-million sellers. Some of them own the top game in multiple, and very different genres. |
lol my post was being sarcastic(hence the stupid face, that's my sarcasm face :-*) insinuating that I actually agreed with you. I didn't really expect you to read my posts in the OP as I don't think anyone bothered to actually read them before chiming in with their opinion but I agreed with your post so I was insisting that you read my posts and took my ideas but really I just know they were your own and I agreed. You were basically one of the first ones to actually tackle the real question. Anyways now back to the debate and now to defend my opinion.
I never said Sony is the only company that wants a large and diverse library. Infact many companies over time develop a large and diverse library of games because they feel that is the best strategy for them.
I agree that the goals are not exactly mutually exclusive. It is possible to make the highest rated game and sell the most copies. Infact that is the goal of every game in relevance to it's genre. However what I propose is that Sony's goal is not necessarily to create the highest selling games but the ones that are unique enough to make a group of consumers feel like they "have to" play that game. And thus pulls them into their console. Third party publishers don't have to worry about pulling people to a certain console because they publish for all consoles, they just want unit sales for the game.
There is a difference, and sometimes when creating games you have to limit the broadness of your appeal in order to better appeal to a smaller audience and make that smaller audience love your game that much more so that they will buy your console just to play it. The overall "quality" of a game is independent of the broadness of the game. A broad game can have just as high of a quality as a narrow targeted game but the impact on a certain audience will be spread out. Take Wii Sports for an example. Very popular game, very broad target market. Now in development if Nintendo were to decide let's not have all these sports in the game let's focus on baseball fans. There may be many baseball fans that would purchase Wii sports and enjoy it but to them the enjoyment could be replaced by any number of games with motion controls. But if Nintendo were to make a Wii baseball game with the same quality as wii sports but more indepth for baseball fans and more focused for baseball fans you can insure that the game wouldn't sell nearly as much as Wii sports. However with baseball fans the game would be much more loved and have a much greater pull with baseball fans(assuming the same perceived "quality" of course).
I'm not saying it's the best strategy, nor am I saying Sony is the only one that goes after narrower audiences, for certain games many publishers are targeting narrow audiences. I am simply saying that is what Sony is doing and that is a reason why their titles are popular, highly rated, but generally fail to warrant the sales of 5+ million units.
