RolStoppable said:
vivster said:
Maybe you didn't notice but in the last 2 years we had a giant wave of new and excellent survival horror games and they are not stopping to come out. JRPGs are still being produced, though currently mostly confined on Nintento hardware or Japan only. Also half of all indie titles are platformers with a couple of great ones even. There are also more experimental titles out there than you can shake a PS2 controller at. To say that a sign of success is retail might not hold up to today. The game industry is changing and shifting more and more to digital. Most games wouldn't exist if they'd been released retail so they are releasing digital first. If the digital sales are high enough, why jump to retail and minimize profit on a sold game? Word of mouth does more to these titles than being visible in retail nowadays.
The game industry is changing so it is fallacy to hold it to standards from 10 years ago. In those times they had no other choice than put everything on retail to make the games visible to the general public. Today there is internet which is a much bigger and more efficient marketing tool than any retailer. If all those diverse titles aren't visible to you then that means you're not looking hard enough. You can't expect getting every title shoved in your face anymore because the sheer volume of games has skyrocketed since it became more viable to self publish and make a living of making games. There isn't less diversity, there is more and I dare to say that the archaic marketing tools from 10 years ago wre holding diversity back.
I don't have enough knowledge about the sales or the DS/3DS in general so I can't say anymore than your view seems a bit onesided since the 3DS is performing very well and I would say that most 3DS customers also own a DS.
You are correct that the signs for Sony seem to promise great things but I would be careful with bold predictions about the US. At least wait until titanfall comes out. Yes, at the end of February Sony will have a comfortable lead in the US but don't underestimate the power of MS when they are pushed into a corner. A price cut and some more amazing exclusive could change everything. If Sony is still leading after the price cut and Halo, then I'm going to start being optimistic about Sony's world domination.
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Why did Minecraft release at retail?
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Because we need to have an exception to prove the rule ;)
Yes a few extremely popular games like Minecraft will have retail releases but it is far from necessary. It's just another stream of revenue. They don't need the extra exposure because if you haven't heard of minecraft before the retail release you were not living on this planet. This won't work with merely "popular" games that are popular and profitable but not enough to go retail. Those are smaller studios and going retail is a huge step. Still even with less games sold they enjoy more media coverage than any mid dle tier retail game of the PS2 era.
