2008 at Bruceongames

[Bruceongames]

Gamerace said:
The average gamer doesn't care about graphics as much as gameplay. That's why the system with the best graphics has never won in any generation. PS2 had the weakest and yet totally murdered the more powerful GC and Xbox.

So in that respect, what has MS or Sony done with this new generation of machines to introduce new gameplay? Ummm... nothing. LittleBigPlanet may be the only notable exception. Otherwise it's all the same old stuff, been there, done that, yeah it's prettier - so what?

The Wii now only brings something new to existing games, but brings in entirely new experiences like Wii Sports/WiiFit. I don't think they'll feel any pressure to have to upgrade. However MS and Sony may if they hope to expand beyond just core gamers.

Hi and thanks for your input. I think that when you have bought a new 40 inch HDTV you will want to see HD games on it. As these screens become cheaper most people will buy one. This will make the Wii pretty redundant. However I agree with your initial sentance and have written about it on my blog: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/01/03/have-we-got-it-wrong-with-graphics/ Have we got it wrong with graphics? When I was working at Codemasters in the mid eighties Richard Darling was considered to be a gaming god with a string of number one titles at Mastertronic and then Codemasters to his name. So it was really interesting that the game machine he had at home was a dated Atari VCS 2600 console when he could easily have used a far more powerful and modern machine like a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST instead. The reason he gave was that gameplay was the most important thing, not graphics. And that the VCS 2600 had finely crafted and polished games in which the gameplay was paramount. This is a debate that has cropped up again and again over the years. Always the platform makers give us ever higher graphics capabilities. And nearly always game developers throw ever increasing resources at utilising those graphics capabilities to the maximum. What a game looks like has become the most important thing. Yet talk to serious gamers about their favourite games. Often you hear the names of titles like Elite, Goldeneye and Super Mario 64. Games with quite miserable graphics compared with more modern offerings. And this seems to be something that Nintendo understand better than Sony and Microsoft, which has given them a massive competetive advantage. Basically Nintendo did not go HDTV with the Wii whilst their competitors did with their latest consoles. This looks relatively sensible as the vast majority of homes do not have HDTV and the adoption rate will be relatively slow because non HD TVs do a perfectly good job. The advantages to Nintendo are firstly that it makes their console cheaper to manufacture. This means that they can sell the base console at a profit whilst their competitors have to subsidise the retail price. It also gives Nintendo far more room to manoevre when it comes to using the price mechanism to take on that competition. The second advantage is that games are a lot easier, quicker and cheaper to develop. In fact they are more comparable with PS2 games in this area. This, obviously, has a massive effect on what appears on the game shop shelf and when it appears. Quite simply it should be far easier for a publisher to make a profit on Wii, which explains why so much development resource has been directed at it.