| rocketpig said: Fair enough. "Dying" was the wrong term. "Stagnant" is a better term. The rest of the industry has expanded greatly over the past 15 years. JRPG sales have remained pretty still, which is a really bad sign for the genre because in the PSX days, a top-shelf game could thrive on 500k sales. In today's high definition world and three year development cycles, 500k sales can break a company. I've long advocated developers moving most of their JRPGs to handhelds. IMO, it's the only way the non-FF/DQ games will survive in the long run. Westerners just aren't interested in the games like they were in the 90s and early 2000s and given the huge advances in WRPGs and FPS games during that time, it's not hard to see why, honestly. It feels like the gaming world is leaving JRPGs behind. Someone needs to give the genre a shot in the arm and for God's sake, they need to break away from dogmatically adhering to the genre's current format. Break some rules and explore new territory, for crying out loud. |
I can agree with stagnant, in the definition that it isn't progressing in any way.
And yeah, a lot of JRPG's need to be moved to handhelds now. It also helps that Japan as a market itself has moved towards handhelds too. DS in Japan has outsold all home consoles combined. That's a huge base, and shows that new IP's like Ninokuni can have fairly big sales.
Like I said anyway, a lot of wrong business decisions have been made this gen. That, along with the higher dev costs... Kinda paints a bad picture. Let's hope they give it a shot in the arm like you said.
