| Serious_frusting said: This aint to every Nintendo fan. But alot of them keep sayin how HD is killing gaming and we are heading for a crash. I am sorry but that would not be said if Nintendo knew how to produce a modern console. |
When people say this, it's usually not so much about current sales, as industry issues.
As HD gaming keeps pushing ever upwards, game development costs have been spiraling out of control. Franchises that would have been released, sold a few hundred thousand copies, and made a profit for their developer and publisher are now not being made, because the cost to develop is too high compared with the number of copies it would sell.
As this occurs, publishers are growing increasingly risk-averse, because they're concerned about the possibility of flops resulting in their company crashing. This results in companies playing it "safer" by releasing games with feature sets that have already been tried and tested. The end result is that more and more games end up being almost carbon copies, and games in the less popular genres are being converted into the "more popular" genres in order to try to sell more copies. Hence recent Resident Evil, for instance. Hence online multiplayer being shoehorned into most games.
Meanwhile, other trends are also concerning - the growth of microtransactions, for instance. These are also a result of the aforementioned increase in development costs - knowing that gamers aren't likely to pay more than $60 or so for a new game, developers are having to push extra monetisation methods into games in order to recoup the cost, because otherwise, if they only sell 5 million copies of the game, they won't make a profit.
Gamers aren't likely to tolerate this pattern for too long, and what happens when gamers get fed up with all of this? They stop gaming, or at least they stop buying the AAA titles that the big publishers depend on for profits.
What Nintendo does is provide a different approach. They aren't rapidly ramping up the raw power, and thus the cost of development, and instead are focusing on trying to bring new people into gaming through innovative controls, etc. Whether they're successful at any one moment in time is somewhat irrelevant - what really matters is long-term effect on the industry. Consider that Nintendo brought out the Wii, and a few years later both MS and Sony released their own motion controls. Do you really think either company would have pushed their motion controls as anything more than a minor peripheral (not unlike EyeToy) if not for Nintendo? It's Nintendo's influence, whether leading or not, that is keeping the industry from stagnating in the ways that matter.
Few Nintendo fans will claim that Nintendo needs to be "leading" in order for it to happen. But they will say that Nintendo, or another company of equivalent attitude, needs to be present.
