| kitler53 said: i'm not sure if i quite see that as a strength though either. the market seems to be split to me and the divide seems to be growing. a large segment doesn't care much about quality (imo) of games and are happy buying up ipads/smartphones for games due to the $0-1 point for games. another segment only seems to care about the absolute highest quality AAAA games and gravitating to fewer but higher quality games and shunning any sort of middle-ware game. there may only be a few developers that can afford the high costs of the ps4/720 but there will be even fewer that can afford the ps3 level costs if that portion of the consumer base isn't there. nintendo is left in the middle without the ability to deliver to the most demanding consumer and without the ability to reach the price point of the other consumer. i just don't see who is in that middle point not really cheap but not really advanced. and i choose neutrally buoyant. nintendo was suppose to have made a profit on the gamecube. even if the wiiU only sells 20M (and i think that number far too low) i still think nintendo makes it work. profitable hardware sales. profitable game sales. they'll get by. |
I actually submit that the segment that's sticking to free/$1 games are either people who wouldn't be interested in any other type of game in the first place or, much more commonly, are not seeing other types of games that would attract them. By that, I mean that the game industry is largely not creating the type of title that these people think is worth actually paying for. I further submit that: 1) this is a failing of the game industry as it currently exists, rather than of the market, and 2) few companies can subsist if they permit gaming to come down to free/$1 dollar games, asI do not believe the AAAA market is in any way sustainable, and I know that relying on $1 games is not a viable plan for anyone beyond the hobby developer.
Your points are well taken, but I have a different slant on them. I do not believe that the middle market ever disappeared, for the simple reason that I've seen no evidence that it has. I believe instead that rising development costs have so polarized the type of games created that this middle market has essentially been starved. Where in past generations development costs were reasonable enough to allow most developers to create a wide assortment of games to appeal to a wide assortment of people, now development costs are so high that publishers feel compelled to always play it "safe."
Thus, the "best" teams, and even most of the B-tier teams, are stuck making narrower and narrower types of games, creating the "hit-driven market" that has existed for the past generation. Diversification at the highest levels has largely fallen to the wayside; this is a charge that has not been levelled just by forum- "analysts" like myself, but by many of the same developers who make up the industry. Experimentation and risk are, quite simply, too expensive to try. And so we have birthed the stratification that we have now: ridiculously-high budget AAA (and now AAAA!!!) games, dirt-cheap "indie" games made by folks who have either fled the rigors of the modern game industry or (worse) folks who simply couldn't crack it in the first place, and precious little product left for the middle ground. I submit that you have the chicken and egg confused: the last generation and even the DS have shown that the middle market very much still exists, but when no one makes games for them how can it be a surprise that it fades away?
As further evidence of my hypothesis, I submit Nintendo and the Wii. The games it offered, at least initially, were not aimed at the top tier AAAA gamer. They were also most certainly not aimed at the person who thinks so poorly of videogames that he'd only spend $1 to play them! And yet those games created the market leader. They created a market leader that sold at a rate which outpaced all prior consoles. They sold at a rate that made Nintendo, a company of roughly 3,000 employees, the most valuable company in the world's second-largest economy. If this "middle-tier" gamer has disappeared, he has done so only in the past 2-3 years.
You said in your post that " there will be even fewer that can afford the ps3 level costs if that portion of the consumer base isn't there." I completely agree. I think, and last generation shows, that even PS3-level budgets have already risen too high. I have said before, even in this very thread, that I don't have particularly high expectations for the Wii U. Basically, I think that if the Wii U is going to have a chance at being anywhere near as successful as the Wii was, it'll be because it offered a life raft for third-parties, and because companies started to once again appeal to folks who demand less than AAAA flash, but also more substance than the $1 phone game.
I'm less than wholly optimistic at the moment.
