dsgrue3 said:
@Bold, not sure how you can say the casuals haven't abandoned the games industry. Have you seen Wii U sales? |
Have you seen all those "casual" titles on Wii U, advertised well and priced competitively?? Oh, erm, wait... They don't exist, so people don't buy them. It's as simple as that. Nintendo stopped making a major push for the expanded audience years ago, and seem to have forgotten how to bring them back on board. Launch an expensive handheld with a Nintendogs sequel at £40? Sure, what could possibly go wrong? Why WOULDN'T the twenty odd million Nintendogs owners want to upgrade? Launch a Wii U Basic model for more than £200 without a pack in title? Why wouldn't families buy that?
It's not as simple as releasing a title and expecting it to sell. You need your hardware AND your software to be priced correctly, and you need a good marketing message. Nintendo have utterly failed at that in recent years. As I pointed out later in my post, Nintendo have abandoned a wider audience to appease a vocal minority. There's a danger here that Sony could do the same, but like I said, my personal belief is that this is only their short-term limited impact marketing message to excite their core users. It only becomes a problem if it's the main message around PS4. Given that the company to first majorly exploit the casual market majorly lost its way, it is a worry for me that Sony could quite easily alienate that audience. I don't want that to happen; I want console gaming to grow and go from strength to strength, and they need the expanded audience to do that.
That audience exists, but they aren't buying consoles or console games: they're buying games on phones and tablets, and playing on social networks. That audience is growing all the time. I'm never, ever going to join the morons that argue this is the death of console gaming, but it sure as hell does mean that the expanded audience that jumps on board and turns a system from a success into a huge hit (Wii, PS2, DS) are being fed by an ever increasing range of software and devices. If those devices cater to their needs, why buy a console? The core market isn't big enough to grow the industry from generation to generation or to support three players, never mind the variety of other devices that will attempt to enter the market during this period of upheaval and transition; the range of software and the range of business models needs to diversify, so that range of users consoles attracts diversifies too. If console companies don't attempt to attract that market, they'll become a niche sector of an industry that is otherwise experiencing record levels of growth. And if it's a niche sector, what will stop the publishers that make or break consoles from looking at expanding sectors of the industry, versus a contracting console industry, and making their investment there? The console game market won't die out suddenly, but it can sure as hell shrink in this generation, jeopardising its long term future.
