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Soundwave on 08 June 2014
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oniyide said:
Soundwave said:

To an extent too I think motion gaming as it exists today kind of hit a brick wall after people got over the initial "wow" factor of it.

It wasn't popular with many genres for starters, when divorced from simple to understand concepts that a beginner could easily equate to some kind of reality (like say bowling or tennis or dancing or jogging or steering a wheel), it's appeal became fairly limited. There's only so many party sports/dance/fitness games you can make before saturation hits and indeed the market became flooded with these types of games. There was no need for smartphones to "replace" Wii Sports ... Wii Sports as a "hot thing" cooled all on its own. 

Attempts to make more fantasy based, level-clearing/quest based motion games never took off with motion gaming really in any big way. Star Wars Kinect, Red Steel 2, Fable: The Journey, Sony's Sorcery (which actually was a pretty nice use of the motion controller), even Zelda: Skyward Sword ... none of these were exactly blockbuster hits. 

I think motion gaming's future really lies with virtual reality now, but as a standalone driver for software sales, it's lost a lot of its buzz. The first time you ride a bicycle, it's amazing. The 10,000th time you do it, you don't even think about it, people I think got their fill of waving their arms around in front of their TV after a couple of years of having their Wii/Kinect. 

That's *part* of the problem, though a bigger issue is that same audience now has a smartphone in their pocket all the time too, which satiates their gaming needs when ever they have a spare 15-20 minutes in an extremely user friendly setup. Apple/Android usurped Nintendo as the lead voice for casual gamers a long time ago really, Nintendo hasn't made a big hit worldwide casual IP since Wii Fit in 2008, which is now 6+ years old (an eternity in entertainment cycles).

it didnt take off cause the technology sucked. Thats what happens. Hell i would argue it barely worked in even some of those minigame compilations (looking at you wiisports boxing) sure they released stuff later that worked better but those should have been at the forefront.

I think the problem is those blue ocean gamers never really cared about gaming. Ninty got alot of flack for not making those guys migrate to other types of games. But that was always a dumb thought. Your aunty who got WIi for WIiSPorts the soccer mom for WiiFit was never interested in anything but those games, and they were never going to migrate. Just get bored and move on.


I agree .... Nintendo/Sony/MS all really tried to make motion games that went beyond the basic formula of games tied to simple movements that people understood in their reality ... bowling, baseball, skiing, jogging, dancing, steering a wheel ... but those other types of games weren't as successful. 

When motion sports was asked to push gamers into more traditional gaming spheres like "hey you're a bounty hunter with a canon arm" ... there was a disconnect with a large part of the Wii and Kinect (and Move) audiences .... they didn't like those types of games that had more esoteric or fantasy based scenarios, in a way there very little wiggle room for Nintendo to make new games using this tech. Even Wii Music I think was too far out there ... most people have never played violin or something so it didn't translate. 

Motion gaming is limited too in the sense that the first time you play Wii Sports for example, you don't notice all the flaws in the control, yes like your boxing example, it's just funny to play because odds are you were playing against "Uncle Frank who never plays video games before, oh man isn't it hillarious that he's boxing!" type thing. 

But when you got to play the games for a while longer, you'd start to notice that the Wiimote (even with WM+) for example couldn't actually detect depth and really your movements were just gesture based. And you can't replicate things like sword fighting all that doesn't work well, because obviously you need to have some kind of force feedback that stops your movement when you clash up against another person's sword. Stuff like that would just be impossible. 

Motion gaming was more limited than people think, pretty much most of the big hit games were a very narrow style of game (as I stated above). 

Kinect 2.0 is actually pretty impressive tech, the amount of information it can pick up is fairly impressive, it's a far better product than Kinect 1 which was successful, but people just got tired of motion gaming a while ago. There will always been lag/problems with motion detection and even if there wasn't they can't get the feedback aspect of doing many physical acitivities to translate so after a while it will always feel like you're just making mime movements.