Issun on 16 January 2008
| ioi said: Pokemon rescued Nintendo 96-98 in Japan, it is amazing how they lost so much to Sony and the Playstation brand. This also happened in the west of course, but in Japan it was much more obvious. SNES totally dominated 91-95 but Sony were the clever ones when it came to launching the PS - encouraging Japanese developers to come on board, lots of strong first party stuff back then (in Japan - a list of hits from Arc the Lad, PaRapper the Rapper, Xi(Sai), Gran Turismo and so on - all appealing to new audiences) - they did everything right. I do have to draw obvious parallels between PS / N64 in 96/97 and Wii / PS3 in 07/08 - one console doing the same as last gen, expensive, graphics-heavy, a few big hardcore games but little else of note (N64 is still probably my favourite system ever btw) and the other console cheaper, different, attracting a huge new casual audience. Of course there are differences as well, but it is easy to use history to see how things are likely to play out. To answer the question about what you do if you are Square Enix - you make FFXIV on Wii, PS2-level graphics (so cheaper) and sell 2-3 times as many as you would on PS3. From a purely business point of view this is likely to be exactly what we see happen. Why plough money into something that isn't selling well. I don't personally expect this to happen with FF XIV or whatever since it is a strong franchise outside of Japan, but more Japanese-centric titles I definitely expect to see following this pattern. Is this good for gaming? Well that depends on your personal views, but from someone who has been doing this and looking at trends over a number of years I struggle to see how PS3 can really carve out any strong marketshare in Japan - history has shown what works and what doesn't and little about the PS3 format really works in Japan. They are the same problems that face MS with the 360, only Nintendo really seem to understand what sells in Japan these days... |
And what is your personal view, is this good for gaming? I want to know, because for me, it isn't. I want more games like Zelda than minigames like Wii Sports. Here is a part from latest interview with Yoichi Wada - Square Enix global president - he share the same opinion.
„Nintendo seems to place a great emphasis on Wii Sports and Fit rather than Zelda, a role-playing game. In my opinion, if they expose the functions in this way, they are making the Wii look like a toy“
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=32093
Rubik's Cube in 1980 won the 1980 German Game of the Year and it is said to be the world's best-selling toy, with some 300,000,000 Rubik's Cubes and imitations sold worldwide. ...from en.wikipedia
