Microsoft: Kinect give us 5 years more

[leatherhat]

RolStoppable said:

leatherhat said:

RolStoppable said:

No skill implies that every flick would lead to the desired result. That's certainly not the case in Wii Sports.

I see you now admit that Wii Sports got people into gaming. Good, at least we are making a little bit of progress here.

No not wii sports, its just a natural progression. We can talk about specific pieces of software or hardware but really it just has to do with acceptability. Look at movies and tv, they got more and more popular over time without any drastic change. There aren't "casual" or "downmarket" movies. It just became more and more present in peoples lives. Video games will do the same regardless of what software or anything else that happens. Every generation gets bigger not because of a specific thing, but because thats just how things go. Older people unaware of the media die and younger people more accustomed to it become more numerous, pass it to their children as a normal thing etc. If you think playstation or the wii or anything else has expanded gaming beyond the natural growth it would have seen than you are kidding yourself. 

Unfortunately for you, the Wii goes against your idea of natural progression. Why were there so many news stories about older people and women starting to play video games? Your natural growth theory works for PlayStation as it just grabbed the MTV crowd which at that time consisted of people growing up with Atari, Nintendo or Sega. But the Wii went way beyond that age bracket and that can be attributed to Wii Sports.

Also, there are downmarket movies and there's a term for it: popcorn cinema. Okay, I am not 100 % that they are called like that in the English language too, but such movies certainly do exist. Additionally, movies experienced an explosion in popularity with the rise of special effects which were a drastic change. Movies like Star Wars and Jaws brought a lot more people into cinemas.

Any form of entertainment eventually hits a ceiling, especially if it remains the same at its core and becomes boring. Then it declines. Or it starts to focus on specific demographics, like comic books which started to decline after the industry stopped to make new worthwile comics for kids.

Growth in gaming shouldn't be taken for granted, because it could get the industry in big trouble. It happened already and twice at that. The first time in the '80s which is remembered as the great crash. The second time just recently when every company (except Nintendo) expected gaming to keep continually growing and $20-30 million budgets were supposed to be perfectly reasonable and sustainable. Didn't turn out that way.

1. Because the media loves a narrative. Those women playing games used to play stuff like the sims and now they play wii sports. No demographic got added in any substantial way. Old people? They don't play games.  There are a few examples here and there but they don't play in any significant numbers. 

2. They gave rise to the summer blockbuster, but until only recently Gone with the wind was the movie with the overall best ticket sales and most earned adjusted for inflation. 

3. True, but comic books ignored kids altogether. Games like Mario and Ratchet and Clank, LBP and kingdom hearts all appeal to younger audiences. You don't need to make dumb downed garbage to get kids attention- they aren't as stupid as a lot of business believe. 

4. I blame it on a surplus of brown console shooter games with no creativity or polish. Whatever your personal opinion may be games like halo, CoD, GoW, Killzone, devil may cry and the like prove that its ok to spend that kind of money as long as you make a quality game that stands out from its competitor in some way. And another argument against the high budget= bad for business thing is that a lot wii devs have gone under this gen same as HD devs. And for the same reasons.